Family Reunions.  What is your first thought when someone mentions family reunions?  Perhaps your initial reaction is something akin to a groan.  Oh no—another afternoon spent with that annoying cousin.  Perhaps your initial response is a warm one—the anticipation of seeing aunts and uncles, siblings, parents and grandparents with whom we love to be reconnected.  I live 1000 miles away from any of my family, so distance makes it difficult me to maintain the type of close relationships with family members that I’d like.  I know many of you share similar constraints, so reunions can be a special opportunity for us to reestablish connections.  When family reunions do occur, I think that there are two aspects that they all share, at least if you’re from the South—food and stories.  I don’t know about you, but the family reunions that I have attended are an excuse for monumental culinary excess, a reason to cram a week’s worth of eating into a few short hours.  And, then there are the stories.  I have to admit that as a kid, there were some story-telling relatives I tried to avoid.  These relatives were usually the ones that at the time seemed absolutely ancient (maybe they were all of 45 years old.)  Woe unto the poor soul who was their captive audience when they got started on stories of “the good old days.”  But, of course, I’ve aged and now I AM the 45 year-old, and my perspective has changed.  I have a new appreciation both for stories and for those who tell them.  I realize that the opportunities to hear those stories and to know that family history are fleeting.  I understand better that those stories are also MY stories, that I am who I am at least in part because of the people telling them, the choices they made and the lives they lived.  I cannot fully understand myself without understanding where and from whom I have come.  In middle age story has become important to me again, much as it was when I was a child.

The setting for our Scripture passage this morning is also a family reunion.  If you were here last week, you remember from our Lectionary text in Joshua 3 that the nation of Israel was finally taking its first steps into the Promised Land.  It was a dramatic entry.  Israel’s priests stood in the Jordan River bearing the Ark of the Covenant, and as they did so, the waters of the river parted so that the entire nation could cross over into Canaan.  Just think about that for a moment—these people were taking their first steps onto the soil that had been promised to Abraham generations earlier.  What a thrilling and defining moment that must have been.  Twenty chapters later, a lot has happened.  The Israelites did not exactly receive the red carpet treatment when they arrived in Canaan.  Once in the land there was hard and dangerous work to be done, and the book of Joshua tells story after story of the conquest and settlement of the land.  By chapters 23 and 24, though, we’re told that the Lord has given rest to Israel from all their enemies.  Under Joshua’s wise and capable leadership, the Hebrew people were settled in the land and, at least for the moment, were living peacefully with their neighbors.  Each tribe of Israel had been given its inheritance, a portion of the land in which to live. Life is pretty good, and Joshua, now a Senior citizen and patriarch of the Israelites, calls for a family reunion.

Not unlike our own experiences with family reunions, with the family gathered, the stories begin.  Joshua is God’s prophet and spokesman in this scene and together, they embark on a trip down memory lane with a series of “Do you remember when?” stories.  Speaking for God, Joshua asks, “Do you remember when Abraham was still living beyond the Euphrates, before I promised him descendants as numerous as the sand and a land flowing with milk and honey?  Do you remember old Isaac with those two rascally sons, Jacob and Esau?  Do you remember that dark time in our history when we were slaves in Egypt and I sent ten plagues on Pharaoh?  Do you remember Moses and Aaron and how I rescued you from the Egyptian army at the Red Sea?  Do you remember those long, long years wandering in the desert?”  The stories keep going—“surely you haven’t forgotten our big wins at Jericho and how I gave you victories against the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites?”  God and Joshua conclude this trip down memory lane with a powerful and moving summary of God’s presence and activity in the history of Israel in verse 13.  Says the Lord, the God of Israel:  “I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live on them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.”

These stories trace in chronological sequence some of the significant people and events in Israel’s history.  Our family stories do the same.  They tell us who we come from and where we’ve been.  Through story we verbally plot our family tree.  We tell of the highs and lows, the births and the deaths.  We tell of our successes and failures, the first family member to graduate from college or to own a home or to travel abroad.  There may be less savory parts of our stories as well—the tragedies, addictions, or moral failings.  Our stories tell us whether we come from miners or teachers or clergy, whether we come from entrepreneurial or risk adverse stock.  Like Israel, we can plot the significant events and milestones that shape us and that impact the direction of our lives.  But, as valuable as that is, Joshua is not primarily interested in recounting these stories of his family for the sake of chronological history.  These stories primarily serve to remind Joshua’s family of their spiritual history and to help them plot their spiritual family tree.  Our stories are no different.  What are the stories that your family tells about your baptism, your confirmation or your first communion?  Who were the people who encouraged you, who taught you and nurtured you in the faith, who mentored you?  What were the Scriptures, the prayers, the experiences in mission or service or worship that shaped you and formed your understanding of who God is and how God interacts with humanity and with each of us individually? 

When Joshua tells Israel’s family stories and focuses attention on the significant events and people in their history, there is one theme, one thread, that is constant throughout, and that constant is God.  Israel cannot tell its stories without God being in the center of everything.  Without God, there is no call to Abraham to leave Ur for the land of promise.  Without God there is no Moses at the burning bush, no plagues to get Pharaoh’s attention.  There is no deliverance from slavery, no commandments given at the top of the mountain.  Joshua’s family history is intricately interwoven with God.  Israel cannot understand their identity apart from their relationship with God, and neither can we.

I think it is not unusual for this God-dependent language to strike our Western, 21st century ears on a somewhat dischordant note.  Ours is a culture that places value and takes pride in individual accomplishment, where one of the greatest compliments one can receive is to be described as a self-made man or a self-made woman.  More often than not the American gospel is that if we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and just work hard enough, if we pour enough sweat equity into our endeavors, we can accomplish anything we set our minds to.  The American dream, however we define that, is within our reach if we just apply ourselves to achieving it.  If we were raised in the church, perhaps we can find common ground with Israel and appreciate how God has loved us and led us throughout our lives, how God has opened opportunities to us or protected us or providentially cared for us.  But, for those outside the church, and even for many inside it, it is counter-cultural to think in terms of being dependent on God or anyone else for what we have, what we have achieved or who we are.  We have lost a sense of dependency on God, and as a result, we have lost a sense of gratefulness as well. 

Joshua is being very careful to help his family guard against that, and he does that through story.  Only after Joshua has recounted God’s faithfulness and goodness does he turn to the second reason he has called this family reunion.  In light of all that God has done for us, and in light of God’s protection and presence with us in the midst of any and every circumstance, what is our response to be?  “Now therefore,” says Joshua, “revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness.”  The sequence that Joshua uses here is critical.  He is not asking for an abstract, theoretical commitment to a divine being somewhere “out there.”  Joshua has deliberately and carefully described God’s personal relationship with the Hebrew people.  God has been intimately invested in their lives.  It is out of this personal relationship that Joshua then asks, how are we going to respond to God’s relationship with us?  In that context what Joshua asks of the people makes perfect sense.  “Choose this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” 

If we were to put this passage in the vernacular of today’s young people, what Joshua is really saying is that this is a “no brainer.”  After all God has done for us, how can we help but respond with our love and devotion?  When we have an accurate understanding of God’s faithfulness, God’s love and mercy, we cannot help but respond with the whole-hearted commitment that Joshua displays.  We don’t respond from a sense of duty or coercion.  Loving God is not, in the words of Reggie McNeal that we heard from Carrie last week, an “add on” to our already crowded and busy lives.  We simply can’t imagine doing anything else.  In fact, even beyond what we do, our commitment to God becomes who we are, an integral part of our very being. 

So, what are we to make of all this?  How is it relevant for our lives this week?  This passage of Scripture offers us an invitation, I believe; in fact, not just one invitation but three.  First, Joshua invites us to join the family, to become part of the ongoing story that is told in Scripture.  Joshua invites us to make these stories our own and to add our stories to the unfolding story of the people of God.  It can be miserably uncomfortable to be simply a bystander to others’ stories, to be on the outside looking in but not a part of memories that are shared.  It is only as participants, as insiders that the stories become part of us and permeate our lives.  Joshua invites us to do that.  Come on, he says, join the family.

Second, Joshua’s invitation is an invitation to remember but these are remembrances not primarily rooted in the past or solely for the purpose of reminiscing over the good ‘ole days.  Joshua’s invitation is about the future.  As important as it is that Israel has followed God into the promised land, the question before them now is one about what happens next.  It won’t be necessary for God to part the Jordan River again.  There won’t be another burning bush.  The Israelites won’t march around Jericho for seven days ever again.  Those are important milestone, yes.  But, God is ready to do new things for a new generation in new and different circumstances.  The lesson to be learned from the memories of the past is that God is faithful.  God is constant.  God will always be with Israel and with us to meet whatever obstacle, whatever hardship, whatever impossibility we face.  That’s the importance of knowing where we’ve come from and to whom we belong.  But, our remembrances must move us forward, not keep us stuck in the past.  What is the new land that God is calling us?  Joshua invites us to use our stories to ready ourselves for God’s continuing creative work in our lives and in the world.

Finally, Joshua invites us to openly and boldly declare our allegiances.  Joshua’s family responds first by owning the stories that Joshua has told as their own with their own mini-recitation of God’s graciousness, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight.   He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples, through whom we passed.”  Joshua’s family is acknowledging the truth of what he has spoken to them, and they agree that God deserves their devoted love and service: “Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God.”  I am sure Joshua felt some fatherly pride over their response, but he still tests their resolve, pushing them a bit to see how deep their gratefulness and their commitment really go.  They respond again, “We will serve the Lord.”  They want to make this commitment.  They choose to accept Joshua’s invitation and follow him in boldly declaring, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”  Friends, thousands of years later the question before us remains the same.  Will we choose to join the family?  Will we embrace the stories, past and future, that God is working out in our lives?  Finally, today, whom do you choose to serve?  May we, like Joshua, have no other desire but to declare, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  Amen.