Title: Repeated Choice
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: Joshua 24:1-3a,14-25
Just last week, I heard someone very sincerely claim the US is a Christian nation and was founded on Christian principles. We've all heard the claim before. That does not make it any less false on more than one count. Several of the founding fathers were decidedly not Christians. The principles behind separation from England had nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with economics and power. Conversations hashing out a way for competing colonial interests to become a federation of states were not arguments of doctrine or theology. They were about competing economic interests. Many of the state constitutions make reference to God or the Divine, but the constitution around which the states came together does no such thing. We may claim to be a Christian nation, but does that claim really hold water or communicate any substantive reality?
Today's passage in Joshua might seem a bit odd in certain respects. It seems misplaced, as this is the message we'd have expected at the beginning of Joshua's leadership, prior to crossing the Jordan. Then again, there was a similar message by Moses just before passing the mantle to Joshua. They were charged with being faithful to Yahweh as the God of Israel. They were to have set aside all over deities in preference to Yahweh. Then the people crossed over into the Promised Land under Joshua's tenure. These words, however, come at the end of his life.
We think of Israel as the chosen people of Yahweh and Yahweh as the God of Israel. This passage, however, questions what it even meant for these people to be called by the name of Yahweh. It questions their sincerity in following Yahweh at all. On the one hand, the text expects that all of the people had been serving Yahweh all along. On the other, Joshua makes more than one reference to their "other gods," which he told them to put away as ancient h ...
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: Joshua 24:1-3a,14-25
Just last week, I heard someone very sincerely claim the US is a Christian nation and was founded on Christian principles. We've all heard the claim before. That does not make it any less false on more than one count. Several of the founding fathers were decidedly not Christians. The principles behind separation from England had nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with economics and power. Conversations hashing out a way for competing colonial interests to become a federation of states were not arguments of doctrine or theology. They were about competing economic interests. Many of the state constitutions make reference to God or the Divine, but the constitution around which the states came together does no such thing. We may claim to be a Christian nation, but does that claim really hold water or communicate any substantive reality?
Today's passage in Joshua might seem a bit odd in certain respects. It seems misplaced, as this is the message we'd have expected at the beginning of Joshua's leadership, prior to crossing the Jordan. Then again, there was a similar message by Moses just before passing the mantle to Joshua. They were charged with being faithful to Yahweh as the God of Israel. They were to have set aside all over deities in preference to Yahweh. Then the people crossed over into the Promised Land under Joshua's tenure. These words, however, come at the end of his life.
We think of Israel as the chosen people of Yahweh and Yahweh as the God of Israel. This passage, however, questions what it even meant for these people to be called by the name of Yahweh. It questions their sincerity in following Yahweh at all. On the one hand, the text expects that all of the people had been serving Yahweh all along. On the other, Joshua makes more than one reference to their "other gods," which he told them to put away as ancient h ...
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