Joshua 5
“Reboot”
January 31, 2010 - Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

         The “three-fingered salute” is what they used to call it. No, I don’t mean a rude gesture. I mean the last resort of frustrated PC users everywhere. Your computer hangs up, the screen freezes, nothing’s responding, and what do you do? Press Control-Alt-Delete, all at once. Then, at least in the bad old days, your computer would shut down and restart, hopefully with the problem magically gone. A “reboot” could get you out of the worst system crash and give you a fresh start at whatever you were trying to accomplish in the first place.

         A reboot can also be an effective spiritual tool. The three odd little narratives of Joshua 5 are actually God’s three-fingered reboot of His chosen people, a restart of their spiritual lives. They’ve been hung up in the wilderness for forty years and now it’s time for new measures. Those wandering decades are shut down so they can begin a new and refreshed experienced with their Lord.

         The first finger of God’s reboot is a strange and, for adult men, painful ritual. God pressed the circumcision button, the Alt key for male anatomy. Verses 4 and 5 explain that those Israelite men who came out of Egypt forty years before had all been circumcised, but evidently there had been no practice of circumcision in the wilderness. A whole generation had grown up without the physical sign God had given Abraham in Genesis 17 to mark His chosen people.

         We might wonder, why now? As we’ve studied the last couple weeks, they had crossed the Jordan. They were in enemy territory. Why would you stop now and have all the young men of military age undergo a painful operation that would incapacitate them for several days? As strategy it makes no sense. As spiritual discipline it fits in with everything we’ve seen already in Joshua and with what is still to come.

         That painful pause for the application of flint knives to the most tender part of the male physiology—I cringe just thinking about it—was a deep and profound act of faith. Right on the edge of a combat zone, the whole nation, men, women and children, would have to depend on God, rather than their armies, to defend them for at least a week.

         You women who’ve had to care for and baby your husbands through some illness or maybe even an operation in the zone we’re talking about, think what it would be like to attend to your groaning, complaining spouse—all the while looking out the tent door now and then to see if the gates of Jericho have opened and an enemy force is marching forth to slaughter you and your defenseless family. It was an act of faith.

         The circumcision was also a mark to set this new generation back on track, to mark in an unforgettable way that they were still God’s covenant people. God had not forgotten them and they were not going to forget God. Their parents had rebelled against the Lord over and over in the wilderness. The older generation had chickened out and failed to rely on God when they first came to the edge of the promised land. And apparently they had failed to keep even the ritual and external rules of the covenant with God. They had failed to circumcise their baby boys. So now it was time for a new start, a re-entry into faithfulness, a reboot of Israel’s spiritual life.

         For Christians this circumcision story is a reminder that our spiritual lives also begin with a reboot. Colossian 2 verses 11 and 12 say that we were “circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands,” all of us, men and women. That is, our baptism in Jesus Christ is the new sign of our place in God’s covenant, a new, spiritual circumcision that reboots those who believe in Jesus into a new life in Him. Circumcision rebooted the Israelites coming into Canaan, and baptism is the new circumcision.

         God makes a restart in Jesus always available to us. You and I are just as buggy and full of errors as any computer operating system, probably more so. Over and over we crash our lives and freeze our souls with habitual sins, with anger and hurtful words, with doubts and the constant temptation to run the system our way instead of God’s way. Even though we are Christians, there is so much truth in the reproach of those who think that we live no better than anyone else, so much bad history in the Church and in our own lives, so much of which we are ashamed.

         The Israelites were reproached by their slavery in Egypt. They were reproached by the fact that word must have gotten back to Egypt that their escaped work force spent decades wandering around going nowhere. They were reproached by their own desire to be well-fed slaves instead of hungry and homeless free people. Yet verse 9 shows us that because of the faith shown in the acceptance of circumcision God “rolled away” their reproach. They even named the place where it happened, “Rolled Away,” Gilgal.

         Every time that blue screen of shameful reproach shows up on the monitor of our lives, there is the grace of a reboot, of a restart yet once again into the new and abundant life Jesus gives us. When the virus of sin infects us, God is ready to roll back our operating system to a previous state that is pure and uninfected once again. Growing up we used to sing,

         At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light,
         And the burden of my heart rolled away…

         As we look back and remember what God has done for us, when we reclaim our own spiritual circumcision, God keeps rolling away our reproach and burden. When Martin Luther was tempted, when he was doubting, when he was in despair or depression, he would reboot back into the life he knew he had in Jesus by repeating to himself, Baptizatus sum! “I am baptized.” It wasn’t that he trusted in a ritual, but that remembering his baptism reminded him of the grace, the forgiveness, the fresh start that is always available to those who believe in Christ.

         We evangelical Christians like to talk about being born again, and some of us even remember the day it happened. But this Old Testament story reminds us that our new birth also happens over and over, every day as we wake up to repent of past sins and embrace a new beginning. Every time we confess our sins and welcome again the grace of Jesus that was shown to us in baptism, we reboot, we restart our life with God brand new.

         Yet God also pushed a second reboot button for Israel here in Joshua 5. Just four days after the mass circumcision, while the guys were still sore but had recovered a little bit, verse 10 says the people observed the first great feast God had given them as they were leaving Egypt. The next finger of their spiritual restart is the Passover.

          As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, Passover was the hasty meal of unleavened bread and roast lamb that was eaten as the angel of death was passing over to slay the first-born child in every Egyptian home. The lamb’s blood was spread on the doorposts of Hebrew homes so that they might be saved from that terrible judgment. At that time, God commanded His people to repeat that meal annually in order to remember their salvation from slavery in Egypt.

         Just before Jesus died on the Cross, He joined in a Passover meal with His disciples. As He served them at that meal, He Himself took the place of the Passover lamb, giving them the bread and the wine as signs of His own broken body and shed blood. And just like God told the Israelites about Passover, Jesus told us to repeat that meal of bread and wine, remembering Him.

         In I Corinthians 5, verses 7 and 8, Paul says, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” If Baptism is the new circumcision, then Holy Communion is the new Passover. We come regularly to the Lord’s Table to remember, to reboot, to receive again the grace of Christ our Lord and start fresh in our walk with Him.

         There’s a bit more to the story of this first Passover in the promised land. Verse 11 says that the very next day they ate something they had not tasted in many years, fresh unleavened bread and roasted grain, made from kernels gleaned from the fields of their new homeland. Perhaps some of the youngest had never tasted that typical mideastern food we call “pita” or “flatbread.” The main staple of their meals had been a daily provision of that miracle bread called manna. But now they made their own bread for the first time.

         It’s another break with the past, another restart. God had been feeding the same wonderful, nourishing food for forty years. It was all they needed. It was easy to get. Wake up and go out and gather it up off the ground every morning. Yet now, says verse 12, now that they were in the new land, now that there would be fields and farmers and bakers and time to cook, that familiar, comfortable, easy meal disappeared. The manna stopped. This was the Delete key of their spiritual reboot, and there was not a little of the feeling of the boot in it.

         I look back on my college years and think about how easy and comfortable it all was. I lived in a dorm in one of the most beautiful spots on earth, Santa Barbara in California. I would wake in the morning and pull on my Adidas and run for four or five miles along Mountain Drive, looking out over the ocean and the palm and oak trees below. I’d jog back to my room, take a shower, then stroll to the dining commons where breakfast was ready with all the good food I could possibly want, including hot, fresh donuts. That same manna dropped on me every morning.

         Then I graduated. I had to learn to make breakfast and lunch and dinner for myself. I had to worry more not only about how much food cost, but how to pay the rent, how to pay for dental care, how to put gas in my car and do my wash and clean my apartment, all the stuff of growing up. Sometimes I think it might be nice to go back to college. Yet if I’d stayed back there eating those manna donuts, I wouldn’t have the joys of a wife or a family. I wouldn’t be blessed with privilege of being a husband and a father and a pastor. God booted me out of the dorm so I could live in a real home.

         But leaving college was a relatively easy restart. There are many harder points in our lives when the manna ends, when the Delete key gets pressed. The easy times when we had everything we needed or even wanted, the comfortable gifts that God gave us daily—home or food or family or work or health—all of a sudden, quickly, maybe without warning, they stop. It feels like a divine boot, kicking us on into the next stage of life, into a new and unfamiliar place where it may be harder to trust that God is going to provide for us.

         At those booted-out-of-the-manna, rebooted-into-the-Lord-knows-what, times, we remember that the Lord calls us always back to His Table, back to Himself given in His body and blood so that we start again, so that we can receive the nourishment of a new and fresh life given in grace and mercy and forgiveness. When the manna stops, when something good in life gets deleted, we come and receive Holy Communion as a gift that reminds us we are called to faith, to trust, to utter dependence on our Lord for all we need.

         Which brings us to the third and final finger of God’s reboot of Israel. As verse 13 opens, Joshua is standing “near Jericho.” Maybe he’s looking at the wall, wondering how his humble army of foot soldiers could possibly climb over or bring down that massive protective structure. Maybe he’s simply contemplating the burdens of leadership. But as he stands there, he suddenly realizes that someone else is with him. It’s a man with a naked sword in his hand.

         Joshua is clearly started. The alert, savvy general of Israel’s armies has been caught by surprise. Someone has snuck up on him. All he can do is respond with the traditional challenge of those on military watch: “Friend or foe?” “Are you for us or for our enemies?” he asks in verse 13.

         The surprising answer in verse 14 is “Neither.” This is neither a spy upon whom Joshua must draw his own sword, nor a malingering member of his own forces to be ordered back to his proper place in the ranks. No, this, we read, is the “commander of the army of the Lord.” Along with Alt and Delete, God is pressing the Control key.

         It’s not quite clear who the man with the sword is. It’s likely an angel, but Joshua falls down on his face to worship and calls him “Lord.” If the armed stranger is an angel, then he clearly represents God to Joshua. He has come to make it plain to General Joshua who is actually in charge, who is truly the commander of the Lord’s armies. Whatever command Joshua holds is at the service and call of the real Commander.

         Joshua asked the angel what message the Lord had for him, but the only answer he received in verse 15 was the direction that Moses got at the burning bush, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.” The final part of Joshua’s and Israel’s spiritual reboot is to go back to where it all began, to the awesome and holy presence of God coming into their lives.

         As you and I find ourselves rebooted, or just plain booted, through life and circumstances, we too are being met by the angel with the sword. He is here to remind us that however ordinary or dull or rough may appear the ground we are walking, it is holy. God is with us. We are surrounded and defended and led by the great host of the Lord’s army, His angels and His saints throughout time and space. God is the one with His finger on the Control key, not you or I. Though we may not be able to see it, though like Joshua we may want some word, some direction or instructions we haven’t heard yet, our Lord is in com­mand. His sword is drawn. He is protecting us, guiding us, leading us through the battles ahead. And the way to handle God’s reboot is to take off our boots, quit trying to find our own way, and just bow our heads to worship His holy name on His ground.

         Standing on the brink of battles, facing the loss of old comfortable things that used to nourish us, looking out on new territory where we’ve never been before, let’s stop to let God reboot us into His presence in Jesus Christ. If you’ve believed in Jesus and been baptized, you’ve been altered, made over, rebooted into new life. If you come to the Lord’s Table to eat and drink and accept the gift of His dying and rising, then whatever else may be deleted from your life, you have all you need. And when you bow in humble worship and trust that God is in control, well then He is. You are in His presence. He is with you, like He was with Moses, like He was with Joshua. And you are ready to start up again, start over with new hope, new faith, new joy, new love, new life. By the grace of Jesus, may our Lord gently but firmly reboot us all.

         Amen.

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