Joshua 6
“Devoted”
February 7, 2010 - Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

         “That’s number 4! Three more times around,” calls our Sunday School teacher as eight first graders march around our second floor classroom, stomping our feet to make the floor shake and blowing as loud as we can on little party favor horns supplied by Mrs. McElroy.

         On the seventh circuit, we get to yell as well as blow on the horns, and a couple of white heads from the seniors’ class poke in the door to see what is going on. But when we’ve gone around that last time Mrs. McElroy shouts, “Now!” and we all converge on the tall pile of cardboard blocks we’ve been circling and gleefully kick them down, delighting in the destruction of our miniature Jericho. We had reenacted Joshua’s most famous battle and in the process learned a modest lesson on patient devotion to God’s directions.

         The truth is that the “battle of Jericho” was hardly a battle at all. Right from the start in verse 2 we see that God is the real warrior of the story. He gives Joshua directions that have no military value at all. Then God is the one who brings down the walls and makes the victory possible. All that is required of Joshua and the Israelites is devotion.

         In about 1,200 B.C., the people of Israel were camped in front of an already ancient city. Archaeology has shown that Jericho was inhabited since about 9,000 B.C., 11,000 years ago. As early as 8,000 B.C. it had a stone wall which included a tower 25 feet high, making it perhaps the oldest walled city in the world. That tower has been uncovered and you can see it today. The archaeological record shows the city destroyed and rebuilt at least a couple times before the Hebrews arrived. You can be sure that the inhabitants knew a thing or two about walls and about defending their home.

         Typically, an invading army like Joshua’s would encircle a fortress like Jericho and cut off supplies, so the inhabitants would grow hungry. They would cut down neighboring forests to create battering rams to hammer on the gates and build siege ramps and ladders to climb over the walls. Taking a walled city required a protracted and dedicated effort.

         Yet the word Joshua gets from the Lord has no battle plans at all, no preparations for a long siege. God says nothing about stationing outposts at points in a circle all around the city to keep any food from going in or anyone from going out. Instead, a contingent of armed guards is to march with the holy Ark of the Covenant and its priests completely around the city and come back to where they started. They don’t actually surround the city, except with a ritual of music and worship.

         As the teaching team I’m part of instructs new Covenant pastors in our theology, one thing we introduce them to is our observance of the church year, that chronological circle moving from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Easter to Pentecost to Christ the King and back to Advent. Many of them, and maybe some of you coming from less formal church backgrounds, wonder about the value of making that circle every year, changing the colors of banners, observing seemingly Catholic holy days like Ash Wednesday. What’s the point? Aren’t we just going around in circles?

         You could ask the same thing about our cycles of personal devotion. Why kneel or sit down to pray every day? Why make a point to read through the Bible every year and then start over? Why show up at a fellowship group every week for study and prayer? What does it really achieve? Wouldn’t we accomplish more good just devoting our time and energy to really significant things like feeding the hungry or building houses for the homeless?

         The lesson Joshua offers is that, when God directs us, our devotion is not just going around in circles. All those seemingly ineffective and pointless acts of worship are patient, obedient trust in God, who will show up, who will bring down the walls we face, who will give us the victory in His time and in His kingdom.

         Israel was, and you and I are, like little children who just need to learn a little patience as we carry out what God asks of us. Seven times around is a symbolic number, a number of wholeness, of completion. Jesus pointed out that some of acts of devotion, like forgiving those who hurt us, may go around and around, seventy times seven cycles, and still we wait, still we trust, still we keep marching on until God’s time comes.

         So patient devotion, over and over, around and around is the lesson we teach to children from the battle of Jericho and the lesson we most often learn from it ourselves. It’s a good lesson, but there’s another side to this story, a darker, more difficult lesson.

         As we kids knocked down our six foot tall Jericho, none of us really pictured the reality behind our cute little play. We did not think of great stone walls collapsing as guards fell to their deaths from high lookouts. We did not imagine desperate men hastily grabbing weapons to make futile last stands before their homes only to be run through by Israelite spears. We did not hear the weeping of the women of Jericho as they tried to gather and hide their children in back rooms. Nor did we consider that there would be six-year-olds like ourselves running for their lives in narrow streets. And we didn’t smell the flames and smoke as Joshua and his men put the whole city to the torch. No, that wasn’t a lesson for children.

         Many of you know that last September I spent a two-week study break partially in thought about just this sort of thing, the terrible violence that is part of the story of the Old Testament. It’s not just the violence that people bring upon other people, as we still experience. It’s God’s violence. God brought the walls of Jericho down, and in verse 17 it is God who demands the total destruction of every living creature there. And when God’s people carry out that direction, it’s another strange and horrible kind of “devotion.”

         Verses 17 and 18 and verse 21 speak about the city of Jericho and everyone and everything in it being “devoted to the Lord.” The Hebrew word is ḥerem, and it literally means “devoted to destruction.” It’s a difficult concept for us and as we will see in a couple weeks, it was not very easy for Israel to carry out. They constantly struggled with God’s claim on the cities, people and property they conquered.

         Deuteronomy 20, verses 16 through 20, suggest that ḥerem, devotion to God for destruction, is partially a judgment on the wickedness of the Canaanites and a way for God to prevent their sin from corrupting the Israelites. It’s true that the Canaanites engaged in various sorts of sexual immorality and worshipped crude idols. Some even practiced child sacrifice. Yet it’s still hard to grasp how that could warrant the slaughter of the whole population, including innocent children and animals.

         Even after some deep study and several months of reflection, I don’t have any really good or satisfying answers about it all for you. It will come up again as we work through Joshua. The best I can suggest is that God took these people and their cultures as He found them, cruel and violent, and worked to bring His good purpose through them. And even in all the destruction, we do find hints of the grace which is God’s deepest purpose. The story we began a few weeks ago, of the redemption and rescue of Rahab and her family, is completed here. Some would argue that what happened for her was available to any Canaanite. Any of them who turned to the one true God and acknowledged Him as Lord would have been saved in the same way.

         As difficult as all this is, there is a good lesson for us here about being devoted to God. Cruel and inhuman as it seems to us, by carrying out the ban required by ḥerem, by devoting the cities they conquered to God for destruction, the Israelites were being asked to behave in a way which was not just a product of their culture. The ordinary expectation of an ancient solider, and I’m afraid some modern soldiers, was to directly profit from a victorious battle. You would take your enemy’s weapons. You would plunder his wealth. You would steal his beautiful wife. You would make his children your slaves. You might even live in his house and farm his land. Wars were a business proposition. They often still are.

         My wife’s father rarely talked about his experiences in World War II, but he did tell me once about his company being detailed to transport sacks of gold coins found in the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. Almost every grunt soldier that carried a bag tried to find a way to worm out one of those coins and sneak it into a pocket. They felt like they had earned it. The Israelites must have felt the same way.

         Yet God claimed the whole of Jericho and everything in it as His own. It was all to be slaughtered and burned, with only the gold, silver, bronze and iron to be saved, and that went not to the fighting men, but to the treasury of the Lord’s Tabernacle. No one in Israel was to profit from this war. There would be no loot, no rape, no drunken victory party guzzling down the enemy’s wine. God claimed it all. It was devoted to Him.

         So the lowliest Israelite fighter was expected to walk through Jericho and not bring anything home for himself, not that pretty woman, not that shiny sword, not those fat sheep, not even a little gold necklace that would look lovely around his wife’s neck. They were to devote it all to God and trust in His reward, rather than what they could take for themselves.

         God forbid that you and I would not learn a lesson that took such violence to teach to God’s people. But we live in a culture that is built on the idea that everyone will take everything he can for himself. We’re taught from the moment of our very first babysitting or lawn mowing job, or by small chores our parents pay us for even before that, to look for the gain, to look for the profit, to look for what we can take home for our own. Yet even in a hard, cruel narrative, Scripture is teaching us something else, teaching us to consider what in our lives belongs not to us, but to God.

         We may learn to devote what we have in ways that feel as difficult as the battle of Jericho, as we lose possessions and people we’ve cherished, thinking they belonged to us when they really belong to God. Yet our Lord also gives us the choice and the grace to make that devotion of our own free will. In the Gospel this morning, we read how Peter, James and John walked away from their boats and their nets, “left everything,” to follow Jesus. That’s the devotion God wants to teach us.

         So how will you and I devote the people and possessions that come our way to God? It’s absolutely clear from Christ our Lord that there is no more ḥerem. Devotion no longer means destruction. But devotion does mean letting go. It means not holding onto persons and things as if they were ours alone to have and control. It means giving them to God so they can be what He means them to be, so that they can be used as He desires to use them.

         Devotion may mean letting your teenager go to the college of her choice, rather than yours. It may mean turning over an estranged spouse or friend or parent to God and letting Him deal with their hearts and minds. Devotion suggests giving at least some of your financial resources up to God’s purposes and surrendering control over them. It suggests relinquishing some portion of your time to daily devotion and weekly worship and regular service. Devotion means placing even your own self at God’s disposal.

         And we are devoted in all these difficult ways for one reason only. God is devoted to us. That’s what the Table before us means today. Christ Jesus became ḥerem, He devoted Himself to destruction, to death on the Cross, for us. His broken body, His shed blood are offerings of devotion calling us to absolute devotion to Him. May you and I eat and drink together the gifts which God has given us in Jesus, and give ourselves back to Him.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj