Well, I’m not going to give too much of a recap of where we have been because our passage actually does that for us today. But I’ll just briefly remind us that over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been in the book of Exodus, and we heard about God using Moses to rescue the people from slavery in Egypt, their narrow escape through the sea, and their time in the wilderness, where they experienced this newfound freedom. But then God gave them the commandments as a shape of that freedom—ways that they can live together in peace and harmony with one another and with their neighbors.

In today’s passage, we’ve moved on from the book of Exodus and into the book of Joshua—and actually all the way to the end of Joshua—when the people are on the cusp of entering the promised land.

Joshua 24:1–15

Then 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. 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. 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, and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I gave Esau the hill country of Seir to possess, but Jacob and his children went down to Egypt. Then I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt with what I did in its midst, and afterward I brought you out. When I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, you came to the sea, and the Egyptians pursued your ancestors with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea. When they cried out to the Lord, he put darkness between you and the Egyptians and made the sea come upon them and cover them, and your eyes saw what I did to Egypt. Afterward you lived in the wilderness a long time. Then I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you, and I handed them over to you, and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you. Then King Balak son of Zippor of Moab set out to fight against Israel. He sent and invited Balaam son of Beor to curse you, but I would not listen to Balaam; therefore he blessed you, so I rescued you out of his hand. When you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho, the citizens of Jericho fought against you, as well as the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I handed them over to you. I sent swarms of hornets ahead of you that drove out before you the two kings of the Amorites; it was not by your sword or by your bow. I gave you a land on which you had not labored and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant. 

“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. Now 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.” 

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

Well, there are times in life when it’s just vitally important to look back and reflect. And these occasions become more and more precious the older that we get: births, baptisms, birthdays, weddings, funerals, anniversaries, reunions. They give us an opportunity to reflect not only on where we are going, but on where we have been.

Why is it so important to look back?

Because it’s vitally important that we understand we did not get here on our own. One of the most dangerous things is when we think that all of this—that we’ve earned it, or that we somehow have deserved it, or that we’ve come about it because of our own goodness or sacrifice or hard work. That may be part of the truth, but that’s only ever part of the truth.

We owe a debt of gratitude to so many who went before us, some of whom we had the pleasure to meet, but many of whom we only know their name, if even that. There have been those who have worked and sacrificed so that those who come after them may have opportunities that they never dreamed of. Parents and grandparents, sure, of course, but countless others as well. And not to mention the strokes of good fortune and all of the needful things that have happened so that we can be here today.

And we see this in our passage today when Joshua gathers the people at Shechem as they prepare to enter the promised land. But before they do, they have to stop. They have to pause. Joshua wants to make sure that they acknowledge those who helped them get there while they are still at this crucial juncture.

Arthur Wright points out, “Joshua gathers the entire people of Israel to Shechem. He then begins to recount God’s activity and faithfulness on their behalf, from the call of Abraham to God’s partnership with Moses and Aaron to save the Hebrew people from the Egyptians.”

And did you notice the emphasis that is put on: Not by your sword, not by your bow. You didn’t plant those fields. You didn’t plant those vineyards. I have done this.

“God is viewed as the primary agent of these events,” writes Arthur Wright, “and the passage emphasizes God’s agency on behalf of the people.”

He then continues, “This passage offers us an opportunity to remember the histories of our own faith communities and reflect on the ways in which we’ve seen God’s faithfulness to us along the way.”

As many of you know, I just had a birthday. Birthdays are a great time to look back and reflect and give thanks. As a congregation, we have just been celebrating 125 years. And to do that, we’ve revisited and celebrated our history. And as a nation, we have marked 250 years as well.

And we give thanks and we celebrate. But these occasions are not just times for celebration. They are also times for truth-telling. As we look back, of course, not everything is worthy of our praise. Sometimes we need to repent and make sure that we learn from our mistakes in the past.

As Joshua and the people stood triumphantly at Shechem, the truth is that their victory came at a cost for others. People were displaced and dispatched in order for them to take hold of this promised land. And that’s part of the story, too. It’s a hard part. It’s a part we would rather look past or look over, but it’s part of the story as well.

“At this moment in time, where nationalism—and especially in the United States, where Christian nationalism—continues to be ascendant,” writes Arthur Wright, “it is important to draw attention to these features without simply minimizing or explaining away the violence.”

Do we really believe that it affirms something true about God’s heart and God’s activity in the world? We have to choose, just as the ancient Israelites had to choose which gods they will serve.

You and I—this text demands that we choose between a God of conquest and violence and a God who intends to bring divine blessing to the entire world.

In recent years, our knowledge of what we mean by the entire world has expanded exponentially. While we had long suspected it, it was only in 1992 that we confirmed that there are planets outside of our solar system. That’s a huge shift in our cosmic perspective of who we are.

Furthermore, with the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we’ve been able to look out further and further into the universe, which also means that we get to look back further and further in time as well. The data that we have available to us now is overwhelming, to say the least. It can make us feel small and insignificant—just a small, tiny speck in the universe.

Physicist and professor of humanities at MIT Alan Lightman writes, “Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension. We’ve learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. And the size of our galaxy is itself inconceivable.”

But there are other galaxies—many, many, many other galaxies beyond that as well. “The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse,” Lightman writes. And I think sometimes that’s why it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning, right?

But seen from a different perspective, it’s a miracle that we exist at all.

Lightman continues, “Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck that we will ever experience, yet it’s the easiest to overlook and to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, we have our coffee, we make breakfast, we send the kids to school, we go to our jobs, we move through our routines, we worry about the deadlines, we check off all the items on our to-do list, and we forget that beneath it all lies something profoundly rare: existence itself.”

The point Joshua is trying to make is that we are blessed beyond measure just with the mere fact that we’re here at all. And no, it hasn’t been perfect. It hasn’t always been pretty. And we’ve not always been on our best behavior, to say the least. But nonetheless, we are extraordinarily blessed just to be alive here and now, in this moment, in this place.

And the least that we can do is give thanks and pledge to honor that blessing and pass it on. We can also look back, knowing that we are loved, and admit where we were wrong. We can learn from our past and our mistakes and promise to do better when we know better.

Gratitude does not require that we gloss over the past. It helps us to honestly acknowledge the good and the bad.

Look, I know as well as you do that there are times in our lives when gratitude is not an easy choice. It may be the very hardest choice of them all. When health fails, or money is tight, or work is overwhelming, it’s not easy to be thankful.

But the more we practice gratitude—like any skill, the more that we practice it when we can and when it’s easy—it will help us to find a little bit of gratitude when it’s more difficult.

We can think of gratitude like a deep well that we dig. And the deeper we go, the more it can hold. And the more it will have for us when we need it.

And we may even find our way to gratitude for some, but not all, of the tough times.

In a really profound and touching interview—and Google it and watch the whole thing later if you haven’t seen it—with Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert reflects to him, “It’s a gift.” Stephen Colbert from The Late Show—you all know, the comedian. Okay? So this is really—that just helps with the perspective.

He says this: “It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. But if you’re grateful for your life, then you have to be grateful for all of it.”

And Colbert goes on to explain further, saying that it doesn’t mean that you’re glad for everything that’s happened to you, but in time you may find it useful to relate to others these things that we have gone through. We can turn our pain into compassion. “You’re a different person on the other side of it,” is how Colbert puts it. And largely, it is up to us how we respond and what we choose in terms of what kind of person we will be.

“If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it’s very unlikely that we’ll ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day,” writes Anthon St. Maarten. “Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully,” he writes, “it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom and find the hidden blessing in it.”

“Choose this day,” Joshua says to the assembly at Shechem. Choose. Every day we make choices, and every day we wake to the miracle of existence.

Sure, some days the weight of it all feels too much, and all we can do is hold on until sunset. But other days, the sun peeks out from behind the clouds, and we’re hit with an overwhelming sense of thankfulness for all of it. Most days, of course, fall somewhere in between.

But choosing gratitude does not mean that we gloss over the hard parts of our lives or those things in our past we would rather not think about again. Gratitude actually helps us to face up to the hard stuff because it puts it in the larger context of existence—and what a miracle it is that we are here at all to celebrate and to suffer, to give and to receive, to learn and to grow.

Existence is a gift. We are extraordinarily fortunate just to be here. But this does not mean that life will be easy or free of pain. Rather, even in the midst of the darkest and hardest times, we can still choose gratitude.

“If the only prayer we ever say is thank you,” writes Meister Eckhart, “it will be enough.” Amen.

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