Sermons
Sunday 12th January 2014, Epiphany, evening
Joshua 3:1-8, 14-end
by Revd Kate Tuckett
At the end of last year I went on a trekking holiday to Nepal. I walked a long way uphill to the base camp of Everest. Looking back it, it was an amazing and immensely privileged experience. At the time, although it was stunningly beautiful, it felt extremely cold, pretty uncomfortable and I spent a lot of time dreaming of a hot shower and telling myself that next year I was going away somewhere sensible. Sometimes it takes us looking back on an event to properly appreciate it, and I want to consider the reading from Joshua we’ve heard as one that makes most sense not as historical reality but as a myth that can speak to us of an inner truth.
So the story we’ve heard comes at a significant moment in the life of Joshua. Joshua has been called by God as a successor to Moses and to lead the people of Israel out of the desert, across the Jordan, and into the Promised Land -- their inheritance from God.
This story is not without its challenge. Yes, it is the story of Israel’s entry into the land of promise, but it’s also a story about Israel’s ruthless displacement of the existing tribes and peoples. The lectionary conveniently misses out verses 9-13, but within them we are told that ‘among you is the living God who without fail will drive out from before you the Canaanites, the Hittites, Hivities, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites.’ This is a passage that speaks of brutal ethnic cleansing, and then of a miracle -- of the waters of the Jordan standing still -- that my rational mind tells me is impossible.
And I don’t think we can read this story without acknowledging that it is an uncomfortable one. But we also need to acknowledge that this was a story written hundreds of years after the event, told from the point of view of those who saw the events as the climax of God’s liberating actions beginning in the Exodus and crossing of the Red Sea. God brings the Israelites out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land. What is key to the writer of the passage is that God loved the people of Israel, and liberated them in every aspect of their lives. Perhaps the only way we can read this story is symbolically, to take this truth and to read it as a story of an inner as well as an outer journey.
We’re told that the people of Israel have camped out for three days, and the Joshua has sent out his spies to check out the Canaanites over the river. Meanwhile the people in the camp have been getting ready for the final crossing. And the thing that stands between them and their inheritance is the Jordan River. This is their one barrier between the wilderness and their new life with God. If they can cross it, it will mean an end to the aimless wandering around that they’ve been doing for the last 40 years. But before them is a river that is flooding with no crossing point in sight, no way around and no bridge. God has brought them to this place, but the only way across the river is to go through the river.
Many of us will have a preconceived idea of what our promised land might look like, and for many of us, this will correspond to our wilderness experience, the counterpart of the things that we individually struggle with. And we also have a Jordan River that we need to cross – and often more than one. But as perhaps it doesn’t matter whether the Jordan River is a geographical feature, or precisely what happened there, nor does it matter whether it affects the outward circumstances of our lives. Taking the first step to cross the Jordan changes us, and that changes our lives.
Sometimes when we look for miracles, for great works that demonstrate the life of God, we look for something very dramatic. And it may be a great challenge to our faith to speak of God’s mighty works and to look round and see the world still carrying on as normal, the wars still raging, people still killing one another, the planet still being destroyed, perhaps still feeling that we are unable to forgive, perhaps still searching for our way in life, still struggling with all the things we struggle with. But perhaps it’s even more of a challenge to see past the instant miracles we hope for and search out the quieter and more radical miracles of changes of heart, increases in dignity, walking a little taller, speaking out a little more confidently.
The people of Israel are standing on the edge of God’s momentous and miraculous salvation in their lives. And yet their preparations to cross the river seem very ordinary and monotonous. They hang around for three days. They go on recces, and come back to the camp. It was probably both dull and uncomfortable. Our lives feel so ordinary and mundane most of the time, and very often it is only when we look back at our rather inglorious pasts that we begin to discern that something glorious was happening. Often it’s only in hindsight that we can see how and where God was leading us. In the same way the Israelites probably went through these apparently tedious and unspiritual events and only later, looking back on them, began to see their spiritual meaning. The miracle that is told – that the waters of the Jordan ran dry and allowed the Israelites to cross – is perhaps a shorthand for a deeper miracle, that somehow and by some means the Israelites reached the promised land. And over the years that this story was told, perhaps it has been embellished so that the facts of the story become more and more miraculous.
This is a story of God meeting people where they are and calling them forward, and in this season of Epiphany, we are reminded again of the truth of Christmas in the words from the Hebrews – that God has spoken to our ancestors in many ways but God reveals God’s glory through humanity. God comes to us. But God needs us to participate in this. God did not hold back the water for Israel until they had put their feet in. When they had stepped into the water, God acted.
To reach the Promised Land, a place where we can live in the joy and fulfilment of God is not a single river crossing, and to do so is a life’s work, and perhaps the final crossing we make is that of our death. But we negotiate multiple crossings before then, and not all of them will be easy. We’ve earmarked today with a focus on vocation. Our vocation is responding to whatever God is calling us to do, and if we do this, it will take us a place of fulfilment, even if that feels quite mundane most of the time. But to follow God’s call in one direction, to say yes to God, may mean that we need to say no to something else. Embracing our vocation, following where God leads will take us to some kind of joy, but crossing the river may never be entirely straight-forward.
There’s a beautiful poem by Mary Oliver.
‘Every year, everything I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal:
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.’
And as we gather here, aren’t we just about trying to live in this world, with all its river crossings, with its endless cycles of loss and salvation, and suffocating from all our competing ideas of salvation – but aren’t we just trying to live as people who believe that we are called to do something to make a difference to our world? There is one way to live in this world – to love, to hold on and to let go. To cross the river, we may need to let go of some security or possession or preconceived ideas of the way we thought our lives would go.
The story from Joshua is a story of God with us. And if we can take that first step into where God is calling us, even if this does involve an element of uncertainty or of loss, we can confident that dry land will be revealed and a way forward with be opened to us.
It may only be in hindsight that we realise we have crossed the river. And goodness knows, the Promised Land might not be where we think it will be. Because the God who calls us and leads us on and loves us to the end may subvert all our preconceptions of how we thought we’d find salvation, and might just reveal a future more glorious and more beautiful than we could ever imagine.
Notes
This sermon makes use of the following resources:
Rohr, R. and Martos, J. (1987), Old Testament: The Great Themes of Scripture, Cincinatti: St Anthony Messenger Press
http://www.uua.org/documents/meyerjudith/to_live_this_world.pdf
