Sermon 9/27/2026
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Threats and Promises
If Dr. Jathanna confessed to you on Tuesday that he drew on sermon material he’s already wrestled with, I have perhaps a twin confession for you: I’ve been preaching sermons for a few decades now, but I have never preached a sermon focused on the book of Joshua. I looked through my sermon archives to be sure. The closest I ever came was when I was preaching a sermon series based on one of (now Senator-elect) Adam Hamilton’s books, using his scripture selections, and I spent about a paragraph of a sermon mostly about Exodus mentioning the beginning of Joshua. Otherwise, I have skipped it whenever it appeared as a lectionary option, choosing another of the texts instead, and have never included it in any non-lectionary series I was doing. The lectionary, to be fair though, seems as prone to “skip” Joshua as I am. Although Joshua is a decently-sized book of the Bible, the lectionary only includes a few selections from Joshua. And they’re pretty selective selections. That is, we get some selections from the beginning of the book, and the end of the book - but the middle of the book, which is full of not just God-sanctioned but God-directed death and destruction, never appears in a set of readings for a Sunday in the three year cycle. The standard lectionary, it seems, does not want to deal with the book of Joshua.
And neither do I. I can’t really call my inattention to Joshua a careless oversight: it is not an accident I’ve never preached from Joshua. Rather, it is an apathy at least, and antipathy more accurately that I feel for this book that focuses mostly on the utter destruction of those unfortunate enough to be standing in the way of God’s people entering the so-called Promised Land. Here’s a characteristic example from the middle of Joshua: 6:17 [Joshua said] “The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction.” 21“Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” “The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand—all the people of Ai (Ay-ee). And again: 26 For Joshua did not draw back his hand with which he stretched out the sword until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai … 28 So Joshua burned Ai and made it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.” What, exactly, does one preach about that? Some of the best preaching advice I’ve received is to keep asking yourself, “what’s the good news in this text?” It’s advice that’s served me well. But what if there is no good news to be found in a text?
Still, today we’ve got an “easy” text from the end of Joshua, one best known for the second half of verse 15, which you might find on any number of decorative wall hangings, “But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” That, at least, will preach, right? As long as we don’t think too much about the context of why Joshua is making this declaration, can’t we pull out some sort of message about allegiance, and being on God’s side, and godly families?
Ah, but alas, I have the voice of our own Dr. Filler in the back of my mind, talking about her preference for a plain sense reading of the scripture. In her article "Difficult Jewish Texts and Contemporary Political Crisis,” she writes,
I propose that the preference for textual ease, as strategically comprehensible as it certainly is, might encourage a communal unwillingness to confront and engage the most difficult questions outside the text as well. An insistence on interpretive honesty, even, or especially, of “difficult” texts, and a healthy skepticism of hermeneutical facility may indeed allow fewer invocations of selective Jewish sources in the public square … To acknowledge the disastrous depth and breadth of political injustice, and the difficulty (even perhaps impossibility) of complete repair requires a thoroughgoing commitment to collective interpretive honesty all the way down. (emphasis mine. Filler, Emily. 2023. "Difficult Jewish Texts and Contemporary Political Crisis" Religions 14, no. 5: 652. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14050652)
Interpretive honestly. I’m afraid that leaves cute Joshua wall hangings out.
What does it leave in? The rest of our text from Joshua reveals that Joshua - a military leader at the end of battle, whose people are about to enjoy the fruits of their labor - Joshua is also a persuasive speaker, using this victory speech to offer the people a blend of threats and promises as they prepare for their new life as settlers in the the land God “gave” them. As with the Exodus text that Dr. Jathanna preached on similar themes on Tuesday, Joshua makes clear that there is no room, no tolerance for the gods of Egypt, the gods from beyond the River, the gods of the defeated enemies. You can only serve one set of gods, and Joshua chooses to stick with the God that brought him victory. The people, of course, insist that they too want to serve only the God who brought them up from Egypt and drove out all the people who were already living in their new home. But Joshua says he’s not so sure he can trust their words. “No, you can’t serve God,” he says. “Don’t forget: God is really jealous. And even though God has done good things for you, if you screw up - God will consume you - harm you.” And the people have no doubt of that - they’ve just lived through it! Of course, then, they insist that they really, really want to serve God. Joshua says they’ll be held accountable - witness against themselves, since they’ve chosen God.” “We’re witnesses, they agree.” And so Joshua and the people covenant together.
What do we do with this threat-breathing, people-annihilating God? Do we want to serve this God? Some people certainly do: I think about Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and his Crusades-inspired tattoos, including the phrase “God Will It” in Latin, which was a battle cry for “Christian” knights. More recently, the slogan has been adopted by anti-Islamic and White Christian nationalist groups. I have almost nothing complimentary to say about Hegseth - but he isn’t making something out of nothing in the Bible to find support for his warmongering theology. And if others embrace narratives like Joshua, we certainly cannot just pretend it doesn’t exist.
And yet, maybe one of the most fascinating things about the book of Joshua is that the events it describes - it seems they didn’t exist - they didn’t happen. Many scholars argue that there’s no physical evidence in most of the places named in the text of the kind of destruction the book of Joshua describes. Israelites, they argue, slowly became differentiated in their culture and their religion from their counterparts in the region, emerging over time, rather than abruptly. Distinctions, cultures, and religious practices were shaped over generations, not through violent conquest. No total annihilation directed by God! What a relief! Right???
But where does Joshua come from, then? What purpose does this violent story with a demanding, threatening God serve? Joshua was likely written centuries after the time period it describes, along with some of the other “history” books of the Bible. They’re books that are attempting to carve out a distinct identity for the Israelites - distinct from all the Others around them. And Joshua is a kind of nationalist propaganda story, one that casts Israel as mighty, victorious, faithful, willing, in turn, to follow a demanding but faithful God, no matter the cost, no matter the task. It is meant to reinforce a sense of group belonging, over and against other options - other threats to group identity. If Joshua and his house choose to serve God, the audience for whom Joshua is written is being asked to serve God, reject the Other, and reject the gods and practices of the Other too. Joshua is a story a community wanted to tell about its origins, its history.
I wonder - what are the stories we are telling about ourselves? Our origins? Our histories? What do the stories we’re ourselves and telling others say about us? We tell ourselves a lot of stories about our identities, and let’s be honest: they are not always perfectly factual. My youngest brother has a reputation for being a storyteller. He’s a theatre professor, so he’s kind of made it into a career. But he called me one time to ask me for the “true story” of how he’d gotten a scar on his shoulder. He’d been telling people a kind of dramatic story of daring-resulting-in-injury about the scar for so long he could no longer remember the real story, which was quite unexciting: it was a chickenpox scar. But even if we try to be less creative with our storytelling than my brother is, we have ways we like to tell our stories, our histories, ways we shape and refine how we recount our stories over time, especially when they’re identity stories, that are important to our sense of self-understanding.
Friends, here is some good news: we have better stories to tell about who we are and who we want to be with God and in God than nationalist propaganda. But we can’t tell those stories without deconstructing the propaganda. Which means no ignoring the Book of Joshua, or other narratives that make us squirm. We’re in an era in which the Trump government has shown itself to be very aware that the stories we tell about our identity and our relationship to those around us matter a great deal. They matter so much that the government has been actively trying to reshape history, suppressing some stories and rewriting others.
We can’t counter these attempts at reshaping our identity if we’re not able to own up to our own histories of telling bad stories - acknowledging the tall tales and the outright lies that have shaped our communities, and shaped Christianity. We can’t fail to acknowledge the destruction that has come from our bad stories. Whether or not Joshua is history, Joshua is in our story. What will we say about it? Who have we become because of it? And who might we become in spite of it? What story will we tell?
Amen.
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