Sermon — August 25, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There comes a point in every one of our lives when we must make a choice between two different paths. There’s no compromise, no way to split the difference. There are two roads laid out before us, one here and one there, and we have to decide which one we’re going to follow.
I’m talking, of course, about the difficult choice between following the road signs and the GPS.
Now, I drive a remarkably-reliable eleven year old car, which came with a wonderful but now quite unreliable built-in navigation system. It’s the kind of early 2010s device where if you want updated maps, you have to send away for a USB drive to plug in and update them, and I have to admit, I never have.
And so there are certain parts of certain routes where, a decade after installation, my GPS is just entirely wrong. Sometimes this happens when I know the route, as when the GPS tries to send me whirling around a rotary that no longer exists, somewhere in Somerville. It more often happens on some highway somewhere out of state, where the entry and exit ramps have moved around, and the GPS tells me to go straight for half a mile, then change between I-95 and I-91 by sailing off through the sky on a ramp that’s no longer there. (Which, to be fair, would not even be the worst driving I’ve seen in New Haven, Connecticut.)
Anyway, at those moments you face a choice between two different sources of authority offering two different visions of reality, and you need to choose which one to trust, and which one to follow. And in a way, this is what every one of our readings this morning is about.
Our first reading tells the story of the choice that Joshua offered to the ancient Israelites at the very end of their journey into the Promised Land. The people have crossed the Red Sea on their way out of slavery in Egypt, led by Moses. They’ve wandered forty years in the wilderness, complaining all the way, and Moses has seen the Promised Land from the mountaintop before he dies. Now Joshua has led them in, and they’ve battled with the people of the land. And years later, after a long time of peace, Joshua’s life is drawing to its end, and he gathers all the people and offers them a choice.
Remember the stories of your ancestors, he tells them: remember Terah and Abraham and Nahor, who lived beyond the river and served other gods. Remember their descendants, you parents and grandparents, the ones who were enslaved in Egypt, and served Egyptian gods there. Remember the gods your ancestors served, and how that went for them.
And remember the story of the God we now serve, and what that God has done for you. Remember how he brought your parents up out of slavery. Remember how he protected them through those long years in the wilderness. Remember how he led you into this Promised Land.
(And for this Sunday, at least, let me just acknowledge that the old stories of conquest and violence as the people came into the land have echoed down the ages, with very real effects. And let me say that if you’re curious about the intersection between these stories and Israeli-Palestinian relations today, I’m happy to talk about that any time; even though I’m not going to talk about it right now.)
So Joshua offers a choice between two ways: you can choose the gods your ancestors served long ago and far away, you can follow their traditions and practice their ancient rites; or you can choose the God who brought you up out of Egypt, and set you free. But one way or another you must “choose this day whom you will serve.” (Joshua 24:15)
More than a thousand years later, another Joshua arose, another leader among the people of that land. We tend to call this one what the Greeks and Romans called him. Their languages had no sh sound, and ended masculine words in s, and Hebrew pronunciation had changed as well, so they spelled his name not Yeshu’ but Jesus. In other words, we call him Jesus, but Jesus and Joshua are the same name.
And like that ancient Joshua, Jesus offered the people around him a choice; implicitly, this time, but a choice all the same. He didn’t ask them to choose between one god and another. Nearly everyone who appears in all the stories in the gospels was faithful to the one God of the Jewish people. Their choice, in our reading this morning, was whether they could accept the strange teachings of this man, the almost-grotesque idea that they should “eat [his] flesh and drink [his] blood,” which we talked about at some length last week. (John 6:56)
“This teaching is difficult,” his disciples said when he told them this. “Who can accept it?” (6:60) And it’s actually unusual, how this story goes. Here, it’s not “the Jews” or “the Pharisees” or “the Sadducees” who criticize Jesus’ teaching, as the various gospels often say. It’s “his disciples,” the people who’ve faithfully followed him so far. He teaches something strange and hard, and they complain. But Jesus doesn’t yield, he doubles down on his claims, and “because of this, many of his disciples turned away.” (6:66)
But a faithful remnant remains, a core group built around the twelve, the ones who we will come to call apostles. And they don’t stay, you might notice, because they think that this teaching is easy to believe. They don’t even acknowledge that what he’s saying might be true. They don’t stay because they accept his words. They stay because they believe in him. They trust him. And so, Peter answers on their behalf, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (6:68)
They’ve made the choice that he’s the one who knows how the right directions, and they’re going to follow him, wherever the rest of the traffic may be going. They’ve decided that, however strange some of what he says may seem, he is, to paraphrase what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel of John, not only “the truth” and “the life”; he is “the Waze.” (I’m so sorry. I am, in fact, a dad.)
So the disciples choose to follow Jesus. And they choose again to stay the course, to remain faithful when others back away. But it’s not until much later that the disciples feel what Paul calls “boldness.” It’s not until much later that their faith transforms from something that they have to struggle to accept, to something that gives them strength, a shield and helmet and armor that protects them from all the evils of the world. This “boldness” is one of Paul’s favorite words, and he means the kind of extraordinary strength it takes to stand up and declare the truth when it’s much easier to say nothing. To stand for what is good in a world that’s often beset by evil. And to remain not only confident in but comforted by what you know to be true, even when the people around you are shocked.
There’s a kind of growth in these stories, from decision to faithfulness to boldness. And you could imagine this as a typical trajectory in spiritual life. The story of your faith might have a beginning, when you make the decision to follow, the decision to choose which god to serve; when you choose who gets to be your judge and what values will shape your life. This is when you choose which way to go. The story might have a middle, in which your faith is tested; in which the road becomes more difficult, when you’re not so sure that your decision was right, or something unexpected happens, and you wish you’d gone the other way, after all. And then later, the story might end with a kind of boldness, a sense of certainty that you’ve gone the right way, and a comfort that the destination is finally in sight.
And yet the story of a life is rarely as simple as 1, 2, 3; decision, faithfulness, boldness. They’re not really three phases of a story, after all, neatly ordered in a row. They’re three episodes, three common patterns of life, that we cycle through again and again and again. It sometimes seems that every week or every month or every year, we have to choose to commit ourselves again to the things that we believe, and it can become a burden. But it’s also a gift: the fact that we need to choose again and again to do the right thing means that we get to choose again and again. We are given a thousand chances to follow in Jesus’ way of love, and when we choose the wrong path, it’s never too late to get off at the next exit, and take a U-turn, however inconvenient it may be.