Do You Also Wish to Go Away?
Sermon by Father Richard Mallory
August 25, 2024
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18, Ephesians 6:10-20, John 6:56-69
Joshua to the people, “Choose this day whom you will serve,” and then Jesus to his disciples. “Do you also wish to go away?” Choices and decisions unavoidable as the saying goes, even not to decide is still a decision.
We read in Joshua 24 that he had assembled all the tribes of Israel. It was a big deal convocation of loosely related Semitic tribes who shared, in common, the experience of escaping slavery under the leadership of Moses. At this point, Moses has died and Joshua, his successor, is near retirement. Joshua recounts their sacred history of all that this liberating God has done for them.
And now it's time to choose. Who will it be? The gods of surrounding tribes or the Lord Yahweh; the one who got you freed in the first place?
Yet it's an open question with the freedom of self-determination in the balance. “But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.” Get clear with yourselves, you cannot have it both ways. Joshua sets the example and he says what rings out through the centuries, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
As alluring as the other gods may have been, the story asserts that the people choose the Lord because that's the God who brought them and their ancestors out of that stinking Egypt, that held them captive for 400 years, and protected them all along the way.
“We're in, Joshua. We know which God deserves our loyalty!”
This is a ceremony scholars call a covenant renewal ceremony of recommitment. Re-decisioning is going on here. Choose this day whom you will serve. Get clear about your purpose and where your loyalties lie. Just that question, leader Joshua puts to them, may be the high point of the book of Joshua which recounts the events in the taking of the land about 1200 BCE. Joshua is problematic for its raw violence. It presents a God who requires holy war. God orders the army frequently to kill every man, woman, child and animal of people who are in their way of settling the land. The practice of sacred violence was instituted as it was common for all ancient peoples at that time of ancient history.
People will say, that's why I don't like the Old Testament; let's get rid of it. And I say, hold on, not so fast. Later prophets begin to question and condemn violence of all sorts. And besides, the Bible is not a static document. The Bible is on its own journey, going from unquestioning adherence to violent retribution and violent domination to the pinnacle in the life and teachings of Jesus, who himself made the decision to go to Jerusalem and absorb the violence of the empire that crucified him.
We need to be reminded of our species' predilections towards violence. That we continue to turn to violence as if the latest unleashing of fury might work this time. Joshua justifies mass killing in the name of God and represents the trap for humanity. Humanity is still prone to enlist God in support of war. But when that God is invoked, that is not the Father, the Abba of Jesus of Nazareth. These ancient tribes in Joshua banded together in a holy war of genocide, not only supported by God, but in their view, they were required by God. Such practices were acceptable in the ancient world. The crisis of humanity is that it is still too easily, this path too easily, chosen. But such an enlisted God is more like the Roman God of war, Mars, than the God and Father of Jesus. When countries and people claim that God is on their side, they reveal their own idolatry by adopting and downgrading God and making God into a rubber stamper of their own violence.
In the Gospel of John, the fourth Gospel, we're on the fourth or fifth Sunday about the bread of life, there seems to be a point here about the bread. And while he was teaching, many of his disciples, perhaps even a majority of them, began to protest. They objected, this is difficult. Now he has just resorted to hyperbole in great exaggeration to get their attention, as ancient wisdom teachers were often doing. He wanted to startle them and shock them out of their lethargy.
Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. This sounds like cannibalism, which is actually one of the criticisms by the Romans of the early Christian movement; those cannibal Christians. In fact, the Greek verb for eat, usually reserved for the way animals devour their food such as gnawing on a bone, is used here. There's a grossness about this, gnaw on me, says Jesus, trying to make a point. In this moment, Jesus is clearly presented as the living Christ in that time and place. He is the only hope for peace.
In his resurrection, we are reminded that his first words to those disciples who had left him all alone, all by himself to suffer and die on the cross, his first word, peace. No grudge holding, total acceptance, total forgiveness of their own flawed humanity. Peace was the work of Christ then as it is now.
Only now the external pressure to take seriously the program of the Prince of Peace is greater because of humanity's ability to obliterate this beautiful planet, our island home, and all living things upon it. Such bitter irony that he was so often co-opted to support violence and war, as well as slavery and the genocide of people already living here. No one could possibly read the Sermon on the Mount and then go out with the age-old excitement of making war. The two just don't connect. Jesus has to be reduced and redefined as a figure simply to save souls, get folks into heaven when they die. Brian Zahn, an author and a pastor in Missouri, points out that we have made Christianity so safe by ensuring that his ideas remain segregated from him as Savior.
This all began with Emperor Constantine in the 4th century when Christian Empire took precedence over Jesus' Kingdom of God. The legacy of this is the worship of Jesus' Savior while brushing aside his ideas of peace. And the hard teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, forgiveness, love of enemies, turning the other cheek.
This privatized gospel ignores his political ideas. Yes, we at least give lip service to peace, love and forgiveness, while secretly holding out in those little pockets in our psyches, cynicism, as if we know better: enemies to be loved, nonsense; vanquish them, choose vengeance; turning the other cheek…we all know that's for simpletons; don't we?
The strength of the Church will be manifest in embracing the ways of Christ as our role model-in-chief. There is the need to reclaim and dust off the Sermon on the Mount and give central importance and daily commitment to the imitation of Christ in our lives with a deeper engagement that is needed now as never before. The disciples complain, this is difficult. Surrender of ego at the foot of the cross will likely not become a mass movement any time soon. The gospel secret, hiding in plain sight, however, is in his words in Matthew,” My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
None of us can do the work alone. A favorite verb in the fourth gospel is abide. Abide. Stay close, stay connected, persevere, don't give up, don't collapse. But how? Paul has some words in Ephesian. Steve Garner Holmes, who is a minister and a poet, has this poem on our epistle for today. “When you fight the devil with the devil's weapons, you have joined his side.”
Our struggle is not against violent people but against violence. Our struggle is not against people at all, even the most evil ones, but against the evil itself; that old ruler which clenches our hearts as well as theirs. Our struggle is against the systems and structures, the powers that dehumanize people and diminish life, the spiritual forces we've ingested, the authorities we've knelt to. We are rebelling against our own masters.To vanquish the conquerors we must vanquish our desire to conquer.
Before we are victorious, we must become free. And then Jesus says, going back to the bread of life, by consuming me, consuming me, and letting me show you how to live out my ideas, and my kingdom. My gift of eternal life to humanity, begins now. I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.
You get to have that life when you die to yourself daily, which means letting ego keep getting smaller and smaller. “I must decrease that he might increase,” confesses the Baptist in his moment of awakening. Jesus asks, “Do you also wish to go away?” He is asking out of his abject vulnerability in that moment? Peter speaking for the group, “Lord, to whom can we go? You are the one who has the words of eternal life.”
