Sermons from Past Years

Joshua 23:1-16; 24:14-24 "A Greater Faithfulness" Scott Hoezee

Professors of preaching often try to prepare seminarians not just for the preaching task in general but also for what could be called "special occasion" sermons. Funeral sermons, wedding homilies, baccalaureate meditations, and the like represent specialized sub-sets of homiletics, each requiring slightly different techniques and sensitivities. Another special occasion sermon type is the farewell sermon. The general wisdom is that a farewell sermon should preach the gospel. Such a sermon is not the place to settle old scores by chiding the congregation for its failures nor is it a time for the pastor to apologize for his own shortcomings. It's not a time, in other words, to deal with unfinished business of the past.

Instead it is an opportunity for the pastor and the congregation to remember that the gospel call to fulfill the Great Commission is bigger than any one congregation or preacher. It is a task that is always fresh and always there. Thus, a good farewell sermon will point ahead to the work that must continue during the upcoming period of vacancy and when one day a new shepherd arrives to tend the flock.

Joshua, of course, lived long before any such homiletical advice was available. So he appears to have done the smart thing and that was to imitate the one farewell sermon he could remember: Moses' sermon as it is recorded in Deuteronomy. As such, Joshua delivers a bracing swan song to the Israelites, full of warnings and threats.

I doubt any preacher today would dare to end his or her ministry in a congregation with a sermon that repeatedly says things like, "Now, my dear people, remember to keep serving God faithfully because if you don't, God will squash you!" Such a hellfire and brimstone message would probably leave an acrid taste in most people's mouths.

But Joshua knew that despite all the good that had been accomplished in his tenure as Israel's leader, the people were nevertheless strangers in a strange land. There were apparently just enough remnants of foreign people and false religions around to make Joshua nervous. Some of the Canaanite girls were very pretty and there were rumors that some of the Israelite boys were proposing to these maidens, even agreeing to adopt a few of the family gods if that's what it would take to seal the marriage. And every once in a while, when taking an inspection tour of the various Israelite settlements, Joshua was certain he caught glimpses of people quickly sticking little golden idols in various closets.

All in all it made Joshua nervous. For if there was one thing Yahweh had communicated consistently to Joshua it was that the people had to keep up their end of the covenant bargain if they expected to remain in the Promised Land. In the midst of war the people had done pretty well. Sure, there had been that ugly incident with Achan, but for the most part the pressures of wartime had kept a lid on the people's tendencies to wander.

But now things were settling down and the people were nestling into comfortable homes. There was a chicken in every pot and an ox-cart in every garage and, as Moses had feared a generation earlier, so now Joshua worried that this prosperity would soften them. It was natural to depend on God for everything when fierce Amorite warriors with fire in their eyes were bearing down on you. But now there were many days when the biggest worry was whether to have red wine or white with dinner. How easy to forget Yahweh in good times!

Thus, the urgency of Joshua's farewell sermon. Joshua even seems a little sarcastic in chapter 24. When he asks them if they will follow Yahweh only, the people reply with a thunderous, "Yes!" But then Joshua comes back at them, "You're not even serious, are you? You don't mean what you say and you know it! I've seen you men dating Canaanite women, I've caught glimpses of those little Baal totems. You folks are going to rebel and so undo everything I've worked to help you achieve, aren't you!?" But the people are adamant that they will follow Yahweh, and so the Book of Joshua concludes with a renewal of the covenant and with what looks for all the world to be a happy ending.

Of course, all you need to do is turn the page to see what's next: The Book of Judges. Joshua and then his lieutenants die, the people get fat and happy from all that rich milk and high-calorie Land-of-Promise honey and they forget all about God's covenant, his laws, and even his abiding presence in the land. Soon chaos reigns supreme in the very place that should have been an island of God's cosmos.

This is an unhappy but all-too-familiar story. But perhaps for us Christians the real difficulty of Joshua 23 and 24 is how conditional it makes God's love seem. The gospel according to Joshua is a tit-for-tat scheme: if the people do this, God will do that; if the people fail here, God will smite them with every plague in the book. Apparently, the Israelites had to walk a fine straight line over very thin theological ice.

It could be pointed out that most of Joshua's warnings are not about minor infractions of the rules but about a wholesale dismissal of Yahweh in favor of a new religious cult. Still, the sheer number of conditional sentences here may unsettle those of us who believe God's love comes as an unconditional gift of grace. The people's faithfulness has a pretty high profile in passages like this one, making it seem that their actions could either merit or forfeit God's love. It looks like it's all up to them.

And yet, even though the people do prove to be repeatedly faithless in the Old Testament, God's faithfulness keeps coming up again and again. After a while it looks like despite temporary setbacks here and there, the one constant in Israel's history is that God is going to keep returning with a love more fierce than even the worst sins. Joshua and Moses before him told the Israelites that if they were not careful, God would scrape them off forever like mud from a shoe. Curses without end would come their way if they messed up.

Yet in truth, God is never done with his people. He keeps getting hurt by them, keeps fulminating in anger at them, keeps weeping bitter tears of hurt over them but he never stops coming back with open arms, essentially saying, "Come on, let's try it again, OK? You messed up during the Judges, but look: here's Samuel to bring a better day. Saul was not the greatest choice for king, but now I'll bring you David and then Solomon. You ended up in exile in Babylon, but look: now I'm going to work through even the king of Persia to bring you out of the concentration camps and back home." On and on it goes in a rhythm of failure and restoration so regular as to become scandalously predictable.

Finally the day comes when God no longer proffers the likes of Samuel, David, Elijah, or Isaiah to bring a better day but instead he comes in person, in the flesh, through Jesus the Son. And in the wildness of grace Jesus somehow brings together the abiding faithfulness of God and the fickle faithlessness of us human beings.

Tonight we see before us once again the body and blood of Jesus, reminding us that not only has God been faithful to a mind-numbing degree, he has even taken the worst of our unfaithfulness into himself. This time God has taken our failure and instead of using it as a reason to bring the world crashing down around our heads, he has used it as a reason to bring his Son crashing down into death and hell. Somehow the hopes and fears of all the years really are met in Jesus. Somehow on the cross faithfulness and faithlessness collide like matter and anti-matter, exploding in a devastating display of grace. Jesus ends up feeling the sting of our faithless failures; Jesus is the one who ends up getting all the punishments Joshua predicts and then some.

But the real wonder of what we see in the bread and the wine tonight is that grace and faithfulness have won out over sin and faithlessness. Now there are no more curses for those who try, however imperfectly, to follow God. Now there is only abundant and eternal love. And for all of us who can recognize the pattern of our own lives in the pattern of Israel's history, this is a piece of news sweeter than Land-of-Promise honey. For all of us who can admit that while faithful living takes work, sinning comes pretty easily, the news that Jesus has found a way to blot out our infidelities is gospel goodness for sure.

Sadly, we don't always like to see ourselves in this picture. The Pharisees of Jesus' day were also participants in Israel's long history of failures--but don't tell them that. They had neatly repressed the bad in themselves. So when Jesus sat at table with prostitutes, tax collectors, crooks, drunks, and multiple-partner adulterers, the Pharisees were sure they didn't fit in and so refused to take a seat even when Jesus personally invited them to do so.

"I saw them eating and I knew who they were." So says an old Middle Eastern proverb. The Pharisees believed this, too. They saw Jesus eating and they knew who he was: a man who could not detest the faithless, a man who refused to take sin seriously, a man who did not appreciate Israel's religious laws on cleanliness and on the need to keep only good company lest other people's sins contaminate your food the same way e.coli on a countertop can mix in with your lettuce salad and so make you sick.

The Pharisees could not have been more wrong, of course. Because at all those offensive dinner parties that Jesus threw and attended what Jesus was up to was allowing our sinful disloyalty to mingle with his divine faithfulness. He wanted to bring those two commodities into contact with one another because he knew that only in this way could God's faithfulness so move into our infidelity as to overwhelm it with grace. So Jesus pulls up a chair and smiles as he passes another dinner roll to the money-soiled hand of an embezzling tax collector. He urges another cup of coffee on the woman who is late for her divorce hearing at court.

In and through it all what Jesus was really doing was giving himself, a point he finally made explicit one evening in an upper room. "This is my body, this is my blood," he said of some flat bread and cabernet, but it's really what he had been saying all along at every meal. He'd pass the lentil soup to a prostitute and so would say, "This is me, this is the love of God I'm giving you, my dear lost sister." For who needed to ingest the faithful love of God more than people like that--than people like us?

Much of the Promised Land's goodness had to do with meat and figs and butter and wine. All such gifts were a sacrament of God's abiding love then, though the people eventually missed it. Tonight the Savior who is Alpha and Omega, First and Last, the faithful witness raised from the dead, he calls us for dinner along with the rest of this world's greasy failures. And if we pull up a chair and take this food from his hand, then we are admitting we need it because we know only too well how our fine clothes and pious words often hide shabby hearts and wandering eyes.

But the wonder of God's greater faithfulness is that God knows all of that about us--knows it better than we do, in fact. Still he hands us this bread of life and wine of heaven once again bringing God's enduring love into direct contact with our wobbly spirits in a way that will insure that grace will win and that we will finally push back from the table stuffed--filled to the top with a faithful and forgiving grace that will not let go. Amen.