August 25, 2024

“Serve the Lord”

There are a lot of things in life that seem like they ought to be simple, but really aren’t.  For starters, computers.  It seems simple enough.  Turn the thing on, do your work, then turn it off.  But, no, you have to update your system with the latest antivirus definitions.  So you connect to the update doohickey, and start to download, which ties up your computer and slows you down while it’s going on.  Then you get a message saying not all updates were successfully downloaded, so you click on the tech support link, and wait for five minutes while it tries to set you up with a technician, but then a message comes up telling you that there are 70 people ahead of you in the queue, so you send them an email about the problem but never hear back.  Meanwhile, you’ve spent three hours trying to do five minutes worth of work.

Another example is love.  In adolescence all that matters is the fluttering of the heart whenever the object of our desire enters the room.  Two houses, three children, 967 arguments over how to squeeze the toothpaste or load the dishwasher, and several major life crises later, we discover that “love” is more than a feeling, it’s also a project, requiring a lot more attention, and a lot more of you than you initially expected.

Well, the same turns out to be true for today’s scripture reading.  At first blush, we have here what seems to be a simple statement from Joshua to the gathered leaders of Israel: “Serve the Lord.”  And we have a simple reply: “We will serve the Lord.”  It’s hard to imagine how you could even make a whole sermon out of that.  That is, until you read a little more carefully, and realize that Joshua is talking about something far more difficult and complex than it seems.

The key is here in verse 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 . . . .”  The two options Joshua puts before the people are telling.  The alternatives to the one true God are these: the old gods of your ancestors, or the new gods of the Amorites.

In other words, “serving the Lord” means doing the hard work of resisting the false gods we are consistently drawn to: the god of yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s problems, and the god of the latest new thing.  The temptation that lies before us is to claim for ourselves someone else’s god – our parents’ god, or the god that’s on TV.  The sirens’ song that would pull us into a trap of self-destruction is alternately the song of tradition and the song of modern culture.  Somehow, we keep believing that we can be saved from meaninglessness and futility either by our rituals or by our toys.

We have felt the lure of tradition.  Our traditions entrap us and threaten to destroy us when we make gods out of them.  And how easily that happens.  The implied divinity of our rituals and expectations sneaks up on us and overtakes us without the slightest awareness on our part.  In a publication called “The Pentecostal Minister” William Poteet told of a Russian czar in 1903 who noticed a sentry posted in a very odd place on the Kremlin grounds apparently guarding nothing. He asked about it and discovered that back in 1776 Catherine the Great found on that spot the first flower of spring. “Post a sentry here,” she commanded, “so that no one tramples that flower under foot!”  So there a sentry was posted for the next 127 years.

How many sentries do we post over the transient fancies of our lives?  We are creatures of habit, including yours truly.  We sit in the same pews Sunday after Sunday; we expect to sing the same familiar hymns we have sung for 30 or 50 or 70 years; we want to be reassured by the same interpretations of the same scripture as we have always known; we listen for affirmation of our favorite theological themes, and post an internal sentry to stand guard over the flowers of our assumptions, preconditions and prejudices.

I was in a church one time where they actually had people lining up, taking sides, getting ready to go to battle with each other – over whether the new carpet in the sanctuary was going to be a different color.

Sometimes we don’t even know where the things come from that we worship and hold on to as though they were sacred.  For instance, as most you know, I was raised a Baptist.  And as a good Baptist, I had throughout my life experienced, practiced and believed in adult baptism.  For many years I would have passionately argued that baptizing babies was silly and meaningless.  But then, a number of years ago, I was exposed to the idea of people coming to faith through their families.  I learned of the concept of welcoming a child into the family of the church, as you welcome the rest of the child’s family, and the value of acquiring faith through a process of growth that can just as easily begin with baptism as culminate in it.  So, by the time I went to a United Church of Christ church, I was already “on board” with the idea of baptizing babies.  It didn’t take any effort at all to feel at home in the UCC.  But that transformation didn’t happen overnight.  Several years ago at a meeting of Baptist clergy I was reminded of just how far I had come.  The conversation turned to the crisis in that denomination over the inclusion of homosexual people in the church.  One of my colleagues said, “I just don’t understand what all the flap is about.  Why should some people get upset just because the church opens its doors to everyone.  This isn’t even some major theological issue.  After all, it’s not like baptism or something.  Now, if someone wanted me to start baptizing babies, that’d be something to go to the mat about!”  I have to confess, I just shrugged and looked out the window.  I realized that just a few years earlier I had been worshiping that same old Baptist tradition myself.

But it’s not only the idols of our traditions that deceive us into worshiping them – “the gods our ancestors served in the region beyond the River.”  Joshua, as he spoke to the leaders of Israel, was wise enough to tell them about the equally perilous temptation of worshiping the latest cultural phenomenon – “the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living.”

Those of us who aren’t serving lifeless and empty traditions that we hardly understand, are often found instead serving vain and silly fads that we also barely understand.  The latest fad is artificial intelligence.  I wonder sometimes how much natural intelligence there is running around.  If we someday end up with an AI generated preacher, we might as well have an AI generated congregation.  Then everyone can just stay home and be comfortable.  Maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy, but if coming to church doesn’t ever make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, then we’re not doing our job here.  The great preacher and teacher, Fred Craddock, once said in a seminar I attended that a preacher has a responsibility to be interesting, but worship is not a show.

The point is this: there’s a very great temptation, and therefore a tendency, for all of us to fall into serving whatever’s at hand.  For some of us that may be ideas and traditions and patterns that we’ve known all our lives, value systems we were handed by our parents, or rituals that satisfy our need for consistency.  For others it may be some new craze, or cultural fixation, a shared anger about something into which we can pump our fear of futility, or even a new car or computer or cell phone.  In any case, it’s likely to be chosen because it’s comfortable, it’s convenient, or it’s consistent.

Discovering where the Lord is truly at work, and where we are asked to grow, and to serve, that’s a lot more work.  Because that Lord is not found in the musty old hand-me-downs of our parents’ faith, and not in the shiny new toys of the emerging culture.  The power of Divinity is found in the honest encounter of your truest heart with the heart of divine truth in the here and now. Sometimes that means being rather brutally honest with ourselves.  Sometimes it means challenging our assumptions.  Sometimes it means letting go of the familiar, the convenient, even the comfortable.

It can even mean letting go of “God” – or at least, the conception of God that we carry around in our heads. When the people of Israel took this message to heart they said they were ready to drop their false gods.  “Far be it from us,” they said, “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 who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.”

Joshua’s response is remarkable.  Listen to this: He simply said, “You cannot serve the LORD.”  The very thing he wanted them to do he told them they can’t do.  Why?  Because if you’re simply serving the “god” who takes care of you  every time you need help, drives out the Amorites for you, and fixes every problem, you still aren’t serving the one true Lord of Life.  I heard a football player on the radio once claiming that it was God who helped him hike the football just right.  Dadgie and I have a name for that God; we call him, “Good-ole’-God.”

Joshua is saying that serving the Lord involves trial.  It means hanging in with love, and self-sacrifice, and justice when it’s neither comfortable nor fashionable.  It means doing the work to actually seek the mind of Christ when an issue or question arises instead of resorting by default to one’s own self-interests, prejudices, and familiar assumptions.  It often means doing that which doesn’t come naturally.  But it carries with it the great reward of feeling integrated with something beyond yourself, and of knowing you are on a path of discovery and growing into more of all that you are intended to be.

So I urge you to leave off defending either your traditions, or your innovations.  I urge you to let go of the battle between the old and the new, and instead seek the divine urging that calls to your heart filling you with deep, profound appreciation for every precious moment of life.  And wanting to share that joy and love with those around you, discovering that serving the Lord means serving others.  I urge you to make a profound choice in your life: whether you will serve the gods of your ancestors which they worshiped beyond the river, or the gods of the strangers among you in this culture – or whether you will at least try your best to serve the Lord.