November 6, 2011
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Already our Sunday newspapers are bulging with ads about Christmas shopping. I just heard that WalMart is bringing back the old layaway plan. You pick out a merchandise and you lay it away and on a regular schedule would pay a little at a time until you have paid in full to take home your purchase in time for Christmas; anything to get you to come into the store to shop! With our consumer-driven society, we tell ourselves that it’s patriotic to shop in order to help the economy, support our troops and to put people back to work. But shopping and buying have become an obsession that borders on making owning things an idol.
It’s like how I wish to own a new MacAir laptop! I’m jealous over those who have one! I can come up with 10 different reasons why I need to have one. I need to put that obsession away.
Joshua
In today’s Scripture, Joshua is telling the people of Israel to put away those false gods. Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt and across the desert for those 40 years as they made their way toward the Promised Land, toward that special land that God was going to give them. But just before the people crossed the Jordan River and entered the Promised Land, Moses died. So God appointed Joshua to take over in Moses’ place. Under Joshua’s leadership, the people entered the land and defeated all their enemies.
Joshua says to the people, “It’s time to make a tough decision: Are you going to worship and serve the God who freed us from slavery in Egypt, the God who fed us and gave us water to drink throughout those 40 years in the desert, the God who gave us victory over all our enemies, the God who provided us with this rich and wonderful land? Or are you going to worship and serve someone or something else?
At Shechem, Joshua reminded the people of the history of God’s relationship with their ancestors from Abraham to the present moment. But now, Joshua presents to the current generation of leaders whether they will assume the responsibilities of continuing the covenant relationship with its God. As expected, the people have worshiped the gods of their captives. Besides their pre-patriarchal Mesopotamian gods, they knew about the Egyptian gods and became acquainted with the gods of the Amorite and Canaanite Baal gods near the Promised Land. So Joshua asks the people, “Are you going to be officially loyal to the one God of Israel or are you going to keep on practicing a polytheistic collection of gods of your choosing? This new generation of Israel must decide whether it will respond to God with loyalty and devotion.
Make up your mind. What are you going to do? Because if you are going to worship and serve God, don’t just say that that’s what you’re going to do. No, if you’re going to worship and serve God, it’s going to make a difference, a real difference, in your life. You are going to need to put some things away.
Too Many Things
For most of us, we have too many things on our plates. It’s like going to Moon Star where we would pile up too many food items on one plate that after awhile, all the food tastes the same. That’s a food obsession. We have so many things on our agendas that everything is treated the same with no real sense of what’s really important. We try to do it all and in the end, we don’t do anything really well at all.
Besides our obsession to possessions, we have a preoccupation with safety and security. Look at how much of our national budget goes toward defense and national security. Don’t get me wrong, I like to feel safe and secure when I board a plane, but the priorities that we have placed on our defense budget has devastated the funds we need for our domestic social programs.
Another idolatrous commitment that we have is toward our children. Now no one here is like this but the amount of things and opportunities that we shower on our children to have the advantage of getting ahead in school, the newest and latest gadgets and computer apps that we think they need to have to maneuver in an increasingly technological world, and the way we dress them to look like they are acceptable and a part of your community all lead us to think that we end up being overly obsessed on our children being a convicting reflection on ourselves.
In Joshua 24, Joshua fears that the people of Israel are only giving lip service to the covenant invitation. After Joshua challenged the people to put away the gods of their ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord, the people affirmed their commitment. But Joshua didn’t seem to believe them and told them that God is a jealous God and if you forsake your commitment, God will harm them. The people said, “No, we will serve the Lord!” But Joshua still didn’t believe them so he said, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him.” Finally, the people said, “The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey.” Joshua relented and made a covenant at Shechem.
De we have so many gods pulling and pushing us around that Joshua would need to ask us many times about our loyalty and devotion to God before he would believe it? The unfortunate fact, though, is that lots of people today say they want to worship and serve God, but those words aren’t making a real difference in their lives.
It’s like some research that shows that, on the whole, people who come to church aren’t any more ethical than people who don’t come to church. In fact, a Gallop poll found that 43% of people who don’t go to church say that they’ve stolen things from where they work. But when people who go to church were asked the same thing, if they’ve stolen things from where they work, the percentage was almost the same. In other words, a lot of people who say that they’re Christians, who say that they want to worship and serve God, apparently aren’t willing to make the hard choices and do what God wants them to be doing. Instead, they’re just following along with the crowd and doing what everyone else is doing. No wonder Joshua didn’t believe what the people of Israel were saying and kept on asking them to put away those other gods.
One God
Our problem, it often seems, is that yes, we believe in God–but at the same time we believe in God and tell God that we’re going to be loyal and faithful, we’re not willing to say no to those other voices that seek to call us off in some other direction. It’s kind of like this 73-year old man in Malaysia who has been married 53 times. Fifty-three times he has stood up and promised he was going to be loyal and faithful to his wife until the day he dies. But of his previous 52 previous marriages, only one of those wives died. All others, he divorced. In all those other marriages, he eventually found someone else who he liked better and left his wife so that he could marry that new person.
Is that how it is with our relationship with God? Do we say, “I’m there for you, God. God, I’m completely and totally devoted to you, and you alone. See, I have pledged 10% of my income to you?” But then when something else comes along, when some other voice calls out to us, inviting us to go off in some other direction, do we forget about God just like that? Or when we find ourselves in situations where those other voices are calling out to us, is our commitment to God strong enough that we’re willing to say no to those other voices so that we can keep saying yes to God?
In the case of holiday shopping, are you willing to set aside, put away all that obsession to possession and give something that’s more meaningful or more lasting? Maybe it’s giving to charity by honoring a person you love. Maybe it’s volunteering your time for a worthy cause and sending a card to a person that you did this on their behalf. Maybe it’s buying a bag of Lanna Coffee to give as gifts with a brochure that says by drinking this coffee you are possibly saving a life. There are so many ways to not give into those voices that lead you in a direction that makes you forget your loyalty and devotion to God.
At this new 9:00 Worship, we want to challenge particularly our youth and young adults to say yes to God and to live the kind of life God wants them to live. In some cases, you are going to have to make some tough choices—to stop hanging out with some people who may be dragging you down. Some of your friends may be trying to get you going on another direction that is not where God wants you to be going. You may need to say no to those people who you thought were your friends who are trying to have you commit some wrong things. You can’t say yes to God unless you say no to these people who are causing you to not have loyalty and devotion to God.
Two weeks ago at the Sojourners retreat, we learned from Jim Hermano that retirement wasn’t just all leisure and eating out. He shared with us this new thought that when we retire, there’s sometime 15-20 years of active and healthy living still to do that we should call it our “encore career.” Go back and discover those things that you wish you did earlier in life and do them now. If we all just sat around, it would be idolatrous, worshiping ourselves in leisure and too much eating and not focusing on what God may want us to do. Perhaps, we should go on a mission trip to teach children and youth because we have a lifetime of wisdom and knowledge. Maybe we should provide care-giving of children to enable young parents or care-giving of older adults to enable middle age adults to serve the Lord.
If I were to ask you to come up with a list of words that describe God, what words would you put on that list? Loving, kind, merciful, good, almighty, compassionate? But one word that quite possibly you wouldn’t think to put on your list is jealous. But here in this reading that we heard today, and elsewhere in the Bible, we are told that our God is a jealous God.
But while we often think of jealousy as an entirely negative thing—which, if it’s carried to an extreme, it can be a negative thing—jealousy also has a positive side. Did you know that when a couple ceases to be jealous of each other, that’s a probable sign that that husband and wife aren’t really in love with each other?
At its heart, jealousy is a feeling that stirs up inside us when we love someone, but then someone else or something else comes along and seems to grab the attention of that one that we love. We feel jealousy because we love someone. We don’t want anything to happen that would bring that relationship—that means so much to us—to an end. It is right to say that God is a jealous God, because God loves us so much that God just can’t stand it when other people or other things come along that try to take our attention away from God. God is a jealous God, because God hopes that we’ll always be faithful to God, to God alone, just like God is always faithful to us.
Renewing the Covenant
In this passage, Joshua has reached the end of his life, his leadership of Israel, and the conquest of the Promised Land. He wanted his parting words to be remembered for all the things that God has done for bringing his people this far. Joshua’s challenge is to choose this day to whom you will serve. This challenge has now come to us. We hear this in John the Baptist’s preaching and in Christ himself. We must decide now which side of history we are on. You can’t choose all of it and make all these things idols to which you worship. For Joshua, he said, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
Last Sunday, we asked you to submit your 2012 pledges and commitments. There are probably many other worthy and important charitable work that would need your generous support but we ask you to give so much that you would feel you are making a sacrifice.
Today we mark in our church calendar to be Gift Planning Sunday. If you are considering estate planning or your will writing, we would like you to think about FCBC. Whether you are in this life or when you are ready to leave this one for the next one in heaven with God, gift planning is a way for you to put away those other idols in life and to only consider God.
Just like at Shechem when Joshua reminded and remembered the long history of how God has a relationship with their ancestors from Abraham to the present moment, we are doing this today when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. When the people of Israel recommitted themselves to the covenant to have no other god than the living God, we come to the Communion Table with that same commitment to put away those foreign gods and to incline our hearts to the Lord. We become witnesses against ourselves holding one another accountable that when we take this bread and drink this cup that we are indeed choosing God. You can leave this church today and say to everyone you meet that you saw this person or that person take communion today because they have publicly declared that they are going to give loyalty and devotion to only God.
Piles of Idols
I suspect that we’ll always have in our lives, people and things that will try to lead us to go in a different direction from God. May it be possessions or safety and security, our families and children or entertainment and sports or food and eating out or any other things that we obsess over that we stop listening and following God’s ways. It’s like we have a pile of idols.
After Joshua said, “I’m not too sure where you might be but for me and my household, we will serve the Lord,” he said, “Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.” Notice how gentle Joshua is here. While he was totally against the people having a polytheistic view of their loyalties, he did not cry out in rage for the violent destruction of these false gods—he only orders that they be “put away.”
We might have expected at the end of this book, a very dramatic chapter, a huge gathering of stones that represents foreign gods and idols. And Joshua with a sledgehammer would go up to this pile of idols and smash them to smithereens. No, he simply says, “Put them away.” The people simply confess their intended loyalty once more, and Joshua now makes “statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem.”
Perhaps Joshua realized that while he can be a leader and an example for his people, he can’t be their conscience or their nursemaid. The Apostle Paul has similar language about “putting off” and putting away the works of darkness or the sins of the flesh. Perhaps both Joshua and Paul understood that you can only ask so much. It would be enough for these people to simply box up the idols and remove them. Just put them away.
Today, I ask you too to put away those things that obsess you so much that they lead you away from God. Put them away. If there are some people that you know who are trying to persuade you to go in a direction that leads you away from God and that you might be doing a very bad thing. Put them away. I will put away my desire to have a new MacAir laptop since my current one is still working. I’ll put this away until maybe next year.
As for me and my household, we will serve only the Lord.
Let us pray.
Dear God, forgive us when we have other gods besides only you. Strengthen our devotion and loyalty to serve you throughout the years of our lives. Inasmuch as you have invited us to have a personal saving relationship with you in Christ Jesus, we pray that we would be faithful and committed to you. Thank you for your grace and mercy on us. Amen.