So I sat there in a church pew after having decided to actually read the story from Joshua 6 for the first time in my life.

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1 Sermon preached at IPMN Annual Meeting Israel Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) The Cenacle Center, Chicago, Illinois Joshua 6:15-21 About Walls It was back sometime in my early high school years when I started paying attention to things that were in my Bible. Dad was a United Methodist minister in rural Kansas, and although I knew what all the important Sunday School stories were, I had not really paid close attention to that stuff at all. I was a teenage boy and was worried about George Brett or the Kansas City Chiefs or why a certain girl I liked didn t notice me, ever. My first exposure to the story of Jericho had actually been in Junior High when for an annual concert our boys glee club prepared Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho as one of our numbers. At 13 years old I really enjoyed singing the phrase: And de walls came a tumbalin down. And then one day, while in church on a Sunday, I just happened to be sitting and reading my Bible in a lull between Sunday School and morning worship, and I had opened it to the Book of Joshua and looked for that Jericho story. It, of course, was not only a song I sang in glee club, it was one of those standard Sunday School stories I knew so well. There s nothing as magical in an adolescent boy s mind than this notion that an army marched around a walled city seven times and let out a shout and the walls indeed just came a tumbalin down. Wow! That s Superhero comic book stuff. How could you not like that growing up as a young boy in America? So I sat there in a church pew after having decided to actually read the story from Joshua 6 for the first time in my life. The Lord said to Joshua: See, I have handed Jericho over to you, along with its kings and soldiers. You shall march around the city, all the warriors circling the city once. Thus you shall do for six days On the seventh day the priest (will) make a long blast with the ram s horn, as soon as you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat Reading this part of the passage, I said to myself: Yep, just as I learned it in Sunday School, and yep, just as I sung about it in glee club. But for me the story ended with the walls tumbling down. I never checked further. My adolescent mind just filled in the gaps without the need to read any more. I just assumed that there

2 were enemies inside that wall, the wall came down and the Israelites won the battle, took prisoners and did whatever you did in those days after winning. But on this day, because I was curious, I kept reading the part the teachers don t tell you about: Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. What? I thought to myself. What is this? This is not right. Every living thing was killed by Joshua s army with the sword? Was there no mercy whatsoever? This was the time when the trial of Lt. William Calley, of the My Lai massacre was taking place, and we Kansas teenage boys, still thinking we might wind up in Vietnam, debated about whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing. I was always on the side of saying that not only was it the wrong thing, I didn t think I was willing to go over there and do that kind of stuff. And now I was in an existential and theological crisis, because based on my good Kansas, Methodist upbringing where I was taught to believe that everything in the Bible was absolutely true: I was reading that God told the Israelites to do that same thing for which they were court martialing William Calley. So what do you do when you read that the God you believe in told Joshua to kill everyone in a city, and the people around you in a small Kansas town believes that we needed to be in Vietnam because those godless communists had to be killed, and by the way, if you get drafted you better not think about not going? You start thinking about going into ministry Really? That s when walls started going up all around me. As I was taking seriously the kinds of questions I had about God s role in Joshua 6, and began voicing my concern that this was no God that I believed in, I could see the walls being built between me and the folks in my dad s church. I continued to watch them being built between me and the conservative Christian students I encountered on the campus of Kansas State University, because as far as they were concerned no philosophy major who questioned God s motives in the pages of Joshua or any other book of the Bible for that matter should be thinking about becoming a minister. The walls continued to go up at seminary, because, boy are there theological and ideological divisions there I couldn t have imagined. And to be fair and honest about it: although others started putting up the walls first when I began to honestly express my adolescent feelings, it did not take long before I realized that my emotional survival depended upon me putting up walls as well. There were real people inside those walls of Jericho, with real people pursuits, and hopes and dreams, and businesses and economics to worry about, and children to raise and love and teach to live a good life. They had a king, and the king had soldiers, and the king promised that they could live their lives and pursue their dreams in safety and security: So to be absolutely sure of that, we will put up this wall that will protect us from the threats out there those who would come

3 and take away everything that is important to us. They believed their wall was a good thing, a reasonable thing, a safe thing. But the wall actually became a threat magnet. You can see a walled city from a good distance, and the curiosity of that was too strong to withstand. Who is inside that wall? Why do they feel the need to be inside that wall? What exactly are they hiding? If someone is hiding behind such walls, what they are hiding must not be good, right? And if we don t know what it is, then it threatens us. Maybe there are WMD s behind that wall maybe they have centrifuges maybe thousands of them. Joshua sent spies to find out what was behind that wall. They came back and reported: We found a prostitute! So they hide prostitutes behind that wall. That doesn t sound good or moral at all. It is time to march. We ll use the magic number, the right combination march around that city 7 times, by God, and those walls will come down and we ll know what s inside, and anything we really don t want we ll kill: But save the prostitute! It seems ironic that we have this story in which the ancient Israelites conquered a people by tearing down a wall. And now these days modern Israelites seek to conquer a people by putting walls up. The wall surrounding Palestine is like nothing I have ever seen before in my travels. Not like the U.S.-Mexican border where walls send certain people a clear message that the good and comfortable life is by happenstance or by God s choosing, wherever your theological worldview leads. Not like in Barranquilla, Colombia where Colombian seminary students would not talk about politics in public restaurants because the walls have ears. Not like North Dakota where sophisticated walls surrounded ICBM silos in the days when every underground missile was locked, loaded and pointed at the USSR. Not in pre-wall Israel during the Second Intifada where off-duty teenagers in the Israeli military leaned against the walls of Ben Yahuda Street night spots socializing. The only difference between them and my own was that these teenagers were carrying automatic weapons. No, standing in Bethlehem looking up from the bottom of this wall at a machine gun nest scared me to death; more than that, it took my soul away. The ironic thing about walls is that they promise safety and security, but in some deep existential way they wind up making the builders of those walls even more afraid. And that s because they make the people on the other side, being forcibly separated and isolated, at best angry about it, and at worst, maybe even a little nuts.

4 In a 60 Minutes segment years ago, Lesley Stahl was out walking with the Senior Commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, in what he was saying had been one of the worst battlegrounds in the city, so bad just a few months earlier there would have been no way they could have walked there. She asked what made the change possible. He showed her the wall. That concrete T wall stopped the violence, and now they were safe, and the Iraqi street markets were back in business because instead of thirty bombings in that section a day, there were now only three. There you go: irrefutable evidence that walls make a difference. Then she asked the locals, who were running and working in those now relatively safe street markets, how they felt about the wall. The anger erupted they kind of went nuts. General Odierno quickly jumped in and told them through the translator that the wall would not stay up forever, that it was just a temporary measure, in an effort to diffuse the palpable anger that was on the rise at that moment. On my first tour through Israel in 2001, I went to Masada. I studied the remnants of Herod the Great s megalomaniacal vision. I peered down at the Roman bulwarks where soldiers worked liked busy little ants figuring out how to get up to that last vestige of fanatical believers hiding at the top. It was a real, confused, and painful human struggle with hard choices that happened right where I was standing. Masada really is nothing more than a big natural wall to the top of which frightened people once escaped seeking security and safety, desperately hoping to survive. In Jewish culture, it is a story of heroic righteousness. Everyone s religious culture has stories just like it. On tour, Jericho is where the walls came tumbling down. You approach the story, not from the inside out, like on Masada, but from the outside in. It would be like telling the Masada story from the perspective of the Romans who finally figured out how to build that big ramp. But the story of Jericho is not told the way the story of Masada is told. They don t tell the inside story I want to hear, the one of yet another people of God afraid and struggling to survive, praying for deliverance, hoping for the best. But I have to wonder: if we are capable of so eloquently and poetically describing the human struggle within our own walls, is it not possible that we can find the same eloquence and poetry inside the walls where others must dwell? Isn t that what we are called to do? Is this not why Jesus allowed those judged unclean to come inside the walls of the homes where he stayed, or told disciples going on missionary journeys to go inside the village walls and homes of those they didn t know? Like Jesus, I have seen beauty and eloquence and poetry inside the walls that close off those who don t understand and would rather judge what s inside. I continue to pray that God will bring them down so the world may see and again know what the fullness of God s Kingdom looks like.

5 We have never heard the story, really, from inside those ancient walls of Jericho. And regardless of what our tradition s intellectual father and foundation, John Calvin says in his commentary on Joshua--let me read it, just to remind you how really messy our theology of walls can get: The indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter, making no distinction of age or sex, but including alike women and children, the aged and decrepit, might seem an inhuman massacre, had it not been executed by the command of God. But as he, in whose hands are life and death, had justly doomed those nations to destruction, this puts an end to all discussion. That s enough because I can t read anymore of it. But trust me, it gets worse Regardless of that theological wall built by our ecclesiastical forbear and we are sadly, descendents of that original sin what God is really telling us is that we are always responsible and compelled to ask what real human stuff is happening inside the walls we think are keeping us safe and secure, because if we cannot recognize the humanity there, then we are just kidding ourselves to think we can ever recognize our own. Amen.