Lent 4, Year B
Joshua 5:9-12**
At the time, the airlines said too bad. Much later, they decided to issue credits for scheduled flights and, thus, I found myself trying to apply that credit this week to a future trip, only to get a run-around and to experience grief all over again. Grief for the trip that didn’t happen. Grief for all that has happened. Grief for the losses and the changes and the time and what cannot be undone.
When looking at the texts for this week, the easy sermon and, perhaps, the better sermon is with the Luke 15 text of the prodigal sons, but I could not stop thinking about the reading from Joshua. Here are God’s people, coming into the land they have been promised. They can now stop wandering. Their stillness, their new location, permits this generation - one removed from enslavement in Egypt - to observe the holy rituals of circumcision and celebrating the Passover.
These short verses are a reminder of how God provided for them and their parents in the wilderness. Today’s passage begins, though, with a curious phrase, “The Lord said to Joshua, “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.””
Surely the “disgrace of Egypt” belongs to Egypt. The shame of having enslaved other persons, the embarrassment of having those persons escape, the humiliation to one’s own personal gods and idols- this disgrace should be ascribed to the Pharaoh and his associates. Why would the people of Israel, the enslaved people, the now free people, have disgrace ascribed to them?
We are not only marked by the history of our actions, but also shaped and scarred by how others have acted toward us. Our ancestors experienced stresses and pains that continue to affect us through family stories. Even more deeply, things like enslavement, pandemics, and wars shape our epigenetics, the history and future of our genes, stirring deep responses within us that are beyond our understanding. In our own lives, this includes our past two years and all those years have entailed.
For us, the disgrace of COVID-19 is still with us, by which I mean the pain, the frustrations, the losses, and the changes. We must tell the truth about these things. We must acknowledge that in our congregation, things that took years to build- Sunday school programs, choir, youth group, WELCA- all of these and more have suffered and we cannot simply go back to what was. We have to grieve what has been lost and then, and only then, can we consider the richness of the place where we currently are.
The disgrace of Egypt lingered with the people of Israel in their fear, their questions about their ancestors, and their understanding of the nature of the Lord. After all, if divine intervention could bring them into freedom, why were they permitted to be enslaved at all? They can fully embrace the joy and possibility of the promised land only when the reproach and shame of the past is lifted.
The years of wandering contained stories of the people’s frustration, rebellion, and anger. The story of the golden calf, the complaining about God’s provision, even Moses striking the rock- all these stories are intertwined with the reality of having been led by God into freedom and a way of being. We have our own stories of frustration, rebellion, and anger.
Some of those stories have changed relationships between people in our congregation, in this town, and across the world. Just as in the story of the Israelites, our own stories feature hardened hearts on all sides. And, frankly, we do not know yet what our promised land will be. We know it is likely that this strain of coronavirus, with its variants, will likely be with us for some time to come. We may enter our promised future with yearly vaccines and advised precautions, as with most flu strains, or there may yet be more serious realities to come. We do not declare when we have arrived. God does.
This kind of burden, the disgrace of Egypt as well as the pain of COVID-19, does not fall away instantly. God’s provision for the people through their wilderness wandering removed the burden slowly. Through each bite of manna, God rebuilt trust with the people of Israel. Through each sip of clean water, the people of Israel perceived the power and mercy of the One in whom their hope was anchored.
The disgrace of Egypt defined them by pain and by the actions of others. The promise of Canaan, the promised land, redefined them as a people who had been led and fed by God. Thus, equipped by grace, they ate the produce of the land and feasted on the promise of tomorrow.
At some point in the future, the generations that follow us will see how we acted to the various realities we are currently experiencing- a pandemic, social shifts, international crises, changing weather patterns. They may well judge us, even though they will not be able to imagine what we have experienced. In our own little corner, we can tell our own version of that story
- how God provided for us through science, mail, social media, and video,
- how we were patient and faithful even when how we did church looked different,
- how we were willing to be uncomfortable for the sake and the health of others,
- how we took risks on new ways of doing things for the sake of the gospel of Christ in our midst and in the world.
Today is not yet the day when the complete pain of COVID-19 is rolled away from us. It remains, but bigger and greater is the God who remains with us, who is still making all things new, who is loving and merciful, who saves us through Christ. In this wandering, in this journey to a new way and time of being, God is with us. This is truth is our feast, in our present time and always. And it is enough.
**This sermon in no way deals with the complications of this text, including but not limited to - history of enslavement, the occupants of the land when the Israelites got there, or the violence of the rest of Joshua against those people.
Additionally this sermon only addresses COVID-19 and is not clearly speaking to any other situations of the past two years.
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