Gateway To Grace
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series II, Cycle C
Object:
When you visit a church camp you're aware that you're separated from civilization. When you take a walk late at night, for whatever reason, and it's usually for whatever reason, you can't help but wonder what that rustling in the darkness might be.
It's probably a raccoon, or a smaller animal, as frightened of you as you are pretending that you're not frightened of it.
But it could be a bear. It's an unnerving experience to see a bear close up. Bears in the wild are the epitome of untamed nature. They don't fit into neat categories. They're certainly not sympathetic to humans, like dogs, or tolerant, like cats. People are not safe around bears. Bears have their own agenda. They act according to their own reason, with their own internal logic. You can't control a bear, but if your luck holds, you get to walk away.
Sometimes. There's an old poem by Hillaire Belloc that goes like this:
B stands for Bear.
When bears are seen approaching in the distance
Make up your mind at once between retreat and armed resistance.
One gentleman remained to fight, with what result for him?
The bear, with ill-concealed delight, devoured him limb from limb.
Another fellow turned and ran. He ran extremely hard.
The bear was faster than the man and beat him by a yard.
Or maybe it's like that old joke: What's the most important thing to remember when you and a friend encounter a bear in the forest? Simply this -- you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend.
What do bears have to do with Joshua? After all, this day's text seems to be about a river crossing, the building of a monument, and the cessation of heavenly welfare as the manna stops falling. But there is a connection. So I want to jump ahead to the next few verses, before coming back to our starting point. Open your Bibles to Joshua 5:13-16.
Forty years of wandering are over for Joshua. Now God's promises are about to be fulfilled. Ahead lies the battle of Jericho, and many trials. Behind lies the passing of a leader, Moses, who can never be replaced.
And on the nervous night before a battle, Joshua finds himself in the dark -- literally -- without a clue as to what might happen.
There is a literal rustle in the woods. Who goes there? A bear?
In my mind, what follows is one of the spookiest passages in scripture, worthy of being shared around the campfire on a moonless night under a dark dish of stars.
Someone is standing before Joshua, a man with a sword. He quickly tries to categorize this intruder. Friend or foe --my friend or my foe.
"Joshua walked toward him and said to him, 'Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?' He replied, 'On neither side. I have come now as the captain of the army of Yahweh'" (Joshua 5:13-14 NJB).
Joshua falls on his face in terror, for the captain of the army of Yahweh can be none other than God. Then the captain speaks to Joshua as he had spoken to Moses a generation before. "Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy"(Joshua 5:15 NJB).
And knowing the identity of the captain, Joshua must have known instantly that the question "My friend or foe?" was the wrong question. This is not Joshua's battle. It is the captain's battle.
Joshua is standing face-to-face with God.
Whoa, get your facts straight, some might say. Joshua is talking to an angel, not directly to God. However, we sometimes forget that in the Old Testament the line is not sharply drawn between God and angels. We tend to think of angels as people. They are not people. They are something different. They are to some extent more than just messengers, which is the literal meaning of their title. They are the present Word of God.
When we speak, sound comes out. When God speaks, something happens. When God speaks, we hear, see, and feel it. The heart palpitates, the eyes bulge, the skin crackles, and we mistake wonder for fear, as the children of Israel found when the Shekinah descended on Mount Sinai. Also consider the second chapter of Judges when an angel appears, causing great fright in Israel, and speaks as Almighty God. We may conclude that when God speaks, he "breathes" angels.
Some may say that God doesn't do things like this. But one thing we can be sure of -- just as bears do pretty much what they want in camp, so God can do pretty much what he wants. After all, it's God's world. We just live in it.
Joshua stands before God and lives. He is becoming God's servant. He's getting the priorities straight that we need as well. It's not a question of whether God is on our side, but whether we're on God's side. It's time to get rid of the things that encumber us, the attachments to this earth that may be attractive, but which bind us fast to the earth. The idolatry of racism, the illusion of nationalism, the temptation of materialism -- get rid of them. Recognize who is the captain of the army of the Lord.
It's a little scary. As the scripture text tells us (5:12), it means no more manna! The manna fed the children of Israel in the wilderness, but evidently it could be pretty tiresome fare. It was free for the taking, and it was a sign of God's blessing and goodness, but I wonder if it could really compare to that first tomato of the spring, the red, ripe, juicy tomato that some of us dream about when we look over the seed catalogs in the dead of winter. A tomato that is partly the result of our own labor, but is also the result of the deep majestic wonder that is God's Holy Spirit, moving in our midst, drawing life from the ground and from our lives as well.
Once we are free of the manna, once we are free of the law, once we boldly enter into the territory of grace, we come to a place where both success and failure are possible, where there are no guarantees, where anything can happen. It's a little scary. Okay, it's a lot scary. But so is forgiveness and transformation.
We've looked at the verses that follow today's scripture passage. Now let's jump backward and see what happened before. It's all part of the crossing over at the River Jordan, and how God's people rededicated themselves to what their ancestors had promised many years before. The people of God had seen great things -- the plagues that struck Egypt, the brooding mystery of the passing over, and the simple grace of the Passover. They had watched the waters of the Red Sea part and had crossed over, and had seen the chariots of the Egyptians, the mightiest high-tech army of the ancient world, swallowed up in the waters that closed behind them.
Yet, they had also rebelled again and again. They forgot the horrors of slavery and pined for their old condition, an affront to the God who had rescued them. When there was trouble there were also troublemakers who painted a rosy picture of a past that never was, and led the people astray.
That can happen nowadays as people pretend that the past was simpler and better. Life was not simpler. It was full of tremendous drudgery, of hard work from dawn to dusk just to scrabble out survival. If historical dramas and books show us the glittering world of the very rich in ages past, we forget that most people were bitterly poor. They did not live long lives. The slightest infection could cast them into eternity. They were subject to the whims of rulers who believed they were descended from gods but whose personal morals suggested they were more likely descended from demons.
Those who look back with fondness to a century ago might conveniently forget that blacks were oppressed in our country and subject to horrific lynchings, often hung from trees and burned alive for crimes they had not committed.
People certainly forget that disease and illness killed many people long before their time, and others grew prematurely old. A century ago, only four percent of the people were over the age of eighty. Now the number is closer to twelve percent!
But we forget the past. We romanticize it. And those things we should really remember, such as the blessings of God in all ages, we ignore. So when the faithless generation had died in the desert, Joshua turns to their children and grandchildren and reacquaints them with their history, and invites the men to be circumcised, something that had been neglected. He invited them to reclaim their heritage; to enter into the gateway toward freedom.
Because they were ready to walk through that gateway, to cross Jordan and claim God's promises, the scripture tells us: "The Lord said to Joshua, 'Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.'And so that place is called Gilgal to this day" (Joshua 5:9).
The disgrace of Egypt was still on them, despite their escape from that land, because they were still slaves to their past. Crossing Jordan, entering the gateway, they put away the disgrace and prepared to enter a mature relationship with God.
And the manna ceased.
In today's scripture text nothing really happens. And yet everything happens. Because a believer and a people are now ready to claim God's blessings.
In Lent we are given the chance to reclaim who we are as a people, to prepare to enter into glory land, and to meet God face-to-face in the person of the risen Jesus. In a sense nothing happens. We go to church and behave as if nothing happened. But everything is happening: in the quiet prayer warriors who hold destruction at bay because of the power of their prayers, among the children who wriggle and bring life to our congregation by their refusal to "behave" which seems to mean do anything but express joy in living, through the active mission people who see every day as an opportunity to praise God through active ministry to others. Every thing is happening in the planners and the sweepers and the bakers and the singers, in all the people and everyone -- everything is happening here. We are called to prepare ourselves once more to be God's people, to put aside the constraints of the laws that worked for us in the desert of our lives, and run through the gateway to Grace, and our real home.
Come, let us reclaim our past as Christians, recall the glorious story of how we were lost in the slavery of sin, and how we were reclaimed, renamed, and restored to our heritage. The manna of the law, the belief that everything can be divided into a clear right and wrong without our having to make any mature decisions as believers, will cease. Instead we will claim the grace that saves us, and allows us to view others whose faults are no worse than our own, to be seen with the eyes of grace as well.
We'll understand that our God is in charge, not us. That there's no telling what God will do, but that we can rest assured that what God does is good. The shame of the past will roll away, and we will become God's partners, God's mature people, ready to live by the rules of a kingdom not yet recognized by this world, but which will, in God's time, become apparent to all. In the meantime, we will cross over our own Jordan, and say with the psalmist:
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing. Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name. For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
-- Psalm 100
And there's no shame in that at all. Who goes there? Someone good. And who goes with that someone good? Us. Praise God. Amen.
It's probably a raccoon, or a smaller animal, as frightened of you as you are pretending that you're not frightened of it.
But it could be a bear. It's an unnerving experience to see a bear close up. Bears in the wild are the epitome of untamed nature. They don't fit into neat categories. They're certainly not sympathetic to humans, like dogs, or tolerant, like cats. People are not safe around bears. Bears have their own agenda. They act according to their own reason, with their own internal logic. You can't control a bear, but if your luck holds, you get to walk away.
Sometimes. There's an old poem by Hillaire Belloc that goes like this:
B stands for Bear.
When bears are seen approaching in the distance
Make up your mind at once between retreat and armed resistance.
One gentleman remained to fight, with what result for him?
The bear, with ill-concealed delight, devoured him limb from limb.
Another fellow turned and ran. He ran extremely hard.
The bear was faster than the man and beat him by a yard.
Or maybe it's like that old joke: What's the most important thing to remember when you and a friend encounter a bear in the forest? Simply this -- you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend.
What do bears have to do with Joshua? After all, this day's text seems to be about a river crossing, the building of a monument, and the cessation of heavenly welfare as the manna stops falling. But there is a connection. So I want to jump ahead to the next few verses, before coming back to our starting point. Open your Bibles to Joshua 5:13-16.
Forty years of wandering are over for Joshua. Now God's promises are about to be fulfilled. Ahead lies the battle of Jericho, and many trials. Behind lies the passing of a leader, Moses, who can never be replaced.
And on the nervous night before a battle, Joshua finds himself in the dark -- literally -- without a clue as to what might happen.
There is a literal rustle in the woods. Who goes there? A bear?
In my mind, what follows is one of the spookiest passages in scripture, worthy of being shared around the campfire on a moonless night under a dark dish of stars.
Someone is standing before Joshua, a man with a sword. He quickly tries to categorize this intruder. Friend or foe --my friend or my foe.
"Joshua walked toward him and said to him, 'Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?' He replied, 'On neither side. I have come now as the captain of the army of Yahweh'" (Joshua 5:13-14 NJB).
Joshua falls on his face in terror, for the captain of the army of Yahweh can be none other than God. Then the captain speaks to Joshua as he had spoken to Moses a generation before. "Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy"(Joshua 5:15 NJB).
And knowing the identity of the captain, Joshua must have known instantly that the question "My friend or foe?" was the wrong question. This is not Joshua's battle. It is the captain's battle.
Joshua is standing face-to-face with God.
Whoa, get your facts straight, some might say. Joshua is talking to an angel, not directly to God. However, we sometimes forget that in the Old Testament the line is not sharply drawn between God and angels. We tend to think of angels as people. They are not people. They are something different. They are to some extent more than just messengers, which is the literal meaning of their title. They are the present Word of God.
When we speak, sound comes out. When God speaks, something happens. When God speaks, we hear, see, and feel it. The heart palpitates, the eyes bulge, the skin crackles, and we mistake wonder for fear, as the children of Israel found when the Shekinah descended on Mount Sinai. Also consider the second chapter of Judges when an angel appears, causing great fright in Israel, and speaks as Almighty God. We may conclude that when God speaks, he "breathes" angels.
Some may say that God doesn't do things like this. But one thing we can be sure of -- just as bears do pretty much what they want in camp, so God can do pretty much what he wants. After all, it's God's world. We just live in it.
Joshua stands before God and lives. He is becoming God's servant. He's getting the priorities straight that we need as well. It's not a question of whether God is on our side, but whether we're on God's side. It's time to get rid of the things that encumber us, the attachments to this earth that may be attractive, but which bind us fast to the earth. The idolatry of racism, the illusion of nationalism, the temptation of materialism -- get rid of them. Recognize who is the captain of the army of the Lord.
It's a little scary. As the scripture text tells us (5:12), it means no more manna! The manna fed the children of Israel in the wilderness, but evidently it could be pretty tiresome fare. It was free for the taking, and it was a sign of God's blessing and goodness, but I wonder if it could really compare to that first tomato of the spring, the red, ripe, juicy tomato that some of us dream about when we look over the seed catalogs in the dead of winter. A tomato that is partly the result of our own labor, but is also the result of the deep majestic wonder that is God's Holy Spirit, moving in our midst, drawing life from the ground and from our lives as well.
Once we are free of the manna, once we are free of the law, once we boldly enter into the territory of grace, we come to a place where both success and failure are possible, where there are no guarantees, where anything can happen. It's a little scary. Okay, it's a lot scary. But so is forgiveness and transformation.
We've looked at the verses that follow today's scripture passage. Now let's jump backward and see what happened before. It's all part of the crossing over at the River Jordan, and how God's people rededicated themselves to what their ancestors had promised many years before. The people of God had seen great things -- the plagues that struck Egypt, the brooding mystery of the passing over, and the simple grace of the Passover. They had watched the waters of the Red Sea part and had crossed over, and had seen the chariots of the Egyptians, the mightiest high-tech army of the ancient world, swallowed up in the waters that closed behind them.
Yet, they had also rebelled again and again. They forgot the horrors of slavery and pined for their old condition, an affront to the God who had rescued them. When there was trouble there were also troublemakers who painted a rosy picture of a past that never was, and led the people astray.
That can happen nowadays as people pretend that the past was simpler and better. Life was not simpler. It was full of tremendous drudgery, of hard work from dawn to dusk just to scrabble out survival. If historical dramas and books show us the glittering world of the very rich in ages past, we forget that most people were bitterly poor. They did not live long lives. The slightest infection could cast them into eternity. They were subject to the whims of rulers who believed they were descended from gods but whose personal morals suggested they were more likely descended from demons.
Those who look back with fondness to a century ago might conveniently forget that blacks were oppressed in our country and subject to horrific lynchings, often hung from trees and burned alive for crimes they had not committed.
People certainly forget that disease and illness killed many people long before their time, and others grew prematurely old. A century ago, only four percent of the people were over the age of eighty. Now the number is closer to twelve percent!
But we forget the past. We romanticize it. And those things we should really remember, such as the blessings of God in all ages, we ignore. So when the faithless generation had died in the desert, Joshua turns to their children and grandchildren and reacquaints them with their history, and invites the men to be circumcised, something that had been neglected. He invited them to reclaim their heritage; to enter into the gateway toward freedom.
Because they were ready to walk through that gateway, to cross Jordan and claim God's promises, the scripture tells us: "The Lord said to Joshua, 'Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.'And so that place is called Gilgal to this day" (Joshua 5:9).
The disgrace of Egypt was still on them, despite their escape from that land, because they were still slaves to their past. Crossing Jordan, entering the gateway, they put away the disgrace and prepared to enter a mature relationship with God.
And the manna ceased.
In today's scripture text nothing really happens. And yet everything happens. Because a believer and a people are now ready to claim God's blessings.
In Lent we are given the chance to reclaim who we are as a people, to prepare to enter into glory land, and to meet God face-to-face in the person of the risen Jesus. In a sense nothing happens. We go to church and behave as if nothing happened. But everything is happening: in the quiet prayer warriors who hold destruction at bay because of the power of their prayers, among the children who wriggle and bring life to our congregation by their refusal to "behave" which seems to mean do anything but express joy in living, through the active mission people who see every day as an opportunity to praise God through active ministry to others. Every thing is happening in the planners and the sweepers and the bakers and the singers, in all the people and everyone -- everything is happening here. We are called to prepare ourselves once more to be God's people, to put aside the constraints of the laws that worked for us in the desert of our lives, and run through the gateway to Grace, and our real home.
Come, let us reclaim our past as Christians, recall the glorious story of how we were lost in the slavery of sin, and how we were reclaimed, renamed, and restored to our heritage. The manna of the law, the belief that everything can be divided into a clear right and wrong without our having to make any mature decisions as believers, will cease. Instead we will claim the grace that saves us, and allows us to view others whose faults are no worse than our own, to be seen with the eyes of grace as well.
We'll understand that our God is in charge, not us. That there's no telling what God will do, but that we can rest assured that what God does is good. The shame of the past will roll away, and we will become God's partners, God's mature people, ready to live by the rules of a kingdom not yet recognized by this world, but which will, in God's time, become apparent to all. In the meantime, we will cross over our own Jordan, and say with the psalmist:
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing. Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name. For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
-- Psalm 100
And there's no shame in that at all. Who goes there? Someone good. And who goes with that someone good? Us. Praise God. Amen.
