Choose Again - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

It's good to see each and every one of you.

And if you're a guest this morning, what a, if you're a first-time guest, what a time to join us as we conclude the book of Joshua together in our band series.

 Yesterday, Elan and I did something that we don't often do.

I can't remember the last time I did it, actually.

We dropped the kids off.

We went on a date.

That's not the last.

We do that more often than not.

But we dropped the kids off early and went to a 9 a.m.

showing of The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan.

 which I recommend you go and see the movie.

The film's incredible.

And I love seeing a movie in the morning because there's no one there to judge you for whatever you decide to eat.

I got a box of Raisinets and ate them all to myself, and no one judged me.

Well, Eli judged me, but it wasn't because I was eating something at 9 a.m.

It was because I chose to eat a box of Raisinets.

Apparently, they're not very popular.

 But I like a good Raisinette.

So we're sitting there in the Angelica at Marking Bridge Station.

 And as I took my seat, I was really thinking that I was about to watch three hours of sea monsters and sea gods and Matt Damon looking both buff and weathered on the beach, which he does look very buff.

He looks great in the film.

And I thought that I was just sort of in for a good flick.

 I also got something far more powerful because I think the way that the film's shot and the story's told, there are these incredibly complex layers to everything and it really has made an impact on me.

I've been thinking about it a lot because there's a stretch in the film where Odysseus finally essentially tells the truth

 tells a truth about what happened at Troy.

And it's not like the version that exists in the songs that are being sung or the myths or poems that are being shared.

It's not the one where Odysseus is like the clever one or the patient one or the heroic one.

 Towards the end of the film, we see Odysseus tell the real version of the story.

And without spoiling how Nolan gets you there, I'll just say this.

Somewhere in this on-screen confession, the thing that had been guiding

 Odysseus, through the whole film, the wisdom he trusted, the voice that he leaned on for the journey, and essentially the essence of human relationships and the moral ethics that are needed for communities to flourish, all of it is destroyed during the siege of Troy.

None of it, none of those things survive to what he's confessing to doing.

 And you watch this man sort of lead with courage and conviction in the film and win a war.

And in the midst of that winning, losing something else entirely.

And never really gets it back.

 No doubt Homer's Odyssey is timeless, and Nolan does a fantastic job with this story, I think.

Nolan doesn't actually try to solve for the uncomfortableness of Homer's truth.

You just sit really in the wreckage of it.

And I can't stop, like I said, I can't stop thinking about the movie.

I dreamed about it last night, and...

 And I also can't help but see the connections between Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and what we've been wrestling with over the past three weeks.

We're in this series about a violent conquest and the God who supposedly commanded this violent conquest

 And I'm now finding the truth of Joshua is also as old as humanity itself.

The things we do for power ultimately leave a path of destruction far beyond what we can ever imagine.

 Three weeks ago, I told you a story and I told you that I also didn't have a bow for this book.

Like I don't have a nice way for us to like pick it up and feel comfortable with the book of Joshua.

And I'm still not sure the book is redeemable, but I said the story itself, the story of God, scripture contains, widens as the book goes on.

And really throughout scripture, we see a widening of who God is.

 And then it moves really from a God who commands destruction in the very beginning of Joshua to a God who dies rather than destroy anyone.

And I asked you to sort of trust that narrative art, trust the shape of who God is, the identity that we sort of

 think of when we think of being followers of Christ and trust that there is a way for us to coexist in the midst of this book being in our scriptures.

And so this morning we're going to start looking at the shape, the broader shape, the arc of the book as it relates to who we are and who God is.

After last week's sermon, right at the end, I said that the last word in this book is really not about conquest or violence, that it's really about mercy.

 That mercy shows up right in the middle of the violence.

And I've been thinking about that promise that I made to you all that we would get there, the promise I made last week, wondering if I could actually make good on it.

Because sometimes, sometimes

 Preachers like myself we make promises at the end of a sermon that we're not sure we can actually like cash like we can't We can't really fulfill the promises we make and so We say hopeful thing on our way out the door and then have to go figure out what we meant by that Turns out that I did mean it when I said it last week but we're gonna have to walk through some strange territory in the book to get there including remembering

 this story i told in week one about a woman and a baby that i said no to and i'm not going to retell that story but i want you to keep that woman in the back of your mind so the book the book of joshua starts off in chapter one with the command uh to god's people to to be strong and courageous every place the soul of your feet treads i have given you that's sort of the promise the command

 Don't wander to the right or to the left.

If you stay on the path that I have laid out before you, if you follow my commandments, I will deliver to you the promised land.

And by the time we get to the end of the book, chapter 24, there's an old man, Joshua, near the end of his life, and he gathers everybody together,

 and doesn't command anything from them.

It simply invites them to make a choice.

Choose this day whom you'll serve.

That is not a small shift from chapter one to chapter 24.

That is a completely different posture from the God we met three weeks ago.

Something happened in the middle of this book to move it from a command to an invitation, from certainty to choice.

 Remember, we talked about the word harem in week one, which is devotion to God essentially through total annihilation or destruction.

That the violence we see in Joshua is an act of worship itself, total destruction set apart for God through annihilation.

Nothing is to be plundered or to be kept or stolen.

There's nothing to be left standing.

 That word governs most of this book.

Violence is an act of worship.

It guides the justification for the things written about in Joshua.

But there's another word hiding in the same chapters as harem right next to it, sometimes in the very same verse.

And it says actually almost the opposite thing.

It's chaya, to let live or to spare.

 We look at where these two words actually sit.

Joshua 6, verse 17, they actually sit right next to each other in the same verse.

The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to destruction.

Only Rahab shall live.

 Not two different chapters written by two different hands centuries apart.

We are in one verse.

And so whoever wrote that sentence held both words in his mouth at the same time.

And remember then what kind of book this is.

We talked about it in week one.

This isn't a battlefield manuscript.

It's not written after the siege.

It's a document that's been assembled generations later, likely finished in exile.

 God's people have been exiled.

And that's where most of Joshua, if not all of Joshua is written.

And it's put together by people trying to answer one question under enormous pressure, who are we?

Who are we now that everything that has made us who we are has been taken away?

That's not a context that rewards nuance.

 It's not a context that appreciates uncertainty.

When you're sort of fighting to hold on to your identity, your national identity together, when you're working to hold that together from a distance, the story you tell yourself tends to get cleaner, not messier.

The lines get sharper.

The heroes get more heroic.

The enemies get less human.

 That's what identity under threat does to a story almost every time.

Which makes it strange that whoever shaped this book left a crack in the narrative.

They had every reason to sort of sand it down and polish the story up and make it really, really clear, cut Rahab out of the story or make her a footnote or move her exception somewhere.

 quieter, where it wouldn't sit two words apart from a command to destroy everything.

But for some reason, they didn't.

Someone editing this text generations after the fact, still trying to convince a scattered people that their God is a God who keeps promises, let mercy stand right next to annihilation.

 And that I think is uncomfortable for me because it's unexplained and it's sort of unresolved.

And I don't think though it's an accident or sloppy editing.

That's not what's happening here.

I think it means whoever kept telling this story couldn't quite bring themselves to let total annihilation be the only word left standing.

 Even while they're building a case for who God is and whose side God is on, they left in the one line that complicates the whole case, and the crack shows up in the actual siege of Jericho.

Now, before we read the text, we can appreciate...

 sort of what we're reading about by thinking through the wall itself, not the walls that we made out of like construction paper for VBS, but most fortified cities looked a lot like this.

There was sort of an outer wall, really there's a retaining wall and an outer wall and between the outer and inner wall, there was this space and many people lived in between the outer and inner wall.

 It's well documented.

Archeology has done a good job of sort of uncovering not only Jericho, but a lot of cities in this age where this type of wall was common.

And it's in this outer wall that Rahab had a home that probably butted up right next to the wall because the text says that there's this woman that lived

 essentially inside the wall.

And Joshua chapter two says, now then, since I have dealt kindly with you, Rahab is speaking to the Israelites through a window, swear to me by the Lord that you in turn will deal kindly with my family.

Give me a sign of good faith that you will spare my father and my mother, my brothers and sisters and all who belong to them and deliver our lives from death.

 Rahab's a Canaanite.

She runs, by every plain reading of the text, a brothel.

She is, according to the category set up in chapter 1 and in Deuteronomy 7, exactly the kind of person Israel was told to show no mercy to, make no covenant with them.

 Show them no mercy.

That was the command, essentially word for word.

And here she is negotiating a covenant through a window, asking for exactly the mercy the text said wasn't on the table to begin with.

And she gets the answer she's hoping for.

The spies tell her to tie a scarlet cord in that same window, the one she's been asking mercy for.

 for mercy, through when the attack comes.

And that cord is the only thing, the only thing standing between her household and the Israelite sword.

Not a weapon, not a wall of her own, a piece of cloth hanging out a window and a promise she has to trust two men she just met.

 actually mean what they what they're saying and what we read in chapter 6 verse 17 is that the city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messengers we sent the city and all that is in it is devoted to destruction only Rahab shall live both total destruction and mercy in the same sentence and

 One exception into the command before a single wall falls, not after but before, and this crack in total annihilation gets built into the ban itself.

And it isn't a quiet exception either because this has to be then said aloud to everyone that is about to siege Jericho.

 Before the battle to the entire camp, everyone marching toward that wall already knows one household is exempt.

The categories are cracking then in public.

And it's not some private footnote scholars found centuries later.

The text...

 then expands this crack in verse 25.

But Rahab the prostitute with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua spared.

Her family, the text says, has lived in Israel ever since because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho.

 She lived in Israel ever since, not as a footnote, not as a curiosity mentioned once and then sort of forgotten.

She actually becomes a much larger part of the story permanently because in the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew's genealogy generations later names her in the family line that leads to Jesus.

 The category that was supposed to be absolute, insider and outsider, devoted in those who are destined to be destroyed, couldn't actually hold.

It cracked in chapter two of the book of Joshua and it never really closed back up.

I want to be careful here though, because it'd be easy to sort of take the story of Rahab and then try to paint the entire book in a much better light.

 to make this into a nicer story than it actually is.

But this isn't the text apologizing for itself.

Genocide is still written about in the book of Joshua.

Almost everyone is said to have died inside the walls.

Rahab's survival doesn't erase any of that.

I mean, the book clearly talks about genocide.

 What it does is something I think more subversive though, this story of Rahab, and I think a bit more honest.

It shows us that even the people who wrote this violence into scripture, who believed God commanded this violence, couldn't quite bring themselves to close the door all the way.

Somebody let mercy through the crack, and once it's through, it creates an alternative narrative.

There's actually a second story like this one.

It's Stranger.

 And honestly, a bit funnier, if you can find humor in the book of Joshua.

In chapter 9, we read about Gibeon.

When the inhabitants of Gibeon heard that Joshua had what they had done to Jericho and to Ai, they on their part acted with cunning and went and prepared provisions and took worn out sacks on their donkeys and wineskins, worn out and torn and mended with worn out patch sandals on their feet and worn out clothes.

 And all their provisions were dry and moldy.

And they went to Joshua in the camp of Gagal and said to him and to the Israelites, we have come from a far country.

So now make a treaty with us.

 They lied, essentially.

They lied, straight up lied.

They dressed themselves up in old clothes, brought moldy bread, pretended to have traveled from far away when they lived right down the road, and talked Israel into a covenant under false pretenses.

And Israel, without checking...

 story out or hesitating or conversing with God who clearly giving some pretty significant commands just took their word for it and swore an oath and we read but all the leaders said to the whole congregation we have sworn to them by the Lord

 the God of Israel, and now we cannot touch them.

This is what we'll do to them.

Let them live so that wrath may not come upon us because of the oath we swore to them.

Let them live.

Show mercy.

The same word as Rahab.

And notice the reasoning.

Israel doesn't spare the Gibeonites because they suddenly develop compassion for the outsider.

 They spare them because they had made a promise to them.

And even a promise obtained through deception still binds them.

The oath that they made outweighs the deception.

And that's remarkable on its own, but it gets remarkable centuries later because after Joshua died, centuries later, Saul violates the covenant that's made with Gibeon.

And the text says judgment fell on the entire nation because of it.

 A promise made to outsiders under false pretenses in the middle of a war still held that much weight generations later.

The Gibeonites don't just then sort of survive one afternoon in Gogol.

They get permanently grafted into the story, protected by an oath God, God's self apparently expects Israel to keep long after everyone involved in swearing it is dead.

 This idea of harem, right, said there should be nothing left standing.

Total annihilation as devotion to God.

But ahaya, this idea of mercy, kept showing up anyway in a prostitute's window and in a pile of moldy bread.

And the text lets it stand.

Now, here's the part in the sermon where we stop, have to...

 kind of have to stop talking about them and start talking about us.

Because, I mean, most days I don't picture myself as someone on the outside, outside the walls of Jericho.

I picture myself inside the walls of Jericho, safe, with the wall doing exactly what walls are for.

 I've spent most of my life on the side of the wall that gets to decide who is worth saving.

I have a great job, just a great job.

I live in a great neighborhood.

I attend the best church.

And all of it is sort of stacked up like sandbags around my life.

 in an attempt to protect me, to preserve the life I'm trying to create.

And my life is pretty well protected.

I don't have to ask for mercy often because mostly I don't need to ask for mercy.

But as I've wrestled with this text,

 the past few months.

That is a true thing about me, that I spend a lot of my time organizing the sandbags around my life, but that's probably not the truest part of me.

Because I'm not the one holding the sword, but there are moments in my life where I am dangling a cord out of a window.

I'd like to think that's not true, but it is true.

 I am the one hanging something out the window, hoping somebody with more power than me decides to let me live anyway.

Places where I know exactly how thin my own defensible reasons would sound if somebody actually pulled them apart, where the only thing standing between me and the wall coming down is somebody else's mercy, not my own righteousness.

I mean, that's what the woman I said no to essentially offered me, right?

 She showed me mercy.

The woman I was sitting across the table at the coffee shop 11 years ago, when I told her no, that I would not baptize her son, she wasn't asking me to agree with her.

She was just asking me to let her become a part of the story.

And I said no.

And I had my reasons, and my reasons were tidy and theologically justifiable.

And they were wrong.

 And somehow, through the cracks in my own righteous wall, this woman still showed me grace.

 And here's what I think happened to this book and maybe to God's own reputation.

Because somewhere between chapter 1 and chapter 24, a God who spares a prostitute and a nation of liars gets picked up by people looking for permission.

And permission is exactly what they take from it.

This idea of total annihilation becomes a weapon before mercy ever gets the chance to be the point.

 We saw that happen last week in the text and we watched as it allowed or helped us get an entire continent.

And we see how it's played out in the Supreme Court case and on the land some of us are sitting on right now.

The truth is before mercy can ever become the true point of the book, the violence, the biblical mandate,

 becomes the headline and the book gets hijacked.

And that's a real hijacking because it has not only happened, it is still happening today.

 But a hijacking only works if there's something underneath it worth stealing.

You don't like counterfeit currency that nobody wants.

And I think what got stolen and what got twisted into conquest and permission and land grabs dressed up as a divine providence was never actually the God this book is trying to describe.

 Rather, quietly, God is best defined as the one who let mercy through a window in chapter 2, and God's people spent the next 22 chapters unable to fully take that back.

 So before we let the weaponized version of Joshua be the last word, I want to go and look at the book and how the book itself ends right at the very end because I said that the story widens and we see that in chapter 24.

Now, therefore, revere the Lord and serve him.

Joshua is old in age and this is what he's saying to his people.

 serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness, putting away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the river and in Egypt, serve the Lord.

Now, if you're unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you'll serve, whether the gods of your ancestors served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living.

But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."

 Choose.

That's the word doing most of the heavy lifting in this passage.

And it's not the word we started with in chapter 1.

It's not command language.

Be strong, courageous, keep the law, don't turn right or left.

This is invitation language.

Joshua doesn't order the people to stay faithful.

Joshua lays the whole history out, the good and the ugly parts both, and hands the decision back to them.

Choose.

 Choose this day.

A book that opened with a God who draws absolute lines ends with a leader who can only ask people to choose freely.

Something got loose in the middle of this story, and I don't think it's an accident that it happened right where Rahab and the Gibeonites happened.

You cannot let mercy in through the crack of the wall and expect the wall to work the same way afterward.

We read on, so Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God.

 And took a large stone and set it up there under the oak in the sanctuary of the Lord.

Joshua said to all the people, see this stone shall be a witness against us.

For it has heard all the words of the Lord that he spoke to us.

Therefore, it shall be a witness against you if you deal falsely with your God.

 This word witness then is not a monument to victory.

Joshua doesn't set up a stone to celebrate what they've conquered.

He sets up a stone to testify against them if they break their word again.

The book ends then not with triumph, but with a warning stone of what happens if you break the covenant.

And an open choice, which is a really strange way

 A really strange note for a conquest narrative to end on.

Unless you already know, mercy got loose somewhere in the middle of it and never really fully, was never able really to be pulled back.

So here's my actual bow on this series.

Three weeks late and probably not fully tied.

Nothing was supposed to survive unless

 And something did.

The story widens, not because God apologizes for chapter one and not because we get to walk out of here today feeling like maybe we resolved something.

It widens because mercy, once it shows up, cannot stay contained.

It shows up in a woman the law said to destroy, in a nation that lied its way into survival.

And by the last chapter, it has changed the very voice of God from command to invitation.

 That's not just a loophole.

I think it might be the whole entire gospel.

Hiding inside maybe the most indefensible book in all of our scripture.

So the question for us as we end this series, the question that I think this book leaves us with is what will you keep choosing?

 Choose this day and then presumably choose again tomorrow and the day after that, the way Joshua asked an entire generation to do standing under an oak tree with a stone as their only witness.

Who do we choose to serve?

 Because we started this series saying we would stay with this text, stay troubled with this text, wrestle with this text, not look away.

And I still believe that that's the right posture to take when we engage with really difficult scripture.

But I also believe with everything in me that the same book that unsettled us maybe in week one...

 really all the weeks, all three weeks, the same book that has unsettled us is the one that hands us this ending, a stone, a choice, and a God who would rather give us a choice than command us to be faithful.

Choose this day whom you'll serve.

As for me, in this house, we will serve our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the one who

 shows us mercy, the one who chooses death over violence.

May the gospel be proclaimed loudly then from this place.

Let us pray.

God, in a world where violence grabs the headlines

 In a world where violence happens and is never written about, may we trust that you continue to make all things new.

And that your mercy and grace is not an accident, but it is a way of life.

May we have the courage to believe that.

May we have the faith to proclaim that.

 And most importantly, give us the strength to carry that message out into a broken and hurting world.

Because the world is in need of mercy and of grace.

May we be a church that shows that to all people.

May we look for those who are dangling cords outside of their window.

And may we offer peace

 as the world continues to proclaim violence.

It's in your son's name we pray.

Amen.