Joshua 24: 1-3a, 14-25 (links validated 10/2/23)

New Resources

  • Sermon Starters (Proper 27A)(2023)

    by Meg Jenista
    In this moment of US cultural history, it can be easy to “cheer” for national politics with the same enthusiasm as a sports fan dons their jersey to sit on the couch, eating snacks while yelling plays at the television set. In this frame of mind, the work of cheering on our political team is supplanted by a local commitment to “serve the Lord.” In the context of ancient Israel, there was no difference between serving God privately and serving God publicly. In fact, one couldn’t be said to be truly doing the former if not also engaging in the latter. As Dr. Robert Coote writes for the New Interpreter’s Commentary, “if we wish to reflect wisely on the meaning of loyalty in the Bible, we have no choice but to include the political dimension in our thinking.” This does not necessarily or most effectively mean national politics but, rather, every effort to love our neighbor in local action and policy. For example, Biblical loyalty and a commitment like Joshua’s (“as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord”) might look like efforts to fund after-school programming, ensure safe streets and safe policing in our neighborhoods. Rather than grabbing a handful of chips and shouting commentary at the TV news shows, this kind of effort gets us on our feet, in our sneakers, tagging in for a pick-up game, a PTA or neighborhood association meeting. By these local efforts we meet our neighbors in order to love them through friendship, advocacy and policy that echoes the promise of God’s people on the plains of Shechem, “We will serve the Lord!”
  • The Stewardship of Faithfulness

    by Jim McCrea
    A story came on the news about a Lear jet carrying champion golfer Payne Stewart and five other people which took off from Orlando, bound for Houston. Not long into that flight, something went wrong and the jet began drifting aimlessly across the sky before it finally ran out of fuel and crashed in a field in South Dakota — nearly 1,500 miles away from its take-off point and 1,000 miles away from its intended destination. All six people on board were killed. While that jet was still zigzagging its way across the sky, the various news outlets were all speculating about the cause of that random flight. At that time, we had a student pastor named Jim Dieters, who was a licensed pilot. He had flown a Lear jet before and he knew immediately what was happening. He suggested that the seal on the door was probably faulty, so that when the jet reached high altitude, the lack of pressure inside the plane caused the passengers to simply drift off to sleep — a sleep from which they never woke up. Lear jets are — or at least were — designed so that if there’s a problem, they will drift to the right and weave up and down in altitude to call attention to the fact that they’re in distress. That’s exactly what happened to Payne Stewart’s jet. It’s an automatic reaction that kicks in when the plane is no longer receiving the constant minute corrections of a skillful pilot...
  • Proper 27A (2023)

    by Baron Mullis
  • Make Your Choice

    by Gord Waldie
  • Proper 27A

    by Howard Wallace et al
  • All of Our Choices

    by Dorothy Sanders Wells
  • Proper 27A (2023)

    by Bryan Whitfield

Illustrated Resources from the Archives

  • Proper 27A (2017)

    by Doug Bratt
    When a local Christian school wanted to publicize its mission, some people wanted to refer to its commitment to help parents and churches carry out their covenant responsibilities. However, other members of the community rejected that idea because “covenant,” to them, referred to a despicable part of America’s racial history. According to the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston’s website, racially restrictive covenants were imposed in a deed on a property’s buyer. They prohibited the purchase, lease or even occupation of a piece of land by a specific group of people, usually African-Americans. Such covenants were enforced with the cooperation of real estate boards and neighborhood associations...
  • Whom You Gonna Serve?

    by Delmer Chilton
    When I was a student in the dvinity school at Duke University, there was a “shaggy dog” story going the rounds about a fraternity hazing prank. Seems the frat brothers kidnapped a pledge from his dorm, took him way out into the North Carolina countryside and put him out of the car with nothing on but a Duke Blue Devil mascot outfit. The young man trudged through the night, calculating how long it would take him to walk the 30 miles back to campus. After an hour or so, he saw some lights back in the woods, then he heard music and singing. It was a country church in the midst of a revival meeting. He thought to himself, “Church people are good people. Surely someone will give me a ride back to Duke.” So he walked across the parking lot and in the front door. The preacher stopped his preaching and stared. Everyone else turned to look at what the preacher was looking at, and then they stared too. Suddenly, the preacher dove out the window. The other folk began diving out windows too, until there was only one person left. She was too old and too frail to dive out the window, and the devil was standing between her and the church’s only door. She began to sidle down the aisle while talking in a soft voice, “Mr. Devil, my husband, bless his heart, was a deacon in this church for almost 40 years, one of my sons is a missionary, and my daughter is married to a pastor, and I was president of the Women’s Missionary Society for 20 years, but I just want you to know—I been on your side all along!”...
  • Preaching Helps (Proper 27A)(2008)

    by Scott Hoezee
    ("Joshua 24 and other similar Old Testament passages do not talk about hell exactly but they surely do talk about the fundamental idea behind the very idea of hell: namely, that God judges sin and doles out punishments for sins. The title of a 1997 article in Christianity Today asked the question 'Can We Be Good without Hell?'...")
  • Do I Choose or Am I Chosen?

    by Janet Hunt
    ("First a disclaimer: I find my home in that line of theological thought which insists that God chooses us long before we begin to give thought to choosing God. And yet. In both the words of Joshua today and in the words of Jesus in this week's Gospel, we are told it is ours to choose. And yet again, I have to say that as I look back over my life, it appears to me that a whole lot of the time the choice was pretty clear. As though it wasn't really mine to choose at all....")
  • Choose

    Art and Theology by Victoria Jones
    The American writer David Foster Wallace, who was not a Christian (that I’m aware of) but who had a spiritual sensibility, spoke incisively about this in his “This Is Water” commencement speech, delivered at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005. He said, In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. . . . Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on...

    “Gotta Serve Somebody” is the first song Bob Dylan released after his conversion to Christianity in the late seventies...

  • Choices

    by Anne Le Bas
    ("the fact is that all of us, whether we like it or not, find in the end that we have walked one path through life rather than another whether we chose that path consciously or not. We are guided by these values rather than those. We see the world through this framework rather than that. We travel with these companions rather than those.. As Bob Dylan perceptively sang, 'It may be the devil or it may be the Lord/ But you're gonna have to serve somebody.'...")
  • Self-Made or God-Made?

    by Anne Le Bas
    The term “self-made man” only entered the dictionary in 1832 – US senator Henry Clay seems to have coined it to describe those pioneering people who made new lives for themselves in the USA. They’d had to reinvent themselves as they’d colonised what was, for them, uncharted territory. Some had chosen to come. Others were forced from their old ways of life in Europe by persecution, pogroms or famine. It’s easy to see why they might have felt as if any success they’d had was down to them alone and to their determination and grit. No wonder the myth of the “self-made man” or “self-made woman” caught on so stronglyin the USA – it’s something that Donald Trump is noticeably playing into. But it is a myth. In reality, those pioneers were drawing on all sorts of support in order to survive...
  • Sermon Starters (Proper 27A)(2020)

    by Stan Mast
    Until Joshua forcefully called Israel away from their other gods, they may not have even been aware that they were trusting those gods. They looked like faithful covenant keepers to the casual observers, even to themselves. They had a hidden virus in their lives, a virus that could sicken and even kill them. But so many of them were asymptomatic. It took a prophet to diagnose them. Today, you are called to be that prophet for your congregation. What hidden gods have infected the faith of your good people. It will help if you do a self-diagnosis first. Joshua’s call to “the people of Israel” reminded me of “we the people” from America’s founding documents. And I wonder if “we the people” who are so accustomed to making our own laws as a matter of principle, if we independent individualistic people will be able to hear Joshua’s strong call to fear, serve, and obey the One True God. Many of our contemporaries will hear that as a call to patriarchal subservience that lessens us, rather than a loving call to a service that fulfills our true destiny.
  • Thanksgiving and Offering Our Lives

    by Jim McCrea
    •Multiple Academy Award winning actress Katharine Hepburn told a story about a time when she was a teenager and she was standing in line with her father to buy tickets for the circus. The family in front of them consisted of two parents and their eight children, all of whom were under the age of 12. She writes, “The way they were dressed, you could tell they didn’t have a lot of money, but their clothes were neat and clean. The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, animals, and all the acts they would be seeing that night. By their excitement you could sense they had never been to the circus before. It would be a highlight of their lives. “The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband’s hand, looking up at him as if to say, ‘You’re my knight in shining armor.’ He was smiling and enjoying seeing his family happy.” But when he heard the cost of the ten tickets, it was clear he couldn’t afford that. Hepburn adds, “How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn’t have enough money to take them to the circus? Seeing what was going on, my dad reached into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill, and then dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father bent down, picked up the $20 bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.’ “The man understood what was going on. He wasn’t begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking and embarrassing situation. He looked straight into my dad’s eyes, took my dad’s hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied: ‘Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.' “My father and I went back to our car and drove home. The $20 that my dad gave away is what we were going to buy our own tickets with. Although we didn’t get to see the circus that night, we both felt a joy inside us that was far greater than seeing the circus could ever provide. That day I learnt the value [of giving]. Hepburn ends her story by saying, “The importance of giving, blessing others can never be over emphasized because there’s always joy in giving. Learn to make someone happy by acts of giving.”...
  • Choose This Day

    by David Russell
    Philip Parham tells the story of a rich industrialist who was disturbed to find a fisherman sitting lazily beside his boat. “Why aren’t you out there fishing?” he asked. “Because I’ve caught enough fish for today.” “Why don’t you catch more fish than you need?” the rich man asked. ”What would I do with them?” “You could earn more money.” The rich man was impatient. “You could buy a bigger boat so you could go deeper and catch more fish. You could buy nylon nets and catch even more fish and make even more money. Soon you’d have a fleet of boats and be rich like me.” “The fisherman asked, “Then what would I do?” “You could sit down and enjoy life.” The fisherman said, “What do you think I’m doing now?”...
  • Choosing Every Day

    by Dave Russell
    I was at a training event a number of years ago with a guy named Ed White. He was a church consultant, happened to be a Presbyterian, and he told about a woman who worked in their Synod office. She was warm, engaging, a hard worker, a committed Christian. But she started missing work on Mondays. A pattern developed. She would call in sick on Monday. Tuesday she would come in and be in a bad mood, irritable. Wednesday she would be her happy self, and the same on Thursday and Friday. But Monday, she wouldn’t show up for work again and the pattern would repeat. People on the staff recognized that she had become a crack cocaine addict. They gave her a choice. She could go to Seaton House, a drug treatment center, or lose her job. So she went for treatment. The whole time she was in the treatment center, she could not see anyone from the outside. She was in a demanding program with 30 other young adults. When she was released, she cut off all relationships whatsoever with anyone who had been involved with drugs. She basically had two groups of people in her life: her church and Narcotics Anonymous...
  • Sermon Helps (Proper 27A)(2017)

    by Several Authors
    On January 25, 1978, the temperature in Columbus, Ohio, was in the 40s and it was sprinkling rain. The possibility of snow the next day was mentioned on the late news, but not with any real concern. Not until about 4 a.m. on the 26th did the barometric pressure drop to below 29 inches and the National Weather Service realize that something big and bad was about to happen. The air pressure drops that low only for hurricanes, and there was no time to warn anyone. We were all caught off-guard. The ensuing storm would be called by some the “White Hurricane” -- but its official name became the “Great Blizzard of 1978,” the worst in the history of the state of Ohio. Fifty-one people died in Ohio alone, thousands were without power, and the entire state became frozen in place for more than three days...
  • Sermon Illustrations (Proper 27A)(2017)

    by Several Authors
    When we know something is about to happen, we have a tendency to prepare for it. A U.S. Army officer was once asked about the contrast in his pupils during two different eras of teaching at the artillery training school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma (home of the Field Artillery). He noted that in 1958-60 the attitude was so lax that the instructors had a problem getting the men to stay awake to hear the lectures. During the 1965-67 classes, however, the men, hearing the same basic lectures, were alert and took tons of notes. What made the difference in the class of ’65? They knew that in less than six weeks they would be facing the enemy in Vietnam...
  • American Beauty

    Notes compiled by Jenee Woodard

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