What can we say November 12? 24th after Pentecost

   On these 3 texts, I’ve commented in the past as wisely as I know how – except that now I would add these thoughts on Joshua and Thessalonians:

   Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25. I found myself commenting on this moment in not one but two places in my new book coming out next year, Everywhere is Jerusalem.

Here’s excerpt #1.

   Near Jacob’s well, where Jesus stood with the Samaritan woman (John 4) is the small village known in Bible times as Shechem. Roughly twelve hundred years before Jesus befriended that Samaritan woman there, Joshua (Moses’ successor) gathered all the tribes of Israel, forty years removed from Egyptian slavery, and made one of the Bible’s great speeches. A challenge. An invitation – to them, and to us.

   As a kid, I was given the impression that the Israelites rolled into the Promised Land and, like a German Blitzkrieg, conquered the whole region. We didn’t need fancy scholarship to show us otherwise. Mark the conquered places on a map. They didn’t win much ground at all, and what territory they captured was not the most fertile. There were Canaanites all over the place, wealthier, with more power – and a religion that lured Israelites repeatedly into idolatry.

   Knowing the challenges to come, Joshua (in the book named for him, in chapter 24) rattles off a profound history lesson of how they got there, going back to Abraham, into days of cruel slavery in Egypt, through decades of wilderness wanderings, God sticking with them despite their foolishness. Noting a veritable mall of other gods that would be peddled on them, he urges them, “Fear the Lord. Serve him faithfully. Put away the other gods. Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

   I’ve stood in that field where he uttered such words. Wherever you stand or sit, right now, you have to make a decision, and a hard, serious one. It’s not some vague spirituality or sliding into a pew now and then. Choose your God or your gods! Take a stand; make this journey – and live it, with courage, grit, patience, maybe making that definitive decision again. And again.

   And here’s excerpt #2:

   How often does the Bible itself urge keeping some distance from our beloved ancestors and their cherished but flawed beliefs? Joshua, thirty seconds before his glorious declaration that “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15) invites the Israelites to “put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the river” (Joshua 24:14). Could it be our journey involves finding a new space, different from, and closer to the truth than the spirituality of our parents, even the most beloved? They may have instilled in us the very faith we have to ask such a question! Or perhaps, as Jonathan Sacks suggested (in his last book, Studies in Spirituality), our parents may have been on their own journey to a new space that was truer than that of their parents. God called Abraham away from the idols of Ur; but his father Terah went with him, at least halfway to Haran (Gen. 11:31).

   1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Paul speaks eloquently here of “hope” – a topic over which I have obsessed. What is it – really? Do we give people enough? Too much? Let me commend to you my lecture on this from this year’s Festival of Homiletics, which (after Kate Bowler!) I entitled “Hope as Arsenic.”