1/21/68

Scripture: read Joshua 24: 14-25a

For generations, following the time of Jacob and of Joseph, the children of Israel had been slaves in Egypt. After Joseph’s time a new Pharaoh -- new ruler -- perceived that these descendants of Jacob - or Israel - were multiplying fast. It seemed to him a kind of population explosion. And the Pharaoh began to fear that the Israelites might become numerous enough to be a danger to the Egyptians. So he took measures to curb the growth of the Israelite population, and he saw to it that they were required to do very heavy work at very little pay. It was slavery, pure and simple.

But despite their suffering, the Israelites thrived. At long last, they were led out of their slavery by Moses. That is a long and thrilling story. For a long time they had no home land. They were nomadic wanderers in the wilderness. They moved from place to place wherever they could find food and water, grazing land for sheep and shelter for their families. They had to spend many years -- a couple of generations -- just learning to be free, responsible people who were no longer slaves. All the while they dreamed of a promised land, a country where they could be permanently at home; where they could be prosperous and proud --- a nation by themselves.

Their leader, Moses, died before they were ready to enter what they believed to be the land promised for them. So it was a younger man, Joshua, who led them into Canaan. The conquest did not happen all at once. They took it piece by piece, bit by bit. It was a mighty triumph for them; but it makes grisly reading when one tries to see it through the eyes of the losers who were killed or driven out of the place.

The Israelites thrived. They did make the land yield a good living to them. They prospered. In fact they had done so well that Joshua became worried ere he should die, that the people were getting “heady” and careless. They had been strongest, morally and socially and militarily, when they recognized that they were led by the God of their ancestors --- God of Abraham and Isaac --- of Jacob and Joseph and the others.

But now there was too much disposition for a lot of them to run off after neighboring deities --- gods of other tribes, or gods of their own imaginations. Joshua decided it was high time to call them all to a single loyalty to the One God of them all -- the Lord who had been their God, who had delivered them from slavery, who had provided for them in the wilderness and who had brought them into this fair land where they now lived.

So he had a meeting of all the leaders of al the tribes of Israel --- elders, judges, other officers --- and he did some strong talking. He reminded them whose they were. He was stern about the tendency to run off after other loyalties --- other gods and customs. And he thundered at them: “Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel.” He reminded them of all they had been through -- slavery, deliverance, conquest, the reward of prosperity in a land of responsible freedom. Then he laid it on the line in these words: “Choose this day whom you will serve.” ---- make up your mind about these gods you have been hearing about --- “but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” It is quite a stirring account there in the Old Testament book of Joshua, and it is interesting to re-read it.

Here was Joshua speaking to a nation of desert nomads who had thrust their way into the dazzling plenty of a promised land. They had been pretty tough --- having endured heat and thirst and hunger in the desert. Could they possibly stay strong --- rightly strong -- at withstanding the perils of prosperity? Would they truly remain the conquerors of the new land, or would the fertile yielding-of-the-land conquer them?

Perhaps we American understand some of this in terms of our own national experience. Many of us are the spiritual descendants of pioneers who came to this country as a kind of “promised land” - a land that was taken over from native tribesmen, a land where there would be freedom to worship as men felt guided by conscience; a land of freedom to build one’s own home and help to shape one’s own future; a land of freedom from conscription in a European army; a land full of hope and promise for those who settled here.

Historically speaking, we were only recently a frontier people, fighting wild animals and native Indians, blazing trails through wilderness, bridging rivers, taming wild lands and rivers and other resources. During much of that period in history, our hard frontiersmen lived in an economy of scarcity. The motto was often: “Use it up, make it do; wear it out.” But, by now, we have reaped so much of the promise in this country that hosts of us live in a land of plenty and pleasure. We can have what we want when we want it, and pay for it later. The question that faced Joshua’s people faces us. We conquered the frontier; now, will the comforts of a culture of plenty conquer us?

Surely prosperity and plenty do not exempt us from moral imperatives. We stand in great danger when we run off after other gods as life seems so easy. Prosperity and plenty probably make moral choices more difficult and more urgent than ever before. The prophetic word of Joshua is as much for us as it was for ancient Israelites: “Choose this day whom you will serve.”

Generally, we can say with other Christians and Hebrews: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Specifically, our choices are fraught with difficulty and filled with compromise. Consider the problem of the businessman who faces a declining market for the product he is selling. Until he can stimulate new sales or handle a product in greater demand, he feels forced to retrench. If he maintains his present payroll, his business will go deeper in the red, and may even fail. But if he discharges the last man that was hired, a young man with wife and family who has just purchased a house will be saddled with a burden that seems unfair. How does the Christian businessman make his choice?

Or consider the homeowner who lives in a community where open housing is a challenge. Perhaps he feels committed to the notion that justice is expressed in opportunity for any person of any creed or nationality or race to purchase a home where he can find and afford it. Suppose this homeowner is transferred by his company to another city, and he must sell his home. He would like to make his witness for justice by selling his house to someone of another race. He knows that most state laws now prevent people from refusing to sell to Negroes on racial grounds if they wish to buy. Perhaps he would like, even though no Negro buyer has applied, to go a second mile and find a Negro buyer among people hard pressed to get a decent location. But what of the neighbors? Would his decision of conscience impose on the neighbors consequences that he ought not to precipitate?

There are other areas of concern where we make our choices and compromises. Sometimes it helps to “give to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar, and to God the things that belong to God.” At any rate, we are still obliged to choose Whom we shall serve.

Before Joshua became leader, Moses had warned the Israelites against the promised seduction of the promised land. Moses had warned them, while still in the desert, “the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. And you shall eat and be full ....” [Deuteronomy 8: 7-10]. Would the stern necessities of moral choice be left behind in the wilderness along with goat-hair tents and discarded desert customs? Would the good life flow automatically from this good land to which the people were coming? Moses warned that tender temptations could undo a nation which had withstood violent assault.

We should know that Moses’ warning is to be trusted, and his concern was justified, for we are beginning to see that a full garage, a full pocketbook, and a full stomach can still add up to an empty life. Even before Joshua, it was Moses who warned: “Take heed lest ... when you have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God ...” [Deuteronomy 8: 11-14].

A nation may be born in hardship and hope and yet die in plenty. In youthful vigor and pioneering struggle, nations are self-denying and self-disciplined. In the ease of a luxurious old age they may become self-indulgent and soft. Without a continuing moral purpose, without self-denial and self-direction, especially in the midst of plenty, life can degenerate into futility and boredom and weakness.

“Choose this day Whom you will serve ..” We must choose, for we have but one life to live; and that a short one. We cannot go everywhere, cannot experience everything, though when surrounded by luxuries, we may be tempted to try everything that seems in sight. For example, we do not lack the possibility of adequate entertainments; so let us take entertainment as an example. I was born and growing into boyhood in the first decade of this century. My first thirteen years were lived on a South Dakota farm --- a pretty good farm, for my father was a very capable operator. But a lot of the conveniences which my children have known were not even dreamed of then. I did my evening reading by kerosene lamplight, and never lived with electric lighting until I was 12 years old. I warmed my feet by a hard coal base burner after the winter chill. News came to our home weekly with the village newspaper, and by way of monthly magazines. I remember the excitement over the first rural telephone. It was hard for us kids to contain ourselves when the first automobile appeared in the neighborhood. The day when my father purchased, and started to drive, his first automobile was a long leap ahead despite the constant mechanical exasperation of operating the thing.

I knew the wonder of the first motion picture shown, I think, at a social meeting in the village church. Theater shows came later, and I saw them only as a rarity. An occasional neighborhood social affair at the township school, or at the church; and perhaps some neighborly visiting on Sunday afternoon; was about the extent of our entertainment, and we savored the occasions long after.

Now I live in a city with several theaters. Travel by air gets faster and faster, making passenger trains and ocean liners gradually obsolete, just as the auto did away with the horse and buggy. Electricity not only lights our home and city day and night, but provides more comforts and necessities than I can know or record. First the radio and then television, brings news to me and to anyone else who listens or watches almost at the time of a given happening. I have a choice of shows to be seen, many radio stations to tune in, several television channels to view. It is impossible to attend, hear, see them all. If I try to take it all in, I remember nothing for long, experience nothing deeply, value nothing highly.

Life presses upon us with a multitude of opportunities and demands. We have no alternative but to choose, for we cannot experience everything, go everywhere, try every fad.

And, the good life is not just put on like a suit of clothes, or held in one’s hand like money. It is lived from the inside out -- not soaked in from the outside. The good life requires choice, self-direction, self-acting -- not merely being acted upon; not just the enjoyment of thrills, but the development of skills; not being served, but serving; not remaining an animal with mouth and stomach, but constantly growing into a person. We must choose. We do not take on life like a cargo. Abundant life does not come by impulse buying at the supermarket. It comes by decision and discipline, by a student’s understanding of history; by a scientist’s precision in the laboratory; by a teacher’s study of his students; by a merchant’s understanding of customer needs.

In our light moments, we say “enjoy yourself.” But enjoyment and pleasure, in any genuine sense, are almost always the by-products of doing something significant and worthwhile. It was the Master Teacher who counseled “deny yourself” or “discipline yourself” rather than just “enjoy yourself.”

It is a paradox, for the person who sets out to enjoy himself soon has little self left to enjoy. But the one who sets out to discipline and direct himself, in order to achieve some worthy goal, develops more of the inner reality of selfhood. We have to choose because human life is purposeful; it must grown from the inside; it can not be put on from the outside.

There is a further reason for the urgency of choice. We have, of course, only one brief life to live. Yet we have almost unlimited possibilities within us. In a time of general education and advanced technology, there are multiple careers open to every young person. A given youth can become an accountant, a physician, a teacher, a farmer, an engineer, a politician, a lawyer, a florist, a mechanic, a physicist, a minister, a merchant, a sales person --- any one of perhaps 20,000 different vocations. If he had thousands of lifetimes, he might become all of those occupations. But he can not be all of them at once, nor in one lifetime.

He must choose which he will try to be in order to fulfill himself. By mastering one vocation, he will fulfill himself and, quite literally, answer God’s call for his individual life. There is almost no limit to the careers from which we may choose. But if there is any life worth living in the last third of this 20th century, we must choose, and we must accept the disciplines of our choice.

“Choose this day whom you will serve -- but as for me, and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Consider how far we have come to this point. Why is choice so imperative in a land of plenty? Because we cannot go everywhere. We cannot experience everything. Because our decisions make a self, and only growing as a person can we find life worth living. Because our rich vocational possibilities compel us to decide what work we will do in the world. We cannot be everybody. And -- one more consideration -- we must choose because, if we do not do so, our choices will be made for us! Then we will not move ahead under our own power, but we shall be shoved and dragged, or led by the nose --- the victims of the pressures, the anxieties, and the fads around us --- slaves of everything else except our own decisions.

Our service, under God, extends beyond our selves farther than some of us suppose. It extends through our church-engendered conviction to our economic life, our political choices, our concern for all the others who must make their choices. We constantly remind ourselves that many of us are advantaged in a community where there are many disadvantaged; we live in a nation where poverty can erupt in some kind of revolution; we live in a world where ignorance and lack far outstrips our kind of opportunity. We are a part of a “have” nation among nations that have not. We can not and should not stay insulated from the world’s needs.

Our choice is far more than providing an emergency blanket. We must recognize the longing and determination of other peoples to be free --- and not just “let them” but help them. Many of the emerging new nations are not al all equipped for the democratic kind of liberty we enjoy and use. We must be willing to assist them in great programs of education, of economic development, of technological advance, of self-respecting effort --- not to direct them, but to assist them as needed.

We have laid hold of the resources of faith and vision in the revolution that brought about our own national entity. Surely we must choose to share such faith and vision in offering a substantial helping hand to others.

If the souls of people stand equal before God, can we be content to see men hungry, to see people starve, to witness their struggles with ill health, while we have the means to help? We do not betray our faith when we do help.

The Christ who bade his followers to feed the hungry and heal the sick, and took his parables from the homely round of daily work, gave his blessing to the use of material resources and the spirit of sharing. His blessing and his demand does not fade because material things are more abundant among us now.

Ultimately, each of us has to ask of himself what we want to become, what we want to accomplish, what commanding life purpose we wish to follow, what good we will serve. Only so can we move through the world under our own power, and not be dragged or shoved into nothingness.

In a land of plenty and prosperity only you can answer for yourself. Of all your wants and desires, you need nothing more than you need to choose what god you will serve. May it be, for all of you, for each of us, our true and rightful Lord whose will is our peace, and in whose service is perfect freedom.

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, January 21, 1968.

Also at Wood County Infirmary, February 7, 1968.

And at Waioli Hui’ia Church, February 13, 1972.