Preached · May 26, 2013
Text · Joshua 4; Joshua 4.1-9
Introduction
If you are visiting with us this morning, we're so grateful that you're here. I know it's less than ideal conditions, but we're going to talk about some of that today. Christians thrive in less than ideal conditions; I think that's what God has called us to do. So what better time and place and temperature to talk about these things.
If you have a Bible, or an iPad, or a phone, or something that has the Bible on it, I invite you to turn to the book of Joshua chapter 4. This morning I got up early, got my coffee, and made a beautiful PowerPoint for you all — and then I left it at home. So for those of you expecting the words to be on the screen, expect to be just as disappointed as I am, okay?
Joshua chapter 4, verses 1 through 9. I've got a paraphrase here based off the NIV, so I'll be bouncing around just a tiny bit, but you should be able to follow along pretty well.
When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan River, Joshua called together twelve men from each tribe of Israel. And Joshua said to them, "Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan River. Each of you is to take up a stone on your shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?' tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever." So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones and carried them over with them to their camp, where they put them down. And Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in the middle of the Jordan, at the spot where the priests who carried the ark of the covenant had stood. And there they are to this day.
What's Going On Here?
So what's going on here? You may be familiar with this people called the Israelites. They are the people fathered by Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. They had been sent to Egypt and had been slaves for 430 years. Then a leader was chosen by God named Moses. And Moses said to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, "Let God's people go." And after a whole thing about ten plagues and miracles of God and God shaming the gods of Egypt, Pharaoh finally let the people of God, the Israelites, out of Egypt. Then they traveled through the desert and were led through the Red Sea miraculously by God.
But that generation of Israelites rebelled. So God said, "You don't get to go immediately to the Promised Land; you have to wander for forty years." And where we are in Joshua chapter 4, we're in the new generation of Israelites. The forty years have passed, and now they are ready to enter the Promised Land — the land of Canaan, Palestine, of Israel. Moses has died, and now Joshua is the new leader, chosen by God, not just to lead through the wilderness but to lead the people into battle and into their new Promised Land.
So they get to the edge of this Promised Land, and there's a big river in the way. We're not talking about a creek or a stream — it's a wide and deep river. Once they get there, the Israelites begin to say, "Hey, who forgot the boats?" — which I hope none of you said this weekend as you traveled to Okoboji. Not that boats would have done you a whole lot of good, unless you were traveling through the cornfields filled with water. Sorry, farmers, about that; I have no control.
They get to the Jordan River, and the Israelites say, "Hey, who forgot the boats? How are we supposed to get from here to there? We are not a seafaring people; we never built a boat in our lives. How are we supposed to do this?" So Joshua goes before the Lord and says, "What are we supposed to do?" And the Lord says, "You guys have this ark." The ark was basically a very, very fancy box laden with gold, and inside were the two tablets on which the Ten Commandments were held. If anybody's seen the Charlton Heston Ten Commandments, you can picture this golden box with angels on top and two poles they used to carry it.
God says, "Take this ark, put some priests on there to carry it, and have them step their feet into the Jordan River." And then what? Joshua tells the priests to do this. They obey. They step their feet into the Jordan River, and it parts, kind of like the Red Sea. God is reminding his people what he has done before in the past, and in fact is doing it again. The priests carry the ark of the covenant — the container of the Torah, the law of God — into the river, the river parts, and Israel, the nation, hundreds and thousands of people, go across dry land, through this river and into the Promised Land.
The priests stay in the middle. They go into the middle of the river, hold the ark of the covenant, and all the Israelites go past them. And then the priests are there in the middle, kind of thinking, "What happens now? What do we do? What happens next?" — thinking they might have gotten forgotten or left behind. But God has a plan. God tells Joshua, "This is what I want you to do. Take twelve stones, because there are twelve tribes of Israel. Gather them." And God tells the people to put them on their shoulders, so we get the impression they're big stones — not pebbles, not little landscaping rocks, but hefty boulders. Take them to the middle of the river, where the priests are standing with the ark of the covenant, and place them there, as a reminder of what God has done. And then, finally, the priests get to go across the river.
And God gives the reason for this. He says, "So that when your children ask, 'What are they there for?' you can respond, 'Remember when...' or, generations later, 'Let me tell you a story my parents told me.'"
Remember / Do Not Forget
Now, this theme of remembering, of not forgetting, is a prominent theme throughout all of Scripture, and it shows up particularly in the book of Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy 8:2 — "You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years." Deuteronomy 4:9 — "Keep your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen." Deuteronomy 8:18 — "You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who is giving you power." Deuteronomy 6 — "Watch yourself, that you do not forget the Lord who brought you from the land of Egypt." Chapter 15 — "You shall remember that you were a slave, and the Lord your God redeemed you." Deuteronomy 8 — "Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments." Chapter 8, again — "If you ever forget the Lord your God, you will surely perish."
You get the impression that God might think we're a forgetful people. And the fact of the matter is, we are.
Why We Need Memorials
So I did a little research on how memory works. As human beings are dying off at older and older ages, we're discovering more and more issues with brains and memory loss — amnesia, dementia, Alzheimer's. There's been a lot of research, especially in the last ten or twenty years, about how memory works and why memories fade. Why is it that a three-year-old can remember something that happened when they were two, but a five-year-old can't remember something that happened when they were three?
So, a little research. Memories get locked away in something called the gray matter of your brain — the stuff we picture when we picture brains, the wrinkles, the goo inside your head. They're accessed by neural pathways, axons, what's called white matter. Gray matter shrinks as we get older; we kind of physically lose memories, the stuff that holds our memories. But what scientists are discovering is that that is not the primary cause of memory loss. It's actually the white matter, the axons, the stuff that goes and gets the memories, that disintegrates as you age. It loses its physicality; it just goes away.
So this means our memories are locked away in our gray matter. They're there — those keys you can't remember where you put; it's in your brain. But the axons, the white matter, the stuff that goes and gets that memory — that's what's disintegrating, that's what's dying away as we speak, if that's not depressing enough for you. It's not like you've forgotten the password to your favorite website; it's like you can't even remember where that website is anymore. It's not like you forgot the key to your house; it's like you don't even remember where the house is. This is how memory works. It's thoroughly depressing.
But slightly interesting, too — to give us a little bit of hope: what that means is that memories locked away in our gray matter never left in the first place, so if we can rebuild the white matter, the stuff that goes and gets the memories, we can get those memories back. So there's hope. That has nothing to do with today's sermon; I just thought I wouldn't leave you completely depressed.
This is what scientists are discovering about memory: those axons, that white matter that disintegrates as we get older — or as we do too many drugs or alcohol, or as we headbang at too many concerts — that stuff can be jarred back into place, back into doing its job, with our senses. Have you ever walked into a school, gotten a smell, and all of a sudden you were brought instantly back to what it was like to be a fourth grader? Or been away from your hometown, gone back, walked into your favorite grocery store, and been brought instantly back to what it was like to buy groceries in that store? Or been flipping through pictures, seen a picture of an object, a person, a thing you hadn't thought about in years, and been brought instantly back to that relationship, that vacation, that trip? Those senses — the visualization, the hearing, the seeing, the touching, the feeling, the tasting — jar that white matter back into place to access the gray matter, where your memories are locked away.
And so why does God ask the Israelites — and, I would argue, ask us today — to build memorials? Because we need all the help we can get. We need these physical, tactile reminders of what God has done, of who God is, of his saving acts in history, or else our amnesia kicks in too quickly. I had a story about an example of forgetting something, but I don't remember it anymore.
Worship as an Act of Memory
Worship, I believe, is an act of memory. Remember in high school or middle school, you had different teachers, you'd go to different rooms, and you had all these different topics — math, science, history, reading. They were all good topics in and of themselves (some of you may argue with that), good things you probably should be learning. But there never seemed to be any interconnectedness between the topics. You'd learn about some scientist in science class and what he discovered about bacteria; but in history class you'd be talking about the Revolutionary War; and in reading class you'd be reading a story about World War II; and in math class you're learning not about the trigonometry required to fire a missile into another person's territory, but something completely unrelated.
The reason we feel this confusion about all these related topics that nobody bothered to connect together is that there's no perspective. They're not situated in any particular instance or story or history. And in order for things to make sense in our minds, we need situatedness — a place to stand in which all these topics can make sense together. We need the math and the science and the reading and the history to have some reason to interconnect, to be together.
And what I would argue worship should be doing in our lives — in our Sunday-morning lives and in our Monday-through-Saturday lives — is giving us a perspective, a situatedness in which all of life begins to make sense, where all these seemingly disparate parts of our life begin to cohere into a meaningful narrative written and driven by God.
When worship has no history, three things happen. One: worship becomes small. Without history, without perspective, worship becomes insignificant. There's no largeness to it, no greatness. Without history, it's just the most recent thing we're worshiping about. Two: when worship has no history, it becomes solely experience-based. It's based only on my own experience. But my experience, in the grand scheme of things, is minute. Of the seven billion people alive now, and the 107 billion people who have ever lived — there's this fact that goes around the internet that we, the people alive now, are 75% of the people who have ever existed, which is just not true. There are seven billion of us now — these are massive numbers that are hard to wrap our minds around — out of 107 billion people who have ever lived, and that's a conservative estimate. So when my worship, my relationship with God, becomes stuck in my own experience, and that's it, I'm missing out on 107 billion other experiences and histories of how God has moved and acted in other people's lives. And so, the obvious conclusion: three, when worship loses its history, it becomes individualistic.
But biblical worship is never just about me and my worship. It's never just supposed to be me and Jesus. Instead, biblical and ancient worship is always about remembering all of God's saving acts in history with his people, with the community he has created.
Anamnesis: Memory That Takes Action
So how do we ensure that our worship is historic, that it remembers? Well, in the Greek — I just finished a full year of Greek in grad school and did my final on Friday, so you get to hear me unload my Greek on you, because I'm paying good money for it and I have to use it somewhere — in the Greek, "to remember" is the verb anamnesis, which is where we get the word "amnesia." And this verb is more than just the cognitive act of remembering, of listing events in our minds. It has the force of making present, of making alive, of making real.
And this makes sense to us. When we remember someone's birthday, or an anniversary, or even a death, we typically don't do it just by saying, "Hey, I remember today's our anniversary," and that's it. We don't just say it and expect that's an effective way to remember something. We commemorate. We purchase gifts, we go out on experiences and dinners, we buy flowers, we lay flowers at a grave or a tomb. We actually take action in our memories. If you didn't, your children would be disappointed by birthdays, your spouses would be angry about anniversaries, and your families would be upset about how you never remembered someone's death. Memory is an action.
So when I say worship needs to be about remembering, it's not just the cognitive act of listing events in our minds. It's not just a history exam of, "In 536 B.C., Israel was exiled to Babylon, da, da, da." Instead, remembering — anamnesis — is about taking action. There are three main ways we do this today: preaching, creeds, and songs.
Preaching
In our preaching, we are declaring what God has done. Preaching is an act of searching Scripture, observing Scripture, and seeing that God has acted in this such way in history. He has loved his people like this. He has saved them in this way. He has done the unthinkable by sending his Son to a cross. He has done the miraculous by having that Son be resurrected and bringing new life. Preaching is a declaration of the goodness — and the action of the goodness — of God.
But preaching cannot just be me spewing information at you. If that's all it is, then we all might as well be in college or school or reading books. Something else happens in this preaching environment: there's a call to action. There's a call for us to be changed, to be moved — to behave one way when we came and to behave a new and God-driven way when we leave. Take, for example, the book of Deuteronomy. All its chapters are one large sermon, Moses reminding the people of Israel, "Look at what God has done for you." And the conclusion of Deuteronomy is: then choose life. Make this decision to live in this way. So that's preaching.
Creeds
The second way we remember, that we reenact, is our creeds. Creeds are our stated beliefs that necessitate action. Creeds are the things we believe that therefore cause us to act in new and beautiful ways. Creeds are more than just intellectual assent to a set list of propositions. When we declare, "We believe in God the Father, we believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in the Holy Spirit," we are doing more than just droning on about facts with a capital F, or truths with a capital T. When we say, "Your kingdom come, thy will be done," we aren't just praying that hopefully someone else will go out there and do God's will. Rather, we are praying that we become the agents of God's will on this planet — that we are the ones who enable God's kingdom to come.
When we take action on our remembering, it actually changes us. And change is good, because if we kept going on in the same way, we wouldn't move forward. For example, my wife and I just moved from a house we were renting to a house we bought. We are now officially homeowners, which is fun. We got to paint yesterday. We've never painted the colors we necessarily chose, so we have to check ourselves to make sure we don't paint everything in the boldest, brightest possible colors ever. If we ever invite you over and it looks like a Mexican holiday, just accept it — it's just who we are.
But the thing is, we just did this move eight days ago, and already, two times, I've found myself driving to my old home, the place we rented. I get done at the grocery store, and then my wheel just kind of goes this way instead of that. This is because my creed — "I live on Jackson Avenue" — my old creed has determined my actions. I drive this way. But now I am a person of a new creed: "I live on 23rd Street." Now I have to train myself; we actually have to take action to drive this way. Our creeds necessitate action, and our actions change us. And if they don't, then we're still going to the wrong place.
Songs
So we have preaching, we have creeds, and we also have our songs. Songs are lyrics and rhythms that reflect lives and reality. If the words we sing take no meaning in the way we live our lives, then the words we sing have no meaning at all. When we sing, "Turn your ear to heaven," but then turn our ears to the hype and propaganda of a world gone wrong, do our words still have meaning? When we sing that our God is our tower and refuge and strength, but then, at the first signs of trouble, find our refuge in the bottle or in our wallets or in the arms of another, do our words still have meaning? When we leave this place, hearing the good news of what God has done, do we remember? Do we take twelve stones and place them at the river God has just opened right for us? Or do we let our pride and our cynicism and our self-centeredness take over instead?
Three Ways to Remember This Week
So God calls us to remember. Our worship is an act of remembering — but not just a cognitive kind of thing; a remembering that takes action: preaching that calls to change, creeds that lead to actions, songs that lead to changed lives. So let's give some examples — three ways I think we can try to do this, even this week: speak, create, and write.
Number one: all of us have a story — a story about how we came to God, or, if we came to Christ at a young age, about how God has drawn us closer to him. My challenge for you this week would be to tell someone that story, maybe over lunch this morning or dinner sometime this week. How did you come to salvation? Talk about your emotions and feelings and the circumstances going on in your life. Remember where God has brought you from and is taking you to, and tell that story.
Secondly, think about the different mementos in your life — scrapbooks and airplane tickets and photos and souvenirs and tokens from events long gone. Do you have any of those from any spiritual events of your life? Do you have any physical reminders of your baptism, your rebellion against God and how he drew you back to him, or a time of great growth, of great pain but amazing comfort? Many of us don't even think to make "souvenirs" of these kinds of things. But why not? Why not make a physical reminder? Why not do the modern-day version of twelve stones in the river? We all forget too easily our own spiritual journeys. Why not make a reminder?
And thirdly, write. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of journaling. We all kind of roll our eyes at the idea of journaling, of taking the time to actually write down our lives. I started a journal when I was in second grade. If you know my story at all, I had just been put in the foster system and moved away from my biological mom and put into the house of my aunt and uncle. I journaled from second grade all the way through high school, then got kind of intermittent through college, and then I've tried to pick it up again. And you would not believe the kind of laughter and self-revelation you get when you read those old journals — as a seven-year-old, as an eighteen-year-old. How often you get to say to yourself, "How stupid was I?" And how often you get to say, "God, you've brought me through so much. God, if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here."
Conclusion
And so when we tell our stories, when we take our twelve stones, when we write down our journey, we get to remember. And memory leads to action. The fact of the matter is, God has moved in history, bringing salvation to each and every one of us. And because of our collective amnesia, our God has called us to remember — not in a vague, ethereal kind of way, but in a way that takes action, that's built out of rock, that will stand for days and years to come. We should be building memorials, so that when our children or our friends ask, "What do these stones mean?" we can boldly proclaim the God who acts on our behalf.
So, my friends, my brothers and sisters: when we sing our last song, when we walk out of these doors, how will we remember God this week and in the weeks to come? Will we just move through a parted Jordan River and then move forward and forget? Or will we stop, take a beat, and build a memorial — tell a story, write it down — that will point us to the God of ages, the Ancient of Days, the one who has acted in the past, who is living within us now, and who will one day soon bring the whole of creation under his glorious and unending reign? Which will you choose?
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
