Whose Land Is It? - Sermon Transcript

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 Good morning again, friends.

It's good to be with you all.

My name is Mitchell.

I am the senior minister here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas.

And if you're a guest worshiping with us, once again, we're delighted to have you here.

Yeah, we're back in our band series, and we're spending some more time focused on the book of Joshua.

 which is a book in the Bible.

It is.

I know many of us have maybe not read that, read it all that closely.

But it is a book in the Bible, and it is an awkward book.

It's a book that's difficult, I think, to make sense of.

 And last week, on sort of the first week of this series, we wrestled with a simple question, what do we do with a God who seems to command conquest and violence as an act of obedience?

And that in and of itself is a very difficult question to have to sit with all week.

But that's like,

 One question, I think the harder question is what do we make of the human response to that?

 What does it mean that we as a people have not just sort of read this book, but then used this book to do extraordinarily damaging things for centuries?

And that's a harder question, I think, for us this week.

And that's where we're headed.

And so I'm just going to get straight into it.

I want to start by just reading something to you.

It's the very first chapter of Joshua.

 And I want to sort of just read it aloud and let's just sit with it.

So starting in verse 2.

Moses, my servant, is dead.

Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people into the land that I am giving to them.

 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you as I promised to Moses.

From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites of the great sea in the west shall be your territory.

Very first few verses in the book of Joshua.

 For a long stretch in American history, this has been the sermon.

That's it, really, the whole thing.

Nobody added any commentary to it because, well, we didn't really need to.

 In the 1800s, while this country was pushing west, while the United States government was forcing native nations off of the land that they had lived on for hundreds of years, revival preachers, frontier preachers, some Methodists, Wesleyan, stood in front of wagon trains, caravans, frontier people,

 stood at camp meetings on the night before the caravan was to leave, and read out loud Joshua 1, 3.

Every place the sole of your foot will tread, I have given you.

That was the send-off.

That was the blessing, the prayer over the frontier caravan.

Pack the wagon, load the gun,

 God has already given this to you.

Your responsibility is to go and take it.

 The troubling thing is that nobody had to even twist the words in Joshua to make sense of it.

That's the part I think that should bother us the most when we pick up this book.

Nobody bent the text into shape or manipulated the text.

They just read it plainly and believed that it was still talking to them.

 And I get it, I do, because I grew up thinking that this book was simply one big adventure story, you know, in Sunday school or vacation Bible school.

There are trumpets in the walls of Jericho.

They come tumbling down.

There's a general named Joshua, a general who never loses a battle, never loses a war.

 Felt boards in Sunday school classes would depict this really well.

There was even that catchy song that had a good beat that we would sing with great enthusiasm.

And nobody in those rooms when I was a child told me that those same verses, the same story in Joshua got read over wagons headed toward land that already had people living on it.

Someone

 a long time ago decided which parts of this story we tell children and which ones we don't.

 So here's where we're gonna start this morning.

Not with what Joshua meant 3000 years ago in some ancient land dispute, most of us will never fully untangle.

We're gonna start with Joshua and really what has been made of Joshua

 ever since on this continent, on this country, in this state.

Some of it is not far away from where we're sitting right now.

The challenge is with difficult texts like Joshua, as you all know, is admitting to ourselves that we are not just studying some old war story or some myth or some history that happened

 Thousands of years ago, the challenge with wrestling with difficult texts is realizing that we're studying actually not just a book of the Bible, but we are studying a weapon.

We're studying a weapon.

 One that got picked up and sharpened and used on real people, some of whose descendants still live in the state, in the city, some of whom might be sitting closer to the sanctuary than we'd even really like to admit.

 And before we try to dismiss it or spend too much energy pointing fingers at bad theology and revival preachers from 200 years ago, I think we have to be level-headed and honest because using Scripture as a weapon is not a dead habit.

This is not something that Western Christianity has grown out of.

 People are still doing this right now.

Today, somewhere, I promise you this, somebody somewhere in this country today is reading Joshua from the pulpit and using it to talk about who belongs here and who doesn't.

Who this land's for and who it's not for.

Whose nation this is and whose nation it's never supposed to be.

 What we're wrestling with then is not ancient history, it's really just Tuesday afternoon in 2026.

And Christian nationalism cloaked in the faithfulness of certain strands of evangelical Christianity is indeed on the rise and that should scare us because last week while we sat with the hard opening chapters of Joshua, the command, the violence, the word harem, right, the

 notion of total, complete destruction as a devotion to God with no exceptions.

We didn't try to explain it away.

We didn't try to make God look nicer than the text actually says God looks.

We said that the full story of who God is though isn't finished being told in these opening chapters.

That the character of God gets revealed over the long arc of Scripture, not in one book, not in one command, but in

 But that the book of Joshua was indeed problematic.

We said that.

That was last week, the hard unresolved.

And I think, you know, that's where exactly it needed to land.

But this week, the challenge is we're not asking what God did in the story.

We're asking what we as a people have done with this story.

And that should scare us.

 We're asking what we did with it and why understanding that is key if we're going to provide an alternative witness to the world.

 Because here's the thing about a weapon.

It doesn't matter how it was forged if you don't scrutinize the people who picked it up and used it and how many times they used it and for what they used that weapon for.

Because there's little doubt that the book of Joshua has been used to justify violence in the name of Christ.

There is very little doubt about that.

And the justification is actually rather easy to do because the book of Joshua

 Joshua is so clear about violence being a divine mandate, like here in Joshua 8.

When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them, and when all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai.

 and attacked it with the edge of the sword, the total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was 12,000 people.

All of odd.

Total annihilation.

Genocide.

Genocide.

 Here it is in chapter 10.

Joshua took Makeda on that day and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword.

He utterly destroyed every person in it.

He left no survivor.

 Verse 40, so Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negev and the low land and the slopes and all their kings and he left no one remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed as the Lord God of Israel commanded.

The next chapter, chapter 11, and they put to the sword all who were in it, utterly destroying them.

There was no one left who breathed and he burned Hazer itself with fire, 12,000 people

 no survivor, no one remaining, no one who left breathing.

I'm not going to explain that away this morning.

I'm not going to tell you that it reads worse in English than it does in the Hebrew, or that ancient warfare rhetoric exaggerated body counts, or any of the other things scholars might say to you to make you feel a little better about the fact that Joshua is in our Bible, because some of that may...

 will be true.

There are ways to academically make sense of Joshua, to soften it, but it doesn't really matter this morning.

What matters this morning is that these words, this specific language, no survivor, no one remaining, no one left who breathed, did not stay locked inside some ancient book.

 Somebody picked it up, somebody read it, and somebody believed that it was still speaking to them and used it then as permission.

We see this actually unfold over and over again, but the question I think remains, why?

Why are we so susceptible to using permission?

 violence and using violence in the name of Christ, why does that happen over and over and over in our history?

Why is using this book as a justification for conquest, as permission for violence, as a mandate for genocide so appealing?

Why is the weapon picked up time and time again?

To get to that answer, hopefully, maybe, why is

 We have two texts this morning, and they are somewhat strange pairing.

And then we're going to look at a long, ugly history of what got built on top of the verses we just read.

But first, Joshua 5, verses 10 through 12.

While the Israelites were camped in Gogol, they kept the Passover in the plains of Jericho.

On the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land.

 Unleavened cakes and parched grain.

The manna then ceased.

The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land.

And the Israelites no longer had manna, but ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

 Deuteronomy 8 says, take care that you do not forget the Lord your God by failing to keep his commandments and his ordinances and his statutes, which I am commanding you today.

That's what Moses is saying.

When you have eaten your fill and you have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied,

 And do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God.

Do not say to yourself, my power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.

But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.

This is what Moses is saying to the people before they enter

 into Canaan before they crossed the Jordan.

And the key word in this text in Deuteronomy is the word forget.

That's the word for us.

The text says, do not forget the Lord your God.

In English, forgetting sounds rather passive.

 It sounds like something that just happens to you, like it's an infliction, like you misplace your keys, you forget a name, nobody blames you for it unless you're me.

That's because I have a habit of forgetting things quite often, like this morning I couldn't find my keys.

But that isn't actually what the text is saying.

 The Hebrew word behind it is shekal.

And it does not carry that same innocence because it's covenant language.

It doesn't mean that your memory just slipped or you have a bad habit of misplacing things.

It actually means that you neglected something.

Abandoned it.

 acted as though it never happened in the first place.

Scripture never treats this kind of forgetting that Moses is talking about as an accident.

It treats it as a choice, sort of wearing the mask of memory loss, maybe in the translation, but it is indeed a choice.

So when Moses says, do not forget the Lord your God, he's not worried that Israel will simply lose track of a fact.

Moses is worried they will choose to live as though the wilderness has never happened.

 that the manna that God provided them had never happened.

That it was never necessary in the first place as though they built all of this themselves from nothing with nobody's help.

That is not forgetting by accident, that's rather forgetting on purpose and it's exactly what happens next and it has consequences because the manna stops.

 on the day they eat from the land.

Not before, not as punishment, just the day they no longer needed it, it stopped showing up.

Now think about that.

For 40 years, manna has been provided to God's people.

For 40 years, every day they would wake up with nothing stored, nothing saved, nothing they could point to and call their own provision.

And every single morning, whatever showed up in the dew of the morning was what you had to eat.

That was

 No harvest to plant around, no granary to protect, no inheritance to pass down except the story of God.

That was the only thing they had to pass down.

Generations, right?

 A story of God who kept feeding them one day at a time, whether you deserved it or not, whether you complained about it or not.

And by their own account, they complained about it rather constantly.

That is a strange kind of formation, if you think about it.

An entire generation raised without the ability to say, I built this, I earned this, I stored this away for later.

And the day they crossed the Jordan River,

 The day they cross it and eat something they grew themselves or stole from the inhabitants of the land, something they can claim credit for, the free bread from heaven just quietly ends.

No more manna.

Moses saw this coming.

Moses stood there before they even crossed the river and told them exactly what was going to happen.

 You're gonna get the land, you're gonna build houses, you're gonna eat well, and the day you do, you're going to start telling yourself a story, a different story, a story that is centered on you doing this, your power, your own hand.

That's the phrase that Moses puts in their mouth

 before they've even said it.

He knew the outcome before they ever moved across the Jordan.

Moses knew what was going to happen to God's people.

So here's my honest question for the week one that I don't have an answer for.

If the warning was so clear in Deuteronomy, and it was so evident that this was going to happen to the people if they cross the Jordan, why do they still fall into the trap if they know the shape of it?

Why are they still constantly falling into this

 trap and i don't think that the answer is that israel is uniquely bad at following god

 I think the answer is that we're really not any better at it, that it's what it means to be human.

Power corrupts and then rewrites history.

The book of Joshua tells the story of a very specific people though, and this is a challenge for us because at a very specific moment, Joshua is unfolding, receiving a very specific covenant.

It is not a template.

The book of Joshua is never meant to be a template.

It's not a formula.

 that any nation should pick up and run with.

It's a one-time promise to a particular people who had been enslaved and wandered for 40 years and finally crossed a river.

And yet, that is not how it has gotten read over centuries.

Somewhere along the way, other nations, centuries later, started reading themselves into this story, seeing themselves as Israel.

They cast themselves as the chosen people.

 and cast whoever was standing in their way on the land they wanted as new Canaanites.

And once you make that swap, once you see yourself as the chosen people of God and everyone who opposes you as the new Canaanites, everything downstream just seems justified.

 The violence stops looking like conquest and starts looking like a divine inheritance.

This is how a book about one people's crossing one time became a license for hundreds of years of crossings that were never theirs to make.

 Because the logic in Deuteronomy 8, the logic of my own hand got me this, is not ancient logic.

It is the exact logic of every empire that seeks expansion and power.

Take the colonization of the Americas.

Spanish and English colonizers did not quietly absorb this logic by accident.

They wrote it into their charters.

 They preached it from ships before they ever made landfall, land that was already lived on, already farmed, already named by the people standing on it.

That land got called empty, got called wilderness, called a promise waiting to be claimed because the men doing the claiming had convinced themselves they were reading their own story in an old book about someone else's conquest, but they believed it was their story.

The same logic shows up in

 Apartheid South Africa where scripture was used to justify a legal system of racial separation as though God had ordained the boundaries somehow.

It shows up in the founding mythology of this country.

A chosen people finding a promised land that already had people living on it.

Same shape, just different centuries.

And this isn't just history.

It's not like we've just moved on.

 We're not just looking backwards.

The doctrine of discovery is a set of decrees from the 15th century written by the church, church decrees that gave Christian nations religious permission to claim land that was not theirs.

As long as the people living there weren't Christian.

That's not just history.

It's not just a museum piece.

It's not something we just sort of grew out of.

 Because in 2005, in the United States Supreme Court, our Supreme Court cited the doctrine of discovery in a case about the Onoda Indian nation trying to reclaim ancestral land in New York in 2005.

Some of us were already like grown adults with kids in this church when that ruling came down.

 It's not ancient history.

That is a legal argument rooted in Christian theology, rooted in books like the one we're reading together right now that shaped a Supreme Court decision within my lifetime.

So here's where I have to stop pointing at other people's history and really turn towards my own because this is the truth.

 I, Mitchell Boone, I benefit from the land, from the stability, from a country whose whole shape was formed by this exact conquest logic.

I did not build the ground that this sanctuary sits on.

I did not build or till the land.

I did not clear it, did not fight for it, did not pay whatever price was paid for me to inherit.

It is simply obviously mine.

I drive to a house I own.

 on a street with a name I've never questioned, in a city built on a removal of people that I was never taught about in public schools.

And if I'm honest, most days, most days I don't think about any of it.

 The land just is what it is.

It's mine, ours, normal.

My kids will grow up the same way I did, assuming the ground under them was simply always going to be theirs.

That is exactly the forgetting that Moses warned us about, not the dramatic kind, the quiet kind, the kind that doesn't feel like forgetting because it just feels like normal life.

And honestly, I don't know what to do with that.

 And if you do, I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee.

And I'd be lying to you if I acted like this was only sort of a philosophical problem, a historical problem, because right now in this country, there are Christian leaders standing in pulpits and in front of cameras telling people that America is indeed a chosen nation.

 That this land was providentially set aside for a particular kind of people, and that reclaiming political power is indeed a holy mandate.

It's not a metaphor that they're borrowing from.

That is Joshua's logic, word for word, just wearing a flag instead of a robe.

 When faith gets fused to national identity and national identity gets fused to who is allowed to belong here, we are not looking at a new idea.

 It's not a new idea.

We're looking at the oldest one in this book, just being draped in patriotism.

But the good news is, and there is some, even in the midst of this series and this week, the good news is a bit smaller and softer, but it is good news.

The good news is that this book has never been hidden from us.

It's been sitting in our Bibles the whole time, available

 Uncomfortable, but also refusing to let us pretend our faith somehow has clean hands.

And a God who lets this type of book stay in scripture unedited is not a God that's interested in our comfort as a source of discipleship.

God seems more interested in us being honest.

So the good news is when we pick up this book and we begin to wrestle with it and we're honest about what has been done in the name of this book,

 we can begin to redeem it because it is clear once you read it, that it is not a manual for how we are to behave as Christians.

It is not a manual for how we're to behave.

It's not a mandate for how to form a nation.

Nothing in these pages in the book of Joshua is instruction for how we as faithful Christians should treat people.

There's nothing in it that should be instructive for us.

 And that has to be said, unfortunately, plainly because for centuries, people have read it exactly that way.

And the violence from that reading is not hypothetical.

It really has happened to people.

But instead of the book of Joshua being read as a manual, we need to read it as a mirror.

It's a mirror, one that shows us, us, uncomfortably, clearly what people do when they convince themselves God is on their side in a land dispute.

 Not what people did past tense, safely behind us, what people do present tense.

Because the mirror doesn't stop reflecting just because we'd rather look away from it.

So that is why we're reading the book of Joshua.

That's why we're staring into the mirror.

We read it the way you'd read a warning label.

Not a blessing.

It's a warning label.

 And we ask every time this text gets picked up, whose hand is holding it and what are they about to do with it?

 And next week we get to read it forward, not just backward.

Next week we're going to meet Rahab and the Gibeonites, people the conquest narrative says should have been erased and instead somehow they end up inside the story, inside the family, inside the promise of Scripture.

That's not a resolution for us today.

 It's not supposed to cancel out what I just said, but it means that the last word in this book is not actually conquest.

It's mercy.

And it shows up right in the middle of violence.

So as we wrestle with a difficult text, may God bless our commitment to not looking away from uncomfortable stories in our scripture.

 Because the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the entire gospel story is not found in the absence of violence.

The resurrection story of Christ is not found in the absence of violence.

It is found in the midst of violence.

And that is good news for us for today and the days that follow.

Let's pray.

 Gracious and loving God, bless our wrestling with the text like Jacob who wrestles with the angel.

May we have confidence that you bless hard, faithful work.

Help us to see your story in spite of the tinted glasses we often wear, and may you continue to bless us as we trust that your gospel

 is incompatible with seeing other people as less than.

May we expand the boundaries and the tables that we participate in, and may we trust that your grace is sufficient for all the failings that have come before, to all the failings that will happen from this moment on.

May your forgiveness wash over us so that we may approach

 our life, our world, our community, as an opportunity to share your good news that love wins.

It's in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I pray.

Amen.