Who will you serve? Or is the question... How?

 It's been awhile since I have posted some preaching. I'm not even sure why, since I have been preaching with reasonable regularity. The Holy Spirit has been poking at me again, though, so here it is: the message I gave at Peace Covenant Church yesterday, November 12, 2023.

Peace Covenant is in a time of discernment so you will read some things that are specific to their situation but most of it applies just as easily to my life and work. I hope it is helpful to your life and work, too.

The text from the Bible is Joshua 24:1-3a, 13-25

And here is the message:

Today’s text includes one of those “famous” scriptures. The second half of verse 15 is the kind of thing you will see on plaques and t-shirts and memes and all the places that people like to put their faith on very public display:

 

“but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

 

Unfortunately all those plaques, t-shirts, memes, and other very public proclamation places leave out many, many verses before and quite a few verses after. But those verses are really important to understand what this text is saying

 

Remember who Joshua was?

 

The young man who started his career as a major figure in the Bible when he was one of the spies – one of only two who was not afraid of the REALLY BIG STUFF of the Promised Land. Then he became Moses’ main assistant, and ended up leading the people into the Promised Land.

 

But Joshua got old, and things changed. He was about to die and he was giving his farewell to the people of Israel. Today’s verses are the culmination of that farewell conversation sermon.

 

Joshua reminds them that they are part of a loooong history.  He is reminding the people that thething happening in that particular “today” is not the central focus of their relationship with God but is just a moment in a story that started a long time ago.

 

We get a glimpse of the larger picture in the first three verses but it actually goes back a few chapters and continues for 10 more verses. We don’t have to read the details to get the idea, though:  this moment in time is just that.  A moment.

 

Peace Covenant Church, and the United States, and the global community across all the continents have a lot going on and we are tempted to reach back a few years, or maybe a few decades, or maybe even a few centuries to decide what should be. But the fact is, even centuries are just a moment in the same story that Joshua is telling. We are part of something that goes far beyond anything we know. Far beyond any ancestors that we could identify knew. This story goes wayyyyyy back.

 

There is a verse – verse 13 – that is not included in the lectionary (which is the part you read). When I was getting the slides ready for Valerie I thought it was fine, the verses that were left out weren’t that important to the story. But the more I studied the more I noticed this verse 13:

 

I gave you a land on which you had not labored and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.

 

Joshua was getting ready to die and was about to ask the people to make a really important decision. He did not want them to forget what had come before – not in their direct memory, or but in their story as a people. He did not want them to forget who they are, or how they got where they were.

 

And in that last verse he was reminding them that God did not give them the very nice lives they had because they deserved it. Nor was it because of their own planning or work. Where they were living, with all those vineyards and oliveyards and cities, was what God had promised to them, and God kept that promise. All that good stuff was God keeping a promise.

 

And we see once again that the people were not particularly good at remembering.

 

Have you been in that situation?

 

In a time when there was some circumstance that pointed to the possibility that something you have known and loved,

         Something that has been so good to and for you

                  Something that came out of a long and robust history

 

was a gift from God, and not because of your work or because you deserve it?

 

That maybe the thing you hold so dear have served their purpose and God is about to give you something else, something undoubtedly more wonderful, because God does not give junk?

 

Can you identify with knowing that things are changing, and that it could go so many ways?

 

Are you experiencing anything like that right now?

 

Does it feel at all like something is dying, but also not dying?

 

I do. I feel it every time I hear a news story, every time I go to work and wonder if the money and people will show up, every time I walk into a large church sanctuary that has 50 pews and 40 people in it.

 

Joshua gives the Israelites some advice:

·      Remember the faithfulness of God

·      Put away the stuff you learned from the culture around you

 

And out of empathy for Joshua I wonder if he were talking to us today, might he say

·      Remember the faithfulness of God

·      Put away Christian nationalism and the idolization of money or politics or the other things of the culture around you that are not of God

·      Put away prioritizing your personal experience over following a God who has a long, long history of loving God’s children in creative and surprising ways.

 

Which brings us to the famous line:

         As for me and my household we will serve the Lord

 

But there is a line that doesn’t make it on the t-shirts:

·      IF YOU ARE UNWILLING TO SERVE THE LORD (it’s an option – he is not afraid of the options)

·      DECIDE WHO YOU WILL SERVE – will it be the gods of the culture around you? Around us?

 

Or will it be the Lord?

 

It’s a dramatic moment and the people answer

 

Of course we will serve the Lord! God did all sorts of great stuff for us! God has preserved us! 

 

In the scripture it appears, however, that Joshua wasn’t buying it. He keeps probing. Are you sure? Can you REALLY do this?

 

And the people keep insisting.

 

Which makes me wonder if Joshua was insisting because he wanted them to stop, to think, to understand what they were saying. 

 

Because this is not a cheap and easy decision, this decision to serve the Lord.

 

This is not a decision that can be done with a business-as-usual attitude.

 

Joshua knows because Joshua has lived all the ways that God can put impossible things before us. But they are not impossible because God will always make a way. As some of my seminary friends are fond of saying… won’t God do it?

 

It’s so easy to say oh yes of course! We want to worship God. We want to remain faithful. We want to be the harbingers of God’s love, the ones to share with people, the ones to live out faith.

 

But sometimes God asks us to do stuff that we think we are not prepared to do.

 

Sometimes we are part of a congregation that is brave and courageous and small and mighty and we want that community to continue, 

 

to be able to continue to love and serve God as we have done so well, 

 

but then things change and denominations make decisions we have thought were impossible, and pandemics reduce our numbers and it is not at all clear that things can keep going as they have been. In the ways we have loved for so long.

 

Notice that Joshua did not say “will you keep serving God in the ways of your ancestors” or “will you serve God in a <fill in some particular way>?

 

He just says “knowing all you know about God – including that God simply will not stand for sharing the God-spotlight, the God-position, that God will not let anyone else do what is only God’s to do – knowing all that, are you sure you want to serve the Lord?

 

I do not know if Joshua was particularly hopeful.

 

I do not know if Joshua actually believed that the people would, in fact, serve the Lord. He asked over and over.

 

But when the people insisted, he said… 

 

OK. So be it. If you are sure you are up for this, then let’s make statutes and ordinances and figure out what that will look like.

 

Peace Covenant Church of the Brethren is standing at a crossroads, a time when you are being called to declare that you will serve the Lord – and once you have done that, to decide how that will happen, what it will look like, who, when, and where will be emphasized.

 

You are in a time of discernment right now, and I believe that you are being faithful. I believe you have begun listening to each other, are willing to take the time it takes to search your souls and decide if you are really up for doing whatever it is that God is asking of you right now, in this time and place.

 

So I offer you this hope:  you are part of a long, long, long history of God guiding and loving and caring for the whole world via people who often do not do a good job of it, but who have committed to following the Lord.

 

If you will be one of those people groups, if you will decide to follow the Lord, if you will mean it, if you are prepared to do whatever it is that God is asking of you next then it may be a strange, exhilarating, scary, exciting, disappointing, radical, and more than a little weird landscape…

 

But you cannot fail, because God will not fail you.

That time I went to Ethiopia (and then went again)

I went to Ethiopia. The first trip was in July, 2021. I went with a nonprofit called Hawassa Hope that partners with an Ethiopian nonprofit to support children without parents and families struggling to be able to care for their children. The purpose of the trips is to meet the people, see their lives, learn a little bit about who they are. There are no "service projects" since the first step in helping people in a culture so different from our own is to know those people, and their culture. And it is beautiful.

It's also hard to describe because, well, how do you explain eight days of interaction with people who live lives that could not be more different than my own? But it's not pitiful and it's (mostly) not upsetting. It's delightful and fun and great and eye opening and sobering.

And after that first trip, I went back again in October, 2022. It was such a delight to visit many of the same people, and see many of the same places, and feel a little less like a fish out of water. I recognized people, and places, and things. I knew a little bit better how things worked. And it was beautiful

So I've made two photo books, one for each trip. There is a little bit of text to help make sense of the pictures, but mostly they are books of images of the people I saw and hugged and took lots of selfies with. 

You can see a .pdf of the book from the 2021 trip here.

You can see a .pdf of the book from the 2022 trip here.

I hope you like looking at them. Maybe we can talk about it sometimes!

#Iloveyouasmuchasyouneedmeto

When Daddy started his decline last summer I was so sad and scared and helpless and I started making the hearts, over and over and over. I had a lot of anticipatory grief and Daddy was in Texas and I was in North Carolina and it is just what I did. 

Later in the fall, the last time Daddy was in the hospital it was clear that he had started his work of dying. I was crying and he was in physical pain. I don’t remember any of the words before or after, but he told me he loved me as much as I needed him to. It would be a few weeks before he died and the anticipatory grief would become right-now grief but the whole time it has been hearts hearts hearts. 

Then last week I realized that there is something in those hearts about the connection I had with Daddy - so many sizes and shapes and colors of love. It occurred to me that I could put pictures of those hearts up on Instagram as a kind of grief visual art thing, so that is what I did. 

Instagram got cranky about how many images I posted that first day but it seems to be worked out now and the #Iloveyouasmuchasyouneedmeto project is online. It is me trying to make sense of what is normal and inescapable but never expected. And I still tear up and get sad but I like that all those hearts are out there.

You can check them out here on my Instagram page.

When Resurrection is more than a word

 I haven't been posting much. I went to Ethiopia and then my father got sick. I was traveling to and from Texas far more frequently than usual (even pre-pandemic) and the amount of preaching I was up for got smaller and smaller and eventually withered away. 

Then, on November 22, 2021 my father died. I was in Dallas and had had lunch with Daddy and David. Daddy had declared that he was "so dang ready to go." It was the 68 years to the day since he had married my mother, although I don't know if he consciously knew that. 

I would have been on a plane flying back to North Carolina but the flight was delayed so I was still there when my brother David called and said "don't get on the plane." It was three days before Thanksgiving, two weeks before the big Parktown Food Hub Christmas giveaway was to start, and just over a month before Christmas. So we made the arrangements, wrote this obituary and waited until the funeral on December 18.

It wasn't quite that clean and clear and as we waited for the funeral I saw some of the ugly side of this thing some call Christianity as not one but two pastors declined to respect my ordination in what felt wrenchingly unkind. I ended up planning and leading the funeral myself. Seldon played piano (magnificently), Jackson read scripture in the Quaker style he is learning in seminary, and Jennifer held my grief. Lisa and David sat on the front row but I couldn't look at them but Jennifer was there for me even if she did not know it.

This sermon is the message I preached that day. I didn't go off script very much - that would have been way too dangerous. Rev. Dr. Robert Preece sat at the back of the church, watching just in case I (or anyone else) fell apart and needed pastoral care. It ended up being beautiful. I now know I am a person who can lead her own father's funeral even as I feel that my heart has had a huge hole torn in it and everything was and continues to be weird. 

There is no moment when the Resurrection is more important and more real than when preaching at your father's funeral, so here is what I said on that day. Someday I will preach again and share those words here... but for now... this is what there is. 

=

What do you remember about my Daddy?

 

<long pause>

 

Do you know him as a brother? As a father? As an uncle? As an almost-grandfather? As a friend? As a woodworker?

 

He was all of those things and so much more. And among all those roles, the most important one for us to remember today is that he was a beloved child of God. 

 

Faith was a work of art for Daddy. The pain of his childhood led him to pay close attention, to study and think and pray and ultimately, to believe. To believe that 

·      The God who would create a world that was good and let it devolve into sin rather than force anyone to behave a certain way…

·      The God who would let his own Son die the most undeserved of deaths out of love for creatures who had gone far astray…

·      The God who is *defined* as love and yet spent his earthly, embodied time with the most impure of sinners…

·      That God would be there for him through thick and thin.

·      That God could handle it all.

·      That God meant that, ultimately, everything would be alright.

 

When I was little, still living at home, we would be sitting in the living room after supper, or on a weekend, or for whatever reason and Daddy would stand up and say… “Well, I gotta go!”

 

He said it so much that we had a shirt embroidered that said “Gotta go!” It was his watchword. He would usually go to his workshop to build something but it could also mean it was time to go home, time to turn off the tv… time to go do something else.

 

Fast forward a few decades. The pandemic was hard on all of us and during the long stretch of time when I could not visit Daddy I would call – sometimes 3 or more times per week – and every time he would say “things are going good here.” 

 

No matter what was going on.

 

In an ice storm so the power would be off and on and he had to put on all his warmest clothing? “Things are going good here.”

 

When he had been hospitalized after a fall?  “Things are going good here.” 

 

Every. Single. Time.

 

So one day I said “well, Daddy, how would you know if things were not going good?” And his answer was “because then I would be grouchy.”

 

For this man – my Daddy, your brother or uncle, cousin or friend - how things were going depended on his attitude, not on the circumstances.

 

And on the very last day I saw him, the very last day he was alive, he said to me “Go on to the airport, it will be ok. Things are going good here.”

 

And here is what I think happened on that day:

 

I think maybe, perhaps at some unconscious level, he decided that things were just not going so good anymore and he decided he had to go. So he went to sleep, and then went to Jesus. It was one last Gotta Go.

 

This is hard for me y’all. I loved my Daddy as much as any Daddy’s girl has ever loved their Daddy. He was not “Dad” or “Father” to me – he was and always will be Daddy. Because I loved him and still love him and will always love him in a very special way.

 

But I know something even more special than that enduring love for the man who once said “I will love you as much as you need me to.” I know that when he went to sleep on November 22 and then went to be with Jesus, he finally found the place where he will never be grouchy. Where things will always be going good. By every standard, and not just the standard of making the best of whatever bad circumstances he might have been in.

 

And so I offer this comfort: 

·      because in his life Jesus showed us how we can care for each other and live with one another, valuing mercy and grace and comfort for those in our lives over any kind of perfection or purity

·      because Jesus came and experienced death when he did not have to

·      because Jesus could not be held by death and therefore broke those bonds

·      because Jesus died and it did not stick…

·      because there was and is RESURRECTION

 

We no longer have to fear anything. We are forgiven and have eternal grace and mercy.

 

Because of that Jesus who literally embodied love, Daddy has arisen. He is shining. His light has come. His son has come from afar and his daughter has been carried into this place by grace. We are here today, the people we are, because of a faith that Daddy embodied every day of his life.

 

My Daddy is now and forever in a place where things are and always will be going good here. Now and forever.

 

So when you are sad because you won’t be able to call him up and seek his advice…

Or when there are no more carved Santas or custom cabinets

Or because you will just plain miss your father, brother, uncle, almost-grandfather, friend…

Go with that feeling.

Feel it all the way.

Appreciate the great love that is necessary for such great sorrow to exist. 

 

But also know this:

 

Jesus has my Daddy and Jesus has you, too.

 

And because of that, things are going really good, now and forever.

 

Amen.