A Strong Follow-Through a sermon by Richard R. Wohlschlaeger Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church Bryn Mawr Readings: Ephesians 6:10-20 August 23, 2015 Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 Ephesians 6:10-20 10Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. 15 As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. 16 With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints. 19Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak. Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 24Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel; and they presented themselves before God. 2 And Joshua said to all the people, Thus
says the Lord, the God of Israel: Long ago your ancestors Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. 3 Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac; 14 Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. 16 Then the people answered, Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; 17 for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed; 18 and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God. 19 But Joshua said to the people, You cannot serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. 20 If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good. 21 And the people said to Joshua, No, we will serve the Lord! 22 Then Joshua said to the people, You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him. And they said, We are witnesses. 23 He said, Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel. 24 The people said to Joshua, The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey. 25So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem.
Every summer our family gathers for a time in northern Vermont. We ve been doing that for twenty years. It s a great opportunity as those of you who do similar things know for families to re-discover who they are, for in today s world families are often scattered hither and yon, and it s only occasionally perhaps just annually if we re lucky and persistent that we get together to check out relationships. I ve found that it s a particular joy for the cousins to get together. The children look forward to that time in Stowe from the moment they leave it to the time they get together again a year later. Growth physically and in all other ways is never more evident than during that annual check-in. The culture in Vermont, I ve found over time, is considerably different from ours here. And that s part of the charm in being somewhere different. The cars people drive are one indicator of the cultural variations. Every other car in Vermont seems to be a mud-caked Subaru. When I drive in with my newly washed SUV the first day I feel like an invading alien from some pristine planet. But in a few days I grow to be right at home as the dust from unpaved roads and byways mixes with the afternoon rain to nearly block my vision out the back window. I leave it that way put away my razor for as long as I can stand the stubble and begin to blend into the crowd. It feels good to be someone slightly different for a while. But one of the first things I do after unpacking the car on our return is to wash it. I can t even trust the local car wash to reach all the crevices. In a labor of love I wash the car myself, watching all the tiny gravel of Vermont running in little rivulets down the driveway. Ah home again! But, like our grandchildren, I m already looking forward to repeating the whole ritual again next year.
So goes the journey of life, mirrored in the little journeys we take as we move along. That s where our reading from Joshua plants us this morning, right in the middle of life s journey, between one journey and another. And in that context Joshua stands tall and strong, challenging the people he leads to decide for themselves, once and for all, where they stand as well, particularly in their allegiance where allegiance counts most. Who will be their God? This is the end of the Moses saga in the Old Testament. Joshua, Moses brother-in-law, has taken over leadership of the Hebrews who have been wandering the desert wilderness for forty years after making their escape from slavery in Egypt. It is God s will that Moses will not complete the journey to the Promised Land, though his leadership has been critical all along the way. It is Joshua s turn now to lead the people into the land God has gifted them. But before crossing the river into a new place and a new way of life, Joshua wants to make sure the people understand what lies before them. Unlike a false god who promises life without difficulties, the God that Joshua represents promises to be present through all the difficulties that life inevitably brings. This God is our God. As we live into maturity and beyond, we know that life often brings circumstances and conditions that threaten our lives physically and emotionally. Yet God stays with us through the struggle, comforting and strengthening us to face what we must, living beyond regret, forging on toward a future yet unknown, even to the end of our days. Remember, Joshua says to the battle-worn, world-weary, wandering community he has been traveling with. Remember the God who led you out of the land of Egypt and into a land flowing with milk and honey. That God is still with us. A new day is
dawning, but even this new day will have its trials and tribulations. Life is that way. But God remains faithful to us in every place and time. Joshua s promise that undergirds his challenge is as relevant to us today as it was to the wandering Israelites centuries ago. It is a reminder that we need to hear again and again. The reminder that God who is faithful to us equips us to be faithful to God. And our being faithful to God opens us to the awareness of God s faithfulness to us. It s one of life s truly beautiful circles, filled with mystery, wonder, love, and grace. I have not preached on this Joshua text very often in my life as a pastor, but the words have remained close to my heart. Perhaps that s because I first preached on it over fifty years ago during a youth Sunday service in the church of my childhood in a German farming community near St. Louis. I m not sure if I chose the text or if it was handed to me, but I remember the salient phrase as if it were yesterday:... choose this day whom you will serve... but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD. I was so clear about that then. Just make a choice today and the force of self-will will carry you through. Of course, I was an adolescent then and the world of the 50s seemed quite safe and sound. Things weren t like they are now with almost daily reports of some terror-stricken situation close to home or elsewhere in our shrinking world. Now we know if, in fact, we weren't deluded then that things weren t quite as they seemed back then. When I watched the very first episode of the now-completed TV series, Mad Men, I thought to myself, I know this world. It all looks so familiar. But as the show went on it became increasingly uncomfortable and disquieting. Unmasked was the world of the 50s in which
such evils as sexism, racism, and unethical business practices lurked just beneath the surface of a seeming placid perfection. So when I am tempted in the midst of current turmoil as perhaps you are, too to look back nostalgically to a quieter, simpler time, I need to remember that every time has had its difficulties. Often we or our forebears have felt as if this might be the last time. In the face of that temptation we need to recover the faith that empowers us to strive and to hope toward a future that still beckons us. We are never without a future. That s what Scripture continues to tell us. Last fall Kathy and I traveled for three weeks to major cities of Eastern Europe. Beginning in Berlin, we toured Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest, with an add-on to Vienna. When asked how the trip was and it was certainly worthy of our time we continue to say that in some ways it was difficult. It was difficult both physically and emotionally, physically because there were long distances to cover, emotionally because so much of what we saw and heard brought us back to the horror of the Holocaust. Our hotel in Warsaw was a sleek new Westin from which we could walk easily to a couple of old synagogues that somehow miraculously had survived the war. They were in close proximity to our hotel because the hotel itself had been built on land previously part of the Jewish Ghetto that Hitler had leveled in his crazed attempt at racial cleansing. Those horrific days were a recent memory to the adults of the generation of my childhood, but they had survived. I heard stories from the war years that were even then sobering to my adolescent mind. What I grew to know more fully was that in that time as in times before, God had been faithful still. Love and mercy had endured.
In 1930s Germany it had been time for the faithful to remember and to choose. Karl Barth, the renowned Reformed theologian of the last century, had been teaching at the University of Bonn when Adolf Hitler came to power. In the madness of that time, Barth would lead what came to be called the Confessing Church movement in Germany confessing because a part of the Reformed Church in Germany stood squarely in the face of Hitler s threat and declared in a formal confessional document in the town of Barmen that Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. There would be countless victims of that war including those faithful to God who challenged Hitler but others would live to see the false gods fall, making possible a new world of hope and life for the human race. There have been other times in our nation s history when we might have seemed doomed as well. Surely our own Civil War nearly a hundred years before had been such a time. On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, was assassinated. This event has been engraved on the American consciousness. If you visit New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, you will see the Lincoln pew preserved for generations to come. The truth is, Lincoln did not occupy that pew all that frequently, though he was a deeply faithful person. His tenacity to the ways of justice and mercy are hallmarks of his life and legacy. Few leaders of our nation have come close to his stature in ways of allegiance to the God of the Ages. And so it was, as I have learned recently, that pastors across the nation scurried to eulogize Lincoln during Easter Sunday
sermons a day after his death and on subsequent Sundays when they had had time to reflect more deeply on the nature and depth of the nation s loss. One of these was the Episcopal Reverend Phillips Brooks, then rector of The Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square, the same man who wrote the beloved Christmas carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem. On Sunday morning, April 23, 1865, the first Sunday after Easter (hardly a low Sunday that year I suspect among the faithful), as Lincoln s body lay in state in Philadelphia before continuing its final journey to burial in Illinois, Brooks preached a 6,000 word sermon that is now considered a homiletical masterpiece. Brooks concluded his sermon with these words: So let him [Lincoln] lie here in our midst to-day, and let our people go and bend with solemn thoughtfulness and look upon his face and read the lessons of his burial. As he paused here on his journey from the Western home and told us what by the help of God he meant to do, so let him pause upon his way back to his Western grave and tell us with a silence more eloquent than words how bravely, how truly, by the strength of God, he did it. God brought him up as he brought David up from the sheepfolds to feed Jacob, his people, and Israel, his inheritance. He came up in earnestness and faith, and he goes back in triumph. As he pauses here to-day, and from his cold lips bids us bear witness how he has met the duty that was laid on him, what can we say out of our full hearts but this He fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with all his power. As Lincoln scholar Lawrence Weber has observed, History teaches us that Lincoln s legacy was in saving the Union and freeing the slaves. This is true. But perhaps we can find more to this legacy that can be applied to our lives today on a day-to-day basis. Lincoln was determined to leave the world a better place to
live for his fellow man, and he actively worked at this on a day-today basis. In his First Inaugural Address he stated, We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. Weber notes that in reflecting on Abraham Lincoln s life, preachers and theologians came to recognize in him the very values and virtues they themselves held dear, such as honesty, fidelity, moral fortitude, humor, strength of character, perseverance, belief in truth, and love. Of such things is our faith yet constituted. Toward such things we still strive. Choose this day whom you will serve... Just know it won t be easy. When I first leaned into Joshua s words I thought it mostly a matter of will that would get me through. The growth into maturity has taught me that it s much more a matter of faith, of yielding to God s providential care after we have done the best we know how. It s a matter of living into each day in the smaller and greater decisions and actions that frame our lives in a manner that our God requires of us. Much that God requires relies on acts of forgiving and of accepting forgiveness. Yet there is so much we can t control, and those things we leave to God who promises to stay the course with us, no matter what turns the course of life might take. I believe this to be true. But I believe also that following through on our promise is often challenging, tempting us to fall back on false gods that promise an easy way out, such as the gods of greed and material acquisition for its own sake.
It s the strong follow-through of faith that keeps us going in the right direction. I began to learn something about a followthrough of another kind back there in the 50s as well. I learned it as a baseball-crazed kid who thought each day turned brighter if my St. Louis Cardinals won their game that day (I ve since become a loyal Phillies fan, I hasten to add in this place). As I learned more about baseball I learned that a batter must always have a strong follow-through. A batter swings with the intention of getting a hit maybe even a home run but obviously every swing does not yield either a single or homer. But it s not just the initial swing that matters; it s what happens after the instant when the bat comes into contact with the ball. The batter must swing all the way through even after he has hit or missed the ball. And the ball that leaves the park after the batter has finished with a strong follow-through looks ever sweeter as it clears the fence. This has become a metaphor for me the image of the batter and the follow-through as I ve thought about it over the years and applied it to more important things in the game of life than whatever sporting games we play along the way. When we choose to serve God we follow the initial intent with actions that follow through on the promises we make. And as we move along life s journey, staying true to the strong and faithful followthrough we intend, in all the moments of consciousness which we are gifted to embrace, we come to know more closely and intimately the God who has been following through with us every step along the way. There are few greater blessings than that. Amen.