Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · July 2, 2006

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

Prayer of the Day

O Judge of the nations, be with us, we pray, in this hour of celebration and confession.  May your Living Word speak afresh to our people.  Inspire us and set us right.  Grant this, we pray, in the name of Jesus.  Amen.

Scripture

Judges 2:6-22

After Joshua had dismissed the Israelites, they went to take possession of the land, each to his own inheritance.  The people served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel.

Now Joshua died at the age of a hundred and ten.  And they buried him in the land of his inheritance.

After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up, who knew neither the Lord nor what the Lord had done for Israel.  Then the people did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served other gods.  They forsook, abandoned, left, set aside, turned their backs on the Lord, the God of their forebearers, the one who had brought them out of Egypt.   They followed, they worshiped, they gave themselves to various gods of the peoples around them.  This provoked the anger of the Lord.  The Lord handed the people over to their enemies.  Whenever they went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them, and they were defeated, and they were in great distress.

Then the Lord raised up judges, leaders, who saved them out of the hands of raiders, invaders, and attackers.  Yet the people would not listen to their leaders but prostituted themselves, sold themselves to other gods and other things and worshiped them.  Unlike their parents, they quickly turned from the ways in which their parents had walked, the ways of obedience to the Lord’s commands.  And so it went.

The Lord said, “Because this nation has violated the covenant, the promise, the commitment, the terms of the agreement that I laid down with their ancestors and has not listened to me, I will no longer drive out the nations Joshua left when he died.  I will use them, instead, to test Israel, to test my people, and to see whether they will keep the way of the Lord and walk in it as their forebearers did.

Message

This Is A Test

Rick Frost

Some stories.

Once upon a time, a long, long, long time ago, there was a famine in our land.  Our people got so hungry that they journeyed to a foreign land, to the land of Egypt, because the Egyptians wisely stored much grain in anticipation of hard times.

When we got there, we were well received.  There were not so many of us then.  Besides, we had good connections.  There was plenty to go around.  We settled down in the good land of Goshen.  Our people prospered.  Our children had children, and our children’s children had children.  So it went for 400 years.

Four centuries later, we numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  But the politics of Egypt took a downward turn for our people.  We were viewed as aliens who lived on the border and did not share the same values as the Egyptians.  We were also perceived as a threat, because we were so numerous.  There was a new Pharaoh named Rameses, who built a strong, central government, developed strong armies, constructed huge temples and buildings.  Slowly, very slowly over time, those in power turned the economic screws tighter and tighter.  Our men, as well as the Egyptian peasants, were gradually, slowly forced into day labor.  Daily life became drudgery.  Freedom slowly, slowly, gradually slipped away.  Human life became very, very cheap.  Our people slowly, slowly found themselves entrapped, intimidated, helpless.  We became, in fact, slaves, the servants of those in power.

But even as slaves, our masters feared us, for our numbers grew.  We were everywhere, so Pharaoh, in an attempt to turn things around, ordered that every baby boy born to our people be thrown into the Nile River.  The soldiers came.  The orders were carried out.  There was weeping and wailing in the streets night and day.  The promise of God – the promises God made to our ancestors – seemed so far away in some other time and place. 

Then, one woman was led to resist.  One woman said, “No way!”  One woman made a plan.  One woman slipped her newborn son into the river as Pharaoh commanded, but he was in a tar-covered basket.  Do you remember her name?  Does anybody remember her name?  Her name was Jochebed. 

On the day we celebrate our independence and our freedom – the day we give God thanks and praise for our freedom – let us remember Jochebed.

She is the mother of the one that God would soon raise up.  She is the mother of the man that was nurtured on his mother’s Hebrew faith.  She is the woman who sang the lullabies of our people to her baby boy.  She is the mother who raised up a caring, compassionate man, a man who drank in the powerful stories of God’s dealing with Abraham and Sarah, with Isaac and Rebekah, with Jacob and Rachael, and at the same time sharpened his mind on the mathematics and the astronomy of the pyramids.  The man that God would raise up and call to an impossible task.  The man God would use to liberate, to emancipate, to free our humiliated, exploited, enslaved people.  His name, of course, is Moses.

The man of God sent to free our people.

Well, most of us in this room know the rest of the story.  Pharaoh and the powers that be have to be confronted.  Faith wrestles with unfaith.  The oppressed fight with the oppressor.  The oppressor comes down hard on the oppressed.  Positions solidify.  Hearts are hardened.  Yet, the Creator of all that is somehow almost always seems to be on the side of liberation.  Have you noticed that? 

Liberation, freedom costs.  Most people do not realize the price tag of justice and freedom.  Without justice, there is no freedom.

So confrontation turns to conflict.  When political freedom draws near, you also know that other forms of captivity also drawer near.  Many, many people suffer, but according to the Bible, the finger of God is at work somehow, mysteriously.  In this case, the plague of death struck down the first-born of Egypt.  But somehow, mysteriously, unexplainably the plague of death passed over the homes of our people, because, according to the story, we obeyed God.  We anointed our doorposts with the sacrificial blood of the lamb.

The plague of death was the last straw.  It brought Pharaoh to his knees.  Moses, the man of God, led us out of Egypt, toward the hope, the light of freedom.  Freedom: costly freedom that our people have struggled with from that very day until this one for nearly 6,000 years.

Folks, the Bible says freedom is not a goal.  That’s not what we live for.  Freedom is a tool.  Freedom is a condition that God wills, so that people can acknowledge, can know, can obey, can serve the purposes of God in this world.  That’s why freedom exists biblically and theologically.  There is no other reason.  Unfortunately, as you know, freedom, once it is established, tends to degenerate.  It tends to be misused.  You see it.  I see it.  We read about it every day in ways that God never intended.  It says in Scripture, there were times when Israel had no king, no leader, and “everyone did as they saw fit.”

So the cycle continues, you see.  The people cry out.  God delivers.  But very, very quickly they fall into disobedience again.  Foreign corruption and oppression arrive.  Crisis exists.  Then the people cry out in distress to God for salvation.  According to Scripture, God hears those cries, recalls, remembers the covenant, the promises that God made with God’s people: “I will be your God.  You will be my people.”  According to Scripture, God starts all over again.  He raises up and deliverers when God’s people cry out.  It’s been going on since the beginning. 

It’s a pattern we see, even this day.  It’s a pattern that’s found in our text for today.  Joshua is a strong leader.  Joshua is devoted to God.  But Joshua is 110 years old.  He’s put in his time.  He dies.  Without Joshua’s strong faith and his Spirit-filled leadership, the people immediately fall into apostasy. 

I had to look that up.  What does “apostasy” mean?  It means to abandon.  It is when people renounce; it’s when people turn their backs on God and God’s ways.  According to Judges 2, the Lord is not happy with this.  The Lord is angered is by this and, “gave them over to the powers of their enemy.”

The Lord decided not to drive out his people’s enemies.  Indeed, God saw fit for all the peoples to mix and mingle together, all sorts of nations remaining in the land as “a test of my people Israel.”

Interesting question:  Does God test God’s people?  Does he?

You know… I’ve heard that phrase all my life.  Maybe you have, too.  Even though it never has made good sense to me, you still hear it from time to time.  People say, “Bad things happen to people, and God is testing you.”  People say, “God is testing me.”  People say, “God is testing us.”  You hear this.  It’s an idea that is rooted in the Book of Job in Hebrew Scripture.  It’s the notion that, somehow, Job’s folks and families get destroyed.  Everything Job has is taken from him, including his health, all as the result of some stupid wager between God and Satan.  It is the most preposterous thing in all of Scripture.  The point of the book, folks, the reason I believe it is in the Bible at all is there simply is no simple answer to the question of unexplained suffering.  If you understand the book in that light, it is a wonderful book to have in Scripture. 

But the plot that often gets picked up by people is that somehow God gives people bad things, tragic things to deal with as a way of testing them.  It’s an awful idea, certainly not to be taken seriously.  I hope you have discarded that idea.  If you have not, I encourage you to do so.  To think that somehow some dreaded disease, some car wreck, some tornado, some terrorists’ attack, or those kinds of things are somehow God’s way of testing God’s people.  It is ludicrous.

On the other hand, however, God has done something with us that might very well be construed, understood, interpreted as a test.  Do you know what it is? 

Could it be that God has called and led us to freedom as a test?  Could our freedom be a test?  Freedom that allows us the opportunity to live in relationship with God and God with us…  Freedom that allows us an opportunity to live well or to live poorly…  A freedom to pass the test of freedom…  Have you ever thought of that?  It is a test, quite frankly, folks, that we fail with regularity.  Why?  Is it because somehow we’re not patriotic enough?  Are we not vigilant enough?  Don’t we care enough? 

Turn to Judges 2 for another possible answer.  Judges 2 says, “The people worshiped the Lord all the days of Joshua and saw the great works the Lord had done in Israel.”  But after Joshua’s generation passed from the scene, “another generation grew up that did not know the Lord or the works that the Lord had done for Israel.”

So, whose fault is that?  Folks, in our legal system, it says that ignorance of the law is no excuse for committing a crime.  Ignorance:  it may not be an excuse, but it is a terrible, terrible shame to be ignorant.  When one never has been taught about God and about God’s ways, it is very, very hard to know God and God’s ways. 

What we have here, I’m suggesting, is a massive, massive failure of religious education.  I suggest that what we need in order to preserve the freedom that we so wonderfully prize, and that we love to sing about, that we are going to celebrate this weekend, is not more courses in American history.  We don’t need more legislation protecting our flag.  We do not need larger armies to root out terrorists and protect our interests abroad.  We do not need greater regulation of big business.  We don’t need more programs for the poor.  We don’t need to level out the playing field between the haves and the have-nots.  We don’t even need better schools with higher test scores. 

What we need is something you and I are not going to hear anywhere else but here today or this whole weekend.  What we need, if we want to protect and preserve our freedom, the freedom of our children, the freedom of our grandchildren, the freedom of those who are going to follow us is to help build a Sunday School.  Did you ever think of that?  That’s exactly what I said, and that’s exactly what I mean.

We need to attend.  We need to teach.  We need to fund.  We need to bring our children and our grandchildren, and most of all ourselves faithfully to Sunday School.  We desperately need religious education.  Find, implement, pay for state-of-the-art tools for effective Christian education for children and adults.  Wonderful!  Do it! 

Folks, I believe, people abandon, they turn their backs, they renounce God, and God’s Church, and God’s ways, and God’s community because they never ever established a strong relationship with God in the early stages.

In fishing terms, the hook was never set, because our best and our brightest are not teaching.  Don’t hear me wrong.  I love the ones who are teaching.  If you are a teacher, bless you.  But we have some really strong, capable teachers who are not teaching, because our people often think that other things are more important for their kids and for themselves than to be in a religious education setting.  Thus, you see, another whole generation is growing up which “never knew the Lord or the works the Lord has done for God’s people.”

Folks, they say we live in dangerous times.  Religions, values, cultures are literally clashing.  The greatest fear today is the rise of Fundamentalism.  It is the rise of extremism in all of the major faiths of the western world.  Now, one of the things we know is that we cannot keep extremism from happening.  There will always be, there have always been, and there are today those who are intolerant, those who are disrespectful, those who are destructive of those who are different.  That has been forever.  That’s not going to change.

But here is something that can change.  Here is something we can do.  We can pull out and lift up the best of our religious tradition and the best that is within us.  We can discover the areas of our faith that unite, that sustain, that create, that redeem, that provide understanding of who we are and whose we are.  We can learn.  We can embrace.  We can practice the elements, the values, the teachings, the truths that we respect, and that we honor that come right from our Christian faith.  And we can also do the very same thing with the traditions of Judaism and Islam, because there are some things, folks, upon which we can agree without diluting one bit our own witness and understanding.  But I’ll tell you what.  Those things are not going to be revealed to us if we and our children and our grandchildren remain ignorant. 

When was the last time you studied Judges 2?  Who can remember Jochebed? 

You want to protect your freedom?  You want to preserve it for the future?  Build a Sunday School.  Teach.  Attend.  Learn.  Fund.  “Train up a child in the way that he/she shall go,” says Proverbs 22, “and when they are old, they will not stray.”  One wonders if that was written for the Judges at one time, or possibly it’s a word for us in our day. 

Could it be that our freedom is a test?  “I will test my people,” says the Lord, “and see whether they will keep the covenant and the way of the Lord and walk in it as their forebearers did.”

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Liberating God, let the freedom that you grant us be the space that we need to realize the blessings of a free people.  Let us walk in the ways of generations of your faithful ones.  Never forgetting the answer to the test:  We are your people.  You chose us.  Let us always choose you!  Amen.