Sermon for 13th Sunday after Pentecost – Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18

Promises suck. They’re easy to make, but are they easy to keep? If I had a nickel for every time I said “yes” and regretted it. But you want to make people happy. You want to be dependable. But what happens when the rubber meets the road? Have you ever begged off? Even if you have a good reason, it feels bad, right? We do it with ourselves too. Back when Covid hit, my company decided to let us work remotely. It’s great. I can just camp out on the sofa with my laptop. I don’t have to drive anywhere. No distractions. It’s great for the company, but no so great for my body. I’m not running to the lab or hunting down folks with questions. I’m just sitting. So I got worried and started walking around the neighborhood every day. I even bought a fancy fitness tracker. But then I got busy. Deadlines. Maybe I’ll skip today. And the next day. And you know where this is going. So if we can’t keep our word with something simple, what about when it’s harder?

That’s what Joshua’s worried about, in our Old Testament reading today. So, the Israelites have finally gotten to the land that God promised them. It took DECADES. Wandering the desert. Fighting a laundry list of enemies along the way. Never sure if they could trust Moses or the God who put them through all of it. But God was always faithful. They’re here. They’re settling in. Things are great. Joshua should feel relieved, right? But he’s not. He’s worried about what the Israelites will do next. Because he’s very old, about 110. He knows God’s about to take him away. He won’t be there to guide them, so this is his last chance to get them to make a commitment.

So he calls together all the elders and leaders, and he retells the whole story of how they got here. About how God called their ancestor Abraham and promised descendants and a land. About Isaac, Jacob, and Esau. About when they were slaves in Egypt. About calling Moses to lead them out. About God delivering them from the armies who attacked them on the way. And now the Lord says, “I gave you a land you didn’t labor for. You live in towns you didn’t build. You eat the fruit of crops you didn’t plant. All because of Me.” So Joshua is trying to build anticipation and get them all riled up, because he’s going to ask them to make a huge promise. “Who will you serve? The Lord who did all this for you, or other gods?” Joshua wants to get their commitment. He taps into their gratitude. Their sense of obligation. He tells them they’re special. They’re not like other people, who worship other gods. Look at what happened to them. God delivered them into your hands.

Now, I know this is controversial. What kind of God would lead the Israelites to steamroll a bunch of indigenous people and take their land? Familiar story, right? These texts have been used to justify a lot of unjustifiable stuff, that we can’t just explain away. But even though we don’t have answers for all that, we can still take a step back and recognize that the Israelites have been making their way through something that they could never have survived without God’s help. That’s the message they hear Joshua preaching. And it works. They promise to only serve the Lord. But Joshua’s skeptical. He says, “you can’t serve the Lord. The Lord’s holy and jealous. The Lord harms and consumes those who worship other gods.” The people swear, “no! We will serve the Lord!” Joshua’s still not convinced. He says, “put away the foreign gods that are among you.” A third time, they say, “we will serve and obey the Lord.” So Joshua rolls a large stone into the temple and says, “this stone will be a witness against you, if you deal falsely with your God.”

Now, the Israelites are totally sincere here. They’ve made a promise to Joshua and to God, and they really mean it. But Joshua knows human nature. He knows they’re going to be living among Canaanites for a long time. The God of Israel is strict. These other gods are going to seem way more relaxed and less divisive. Israelites and Canaanites are going to start getting very….. friendly…. with each other. Worshiping their gods makes it a LOT easier to get along, and everyone’s tired of conflict. As time goes on, they’re going to start forgetting about all the Lord did for them, and Joshua will be long gone. They’re going to start taking a whole lot of things for granted, and it’s a short step from there to feeling entitled.

What about us? It’s easy to make promises to God when we feel all inspired. And it’s not lying. We absolutely mean what we say. But somehow we really get thrown when things get difficult. Those times when our commitment becomes inconvenient because we’re tempted, or we’ve got conflicting priorities, or maybe it even embarrasses us a little bit. We get really good at making excuses, and maybe we stop noticing after a while. But God notices. Or another funny thing happens. Sometimes we hit bottom. We struggled and fought and we finally called on God because we had nowhere else to turn. And God can be surprisingly gracious. So we get back to “normal” again, but darned if we don’t forget about how bad things were. Like selective amnesia. Maybe we hate feeling so dependent upon God that our subconscious just blocks it out. But, if we can’t seem to remember God, why should we expect God to remember us?

The good news is that God remembers us anyway, by giving us another Joshua. But we know him by his Greek name, “Jesus”. And Jesus doesn’t demand that we make some kind of big decision, or make us feel obligated, or demand that we prove our commitments. He doesn’t even ask us to serve him. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. So he serves us without asking, by going to the cross, to suffer and die, and after three days be raised. He does all this for us because he loves us, and because he wants to show us what that kind of love looks like, so that we never have to wonder about it. It’s a done deal. Everything has been accomplished in heaven and earth for us.

Now, Jesus knows how forgetful we are. We stop thinking about God because we’re always so distracted and wandering in our own wilderness. But Jesus does something about it. He gives us his own body broken and his blood poured out, for us to eat and drink. By this he literally binds himself to our bodies, so that we can’t help but remember that nothing can ever separate us from his love. That’s why he says, “This is the bread that came down from heaven, and the one who eats this bread will live forever.” Of course, it’s easy to take all this for granted. We have the Lord’s Supper at every worship service. Ah, but there was a while when Covid had taken it away from us, and that was hard for a lot of folks. For all we know it may happen again. We shouldn’t be surprised. But Jesus won’t let that be a problem. He gives us his Word of faith through the Holy Spirit, the comforter, who abides with us and sustains us in every hardship. So Jesus says, “it’s the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” Jesus isn’t worried, and we don’t have to be either. He’s dependable whenever we’re not.

That’s good news, because we’ll still make promises we can’t keep. We still have those situations where we feel obligated. We still want folks to think we’re dependable. Even though we don’t really need to make promises anymore, because Jesus made the only promise that anyone really needs. So we can help our neighbors as a free gift of love, without feeling overwhelmed. When we fall short, we know Jesus assures us of his forgiveness, so we don’t have to feel stuck. And when it all gets to be too much, faith reminds us that it’s not all just up to me or you. We always have brothers and sisters to share the load. Therefore friends, we can say with all the confidence of Israel, that we will also serve the Lord, because he is our God.