Sermon for August 22, 2021 Pentecost 13 B House of Prayer Lutheran Church
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18; John 6:56-69 Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
In our Old Testament reading today, we hear one of the most popular verses of the Bible, and you’ll often find it framed on a wall in someone’s living room: “Choose this day whom you will serve; as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
The story behind this verse is that it’s Joshua’s farewell speech, soon before he dies. And just as Moses gave the 10 Commandments to the Israelites a second time before he died, this time Joshua wanted the people to renew their covenant with God before he died. He wanted them to reaffirm their commitment to serve the Lord and follow all the ways that God had taught them. So as Joshua promises that he and his household will serve the Lord, all the people of Israel answer with their own promise: “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who did great signs in our sight, and protected us along the way...Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God.”
That leads me to ask: what does it mean to have a god? This is the big question Martin Luther answered as he explained the First Commandment In his Large Catechism. As Luther put it, “A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. If your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God.”
Luther continues: “Many a person thinks that they have God and everything they need when they have money and property; in them they trust and of them they boast so stubbornly and securely that they care for no one. Surely such a person also has a god--mammon by name, that is, money and possessions--on which he fixes his whole heart. It is the most common idol on earth… So, too, if anyone boasts of great learning, wisdom, power, prestige, family, and honor, and trusts in them, they also have a god, but not the one true God… To have God is nothing else than to entrust ourselves to him completely.”
If you keep reading the Old Testament, you’ll see how often the people didn’t live up to their commitment, and found other gods to put their trust in. But just because it happened way back when, that doesn’t let us off the hook either. Because of our human nature, each one of us has had times of falling away from the Lord and not putting our complete trust in God alone.
So what are we to do? Just like those Israelites answering Joshua, the answer is the same. Begin by remembering what God has done for you, and telling the story of how God’s love has made an impact on your life. The Israelites told the story of how God liberated them from slavery, and gave them freedom to live good lives based on loving God and loving others. And that story pulled their hearts back into a posture of trust and faith.
What has God done for you? You can start with the freedom he gave us as human beings to be caretakers for the earth. You can praise God that Christ has liberated us from sin through the power of forgiveness from the cross, and given us freedom from death through his resurrection. You can thank God that Christ has freed us for serving God when we live by faith, and freed us for serving others as a sign of hope. Learn how to tell your own story of God’s presence in your life, and that will help to turn you back to the Lord when you’ve lost your way.
In today’s gospel, we hear Jesus continuing the theme of Joshua and the Israelites, asking his disciples for commitment to put their trust in God. In Jesus’ conversation with the disciples, we also hear again about how hard it can be to take that “leap of faith” and put your life completely into God’s hands, instead of trusting in “the flesh” by which Jesus means the things of this world that are not God but which we can easily turn into “gods” that would turn us away from serving the Lord. Which is what Martin Luther was talking about earlier.
The things Jesus teaches are simple but hard. For example, Jesus teaches about living forever by eating and drinking his flesh and blood. And he’s given us earthly bread and wine to do just that. It’s a simple teaching, but can be hard to understand. Many disciples heard this teaching, found it difficult and turned away from him. Luckily, we don’t have to have full understanding to follow Jesus in trust and faith--God gives us the benefit of being able to grow in our understanding of faith throughout our lives, and doesn’t insist that we have it all figured out ahead of time. Jesus just says “put your trust in me; I know my way is difficult, and you won’t always understand it fully. Sometimes you’ll fall away and want to quit--but I promise, stick with me and I’ll carry you through to true and abundant life.”
As I reflected on this, it reminded me, by way of analogy, of an experience I had on vacation last week while I was camping with the Boy Scouts. One day we did a 12 mile canoe trip on the Brule River in northern Wisconsin. There’s something liberating about being dropped off by a bus upriver, putting in your canoe, and then having no choice but to go 12 miles until you get to your landing spot. You're just living by faith that you can make it. The water on the Brule River is known as “puddle and run”, meaning there are long, broad, shallow, slow-moving stretches that turn into narrow quick-moving rapids. After 3 miles, and a long hard slog through the slow water, you’re wishing you were done. Then you hit a rapids, and you try to paddle around the rocks sticking up, only to hit another rock just under the surface that you can’t see, and it turns you around and makes you go the wrong way so you get stuck in a tree that’s fallen under the water. So you have to use whatever skill, weight shifting, and luck you can muster to get through and keep going. And once again, you wish this canoe trip wasn’t quite so long and hard.
But if we had been able to bail out early, what would we have missed? Countless spots of pristine beauty in God’s creation. Trout jumping to catch an insect. Charming cottages lovingly cared for on the river banks. Towering pine trees, home to hawks and eagles. And of course, the thrill of feeling those rapids taking you zooming down the river, and the sense of accomplishment and appreciation for the teamwork that got you to your destination. Eventually, 3 miles turns into 6 and that becomes 9 and the normal sense of time melts away. All that seems to exist is the river, flowing continuously, endlessly, almost eternally--and it carries you, despite the mistakes you make and the obstacles you crash into. The river still carries you, while you just get to be part of it for a while.
And this is an analogy to help us understand what Jesus is teaching the disciples. They think they understand what he is telling them, but they find it difficult, and don’t want to believe it, and want to quit following him. But for those who “put in their canoes'' and allow the river to carry them--allow Christ to carry them--through the obstacles, the mistakes, the difficulties, the hazards, the long slow slogs and muddy bottoms, the rocks that get you turned around and put you into all sorts of hard places… Well, it is by going through the difficulty and accepting it as the normal course of life, and trusting that God will carry you through when you put your trust in him--that is where true life is found. Amen.