The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 16B
This morning in our Old Testament reading, we read of Joshua’s farewell address to the Israelites. The pilgrimage of the Exodus is done, the conquest of Canaan is “complete.” I put that in quotes because one, even by the words of the Old Testament, they didn’t completely destroy the peoples who were already there, and two, historical evidence for an actual conquest is very thin. But in the context of our reading, Joshua has led the Israelites from after the death of Moses, and now Joshua is setting down his leadership.
As I was reading a commentary on this passage, a line jumped out at me: “Both (Moses and Joshua) took steps to prepare their succession, Moses by equipping Joshua, and Joshua by reaffirming the people in their commitments. Joshua succeeded less well than Moses, as we witness in the chaos of Judges.”[1]
The book of Judges that follows the book of Joshua is absolute chaos. It’s upheaval, one after another, and most of the so-called Judges who rise up to lead the people in battle are not moral exemplars. These judges arise because people have turned against one another and there is an enemy to fight. The book basically sets up the excuse for the people to demand a king, even though they are repeatedly warned by Moses in Deuteronomy that it will not go well to replace the divine kingship with a human one.
But the book of Joshua is absolute chaos, too. The Canaanites who are there get abused, murdered, exiled out of their land. It is bloodshed and chaos for the Canaanites. But it’s not chaos for the Israelites because they are united in fighting and conquering their so-called enemy. The Israelites blame their enemy for being pagan idolaters, for being in the land that they believe has been promised them, for possibly tempting the Israelites to abandon the LORD. The logic goes: “The Canaanites deserved their suffering, and thus we were justified in what we did to them. We were united as Israelites to destroy an evil.” That unity under Joshua is short-lived; once there is not a common enemy to destroy, what becomes of that unity? It fractures. It turns against one another.
Joshua ends on a darkly prophetic note: Joshua reminds his fellow Israelites that they have a decision of whether to actually serve God or to follow the traditions of other nations. Joshua says that he and his household will serve the LORD, and the rest of the Israelites then proclaim that they, too, will serve the LORD. But what do the rest of the books of the Old Testament testify? That the Israelites do not, in fact, have a good track record of that. In some cases, they give in and worship other gods entirely. Or they choose to oppress their workers and the poor, giving into the idolatry of greed. Or they choose to abuse the immigrant among them, forgetting that they were foreigners in the land of Egypt. Or they throw the prophet Jeremiah into a well because he wasn’t patriotically supporting the human king, right or wrong.
It seems that following God’s commandments get really hard once you don’t have a common enemy to fight. The fight against the enemy creates an illusory unity, makes it clear who’s in and who’s out. And it makes it easier to neglect the weightier commandments. Unity and triumph become the most important goals, the only commandments that matter. Justice, fairness, kindness, compassion, even truth get discarded.
But that illusory unity has energy and oomph. It’s tempting. Who doesn’t want to feel like they’re on the winning team, to be part of something powerful, to be unified against an enemy? It’s addicting. No wonder people throughout time have given into that impulse.
It happens in politics: those people are destroying our way of life; we have to destroy them first! It happens in religion: those people are destroying the faith; we must unite against their evil. It happens in society: those people do not belong; we must get rid of them.
French philosopher Rene Girard called out this scapegoating impulse. We blame the scapegoat and project all manner of things on this person, this group, and then we act to destroy the scapegoat. Girard then goes on to point out that we Christians point to Jesus as absolutely innocent. The scapegoat was innocent, but we condemned him. Jesus upends the system of violence by taking the violence on himself. He suffers instead of killing. He doesn’t call down angels to fight for him. He doesn’t even reproach the people who have crucified him or rejected him. He breathes out forgiveness.
Instead of unity in the face of a common enemy, Jesus Christ calls us to communion in the presence of God. Not unity. Communion. We glimpse it at Eucharist. We glimpse it at coffee hour, Bible study, the community meal, the food truck. We glimpse that communion with contemplative prayer, with music, with working with the creatures of earth in working in the dirt with the flowers, plants.
Communion is harder to maintain than unity, but it is real. That unity against an enemy is illusory. Communion is real. It takes work. We work for communion with one another, with God, with creation to heal what has been torn apart, rejected, destroyed. Yet authentic communion is hard. It means moving past the surface to get into the depths. It means risking being seen, risking having to change ourselves, risking the work of forgiving and being forgiven.
But, like I said, communion is hard. There is an impulse deep down that wants unity formed by a fight against a common enemy. It seems a little hard-wired into our brains.
So, perhaps, we work with it. Psychologist Richard Beck suggests that we take seriously the letter to the Ephesians. He focuses on that line from our Ephesians reading this morning, “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.” Beck says that perhaps we take it seriously that our struggle is not against flesh and blood – our struggle is not with other people. We aren’t called to fight people. People are not an enemy to be overcome. People are not unredeemable, demonic foes. But we are fighting against something that enslaves humanity in cycles of violence, poverty, greed, oppression, and hatred. But we remain steadfast that every person has dignity and is made in the image of God; they are not an enemy to be overcome, but a fellow human being who, just like us, needs liberation from all that binds us. And this fellow human being is called to the life of communion just as much we are. True communion liberates us from this cosmic chaos that keeps us enslaved in violence, greed, and hatred.
This communion that liberates is not our work alone; it is not a utopia, a party platform, a nice worship service, or a series of statements adopted at church conventions. This truest communion is made flesh, made present in our midst by the power of the Spirit bringing us together in Christ to the glory of God our Creator. It is a work that we must attend to, that we must each work towards. It is a goal that draws us into the eternal life of God. Communion, not triumph, is what gets us into the Promised Land.
So, if you want a nice little summary at the end: the world may be chaos, but what we seek is not unity against an enemy, but communion with God and all that God has created. Not chaos, but communion. Not unity, but communion. Not violence, but communion. Communion continually made perfect and real in the body, blood, and life of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[1] From Tim Meadowcroft’s entry “Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World”, Proper 16B, Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, pg 249.