What do you know about the Old
Testament? If you’re like many Christians, the answer is not much. You probably
know a few stories—there’s the creation of the world; there’s an ark; Moses,
plagues and parting the Red Sea; there’s Jonah; and maybe, if you really
stretch your memory back to Sunday School, you might remember a few other
things. Perhaps you know quite a bit more than that, or maybe even those few
events were testing the limits of your memory. Wherever you find yourself when
it comes to the Old Testament, there is some good news: The Old Testament is
really good at repeating itself.
Many
of our readings, including today’s from the book of Joshua, spend a large
amount of time retelling a series of historical events. Often, God is the one sharing
that history. God says, “Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and
Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father
Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and
made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac…” etc, etc, etc. Pretty soon, God is
listing off the entire history of Genesis and Exodus. Then, God just keeps on going,
telling us about kings and nations and history, lots of history. You might
wonder: Why? Today’s reading could have been 90% shorter if God just skipped to
the point. Many of you probably would have liked that.
In
order to understand why the Old Testament is so repetitive, you need to imagine
the way these stories were passed down. People didn’t write them down. Few
people were literate—why would they be? Even if you had the materials to write
a book; you can imagine the effort—writing each individual copy! It would be
centuries before there were scrolls, and even then most people—even devout Jews—would
never see them, and only the priests could read them. This was an agrarian
society; people didn’t need to know how to read, but they certainly did know
how to tell stories. For centuries, these stories about God were passed on
around campfires and dinner tables. People told them over and over, each story
like a thread weaving the tapestry of the history of the nation, each character
stacking their rock on the cairn that is the history of the Hebrew people. God
became known through these historical characters. God’s name became “I am the
Lord, your God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
Nobody
was going to know about the stories unless they were repeated again and again.
You couldn’t go to Amazon and order a copy of the Hebrew Bible. Beyond that, the
world of Old Testament gods was awfully competitive. Everybody had a god to
worship. One of the common misconceptions we have about the Hebrew people in
the Old Testament is that they believed there was only one God, which is not
quite right. They actually believed there were many gods; it’s just that their
God was the only one worth anything (if you want a useless vocab word for the
day; this is called “henotheism”—Israel was henotheistic). So, these stories
told around campfires that became the Old Testament were concerned with telling
us that the true God was powerful and other gods were not. Whose God opened
Sarah’s womb in her old age? Who led the people Israel out of slavery through plagues
and wonders? Who flooded the world? This God is powerful. This God is worthy of
being remembered.
As
Christians, we take this Old Testament with all its history and cherish it as
our heritage—this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is our God—but it can be hard to know what we are supposed to learn
from it. Moreover, when Jesus came into the picture something changed
dramatically. When Jesus rises on Easter morning, we became Easter people. Easter
people no longer need to say, “I believe in the Lord, who brought his people
out of Egypt, who went before them as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of
fire by night…” and it’s not because we don’t care about that. It’s just that,
as Christians, the proclamation of our salvation rests in a single moment, the
singular act of the resurrection. As Christians, we only have to point to
Easter To say, “I believe in the God who rises from the dead” is more than
enough. Salvation comes from the cross through the empty tomb. In much the same
way, this is why we baptize as we do. One baptism. One moment. Once and for all
forgiveness, because that’s what Jesus gave us on the cross, and that’s where
it was made known to us in the empty tomb.
I
think about this story of Joshua. Joshua weighs all the stories of the past,
telling us that God has done all these amazing things, and then, at the end, he
tells us “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” That’s such a
natural way to talk about faith development. You list off all the things God
has done—things we’ve read about in the Bible—and then we proclaim, “As for me,
I will serve the Lord.” I suspect that many of you can resonate with this kind
of faith declaration. You weighed the evidence and decided, at the end of the
day, to serve God.
That’s
not wrong, but, after Christ, our declaration of faith happens second. First
comes the resurrection promise. You are saved by grace through faith because of
what Jesus did on the cross. This is why we baptize infants, because you can’t
choose it; it’s yours already. Then, only then, do you get to turn around and
say, “Yes, I will serve the Lord,” not as the thing that saves you, but as the
thing you feel compelled to do because of what God has done for you.
So,
today, I get to baptize Elias not because he has declared this to be true. He
gets zero say in the matter. I want him to have a load of freedom in his life.
I want him to have the freedom to become the person he would like to be, I want
him to have the freedom to fail, and to pick himself up. I want him to choose a
bunch of things, but not this—not baptism. And I say this not because I think baptism
is magic, or that it will guilt him into staying in the church, or anything
like that. Rather, I want him to know that God has chosen him and loves him no
matter the path he walks, no matter how he treats God, or even if turns his
back on everything we value as a family. No matter what comes next, we want him
to know that God has chosen him first.
So,
this Christian faith is subtly different from the faith of Joshua. Joshua
didn’t have the resurrection; his belief was rooted in a history of God’s
salvation of Israel, but since we have the resurrection—since we have Jesus—we get
to throw around grace with reckless abandon, knowing that we don’t deserve this
baptism, this faith is always a gift, and, in the end, we are saved, like
Elias—like all children of God—not by what we do but by what Jesus has done for us.
Amen.
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