Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 24, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Back in the 1960s, or maybe it was the early ‘70s, there was a popular song that had a verse in it something like this:

Don’t you know you have to make up your mind,
And say yes to one and leave the other behind.
It’s not often easy, it’s not often kind,
Don’t you know you have to make up your mind.

In that passage, Joshua, who is the chosen successor of Moses, and who is the person who actually leads the Hebrew people across the Jordan and into the Promised Land after Moses’ death, has gathered all the people at a place called Sechem. Now, one theme that runs throughout Hebrew Scripture is that the people were always tempted to fall away from pure Yahweh worship and to begin worshipping the Canaanite gods, that is, the gods of the people who already lived in the land before the Hebrews came there. Apparently, that phenomenon had appeared almost as soon as the people crossed the Jordan, since even Joshua had to deal with it. He says to the people: Revere and serve the Lord; but if you won’t do that you still have to choose which gods you will serve-either the pre-Yahweh gods of your ancestors or the present gods of the people in whose land you are living. Joshua himself professes his devotion to Yahweh with the wonderful and justly famous line: "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

Now, whether or not to serve the pre-Yahweh gods of the Hebrews or the gods of the Amorites probably isn’t a big issue for you. I mean, we don’t even know who those other gods were, so we couldn’t really worship them if we wanted to. On the other hand, we too are living in someone else’s land. The Native Americans who were here long before any of our ancestors had gods too, often various figures from nature like the raven. Still, I don’t suppose very many of us are tempted to begin worshipping ravens; and although many of us find much that is very appealing in Native American spirituality I doubt that any of us is tempted to give up Christianity and convert to it. So you might think that this story from Joshua doesn’t really have much to say to us.

If that’s what you’re thinking, I beg to differ. I think this story has something very important to say to us. Let me explain. We are indeed faced, indeed we are faced every day, with a choice of which God or gods we will serve. We are Christians. Our faith offers us one God Whom we may choose to follow. As Christians, we try to live our lives within a belief system, a world view, grounded in belief in the God we know in and through Jesus Christ. That God, who as we talked about last week is the same God that the Hebrew Scriptures refer to as the Lord, makes demands on us. That God calls us continuously to lives that reflect the values of our faith, lives marked by commitment to peace, justice, and the dignity and equality of all people. When we come here on Sunday morning we are saying that we choose to follow that God. That God, the one true God, is one of the gods we may choose to follow.

And yet we are also Americans. Most of us live our lives within the mainstream of the dominant American culture. All of us are profoundly shaped and influenced by that culture. That culture has its own values, and those values are also gods that we may choose to follow. What are those values, those gods? There are lots of them. Some of them are good things, as far as they go-freedom, equality, and justice for example. Our culture, however, presents us with many other values, other gods, that are not so benign. Our culture has many values that we don’t claim as our gods but which function as gods nonetheless.

The gods of our culture include materialism, consumerism, and the idolatry of success understood in materialistic terms. They include other things too-narrow nationalism that denigrates other people and cultures and leads us to a callous disregard of the lives and wellbeing of other people; militarism, seen in an excessive reliance on our own military might to achieve the ends of that narrow nationalism and that today is leading to a militarization of our entire popular culture. Look at the success of GM’s Hummer, for example. Today they include an arrogance on the international stage that has alienated almost all of our former allies and made us the most distrusted and feared if not downright hated nation on earth. All of these things are gods. They demand our allegiance, our worship. And the culture that worships them is quite prepared to punish us if we don’t give it. Just think of how today anyone who disagrees with our government’s Iraq policy is accused to being "unpatriotic," with the unexamined assumption that that is the worst thing anyone could be.

Maybe it sounds odd to you that I refer to these cultural beliefs and values as gods. That is, however, what they are. The great twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich taught that anything that demands our "ultimate concern" is a god. Our culture demands that we make it and its values our ultimate concern, i.e., that about which we care the most, that to which we subordinate everything else in our lives. Nationalism is the best example. It was the example Tillich used most to make this point. He should know. He was a German who lived through the time of the Nazis. The point for us is that even a nationalism like ours that is less virulent than Nazism makes that ultimate demand. So do things like success and materialism. They demand our allegiance. They promise us great blessings if we worship them and threaten to punish us, or at least try to convince us that we are somehow unworthy human beings, if we do not. In that way they function just like gods. In that way they are gods.

And as American Christians we have to choose between those gods and the God of our faith. Our God too demands our ultimate allegiance. Our God too judges anything less as unfaithful. That is the message of Scripture, especially of Hebrew Scripture, the basic outline of which is that God made a covenant with the people to be their God in return for their allegiance, that the people were unfaithful to that covenant, and that God therefore punished them with destruction and exile. We have to choose. Religion that glibly and easily equates Christian faith with American cultural values is no true religion. The central symbol of Christianity is the cross not the American flag. The two can coexist, but they can coexist for Christians only if we always make it clear that the flag is subject to the cross and not the other way around. We have to decide where our ultimate allegiance lies. Which God will we serve?

That’s the question Joshua put to the Hebrew people in this morning’s Scripture lesson. In that lesson, the people say that they like Joshua will serve the Lord. So far so good. I need to say, however, that when the people go on say why they will serve the Lord they wander into some very bad theology. They say they will serve the Lord because of the all the marvelous things He has done for them. He freed them from slavery in Egypt and gave them the land they now inhabit. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not why we should choose to serve the one true God rather than the false gods of the society within which we live. Recall Job. God didn’t do such great things for Job. Yet in the end Job learned to worship God nonetheless. The point is that the reason to choose the true God over the false gods of society is simply that God is God and society’s gods are not. Put another way, we should choose to worship and follow God because only God is truly ultimate. Everything else, including the false gods of society, is finite and fallible. The one true God is neither. They are idols. God is God.

What does that mean for us? Although we should not worship God because of what God can do for us, the truth remains that because God is ultimate, God can in fact do for us what no false god of society can. The best way to get at this truth is to look once again at the profound mystery against which we live our lives, the mystery of death. Let’s take the god of nationalism. What can that god do for us in the face of death? For some it can give death met under the proper circumstances a certain kind of meaning. In those limited circumstances it can function as a kind of god. But what of the death that has nothing to do with dying for our country? Nationalism has nothing to say in the face of such a death, and most of us by far face such a death, not a heroic death of sacrifice for our country. Can nationalism answer the profound questions about death-why we die, what our mundane, un-heroic deaths mean, whether anything awaits us beyond our deaths, what our lives mean once we are gone? Can it comfort a grief-stricken family? You can answer those questions for yourselves. My answer to them for me is no, it cannot. The god of nationalism, being less than ultimate, being therefore an idol, is simply not up the task of helping us grapple with the most profound questions of life, the question of life and death.

The one true God is. Because God is truly ultimate, God can help us as we face that final mystery, our own deaths or the death of loved one. The one true God can give our lives meaning that does not fail us, as finding meaning only in commitment to society’s false gods invariably does. The one true God can comfort us as we face our death or the death of loved one because the one true God, and only the one true God, transcends death, conquers death, and brings new life out of death. No societal idol can do that. God is God, and nothing else is. That’s why we should choose God, and it is why choosing God, the one true God, makes all the difference in our lives.

So: Don’t you know you’ve got to make up your mind? Which god will you serve? I pray that we all will choose the one true God. It’s isn’t a once for all choice. It is a choice we make again and again. We make it with the decisions we make in our lives, decisions about how we will treat ourselves and others, decisions about how we will use our resources of time, talents, and treasure. We make the choice in how we live. Which choice will you make? Which choice will I?