SERMON, SUNDAY AUGUST 23, 2009 1 Text: Joshua 24:15 Freedom to serve Choose you this day whom you will serve... as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Here Joshua has a great deal to say to the people of Israel. He is reminding them that God has delivered you, brought out of the land of Egypt. That God through the years has done all sorts of wonderful things for the people of Israel. The response from the people of Israel, says Joshua, is that they ought to serve God. For if you don t want to service God, choose who you will serve but as for Joshua and his household they plan to serve the Lord as the passage tells us. When students leave home and head off to university or college many of them struggle with all the new found freedom that they have. They wonder what they are supposed to do with all this freedom that they didn t have before, how they are to make good choices without that ever present parental guidance. And as the time moves there is the question of to whom or what I am committed. These are questions that first year college and university students ask but not only them. For they are life questions for everyone, everyday. When one thinks about the freedom they have to deal with, the choices they have to make and then, ultimately, the commitment to those choices one thinks of how much like clichés it can sound. When, however, one thinks of different clichés you realize that they are not all bad. Think of clichés like a stitch in time save nine or the early get the worm just to mention a few and realize that indeed a stitch in time does save nine and the early bird usually does get the worm. So we can see the clichés are not necessarily bad things, especially if it helps you to remember a truth without which you would be in trouble. The idea of freedom and choice and commitment has a ring of familiarity about them. They point us to the truth, the truth that without which Christians at the beginning of any opportunity will be in trouble. The reading from Joshua gives us the scene. The children of Israel are wandering in the wilderness with their freedom. They are no longer slaves in Egypt but at the same time they have not yet become anything else. They are neither here nor there as one might say. They have experienced from something but not yet experienced freedom for something. Joshua is giving the people of Israel and chance at choice, an opportunity to translate freedom into something more then just freedom from. The essence of freedom is choice. Choose this day whom you will serve as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. The choice here is an invitation to commitment, to an ultimate loyalty to God who deserves that loyalty not in the abstract but in the concrete. God does not say to us, Trust me and I will do great things for you. God says, I have done great things for you; trust
SERMON, SUNDAY AUGUST 23, 2009 2 me. The choice is an invitation to an ultimate loyalty to God who has already shown ultimate loyalty to the people. The elements of freedom expressed in choices that lead to commitment are all in place, here in the twenty-fourth chapter of Joshua. But how it is that we can speak of freedom and commitment at the same time when they seem to much to be opposites? When marriages or relationships break down, we hear words like, Oh, I couldn t keep the commitment; I wanted my freedom. In a sense, commitment equals bondage, obligation, duty, responsibility. Freedom then means things like the words of Martin Luther King Jr who said, Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I m free at last. When talking to students at the local college about what they like most about being away from home, most would reply, the freedom. By that we assume they mean things like the freedom to go to bed at late as they want, to get up as late as they want, to eat and drink what and when they want, to dress as they like without someone overruling their decisions. As students we can also recognize that there is the freedom to go to class if you want or not. You are free to do as you wish without anyone actually says yes or no to what you are doing. You can spend all your money on partying or clothes or just on nothing. You can discuss freely and talk freely about any subject you want. Freedom. We love the word, the concept, the sound. In our culture we live for it, love for it, are prepared to kill for it and to die for it. We travel halfway around the word to help others achieve the freedom that we enjoy and we are prepared to sacrifice are all for that freedom. Even in our death we feel that we have helped achieve freedom. Yet at the same time we realize that freedom is not the unambiguous thing our moral shorthand is tempted to make of it. We know the stories of prisoners who are freed from their imprisonment only to find that their freedom in the world is more demanding and dangerous than their old life in jail and they long and work to regain that security of the jail cell. We know of the countries of Eastern Europe who have celebrated their freedom in recent years from the control of Communism and yet today have a hard time with the freedom of the free market and the obligations that go with being a part of the free world. And we realize that freedom is not al that it s cracked up to be. We remember how the people of Israel, after their liberation from slavery in Egypt, complained about their freedom to die in the wilderness. For them freedom was not all that it was cracked up to be. People in another generation understood what we have trouble understanding: that freedom is not merely the absence of restraint. In the words of a nineteenth century divine: But what is freedom? Rightly understood, a universal license to be good.
SERMON, SUNDAY AUGUST 23, 2009 3 Freedom, as every struggling nation and individual learns sooner or later, is a means and not an end, and the essence of freedom is not liberation, as we think. The essence and expression of freedom is choice. That is that we are free in order to be able to choose. What is the one thing that unfree are unable to do? They are unable to choose. Slavery is the ultimate lack of choice. To be a slave is to see no choice, have no choice, be unable to exercise any choice. Freedom implies, indeed requires, choices, and Joshua s great question in our text put the test to the freedom of the people. Choose this day. You have a choice. Your freedom is expressed in the fact of your choice. So as free people, as the free people of Israel, choose. You see we all have to choices, those times when we say, I have no choice; I am trapped. If the essence of freedom is choice, then many of us know ourselves from time to time to be unfree, captives of circumstances, or of the moment, or of conscience, or of ideology. The people we spend time with, the ethnic or culture groups we associate it all influence our choices, our expectations. The choices seemingly available to us are like those presented in Woody Allen s famous parody of a commencement address: We stand at an historic crossroads. One road leads to total annihilation, the other to existential despair. Let us hope for the wisdom to choose wisely. However I must say that I would rather take the counsel of Dietrich Bonheoffer than that of Woody Allen. It was Bonheoffer who, while a prisoner of Hitler, awaiting his own death, showed that in his imprisonment he was free because he exercised the essence of his freedom by choosing how he would deal with his imprisonment and his death. He recalled Martin Luther s fighting lines: Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also; The body they may kill; God s truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever. It was said of Nelson Mandela that during all the years of his imprisonment in South Africa, for conscience s sake he was the only free person in that country. To choose is to exercise the option to define how you will deal with your lack of options. In this we all have choices to make. We are in the constant process of exercising our freedom, whose essence is choice. We are free even to make bad choices, to make mistakes, even big ones. Someone has said, God invented mistakes so that we could learn quicker. That could be and should be a comforting statement of us. In our text in Joshua, the children of Israel could have chosen the lesser gods of their fathers, the gods of Egypt, the petty deities of their past and of their neighbours, the gods of the Amorites. But they are asked by Joshua to make an informed choice. The gods of the Amorites had done nothing for them. It was the Lord who had defeated their enemies. It was the Lord who said, I gave you a land on which you had not laboured, and cities
SERMON, SUNDAY AUGUST 23, 2009 4 which you had not built, and you dwell there; you eat fruit of vineyards and olives which you did not plant. The children of Israel had a choice, and of course they would choose the God who had done great things for them. They may have been willful, but they were not stupid. Their freedom consisted of making the right choice. And that choice is one of ultimate loyalty, ultimate commitment, of giving yourself over completely and totally to someone, something, worthy of your utmost. And so if the essence of freedom is choice, the object of freedom is commitment. How often do we hear people say, I want to find something to give my life to. Some see that commitment in the family, or to business or to the government or to a profession. People join the military because they wish to be part of something that demands their utmost best, and that is doing something worthwhile. People believe in God for the same reason. I realize that in our day and age people have to believe that we are anarchic, autonomous little individuals with no sense of each other or of commitment. Our ideas and thoughts are driven by the idea of us being number one. I don t agree with that though. I think that most of us are searching for something worthy of our commitment, our ultimate commitment and loyalty, something worth submitting to. We hope our heroes and celebrities will play this role for us, and they fail. The lyrics of contemporary popular music, sing of the angst and terrible despair we feel when we discover that there is no one nor anything worthy of what we have to offer. Money, sex, power: we have sought them all, and we find that the example of those who have them all is not encouraging. We come to realize that the most enslaved people are those who are bound by the human desire for happiness, pleasure, satisfaction and sensation. For these people, and for those who aspire to join them, the notion of commitment as the object of freedom and the consequence of choices seems fantastical, revolutionary, illusory, sheer madness. Yet, it is just such sweet irony that is the essence of the Christian faith: to gain your life you must lose it, to be winner you must be a loser; to be free you must choose to be committed. Life worth living is life lived in service of that which is ultimately worthy and trustworthy. Only in such service will we ever know freedom. That is the essence of Archbishop Cranmer s magnificent Collect for Peace, which says of God: O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom. For the Christian, as well as for God s children, God gives freedom to choose the best, the ultimate, the highest. You are free to choose God. Tempted as we are to try our options on for size, none of the lesser gods will do. We have been given this new day and this fresh work from the Lord to make us make wise choices freely: the essence of freedom is choice; the object of freedom is commitment. Therefore, it s simple; give all that you have. Give to God nothing less than your whole life and all that is in it and
SERMON, SUNDAY AUGUST 23, 2009 5 within it; then you will be truly free. Make the right choice, and then you will know that freedom which is perfect service. As Joshua expressed and challenged to the children of Israel.: Choose this day whom you will serve as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.