A sermon by the Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda, written for and delivered at All Saints' Episcopal Church, Tybee Island, GA, on Sunday, August 25, 2024, the 14th Sunday after Pentecost (RCL Proper 16, Year B).
Primary Bible Reading
Joshua 24:1-2a,14-18
24:1 Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel, and they presented themselves before God. 24:2a And Joshua said to all the people, "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: … 24:14 "Now, therefore, revere the LORD and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt and serve the LORD. 24:15 Now if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living, but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." 24:16 Then the people answered, "Far be it from us that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods, 24:17 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, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went and among all the peoples through whom we passed, 24:18 and the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God."
Which God?
By the Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda, Program Manager for New Starts, ELCA
Today we read this somewhat confusing passage from the Book of Joshua. We don’t read from Joshua very often on Sundays or holidays (only three or four times in the three-year lectionary cycle). So you will be forgiven for not fully remembering what happens in Joshua or understanding what is going on in this text. The story of Joshua takes place immediately after Moses died. God called Moses to lead the Hebrew people to escape their slavery in Egypt. By God’s power, they crossed the Red Sea as if it were dry land, they traveled to Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments and the rest of God’s Law, and then they wandered in the wilderness for forty years, surviving only on manna and quails that God provided. Right before they were ready to enter the “Promised Land,” Moses died, and his assistant Joshua became the new leader of the people, the Prophet who spoke with God on their behalf. The majority of the book of Joshua contains stories about the wars that the Hebrew people fought against the Canaanites (a.k.a. Amorites) so that they could settle down in the land.
Today’s reading is at the very end of the book. They finished their wars, winning many but losing some too. Joshua was old and ready to pass down his legacy. So he called all the tribes together to remind them of what God had done for them and ask them to swear oaths of loyalty – not to him as a king, but to the LORD their God as their king and ruler. And that’s the point of tension. Will they actually worship and serve the LORD God of Israel? Or will they serve “the gods that your ancestors served beyond the [Jordan] River and in Egypt” (Joshua 24:14)? And the elders replied with these words: “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, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went and among all the peoples through whom we passed, and the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites [Canaanites] who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God” (24:16-18).
Now, let’s circle back to where we started. Why do we need to spend time thinking about this passage in the Bible? Has anyone asked you recently which god you are going to serve? Have you felt compelled or pulled to worship some other deity from some other religion? What does it mean today to “serve other gods”? Who are the gods we serve when we turn away from the LORD our God?
I have only preached here a few times this year, so most of you may not have picked up on some of my preaching habits. But one thing I try to be consistent about is trying to use proper Names for God. When I’m preaching, I will often say “the God of Israel” or “God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” or even “our God”. Because, throughout the Bible, that specificity really mattered. In the cultural context of the Bible, most people outside of Israel literally worshiped different gods with different names and different stories. Most of them believed that there were many different gods (polytheism).
Most of the Old Testament authors themselves assumed that the foreigners’ gods were real, just that they were less powerful than Israel’s God. That’s why they sometimes used the title: God of gods and Lord of lords. Later prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel used the image of Israel’s God sitting on a throne and other gods (from other places, peoples, religions, and cultures) bowing down to worship our God. (The technical word for this is “henotheism” - one God above all other gods.) But more often than that, biblical characters and authors refer to their God by talking about God’s actions, what God has done for them. Some of God’s actions were so important that they became defining characteristics. The most common godly action used to define God, by far, is the Exodus. We’re not just talking about any old god (lowercase “g”). We are talking about “the LORD our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight” (24:17).
Today, on Tybee Island, polytheistic religions are not very common. Belief in many gods is still very common in other parts of the world, of course, and many Native American spiritualities across this continent believe in some form of polytheism. But my hunch is that most people you know identify as some kind of Christian, some kind of Jew, maybe even some kind of Muslim, or nonreligious/agnostic/atheist. And Christians believe that Jews and Muslims worship the same God we do (though their understanding of God and God’s characteristics are different). Most westerners agree that there is One God. So it’s pretty rare that we encounter people who are literally tempted to “serve other gods” like Joshua’s Israelite audience was.
But, I argue, we actually are tempted to “serve other gods” all the time. Sometimes, we serve the gods of Pleasure or Greed or Arrogance or Ambition or Social Status or Supremacy. We usually serve these gods without realizing it. We sometimes even mask our service to those gods by calling it worship and service for the true God. We sometimes distort the LORD our God, telling ourselves that God approves of our own twisted, self-centered desires.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that all those things are inherently evil, that they are always idols to be avoided. In the right context, pleasure, ambition, wealth, and status can be good, or at least morally neutral. But I am saying that we can take these things and place them up on pedestals. We can pursue them to the detriment of anyone or anything else. Then, we’ve taken things that are good and twisted them into something evil and self-serving. Then, we have turned them into false gods. Then, we have made them idols who draw us away from the love of the true God.
This is where the Letter to the Ephesians can be helpful. It says, “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm” (Ephesians 6:12-13). We can easily be deceived into thinking that we are serving God when we are really just serving ourselves; we can be tricked by spiritual forces of evil that surround us.
This is why I speak so often about identifying who God is and what God’s will is. If we are not clear on the kind of God we serve, we can do all kinds of evil in God’s name. For centuries, most white Christians in the Americas believed that enslaving African people was good and righteous. Many pastors and theologians narrowed in on and misinterpreted weird parts of the Bible to defend slavery and justify their hateful, self-serving, cruel behavior. Most Germans in the 1930s and 1940s were Christians (Lutherans and Catholics) and most of them went along with the Nazi Party’s increasingly oppressive policies, all the way up to genocide. Many pastors and theologians narrowed in on and misinterpreted weird parts of the Bible to defend Nazism and justify their hateful, self-serving, cruel behavior. Even in this Old Testament reading, Joshua and the Israelites believe that God empowered them to wage war on the Canaanites, slaughtering them and stealing their land. Sadly, I could go on. There are plenty of other examples throughout biblical and Christian history of people serving other gods in the Name of one, true God. They claimed that the God of love supported their hate, and millions suffered.
Instead, we must remember our God’s fundamental characteristics. God is Love. The great commandment is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. God rescued and freed enslaved people because human slavery is at odds with God’s love. God rescued us from slavery to sin because we were created to be free to love God and our neighbor. Not only that, but our God is selfless. Our God’s love is self-sacrificial. Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God, gives himself to us. Christians believe that Jesus dwells in us through the Holy Spirit, and that the bond we have with God is renewed every time we gather to receive Holy Communion. The bread and wine of communion become Jesus’ flesh and blood, the very flesh and blood of God. The flesh and blood of Christ are life for this dying world, healing for our brokenness. This act of worship is communion and fellowship with God and communion and fellowship with one another. Through our worship, our Loving God empowers and inspires us to love as Christ loved us. When we love like that, we cannot serve other gods. We are not bound to any other spiritual force of evil. Because the love of our God is stronger than all hate. The goodness of our God is stronger than all evil. The life of our God is stronger than all death. Amen.
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