Sermon: Forsaking All Others

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25

Forsaking All Others

James Sledge                                                                                       November 9, 2014

Choose this day whom you will serve… but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord, (Yahweh). So says Joshua in one of those signature lines from the Bible. Of course there are other options. Joshua even mentions a few: the gods their ancestors served back in Egypt or in the wilderness, or perhaps the gods of the people in the land where they now live.

Bob Dylan once put is slightly differently in song called “Gotta Serve Somebody.

You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed

You’re gonna have to serve somebody

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

Choose this day whom you will serve is part of something called a covenant renewal ceremony. God had made a covenant with the people of Israel, and Joshua takes them through its history and what that means. Then, in something akin to the renewal of marriage vows, the people once more state their loyalty and fidelity to the God known as Yahweh, to God and God alone. In fact, they could well have used a line from the old, traditional wedding liturgy, “And forsaking all others, be faithful only to you…"

We have a covenant renewal ceremony in our worship today. We have one any time someone joins the church or is baptized, and it has its versions of Choose this day whom you will serve, put away the foreign gods that are among you, and “forsaking all others.”

Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world?

Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love?

Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love?

Choose this day whom you will serve. Forsaking all others, be faithful only to Christ. Put away the foreign gods that are among you. Of course that last one doesn’t really connect with us. Foreign gods, the god our ancestors served beyond the river or back in Egypt. What does any of that have to do with us and our lives?

We do not live in a world inhabited by a myriad of gods. As a general rule, we are not prone to grabbing an idol and making an offering to a weather god when we plant a garden or a fertility god when we’re trying to have children or a god of healing when we are ill. We may pray to God about all these things, but most of us have a very short list of gods from which to choose.

But if we are not tempted by a great cloud of deities, each luring us with his or her own goodies and promises, we nonetheless seem no better than the ancient Israelites at keeping covenant with Yahweh. We find all manner of other things to give ourselves to, occupy our time and attention, and to serve. We may not call them gods, but there is much that keeps us from living with Jesus as Lord, obeying his teachings, and being his faithful disciples

For that matter, we’re not always all that faithful in our other covenants. The divorce rate in our day makes that painfully obvious, but married couples can break covenant without divorcing or even having an affair. They can give their attentions and energies and dedication to other things and activities and people. Couples can and do remain in marriages where there is only a shell of the relationship they once  pledged themselves to so sincerely.

Turns out that covenant relationships require a fair amount of work. When the marriage vows are said, the work is just beginning, work that requires each to willingly extend grace and forgiveness, that requires a willingness to put the other’s needs ahead of one’s own. Successful marriages figure this out to some degree, but I’m not sure we always recognize this in our covenant relationship with God. God can seem so remote at times that it is easy to drift away, to forget the covenant made at baptism, to forget the faith awakening we once had that made us want to follow Jesus in the first place.

We’re in good company. The people of Israel forgot all down through their history. The call to put away their foreign gods, to set aside those things that come between them and Yahweh, echoes over and over in Israel’s story. In the New Testament, that call becomes, “Repent,” with much the same meaning. It is a call to turn, to put aside the things that draw us away from God and God’s ways, to forsake all others and re-embrace our covenant relationship with God, that covenant that we rehearse once more today.

And fortunately, God’s desire for loving relationship with us is even greater than our tendency to go our own way and break covenant. Despite the foolishness we often display, despite all those things we give ourselves to thinking they will make us more alive, God keeps seeking us. The cross is the supreme example, the remarkable and costly embodiment of just how far God goes to woo us back.

And so, in the certainty that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, we come once more to remember and renew the covenant. We renew our vows and, forsaking all others, we begin once more.