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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 4th, 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.
