Sermon Text - May 4, 2008
"A Covenant of Promise: As for Me . . . "
Rev. David Kratz
Selections from Joshua 24
This Sunday is the culmination of our stewardship campaign and for those of us who are new to the church that means that when we talk about stewardship, we talk about taking responsibility for the gifts of God. I suppose it begins with our own lives, we see our lives as not just an accident or birth or something that we demanded of God, and finally received. But as a gift of God actually, not only our birth and our parents and those people that influence us along the way, but our skills and our gifts and even our limitations we see in a way as gifts of God that because we are children of God we use them responsibly and with great care in our lives. And we are accountable to God for how we use them.
But we're not only about ourselves; stewardship involves the care of the world really. It is the care of our families, our neighborhoods our church, our world, in fact, that we are created not just for ourselves but we are created to live in community and covenant with one another and those of us who see that God loves us. We are particularly called to take responsibility not just for ourselves, but for the common good. And so every year we get together to offer these gifts of ours, we make promises of money and finances – not only to keep a building running, but accomplish this gift of stewardship that is placed in our laps.
And one more little thought is that we know that are not in it alone because we do it together. It's a terrible burden to feel like we have to be saviors of the world. And even though sometimes some of us get that little egocentric thought in our brain, we know in times like this that we are not in it alone. We’re not the saviors of the world, we believe that God is saving the world and our job is simply together, as a community of faith, not only to trust God but to learn how to be better stewards of God's gifts for us.
Our text this morning is about a covenant, that's what covenant making it is by the way, is taking our part of the responsibility for God's promises and saying thanks to God by making our promises. Our Scripture reading this morning is a story about a covenant that was made a long time ago and the mediator of that covenant was of a man named Joshua. Some of us may remember a song about Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho and I suppose that's true, although it's an interesting thing that Joshua fit the battle not with weapons, but with music, and you remember he went around the city several times and then they were playing their horn in the city fell. One more incident of the power of music is greater than the power of the sword. Also Joshua’s mentor was a man named Moses, who was made more famous to us. You know Moses never got to the promised land, and it was Joshua's job to take the people over the River Jordan and into the promised land and to settlement it and to gather the people together and to create a federation of tribes so that they can live out God's promises to them. And he gathered them together at a place called Shittim and this is what happened – I’ll read it in part:
Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shittim and some of the elders and the heads and the judges and the officers of Israel, and they presented themselves before God and then Joshua told them stories actually, he recounted the history of the people of God from Abraham's coming and getting the promise and Jacob and Esau and Joseph and Moses and the 10 Commandments and after 40 years of wilderness and finally they arrived in this land into a land they did not discover or plant or build and then he says. “Now therefore a revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now, if you're unwilling to serve the Lord choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods of your ancestors served in a region beyond the river of gods of the Amorites. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” And so right away everybody's said ‘count me in,’ but Joshua said, no you can’t serve the Lord. Finally, the people said to Joshua ‘the Lord our God, we will serve and him we will obey.’ So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shittim and Joshua wrote these words in the book ‘The Law of God’. Amen
It’s a serious story actually, it's not just another Sunday morning at Fauntleroy Church or just another annual campaign. Joshua take seriously the fact that these people needed to make a personal choice, to take personal responsibility, it wasn't just taking responsibly for somebody else to respond to God's love, everyone was invited to follow his lead. As for me and my house, as for me and those people that I'm responsible for, we will serve the Lord. It's interesting that he didn't accept their ‘you can count me in’ – not the first time, not the second time, it took them three times to promise that they would serve the Lord because he knew that real choices require a commitment of the heart as well as the commitment of the words or the tongue.
And that's what we do every year. I remember a long time ago one of our stalwart members said ‘why do we do this stewardship campaign every year? Why do we do it – let’s do it every three years or every five years or something. People are going to follow-through.’ And the reason is that every year we need a chance to look at our own lives and our priorities to say, what matters most than if you're not going to serve this Lord, what are you going to serve? The problem is in our society and our day it's so easy to say yes to so many things isn’t it? This language about alien gods may sound weird to us.
We don't talk about alien God very much, but you know, there are a lot of different forces that are requiring, asking us, inviting us, sometimes demanding from us commitments. And I don't know about you but for people like me who loves to please other people and you know, I just say yes yes yes yes yes yes and then they pile up on top of each other by Thursday afternoon, you know, I've got so many yeses I don't know what to do. And because I can’t do them all you know. So I am one of those people that lives by forgiveness. But it’s important and that's what Joshua wants to say to us is that we need to think, now and then, maybe always, maybe at least once a year, about what are we doing with our lives and where are we putting our commitments and are energies.
A couple weeks ago Peg Jones led us through, a retelling of our history here. And it's important that Joshua doesn't say, you know, just commit yourself out of the blue. Just throw their promises out into an empty universe. Joshua begins by saying, the one that you're promising your life to is a person trustworthy. And then he recounts the history of his people and he talks about Abraham and Jacob and Esau and all of these people, and it's not just a recounting of history, it is not so that they can pass some WASSL test, it is so that they know that the one who invites them to covenant is trustworthy, that God is a promise making God and God keeps promises and we are the recipient of a whole lifetime, a whole Earth time of promises. And that is now our responsibility to take up to say yes, in our time and place, with our lives and resources, to what we will do.
And as I mentioned Peg led us through our history here a few weeks ago with the building of the church that was donated by lay people – there wasn't a clergy person around. People from the community came in and helped. And then we built a church in a day and then before we built a steeple, we built the gymnasium – I thought that was a great timeframe. And during the Depression we gather together and helped those people that didn't have enough to get through. And during a wartime when half of the men of our community were halfway around the world fighting a war there was this wonderful sense of remembering them and sending them letters and packages and keeping them in our prayers every week.
And then when the community grew and we rebuilt the church it was lay people who built the church and put their finger nails in the carpet and laid the tiles in Fellowship Hall and it was a community Church raising event. And we've been through tough times and conflicts over social issues and leadership questions. But we came through it all and passed an open and affirming resolution that wasn't necessarily agreed to buy everybody, but everybody stayed and continued to work on how we’re going to do it together. And we have come to this time – guided not just by our own creative genius or persistence or stubbornness, but brought to us to this place is the gift of God for us to use and care for this particular time and mission of the church at this point. As for me and mine, we will serve this God who has been faithful, not only to Joshua and his people, but to us and our people.
So this morning, we want to do a simple little exercise that I hope will be more than just a question of words but I want you to turn for the back of the hymnal. The first part of our covenant, the first part was actually rewritten in 2003 so it's not so old, but it tries to say in a few words, what we're trying to do here. So let's say the first part, together:
Trusting in Christ's love for us in this place and time. Building on the legacy of previous generations, mindful of our needs and of those we seek to help, respect all of our differences in an inclusive caring community. Seeing peace and justice as the work of the people of God, believing that worship service and learning our life giving. We yearn for God’s grace, we draw strength from God's presence. We dare to commit ourselves to the challenges of following Christ.
Couple weeks ago Laura and Kip gathered in our covenant and said the next part, but year after year, or maybe twice a year, we need to look at these words and see them not as Laura and Kip's commitments but as ours to let us read together the church covenant as if it were for the first time
let's stay together:
Adopting as my own, the covenant of the Fauntleroy Church, I promise and covenant with God and the Church to follow the teachings of Christ to support the work of Christ Church with my resources to participate in service to others to worship regularly in community and to foster individual and united spiritual growth.
One of the wonderful things about our particular brand of the Christian faith is that we believe we are all priests and we are all profits to one another. And so if you can imagine saying this not just to Laura and Kip but to the person sitting next to you or in front of you. Let us respond to one another by offering our love and support by saying:
We therefore the members of this church receive you into our communion and welcome you with joy into our fellowship. We promise to pray for you to watch over you and to help you. God grant that as we love and are loved as we serve and are served as we bless and are blessed, we may so live and worship together as to glorify the name of Jesus the Christ, in whose ministry and life we share.
As for me and mine, we will serve the Lord, and that's kind of what we were saying here in more words than that. But now and then it's important to remember and to see these as our words and our opportunity to live up to them. Because we are not just a bunch of people. We are a covenanted community, and we live on the commitment and promises of one another and our ability to put our lives behind our words. The sermon really this morning is not these words, but is the time when we come forward to offer our gifts and to receive Christ’s new covenant, Christ’s new promise – to love us to the end and beyond. So I'm let us sing together this hymn and then we’ll share in Christ's love for us.