Strength to the End

Mark 13:24-37; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Click Here For Worship Service Video

One evening during the summer of 1986 I was having dinner with my grandparents.  We were sitting at the kitchen table eating supper and watching the evening news.  A very interesting news story came up. People were coming from all over the place to some little town in Ohio to see what appeared to be the face of Jesus rusting up on the side of a town water tank.  I looked over at Granddaddy and it appeared that he had become rather interested in this story and was becoming visibly angry for he had stopped eating. All of a sudden he blurted out, “What in the world! The Bible says Jesus is coming back on clouds of glory, not on the side of some water tank. Ain’t that right boy?” and I said, “Yeah.” Then he just shook his head for a minute or two while the story finished and then went back to eating.

Granddaddy’s response begs a very important question: “Why were so many people, and good Christians at that, searching for hope on the side of a water tank?”  For Granddaddy, the Bible said quite specifically that Jesus would be coming back on clouds of glory and that was good enough for him.  He didn’t need the proof of Jesus coming back on a water tank.  Yet, these water tank Jesus folks, they apparently needed some proof.  It wasn’t that they needed proof that Jesus was coming back.  They rather wanted something, a miracle, to assure them that the God they believed in was real.  Person after person that the newscaster interviewed at this water tank phenomenon said just that, “This proves that God is real.  This proves that Jesus Christ is alive.”  

So, why were they coming to the water tank for validation of their faith?  Well, this was going on in the midst of the economic crisis that bedeviled the “80’s.  There was also living daily with the Cold War fear of nuclear holocaust.  The first hints of the cultural decline of Christianity were becoming visible.  The AIDS epidemic was afoot with some actually believing it to be a plague sent by God.  In the midst of all that social turmoil people just wanted proof that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost hadn’t taken the last train for coast.  

To many people, the times seemed so “Apocalyptic” (if I might misuse the term), like the world was going to end soon, and they wanted to know if God was with them.  That’s back when I first accepted the call to follow Christ (not just believe) and I remember very clearly how Endtimes-focused a good bit of American Christianity was.  You didn’t need to look too hard for a class on the Book of Revelation.  And it wasn’t just the church that this apocalyptic fervor touched.  The artist formerly known as Prince was singing “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999” and that song was all about an impending end of the world.  In the mid-80’s there was a strong sense of expectation of something apocalyptic in the air and those water tower Jesus people were just wanting some assurance.

Well, what’s all this got to do with Mark’s gospel and Jesus coming back?  This is the first Sunday in Advent. It’s traditionally called the Prophet’s Sunday and, on this day, we remember how the prophets of the Old Testament were filled with the expectation of a day when God would come as the Saviour/Messiah to set things right and establish his kingdom forever.  Their hopes and expectations were partly fulfilled with the coming of Jesus. They also hoped for a day when God would pour out his Spirit on all peoples and this has been happening in part since the day of Pentecost when God poured his Spirit upon the church.  They also looked forward to the Day, the Day of the Lord, when God would finally put all things to rights.  We still look forward to that same day, the day when Jesus will return and all things will be created anew.  This “looking forward” is what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian faith from all other religions.  

In our text today Jesus proclaims to us the message of the prophets to expect a day when he will return in glory. It is often the case that some find it difficult to accept that Jesus will return. After all, it’s been nearly two thousand years now and he hasn’t shown up. I could very easily accept this view point on the basis that it fits reality, but I cannot. To say that Jesus is not coming back robs our faith of its hope, a hope born in the expectation of a day when God will finally put an end to sin and an end to death. I have seen too often the difference that hope can make in a person’s life (particularly those who are near the end of life) just to dismiss the world which the prophets, the earliest Christians, and Jesus himself hoed for and imagined. 

In expectation of that day, Jesus commands us to keep awake, to not be found sleeping. It’s never a good thing to fall asleep at a time when you’re supposed to be awake.  You miss important stuff like things that are going to be on the exam or that you’re driving off the road.  Jesus commands us to stay awake meaning to keep hoping in God, to keep expecting God to act not just at the end of time but more so now, in our daily lives right now.  

We hear a lot people making semi-funny jokes about how bad 2020 is.  Humour is a good way to deal with 2020.  Yes, the times are bad now.  You would think it was the 80’s all over.  We’ve got a pandemic that’s requiring us to adapt with major changes to our lifestyles.  It’s got the global economy on the brink of a shambles.  There’s the instability of the American political situation.  There seems to be no such thing as straight up news anymore.  Even the weather report seems to be a biased opinion piece, but I guess that’s always been the case with the weather.  Everybody just seems to believe what they want to believe.  Sometimes I scroll through Facebook and see some of the stuff that people I went from elementary to High School with post; particularly the political stuff.  I can’t believe we went through the same schools and had the same teachers and see things so differently.  There’s still the threat of nuclear attack but more so from a terrorist group than from another nation.  There’s societal distrust of the institutions of authority but blind allegiance given to authoritarian figures.  Then, there’s the impending Climate crisis.  That one really worries me.  

Jesus said, “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers will be shaken.”  That’s a style of writing called “Apocalyptic” and he’s just saying that that all the institutions and beliefs and what not that hold a society together get shaken to where nothing makes sense.  It’s like clearing an Etch-a-Sketch so you can start over.  We are in such a time as that now.  Now more than ever hope and a people who live according to hope are necessary.

Jesus says, “Keep awake.”  God will come to us in this time of upheaval, and its best we not be sleeping lest we miss it.  I don’t want to sound like one of those Bible-thumping, late-night, AM radio preachers and scare people.  No.  Quite the opposite, I want to give hope.  People are already really scared and just don’t understand what the hell is going on.  We need hope.  I started out talking about people flocking to a small town in Ohio back in the ‘80’s to see what looked like the face of Jesus rusting up on water tank.  People need to see the face of Jesus right now.  It is my prayer that he shines through our faces, our lives and isn’t just rusting away on us.  We need to keep awake.  Attend to your devotional life.  Keep in contact with people especially those shut-in.  Encourage people to work together to solve our common problems particularly the problems faced by those who are struggling. All the finger pointing and labelling people as enemies does absolutely nothing towards healing divisions.  Encourage people.  

Encourage people.  In the passage I read from 1 Corinthians Paul remarks on how God had given them so much grace meaning that God had been so evidently at work in their midst.  That being the case Paul says, “He (God) will also strengthen you to the end.”  I have been through periods in my life when everything has been upside down.  This verse has meant the world to me.  Tough, tumultuous periods come but will in time come to an end and, truly, God does strengthen us to get us through them.  In these times when everything is being turned upside down and inside out be encouragers.  I’ve run a few marathons in my life and there is nothing like another participant coming alongside you at mile 19, mile 20, when everything is its most disillusioning, hurting just as much as you are and they simply say to you, “We got this.”  Then, the next 6-7 miles go by and where the strength came to finish from?  Who knows? It just did.  Friends we got this and God will strengthen us to the end.  Encourage people.  Give hope.  Amen.

 

  

The Credibility Problem

Ephesians 1:15-23

Click Here for Worship Service Video

This is Christ the King Sunday.  The day we step up and boldly profess that Jesus rules this Universe.  I like the title the Eastern Orthodox tradition gives to Jesus with respect to this role – Pantokrator (krator means ruler, panto means all).  There’s a movie in that, I’m sure.  If Schwarzenegger can be The Terminator who comes back from the future to prevent a very dark world filled with war between humans and the intelligent machines they created; so, Jesus can be The Pantokrator - the Incarnation of God the Son; the One who was, is, and will be; the One who died and was raised and lives; he who is at all times presently working in the power of the Holy Spirit to bring about the glorious future of God’s perfecting of his Creation so that sin, death, and evil are no more; the One who will finally come to raise the dead and make it all so.  That would make a great movie, I think, but we would need longer than an hour on Sunday morning to show it.  It has the potential of be as long as history itself.

It’s Christ the King Sunday.  Jesus reigns.  Amen?  Well, I guess we should say how he reigns because the obviousness of that fact isn’t that (how shall we say it?) obvious.  People do ask, “Well, if Jesus reigns, why is the world so messed up?  Why doesn’t he just go ahead and fix it?”  That’s a tough one and we can only commiserate with the asker, because we people of faith suffer in this world too and it sure would be nice if God would just go ahead put it to rights.  We just can’t answer that “why not yet?” question.  God has to answer that himself.  

  Looking again at the question of how Jesus reigns, a part of the answer to that question, which we can speak to, would be that for now, Jesus manifests his reign in this world most obviously through his people, his body, his brothers and sisters on earth bound to him by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, we who know ourselves to be the beloved children of God just as Jesus is the Beloved Son of God the Father.  I’ll be careful not to get too theological here.  Let’s just say it this way: We sing “Jesus loves me, this I know.”  Yes, indeed he does.  Yet, if we want to be truly Biblical, it is more correct to sing “God the Father has adopted me and loves me just as much as he does his Only Begotten Son Jesus and I know this because the Holy Spirit has made a home in me.”  We should rather be singing that, but I’ve yet to find a catchy melody and the lyrics need tweaking.  Knowing yourself to be God’s beloved child is a good portion of the means of how Jesus reigns in this world, because, believe me, knowing that changes everything.  

Anyway, back to the topic – Jesus makes his reign visible through his Body, the Church.  Well, that’s a bit of a bitter pill for most people to swallow.  When we start talking about the Church exhibiting the Reign of Jesus, we run into some credibility issues.  In particular, throughout most of its two millennia the Church has tried to reign on Earth instead of Christ Jesus.  Popes have sat in the place of emperors.  Christian kingdoms have warred against Christian kingdoms.  Christian nations have gone to war against other Christian nations.  Christians have warred against people of other faiths.  In Modern times, in Democracies Christians have tried to govern by enforcing Christian moral values, by getting people elected who will further pseudo-Christian moral values and social agendas even to the extent of jumping into bed with Donald Trump and saying he is the one ordained by God to restore America to greatness in exchange for the hopes of the appointment of a couple of Conservative Supreme Court justices.  

The Church truly has a credibility issue when saying Jesus manifests his reign through the Church.  The institution of the Church throughout the ages has had a problem with power lust and greed to the extent of often becoming an oppressive force in the world.  Where the Church has reigned, it has not looked nor acted like Jesus.  We have instead grossly abused power.  Well, let’s talk about power.

Looking at our Ephesians passage, power, the power that belongs to Jesus, is a key topic.  It is such a key topic that Paul uses about every synonym for power that exists in the Greek language.  In translation, we see the words power, rule, authority, dominion, might, greatness, strength all within the span of a couple of verses.  The topic of power is important here, but the power that Paul refers to is not an earthly form of power.  It’s a power that belongs exclusively to God and it is above all earthly powers.  God the Father has placed all earthly powers under Jesus foot so it says.  It is so sadly ironic that the Church has historically chosen to exercise and abuse those lesser earthly powers in order to make itself great when all along we have had God’s power at our disposal and could have done great things.

Well, what kind of power are we talking about then?  Paul says it is the power that God used to raise Jesus from the dead – Resurrection power.  There is no power on earth to which we can compare this power.  We know no energy or force that can raise the dead.  But, God’s power can be known.  Paul indicates that the more we come to know Jesus and his way of life, the more we will know this resurrection power for it will be working in us to change us to be like Jesus as he is alive from the dead.  Through knowing Jesus by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit we get a taste of Jesus’ resurrection life right now.  

But, there’s a catch.  Jesus taught that we must die to ourselves to know this life, this power.  This dying to self runs contrary to the self-seeking we are accustomed too and do by nature.  God has called us to live the Jesus Way, the Way of the Cross, the way of dying to all that the world calls success by means of living according to the teachings of Jesus.  The blessing we get in life is to know Christ Jesus and the power of his resurrection, not success and material comfort.  The way of the Christian is not simply to believe in God and be a good person and God will bless what you do with success and comfort.  It is to follow Jesus at great personal cost and reap the blessing of knowing him and coming to know ourselves as beloved by God.

Paul notes this way of life among the Ephesians.  Paul tells the Ephesians that he has heard of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and of their love toward all the saints.  Wouldn’t it be nice that the only thing people hear about us is about our faithful following of and trust in Jesus Christ shown in our overwhelming love for others?  You know, what people hear about you is your legacy, the reputation you leave behind.  One way to think about our legacy is think about what people would write as an epithet on our tombstone. Wouldn’t it be nice if the epithet on our tombstone read: “Worked hard all his life, but never got rich because Jesus taught him to share it with others.”  We’ve heard the phrase, “Never met a stranger” about those people who can just talk to anybody.  Well, how about, “She never met a stranger she didn’t help”?  Would our tombstones reflect faithfulness to Christ in any kind of way or would it just be dates that say nothing?

Paul then goes to say that hearing of their faithfulness and love, he prays for them.  Paul prays that God would give the Ephesians (and us) a Spirit of wisdom and revelation as we come to know him.  Wisdom isn’t the ability to whip out catchy phrases about life that find their way onto coffee mugs.  Wisdom concerns the way we live our lives.  In Paul’s teaching, wisdom is living according to the Way of the Cross; and, when we live according to the Way of the Cross revelation happens meaning what God is up to in the world becomes evident.  Paul indicates that this wisdom and revelation will become ours the more we get to know Jesus, which means building that relationship with him.  

Paul also prays for the enlightening of the eyes of our hearts.  That is a rich phrase.  It means to see life, the world, others through sight that is forged in devotion to Christ.  It means always looking about for the opportunity of living according to our devotion to Christ Jesus.  We know of people whose motivation in life is “What’s in it for me?”  Our motivation should rather be asking “How can I serve the Lord who reigns in love in this situation?”  To do that it is necessary we fell devotion to Jesus.  That’s what faith is.  Faith isn’t just believing stuff.  Faith is felt devotion, loyal friendship with Jesus, which we express in the way we live our lives. 

Paul prays this prayer for us so that we may come to know the hope – know the hope – to which we have been called.  Hope!  Who do you know that doesn’t need hope?  The way of life in Christ makes evident the hope of salvation.  By it we help God powerfully bring healing to his diseased creation.  People living the Way of the Cross, putting self aside to act in unconditional love, is the path to the healing of nations.

Paul prays this prayer for us so that we may come to know and share in the abundant overflowing wealth of the inheritance that belongs to Jesus…the wealth he means isn’t money or material wealth.  It is the wealth of knowing ourselves to be God’s beloved children; the wealth of knowing we will live the resurrection life in a creation that God has healed and made new because we taste of it now because the presence of the Holy Spirit moves in us.  We feel the presence of God with us. 

Finally, Paul prays this prayer for us so that we may come to know the immeasurable greatness of God’s exercising his universe creating/life-changing/resurrection power on our behalf.  I don’t know if you have had moments where the only way to explain them is to say God stepped in and fixed what was unfixable, healed what was unhealable, loved me when I thought myself unlovable, stopped me when I was out of control.  I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

That universe creating, life changing, new creation making, resurrection power is how Jesus reigns until he comes again.  It is not of this world.  It comes from God’s very self and we find it by living according to faith, hope, and love.  That’s how Jesus reigns now.  Oh, for a world where Christians quit trying to control nations by earthly powers of coercion and rather devoted ourselves to Jesus, seeking to know him above all else.  The credibility problem would be solved.  Amen.  

We Belong to the Day

 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11

Click Here For Worship Service Video

Years ago, when I lived in West Virginia, I used to drive over to Virginia the Sunday before American Thanksgiving to meet my brother at my grandmother’s so that we could get up early the next morning and go hunting on opening day of Deer Season.  We would get up 3:30AM-ish to drive to his piece of mountain property near Vesuvius, VA.  Then, we would hike in and take our stands before sunrise to await any deer passing through.  Now, I need to admit that I lost my nerve to pull the trigger on anything a long time ago.  I went with him mostly just in case he shot something.  I could help him drag it out.  He was way overweight and not in the best of shape.  There’s nothing worse than getting your deer then suffering its revenge of giving you a heart attack dragging it out.

I enjoyed those mornings standing under a tree in the crisp cool air as the sun came up, watching and waiting.  The critters and birds all begin to wake up and rustle and wrestle about.  The light in the woods goes through its shades of blues and greens and purples and pinks.  Then, as the sun makes its way into the sky the darkness fades away to become only shadows of trees.  It begins to warm and everything glistens with the dew – a new day.  Once the sun was up we would hike out and cap the morning off by stopping at a little convenience store in Vesuvius, VA for a very salty country ham biscuit.

Please allow me to step back and be a bit theological and metaphorical about things and have a look at our reading from 1 Thessalonians.  Paul says we belong to the day.  A new day dawning, when you’re out in the woods like that a new day dawning can be an absolutely beautiful moment.  Metaphorically, theologically, we, Jesus people, belong to that beauty.  Day brings with it the hopes of a new day to live and enjoy and accomplish something.  We belong to that hope.  Day brings with it the end of the darkness of night and all the uncertainties, fears, and lack of safety.  Thieves do their thieving more readily at night under the cover of darkness.  People who wish to party and carry on tend do it at night.  It’s less shameful that way and it doesn’t interfere with the day’s work.  We belong to daylight’s security and sobriety.  We, the Jesus people, we belong to the day.

Paul talks about the day in the sense of the Day of the Lord.  The Day when God the Father will finally say, “Enough!” and send the Jesus the Son back from Heaven to Earth in the fullness of the power of the Holy Spirit to put things to rights.  That Day, like a thief in the night, will come with surprise; but not unexpectedly. Paul indicates that it will be like the labour pains pregnant women go through.  Those pains are beyond description and every pregnant woman knows they’re coming.  For those who live for the night, for the darkness, that Day will not be pleasant.  They will know what it is to be put to rights.  It’s like waking up the morning after a party and realizing the mess that needs to be cleaned up and remembering the ass you made of yourself or worse and realizing all you’re going to have to do to fix what you’ve done.

Paul uses the word Wrath.  It’s an interesting word in Greek.  It’s where we get our word orgy, but in Greek it isn’t a sex party.  It is a very passionate anger.  We have difficulty (or at least I think we should have difficulty) squaring up a loving God with a wrathful God.  There are End Timer’s out there who paint the picture of a wrathful God coming in very impassioned anger like Godzilla to Tokyo and destroying everything and sending all the wicked people to a fiery Hell to suffer forever and ever.  

Well, I’ve grown to have a lot of difficulty with that image of God’s wrath.  I am under the impression that what God does when he comes and is passionately angry at these humans he has created is to hold us accountable, not to act vengefully to destroy us, but to heal us.  The judgement of God will in the end be restorative, healing, rather than retributive (you get what you deserve).  The Bible is clear that at the Resurrection everybody will be raised and everybody will face judgement.  Everybody will stand in the presence of God fully able to feel the fullness of God’s love but along with feeling that love comes the piercing self-awareness of “Oh my God, look what I’ve done; look what I’ve been; look how I’ve wasted the life you’ve given me.”  That’s feeling naked and ashamed; wanting to hide but there’s nowhere to hide from the love of God.  To me, that’s how I make sense out of all the metaphorical language the Bible uses to talk about what we call Hell.  I say “what we call Hell” because the word Hell and the ideas we associate with it do not appear in the Bible in its original languages.  That’s a topic for another day.

In Christ, we who belong to him get a taste of judgement now, a taste of the love of God that exposes our brokenness and heals us.  The result of this judgement isn’t condemnation, rather it leads to our salvation. The Greek word we translate as salvation can be translated interchangeably with healing.  God’s judgement saves us by healing us of the disease we call sin.  We can jokingly say “God’s going to get you for that” but what we are really saying is that when God “gets us”, God heals us.  It doesn’t feel nice to go through it.  God’s saving judgement digs up a lot of shame and emotional pain and we have to eat some crow, but the resultant healing is the beauty of a new day.

In the end, when the Day of the Lord comes and the night of the way things presently are comes to its expected and hoped for end, God will save and heal his whole creation from the effects of our disease we call sin.  Until then, since we belong to the day, we have the responsibility to live now accordingly.  Paul gives some guidance.  He says, “Let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.”  Let’s look at these briefly.

By saying “Let us be sober” Paul isn’t necessarily referring to abstaining from alcohol and other substances; though avoiding substance abuse is always a good idea.  He means it figuratively, meaning to keep watchful and aware of the coming of morning, watching for what God is up to.  To be sensible and not fanatical.  It’s remaining prayerful and studious of the Scriptures and doing that not only on our own but together, with one another.

Next Paul makes reference to putting on protective gear, a breastplate and a helmet.  Some of the Thessalonian believers had probably faced death in the coliseum by battling wild animals and gladiators as punishment for appearing to be treasonous for claiming that Jesus is Lord rather than Caesar.  They would have faced that battle without protective gear.  So here Paul tells them that their breastplate is their faith and love and their helmet is the hope of salvation.  In the Hebrew way of thinking, faith and/or rather faithfulness and love are matters of the heart, the part of us where the will and desire and drive are located.  Faith/faithfulness and love are fitting to be our breastplate to protect our hearts as we stand defenceless in this life not seeking our own gain or power for ourselves but rather seeking Christ Jesus’s benefit and his kingdom reign for all.  

As the hope of salvation is our helmet which sits on our heads, we can also say that hope is a matter of the mind or mindedness or our orientation in life.  To put on the helmet of the hope of salvation is to wrap one’s mind around God’s ultimate acting in his creation to triumph over all that distorts and destroys it and how our lives now fit into God’s ultimate triumph.  It is to be minded towards, oriented towards, pointed towards God’s Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven.  Instead of being minded on the things of the world, it is to be minded on the things of God in this world and how he is and will ultimately put it to right and strive to be a part of that.

That said, we as Christians step into this battle of life, God’s battle for the renewal of his creation, defenceless.  Where the world fights with some pretty mean weapons, as we ourselves have done, we must now stand as Jesus did, in the power of the Holy Spirit in the apparent weakness of only faith and love with our minds set on being signposts in this world that point to the reality of the Day when God will triumph.  As individuals we must prayerfully strive for justice, peace, fairness, and equality in our immediate lives – in our homes, in our work places, among our neighbours.  As communities of faith we must do so at the larger scale of neighbourhoods, cities, and regions and so on.  And let us not forget the Creation itself, the environment, this planet which groans in labour pains awaiting that Day.  We, you and I, us together are signposts of the coming of God’s salvation in this world.  Let’s wrap our minds around this and live our lives accordingly. 

Paul ends with saying, “Therefore, encourage one another and build each other up, as indeed you are doing.”  That’s how I will end this morning as well.  All of you in all four of my churches do a beautiful job of encouraging and supporting one another.  In my humble opinion, it is obvious that you belong to the day.  Amen.

 

Incline Your Heart

 Joshua 24:1-3,13-28

Click Here For Worship Service Video

This passage from Joshua makes me want to look back over the last couple of decades and ponder how God has moved me around brought me to where I am.  From time to time people ask me how it happened that I came to Canada.  I usually tell them, “Following the Banjo”.  Then after they say, “What”, I tell them a truncated version of my story, a story of how a good friend of mine in West Virginia held banjo and fiddle camps that he let me frequent.  There were other frequent offenders who came down from the Toronto area to learn from him.  I got to know one of them well enough to come up and visit Toronto.  W hen it was time to move on from the church in West Virginia, I made application both up here and in the States and Claude Presbyterian Church in Caledon, Ontario happened to be where the call came from.  I was happy to come for I had always had the sense that my call to the ministry would involve an international border crossing. So, on March 4^th, 2003 (no pun intended) followed by ten inches of snow, I finally arrived to live and work in Canada.  

I say that’s a truncated version because I leave out most of the “God stuff”.  Here’s some of that.  I was in my mid-thirties and had recently been through the death of my father and a divorce and I needed a break from the ministry.  The folks in West Virginia were overwhelmingly supportive of me through all that.  But it was just too small of a bowl to be a public figure in while going through all that so I prayerfully decided to resign and move on.  The morning I mailed out the letter announcing my resignation to the congregation after leaving the post office I went home and sat in my recliner.  My head was literally buzzing in anxiety at what I had just done.  Suddenly, I heard the sound of running water and a voice said to me, “You will see what will come, Randy”.  I never had anything like that happen before or since.  

About a month later I was in Toronto visiting and had the opportunity to attend a Presbyterian worship service up here for the first time.  It just happened that the sermon was on Genesis 12 when God told Abraham “Go!  Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.”  Oddly (weirdly), on the back of the service bulletin was a story of an elderly man recently widowed packing up his belongings and leaving his home not sure of where he was going.  He found a place he liked , settled, and eventually remarried.  I am wary of putting too much weight upon something that seems coincidental but that had me thinking, hoping that up to Canada would be were God would bring me to start over.  

Well, back to hearing and seeing things, a few months later I was into the process of making applications and lining up interviews. While I was praying one morning, I suddenly saw a church building I had never seen before.  I wondered if vision of a church was what the voice meant by saying I would see what will come.  I had three interviews lined up in Ontario in the course of a week in October of 2002.  The first two interviews went well.  While I was heading for the billet for my interview with Claude, well, you should have seen the double-take I did when I drove up HWY 10 north of Brampton and there prominently stood Claude Presbyterian Church, the church I had seen that morning while praying.  At that point I had no doubt God was making me a promise and was keeping it.  I moved to Canada.  Like the man in the story on the back of the service bulletin, I, in time, met Dana and we married.  A couple of years later, a few months after William was born I was looking out the living room window at the cloud cover before a run and suddenly the LORD impressed upon me, “Look at where I’ve brought you.”  He had kept his promise.  Where I stand today is his doings not my own.  I just had to go along for the ride.  

God was very much with me at that time in my life.  Yet, time has gone on and we are up here in Grey Bruce and I’m serving a four church Cooperative apparently something I’m uniquely qualified to do.  So goes life here in my Promised Land and it’s good.  God has been faithful.  But, it’s different now. God’s not so readily needed by me and so I have to work a lot harder at the relationship with God now.  More about that in a minute. 

Looking at Joshua, in the verses preceding our passage this morning, which incidentally were his last words to the Israelite people before he died, Joshua said something I can relate to, “And now I am about to go the way of all the earth, and you know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one word has failed of all the good things that the LORD your God promised concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one of them has failed.”  Then he goes on to recount all God had done for them from the promise of Abraham to where they stood that day in the Promised Land the promise fulfilled. 

Our God is a God who makes promises and keeps them.  I have certainly experienced this for myself.  I hope you have as well.

Having set that stage I have to move on to the troubling matter of human nature that this passage is really about.  So, there they stood the people of God’s own choosing, saving, and establishing.  They were originally nomads, then slaves, and now a nation living in cities they did not build eating the fruit of vineyards and olive trees that they did not plant.  At this point we would expect Joshua to launch into a litany of praise and thanksgiving for the steadfast love and faithfulness of the LORD.  Right?  He doesn’t.  Instead, he warns them about idolatry, about worshipping the gods of their Mesopotamian ancestors and the gods of Egypt where they were enslaved and the gods of the Amorites and the Canaanites in the land God had now given them.  He tells them to put those gods away and choose that day whom they will serve for as surely as the LORD had given them a land and made them to be a great nation, the LORD could just as easily take it all away.  

That’s an interesting twist.  Some commentators try to explain it by saying that the Book of Joshua was written during captivity in Babylon when idolatry and its ill-effects were the predominant reasons the prophets had given for God letting his temple in Jerusalem be destroyed and his people taken from the land.  But, I think there is still a more straight forward answer for Joshua’s twist: the people were still worshipping other gods.  After all this wonderful stuff the LORD God had done for them, they were still worshipping foreign gods, still worshipping foreign gods.  Their response to the mighty acts of the LORD was to secretly worship other gods in their homes.

Well, I wonder if Joshua’s speech and challenge is just a sad commentary on the Israelites of long ago or is it that he is saying that idolatry is endemic to human nature.  The answer to both those questions is yes.  Ancient Israel was rarely if ever free from idolatry and they stand representative of the people of God in all times and all places, us included.  We are still idolatrous.  Idolatry is endemic to human nature.  

We may not be like ancient times with idols in temples and all that.  But, just think about this; in Western Culture we are descended from Greek and Roman culture.  Though dressed a bit differently these days, the ancient Greek/Roman pantheon of gods still exist in our culture today.  Just look at the world of advertising, turn on the TV, read the paper and you will see them: Zeus, the god of power, is still around; Aries the god of war, Bacchus the god of party ‘til you barf, Eros and Aphrodite the god and goddess of beauty, love, and sex are still around; the election down in the States shows clearly that Emperor and Empire worship are still around.  Those gods are all still around…and well served.      

Idolatry everywhere pervades our lives.  I fully understand what Joshua meant when after the Israelites made a whole-hearted declaration to serve the LORD he said, “You cannot serve the LORD.”  Meaning they were unable to serve the LORD exclusively. So it is with us!  That is our predicament too.  Idolatry of money, sex, power, nation, religion, even family – truly every nook and cranny of our lives are tainted with devotion to something other than our God.  I confess it for myself.  This endemic idolatry is a problem even for the preacher.  What can we do?

Well, Joshua advised his people to put away those false gods and incline their hearts to the LORD – incline our hearts to the LORD.  Well, the heart has to do with devotion, desire, motive.  What we want and why we do what we do to get what we want.  We have to redirect what we want in our hearts from being our own idolatrous desires to being devotion to God.

Settling in the Promised Land the Israelites faced a problem that they didn’t have in the wilderness.  While they wandered in the wilderness they were gathered as one people and there were visible reminders that the LORD was with them – the whirlwind cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, the presence of Moses.  They were one people gathered around one God.  But in Promised Land, they were scattered and did not have those strong reminders of God’s presence with them.  All they had was a Levite priest and his family living among them whom they had to support, probably begrudgingly.  Therefore, many to most Israelites turned to the gods of the people of the Land they conquered.  They kept household gods, little Barbie and Ken size idols of the Canaanite gods, and worshipped them in secret while publicly claiming to be the people of the LORD.  Over time the secret worship would become public worship and that’s when they got in trouble with God.

We face a similar problem as we are scattered to our homes all over the place among a people that’s largely secular but de voted to the gods endemic to our culture.  How do we keep ourselves devoted to our LORD?  Incline our hearts to God.  Incline means to lean in, to lean in like your trying to hear somebody better.  When children come to speak to us we often lean down to their level to give them our full attention.  So, we must lean ourselves to God to hear him better.  Here’s a suggestion.

There was a monk who lived back in the 1600’s around Paris, France named Brother Lawrence.  He wrote a little book called “The Practice of the Presence of God” which you can get free on the net.  He lived in a monastery and followed a very worshipful routine of gathering in the sanctuary with his brethren several times a day to worship and pray.  Yet, he pondered the question of how he could remain aware of God’s presence when he was away from the sanctuary and doing his daily tasks.  They had difficulty seeing how God, whom they believed to dwell exclusively in sacred places, could be with them out in the world.  He concluded that he just had to train himself to be mindful that God was present with him in the same way that somebody else might be in the room with him and to train himself to be conversing with God as much as he could.  He found that the more he felt he was spending time with God outside the sanctuary, the more he grew to love God and to want what God wants.  

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.  Give it a read.  Give his practice a try.  For myself, this practice has been an important part of my devotional life since I discovered it 30 years ago in university.  Amen.