Dangerous Memories (Joshua 24:1-15; Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost; October 12, 2014)

Dangerous Memories

Joshua 24:1-15
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 12, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

So far in our journey through the long arc of the Bible’s story line we have been with Noah through the destruction and recreation of the world, with Abraham and Sarah as they are called to be God’s people, with Joseph as he preserved Abraham’s legacy in the face of famine, with Moses as God brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt, and with the Israelites as they are set on the path that would lead them to life as God dreams of it for them. 

Along the way, there have been some changes.  The story is taking on the shape of what feels almost like ordinary history with the difference of course that this story has the God Yahweh as its leading character, while in our histories God is not reckoned as a character at all.  The people are changing as they begin to come to grips with what it means to be God’s covenant people, not always a pleasant process for them or for us.  Even God is changing, at least within the horizon of the story.  In the episode with Noah and the flood, God becomes more realistic about what can be expected from humankind.  We are flawed and, if the choice is between living with us or destroying us, God has decided to live with us.  God is still passionately committed to justice.  God will hear the cries of the afflicted, God will know their misery, God will intervene to save.  But in the midst of this commitment we could say that God is now a little sadder but wiser, a little less naive.

In our rush to get through the whole of the biblical story, we have skipped over quite a bit.  Several times in their journey across the desert, the Israelites disappoint God.  They don’t really understand what has happened to them.  They are afraid and anxious.  From time to time they want to call off the whole thing and go home, and by home they still mean Egypt.  They are stubborn.  They complain a lot.  They want gods they can see.  They want a religion that “works,” that gets them what they need and want without all the demands God has placed on them to seek justice and that sort of thing.  They spend a entire generation wandering in the unsettled country south and east of Palestine learning what it means to be God’s people.

Before they are quite ready, they find themselves camped on the east side of the Jordan River about to enter the land of promise by force.  The Book of Joshua is an account of their conquest and settling of the land of Canaan.  Our text this morning is set at Shechem in the middle of their new home.  Joshua reminds them of their history and of some of the ways that God has been with them.  For Joshua this history means that they have to make a choice about the gods they will serve.  They have served the “gods beyond the River,” that is, the Euphrates, and the gods of Egypt.  There are also gods in the land they have settled.  All these are available and tempting because they offer just what the people have wanted: a technology to control the invisible world, to guarantee harvests and prosperity, without all the fuss over justice.

But, as Joshua reminds them, Yahweh, the God who delivered them from Egypt and gave them their new land, has been faithful.  Yahweh requires their faithfulness in return.  God requires a decision of them.

This is a great story, one that is always timely.  Certainly, in the midst of the pressures of life, of working at our jobs, caring for children, running the family taxi service, attending countless athletic events and recitals, helping with homework, and even serving our community and especially those in it who are struggling to care for themselves, we can forget that the center of it all is supposed to be our God and our relation with God and each other.  So this story could be, and often is, a reminder to remember who and whose we are and to recommit ourselves to being that people.

But there is a problem in this story.  This text remembers that it is God who has given the Israelites this land, rescued them from slavery, led them through the wilderness, and settled them in the land of promise.  But this text also reminds them and us that the land they have been given was not empty.  There was someone already living in it.  There were towns and walled cities.  There were vineyards and olive orchards.  There were people, ordinary people going about their business, getting married, having children, earning their living, singing and dancing with their friends, visiting neighbors, doing and all of the ordinary things that ordinary people do.

According to the story in Joshua they were all killed.  All of them: the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.  They were all killed.  Their mere presence was counted as an abomination to God, and therefore, of course, to God’s people.  In the conquest and settlement, there was no mercy shown to the people who by the accident of history happened to be in the land promised to Abraham, to Sarah, and to their descendants. 

In this story is not only a tale of the children of a band of escaped slaves who, against all the odds, were set free from Egypt and, again, against all the odds, found themselves in a land that was not theirs, living in towns they had not built, eating and drinking from vineyards and olive orchards they had not planted.  This is the story of a great reversal.  Escaped slaves defeat an empire.  Weakness wins against strength.  In later parts of this story, the hungry will be fed, the lame walk, the deaf speak and hear, the blind see, the dead raised from the grave.  And the rich will be sent empty away.

This story is that story, the story of deliverance from slavery, of return after exile, and of resurrection from the dead.

But it is another story as well.  It is a story of holy war, of ethnic cleansing, of genocide.  It is a story that has provided the script for atrocities even in our own times.

It is no accident, for example, that when the United States of America pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide against this continent’s earliest inhabitants it did so by invoking this story.  It styled itself as the new Israel and Native Americans as Canaanites who were either to be penned up on reservations or slaughtered.  Justified as holy war by Joshua, the wars of conquest in their turn became a metaphor that was still being used in the late twentieth century.  Our troops in Vietnam referred to it as “Indian Country” and General Maxwell Taylor urged escalation in order to move the “Indians” away from the “fort” so that the “settlers” could “plant corn.”  Joshua has come home to modern Israel as a pretext for the slow-motion ethnic cleansing being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank.

Joshua is a dangerous book, not just because it contains something subversive that might threaten the powers that be.  It is dangerous because it has supplied the powers that be a structure of thought to carry out atrocities.  It is one thing for an oppressed people to use this story to imagine their triumph over or at least their survival in the face of the massive military and cultural force of an empire.  It is another thing entirely for a dominating nation or empire to use it to justify its treatment of its neighbors.

So it turns out that we do indeed need to make a decision about this story.  Yes, it certainly asks us to remember who and whose we are.  But beyond that, the story asks us how we will read it.  Is it a story of the triumph of the weak over the strong sponsored by a God who liberates?  Or is it a blueprint for oppression and genocide sponsored by a God who supports the strong and betrays the weak?  In the story Joshua won’t allow for any neutral ground.  Neither will the book that bears his name.

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