God Said What? - Sermon Transcript

United dramatic.

 Good morning, friends.

It is really good to be with you all.

My name is Mitchell.

I'm the senior minister here at First Year.

United Methodist the Church of Dallas.

And if you're a guest worshiping with us, once again, welcome.

We're delighted that you are here.

We hope you come back and worship with us again in the future.

And it is...

 Really good to be back with you all after a few weeks away.

I was able to take some time to travel, to attend a few World Cup games, and to try and work on plans for worship for 2027.

It was not as productive as I had hoped, but I am rested.

 I am rested and I am grateful for both the time away and the opportunity to be back in the pulpit.

And I first want to say thank you to Joe and Anna, Elizabeth and Roy.

It's a gift, really.

It's a gift to be able to leave and not worry about the pulpit when I'm away.

 Their work with Recoloring the Bible series was great, and while I'm often the one you see in the pulpit or behind a music stand, they continue, I think, to remind all of us that we've got an incredible staff here at the church, and we've got some fantastic preachers, and so I'm really grateful.

Of course, as you know, there's this particular feeling, I think, within the church, especially a downtown church during the summer, the choir.

 Takes a break, well-deserved, no doubt.

Some of you all, many of you all,

 Not you, because you're here, but many of us scatter and head to the lake or the mountains or wherever you people go in July.

The whole rhythm of this place loosens up a bit, hence why I'm wearing this fun shirt and not my robe.

This is no doubt my favorite season to preach in because it gives us permission to do something that we can't always do during the season of

 Lent or the season of Advent, it gives us permission to sit just inside one book for several weeks and not rush anywhere else.

No candles to light, no liturgical calendar telling us what comes next.

 Just us and a text and a few weeks to actually wrestle with it.

And every summer around here it's becoming a tradition at this point.

I guess it's a tradition.

Four years in a row, is that a tradition?

I don't know.

Maybe not in the scope of.

 things here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas.

Four years is just a blip on the radar, but four years of my life, that's a tradition.

Four years running now, we've done a series called Band, which is great because each year we grab a book of the Bible that gets overlooked or misused or just plain avoided, and we spend a few weeks in it together.

If you remember...

 I know many of you do.

In 2023, we were in the book of James, and we talked specifically about our response, the human response to God's grace in our life.

In 2024, we read everyone's favorite summer book, the book of Job, where we talked about suffering.

And last year, we did

 the book of Revelation and talked at length about how much harm bad theology can do in the world.

And so that's sort of where we were at.

And this year, we are continuing this series with the book of Joshua.

 Now, every single time we've done this series, somebody finds me afterwards and says to me, Mitchell, I have never heard a preacher preach on that, which I'm not sure is a compliment, but it is sort of a common response.

 I'm not sure I've ever heard a preacher preach on that.

And and so I know that there are going to be moments in this series with the Book of Joshua that are going to be challenging for us.

They may be new for us.

It'll be an opportunity for us to

 to really wrestle with a text.

And the reason we're doing Joshua this year, which is far more ambitious than I think I realized when I chose it last summer, is because it is a book in the Bible that we are often trying to avoid.

It's sort of like...

 The one text message you may receive from someone that you just leave on your phone like unread, I don't know how quick you all are to respond to every text message, but there are these times when someone sends me that one message, maybe it's in a group chat or from a friend, and you know it's there, and every time you pick up your phone, you sort of debate on whether or not to open it.

 That little red notification badge on the message app is just sort of staring at you.

And you tell yourself, not today, I'll get to it later.

Maybe it's from a relative.

Maybe it's someone you used to be close with and things got complicated and you can't bring yourself to delete it or reply to it or even bring yourself to open it.

So it just sort of sits there, unread, waiting.

That's the book of Joshua, okay?

So it just kind of sits there and we don't really engage with it.

We don't really read it.

 We sort of just move right past it.

And so today we're going to open it.

So I want to do some quick orientation to the book itself.

Nobody knows exactly who wrote Joshua.

It's not a single author sitting down with a pen.

It's part of a larger collection.

 It's shaped and shepherded by different hands over time and we kind of look at it as a book that sort of got carried and copied and edited across generations before it looked like the book you are holding today.

 It's important to also note that the earliest material of this book, of the book of Joshua, was probably compiled, put together in the seventh century under King Josiah.

But it was edited and added to, adapted, curated over several decades after that first source material.

 The book we actually have in our current form was finalized much later than the seventh century.

And most of the book was sort of put into place in the sixth century during the Babylonian exile, which means that this isn't some sort of day of account of war.

It's a story.

 The book of Joshua is a story that got told and retold by people a long way downstream from the events themselves.

And here's maybe the most important part.

Joshua wasn't written to give you a history lesson.

That's not the point of Joshua.

It was written to secure a nation's identity.

 Their sense of covenant, of law, of belonging to this land during a time when all of that felt like it might come apart during the Babylonian exile.

This is a people trying to answer who we are written in a season when that question was not simply theoretical.

It was a matter of life and death.

 So Joshua opens what's called the Nebom, the former prophets, and it picks up, Joshua picks up the very next page after Deuteronomy ends, and that is intentional.

There's no gap.

There's no breath.

Moses is barely in the ground before his books, this book starts.

Moses was told, if you remember, that he would not cross into the Holy Land.

He will not cross into the land.

 And the very last thing Moses does is he hands over leadership responsibility to Joshua.

The whole operation belongs to Joshua.

 And that sort of transition doesn't happen gently.

There's no sort of org chart.

It's not planned out.

There's not a transitional plan.

It just sort of, Moses one day essentially dies and Joshua picks up the pieces and begins to lead the people.

And think about that then, the position that Joshua is in.

Because he didn't ask to lead.

 He'd spent decades as Moses' assistant, the aid, the one who carried Moses' bags, I imagine, up the mountain and waited at the bottom while Moses spent however long Moses was going to spend on top of the mountain talking to God.

And now overnight, he's the one that everyone is looking at.

And 40 years of wandering behind him in an entire nation's future in front of him, and the man he learned everything from was gone.

That's...

 not really a promotion as much as it is a burden.

And so I want us to sort of, that's sort of the sociological stuff that's happening as we pick up Joshua.

I don't know how, it doesn't really matter.

You just need to see two colors.

They're both green, okay?

 There's the light green to the east.

That is the current land that Israel sort of occupies.

And then there's this darker green to the west.

And that is the land that they will be conquering.

And right in between the two pieces of land is the River Jordan.

 Now the big body of water in the south, that's the Dead Sea.

And right to the north of it, the first city to the north of it on the darker side of the map is Jericho.

And that is the place where the book of Joshua begins its sort of conquest narrative.

 Jericho is the first city standing between Israel and everything that Moses promises.

And so as we go through this book, it's important to note that not only does it describe a movement, a sort of relocation and expansion of a people, it happens in a very particular geographical location.

And everything west of that river, of the Jordan,

 All that dark green still belongs to somebody else as we begin to read this book.

That's the tension essentially of the whole book.

The whole book exists within this tension, the promise and possession, that promise and possession are not the same thing.

And here's the deal that Joshua gets handed to keep the law, to get the land.

It's in the very first chapter of Joshua.

And this is what we read.

 Be strong and courageous for you shall lead this people to possess the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them.

Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law

 that my servant Moses commanded you.

Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left so that you may be successful wherever you go.

This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth.

You shall meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it.

For then you shall make your way prosperous and then you shall be successful."

 The very first chapter of Joshua, we read that Joshua and the people are to meditate on the book day and night.

You don't turn from it to the right or to the left, and you'll succeed wherever you go.

It reads almost like a transaction.

Obedience in, blessing out.

That's a very common theological proposition.

 position that we hold in this country.

If you're obedient, you'll be blessed.

And for the first several chapters, that's exactly how it plays out.

Jericho falls, Ai falls eventually, and the land starts changing hands.

And through obedience, God fulfills promises.

This is the overarching, very thin, overly optimistic view of the book of Joshua.

And this is where, honestly, if anyone preaches,

 sermons on Joshua, this is where all those sermons stop.

This is sometimes where I would love to stop.

Faithful leader, conquered land, God keeps God's promise, the end.

A tidy testament to what happens when God's people trust God's word.

 And if that were the whole book, we wouldn't need three weeks to deal with it, and we certainly wouldn't need to call it banned.

But unfortunately, that's not the whole book, because the same chapters describing Israel keeping the law also describe what keeping the law required, specifically bringing about destruction, like massive amounts of destruction.

 Entire cities, everything living inside them in some accounts, not as a regrettable side effect of ancient warfare, but something that scripture commands, something that is holy, something that represents obedience.

 And there's a word underneath all of this, a word that doesn't translate cleanly into English, which frankly is part of the problem we run into when we pick up the book of Joshua.

We keep softening it because we don't have a category for what it actually means.

And that word is harem.

You'll sometimes see it translated as devoted or dedicated or set apart.

 It almost sounds sacred when we do it that way, almost gentle, which is exactly why it's misleading.

Harem means to ban something completely, to ban it completely in a devotion to God, essentially by destroying it.

Not to give it away, not to set it on a shelf as an offering, but to wipe it out.

 cities, livestock, people, all of it consecrated to God through total annihilation.

Most ancient warfare, the whole goal was to plunder.

 You conquer a city, you take what's valuable, you haul it home.

The idea of harem sort of flips that on its head because nothing is kept, nothing gets sold.

The entire idea is that nothing survives to be claimed by human hands because the claiming belongs to God alone.

This isn't violence for gain, it's violence that is essentially framed as worship.

 And I think that's what makes it so hard to sit with.

And I think that's the part that we skip past too quickly.

We hear ancient conquest and our brains follow it under history, something that happened to other people a long time ago for reasons that made sense in their world even if they don't make sense in our world today.

But harem isn't presented as military strategy that happened to have religious backing.

That's not what we're reading about.

 It's presented as an act of devotion, which means the question this text is actually asking us isn't did God command violence somewhere back in the Bronze Age?

The question is what kind of God and what kind of devotion this text believes it's describing?

And that's a harder question, I think, for us to look away from.

 So for the next few weeks, we're going to sit with it instead of rushing past it because our instinct is to explain it away, to find the footnote that makes it feel less severe, or just to move right by it and pretend like it doesn't exist.

That's typically how we deal with challenging text, and there are some footnotes, and we'll get to some, but not really today, not before we really let

 the book of Joshua sort of sit with us, because harem, this idea of devotion to God through complete annihilation, shows up 80 times in the Hebrew Bible, and almost all of them are clustered entirely in the conquest narratives.

 And so it's not incidental language.

This essentially, this idea is the engine that drives the whole story of the book.

And listen to how plainly it's commanded actually in Scripture.

Because before we even get into Joshua, in Deuteronomy chapter 7, we sort of get a glimpse of this.

The passage that Joshua is standing on when he leads people into the land is,

 back in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 7 says, when the Lord your God brings you into the land that you're about to enter and occupy and he clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them.

 It's what the text says.

Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.

Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me to serve other gods.

 Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.

But this is how you must deal with them.

Break down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire.

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.

The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

There's no ambiguity there in Deuteronomy 7, no poetic distance that I can find.

 utterly destroy them, show them no mercy.

Unfortunately, there's no like background noise.

This isn't just background noise like on the way to the good parts.

This is just what it is.

And I think here's maybe the whole point of today's sermon.

It is easy for us then to pick up the book of Joshua and say, wow, that's awful.

 I can't believe that someone would think that way and project all of our sort of negative feelings onto a whole group of other people and say, man, they should do a better job of reading the Bible, right?

To essentially take what is uncomfortable and try to like cast it upon other people.

But the truth is every single one of us probably already knows how to do a very small version of this every day.

 Now we don't call it harem and we don't stand at a border with an army behind us, but every one of us at some point has decided who's in and who's out.

Every one of us at some point has decided who gets in and who doesn't.

Who's safe, who's family, who gets the benefit of the doubt.

 Who gets held at arm's length until they prove themselves?

Now we don't beat war drums, but we are still drawing those lines quietly every day.

 A guest list, a comment left unsaid, a decision about who gets invited back and who doesn't.

We don't call it conquest.

We call it boundaries or wisdom or just knowing our own people.

And most of the time we can explain exactly why the line sits where it sits.

That's the part that I think should unsettle us.

It's never arbitrary.

 arbitrary from the inside.

It always feels reasonable.

It always feels justified.

That's what makes it so easy to live with and so hard to see clearly until years later looking back.

But every single one of us participates in the drawing of lines, the setting of boundaries, and the clearly othering of other people.

Some of you heard me tell this story, and I'm going to tell it again because I still

 I can't let go of it.

But back in 2014, when I was a pastor of another church, a young mother reached out to me and asked me to baptize her son.

She wasn't ready to join the church herself.

And we sat across each other at Cultivar Coffee at PV and Garland Road, one of my favorite coffee shops.

 And her baby was fussing as babies do.

And she looked at me and asked me plain as day, will you baptize my son?

And I said, no.

And I could actually justify that no.

I could justify it today.

You just give me a whiteboard in five minutes and I can justify the no because baptism is essentially covenant, right?

 The church makes a promise to that child alongside the parent.

And the parent promises to raise that child within the church.

Doctrine and polity, all of it lined up neatly on my side, a defensible no, a theologically sound no.

And it took me four years to understand what it actually was.

 I didn't actually think about that conversation too much until I was standing in front at the font watching my own son get baptized.

 both of his grandfathers speaking an identity over him that he had nothing to do to earn it, nothing he had to do to deserve that.

And it hit me as I watched Cash get baptized that I had denied a mother and her son the exact same thing that I was watching transpire and happen within my own family.

 And I drew a line, and I said no, and I had good reasons for where I drew it, and a woman and a baby ended up on the wrong side of that line.

The truth is I've thought about that instance like 100 times since, and I don't know her name anymore.

I don't know what happened to her son, whether he grew up in the church, whether anybody ever did for him what I wouldn't do.

 That sort of not knowing what has happened to that family is its own kind of weight.

You don't always get to sort of find out.

You don't always get to find out what your line drawing has cost somebody.

Sometimes you just have to live with it, live with the fact that it costs something and you move forward carrying that.

 I tell you all of this because this is the truth that's found in Joshua.

It isn't only a text about people who lived 3,000 years ago.

The same instinct that told Israel who was in the land and who it belonged to and who was in and who was out, that same feeling

 That same sort of response to the world is happening within us each and every day.

It doesn't just show up when we're wearing armor.

It shows up when we're wearing good theology in a calm, reasonable voice telling me exactly where the line goes and why it's justified.

We have a habit of drawing lines.

 I don't think I need to convince anybody in this room that we are living through a season that rewards drawing hard lines.

We turn on the news, scroll for five minutes, sit at a family dinner table, if you dare.

Plenty of people will tell you exactly who belongs and who doesn't.

 Who counts as a real American?

Who counts as a real Christian?

Who's inside the story of this country and who's just an obstacle standing in front of it?

I say that carefully because I'm not up here to score points for one side of our politics.

That's not my job and essentially it's not the church's job either.

But I'd be lying to you and failing this text if I pretended a book like Joshua has nothing to do with the world we're actually living in.

 This book has been picked up before by people who called themselves faithful and justified line drawing in pretty disastrous ways.

Land taken in God's name.

Nations conquered in covenant's name.

Whole peoples treated as obstacles standing between somebody else and a promise that they believed was theirs alone.

 And before we assume I'm only talking about someone else's history somewhere far away, remember where we are sitting.

This land had people on it before any of us arrived to.

And I think that's a thread that pulls this book tight to us because we're not exempt from it just because it makes us uncomfortable to pick it up.

 Because here's what gets lost when we rush to make this only about ancient warfare or the Bronze Age or a misinterpretation, a violent culture doing what violent cultures do.

Joshua 11 doesn't say Joshua decided on his own to wipe out the northern coalition.

Listen to the wording, as the Lord had commanded his servant Moses...

 So Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did.

He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses.

Joshua isn't the author of this violence.

He's simply the instrument of it.

 And the text puts the command, the intent, even the hardening of the hearts directly on God.

In Joshua 11, 24, it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle in order that they might be utterly destroyed, receiving no mercy, but to be exterminated just as the Lord had commanded Moses.

 That doesn't make this easier.

If anything, it makes it harder.

This idea that the command, the intent, the hardening of hearts is God's work.

So now we're not just wrestling with what an ancient army did to others.

We're wrestling with what scripture says God commanded them to do.

 A quick bit of history, and we'll go deeper next week.

Most scholars believe Joshua as we have it, as we read it today, was compiled generations after the events it describes, likely finalized, right, under King Josiah and completed or edited, as I said, during the Babylonian exile.

 This isn't a battlefield transcript.

I said that out front.

It's closer to people rewriting their origin story generations later, in exile, under the threat of it, wrestling with a desperate question, who are we, when everything that made us who we are has been taken?

 So maybe you're a scribe, maybe you're a priest sitting somewhere in Babylon, far from anything familiar, and your job is somehow to keep telling your people who they are when every visible sign of who they were has been stripped away.

No temple, no king, no land, just stories.

 Now that doesn't excuse the violence.

The command still says what it says, but it changes what kind of book we're holding.

This is also a people, generations later, telling themselves why they mattered, why God hadn't abandoned them.

 And the anxiety underneath all of it isn't so different from the anxiety underneath a lot of our own line drawing.

Fear of disappearing, fear of losing what has made us who we are, fear dressed up as certainty because certainty feels safer than grief.

That doesn't excuse it or make it right, but it does make it human.

And that is, I think, the most important point about Joshua.

It is a very human-centric book.

 And a text that's human, rather than simply monstrous, is a text we're actually required to keep reading.

So we'll sit with that this week, and we'll pick it back up next week.

But here's what I want to leave you with.

We can pretend like the book of Joshua isn't in our Bible, and many faithful United Methodist churches do.

Or we can bend over backwards trying to explain of it, but neither one of those options is really the faithful option.

 Because I think the most faithful thing we can do is take a posture that is honest.

It means staying at the table with a text that unsettles us.

And it essentially means that we are going to refuse to leave this book unread, refuse to sort of stand it down or sand it down into something easier to swallow.

And so as we wrestle with this text this week, this book this week, I want you to think just

 This question, this is the question I want you to think about.

Where in your life have you already decided who is in and who is out?

Where in your life right now have you already drawn lines, othered other people, and where

 Where do you see that playing out in your life in such a way that you can relate to the sharp lines found in the book of Joshua?

Because the truth is, we all are drawing lines each and every day.

The first step for us to really engage with this book is to clearly and honestly name them.

 Now, you don't answer this question out loud, but I am gonna ask you to sit with it for this week on the drive home and conversations at the dinner table.

But where are you drawing lines already in your life to decide who's in and who's out?

So for the next two weeks,

 we're gonna wrestle with what does Joshua then mean for us as a people of faith and how can we engage scripture faithfully when it seems to be clearly saying that God is in favor of genocide.

 And how does that have an effect on our public witness in the world?

We'll talk about Christian nationalism some next week.

We'll also sort of talk about geopolitical forces.

But the truth is, until we're able to find ourselves in this book,

 find the human element, how we show up in this story, it will remain something that we rarely engage with.

So we need to be honest with ourselves about how we draw those lines, and then we can be honest about how to claim a new identity or rewrite the identity that Joshua gives God.

The truth is because we follow Jesus, and Jesus is really the antithesis of this.

Jesus is constantly crossing the line.

 Jesus is constantly touching those who are seen to be unclean.

Jesus is constantly inviting people to the dinner table who have been shut out.

So how do we maintain a Christian faith while Joshua is a part of our scripture?

We'll talk about that more next week.

But before we get there, we have to be honest about our own line drawing and not just project it onto others.

 And as we do that good work this week, I trust that God will continue to show up to give us grace, an abundant amount of grace, as we do what is often not done, wrestle with hard parts of our scripture in hopes to become better, more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.

May God bless the work in front of us.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.