Joshua 7
“Corporate Sin”
February 21, 2010 - First Sunday in Lent

         “When the river runs dry, the jagged rocks are revealed,” so says Chris Marquet in the second annual “Marquet Report” on embezzlement. In the economic downturn of the last couple years, companies and organizations took harder looks at their finances. Embezzling schemes that might have stayed hidden in fatter times were found out in these leaner years. The top embezzler of 2009 was Sue Sachdeva of the Koss Corporation, who stole 31 million dollars, edging out Ricardo Figuerdo of Bank of America, who made off with 29.6 million.

         Achan in Joshua chapter 7 is a kind of ancient Israelite embezzler. In the business of conquering Jericho, he managed to misappropriate some of the loot that was meant to be devoted to God. Instead of a wire transfer to a Caribbean bank account, he used a hole in the floor of his tent to hide his little stash. Like any embezzler, he must have thought no one would ever miss it.

         Yet right from verse 1, Scripture has a different take from our usual understanding of crimes like embezzlement. Looking at the Marquet Report, we see the people like Sachdeva and Figuerdo as individually guilty of these crimes. We arrest them and try them and send them to prison (we hope) as individuals. But chapter 7 of Joshua begins, “But the Israelites were unfaithful in regard to the devoted things.” In complete contrast to what we imagine is just or fair, the whole nation was held responsible for what Achan did. It’s not just Achan that was unfaithful, but “the Israelites,” plural, all of them.

         Verse 1 continues saying that Achan took the stuff, but “the Lord’s anger burned against Israel.” He punished them in one of the worst possible arenas, on the battlefield. After the stunning success of the battle of Jericho, they were confident and cocky, like your favorite sports team after a big win. They were ready to move eastward and conquer the high country of Palestine, from which they could set up strong positions and establish control over the whole land.

         Joshua once again sent out spies, this time to Ai, a smaller fortified city a few miles east of Jericho on the route up into the hills. Verse 3 says the spies came back reporting Ai to be easy pickings. No need for the whole army to go, it will only take two or three thousand Israelites to bring down this little burg.

         Just to be safe, three thousand men went marching up the road to Ai, but like the British in the “Battle of New Orleans,” it wasn’t long until “they began to runnin’,” not “down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico,” but “from the city gate as far as the stone quarries” and on down the slopes. Thirty-six Hebrews were killed and it was a complete rout, utter defeat, all because of the sin of one man.

         The next part of the chapter tells how Joshua and the elders of the people went weeping and bowing before God to discover what the problem was. Why would their great Lord who had been so very much with them at Jericho so totally desert them at Ai? Joshua goes so far in verse 9 as to appeal to God’s own pride in God’s name, in God’s reputation. What are all the other nations going to think if God lets His team get chased off the court by some second string bunch of losers?

         God responds by telling Joshua what we already know, that it’s not God’s fault, it’s their fault. This botched battle is punishment for botched devotion, for their failure to ensure that everything devoted to God was really devoted to Him. He holds them all accountable for Achan’s theft. The only way to set it right is to find the stolen loot and punish the perpetrator. That’s what they do in the rest of chapter 7.

         Now if you’re like me, you’re struggling with this story. Even if a person steals millions of dollars, we don’t hold his whole race accountable. Last year the president of Brazil said that the world financial crisis was caused by “white men with blue eyes.” But you and I regard that sort of remark as crazy exaggeration. We aren’t going to hold all the blue-eyed white people of the world responsible for the downturn. Yet that is almost what God did here. It’s a lesson for us in how seriously God takes our sins.

         As we begin Lent and perhaps enter into a discipline of personal spiritual assessment, our tendency will be to focus individually. We will zero in on the sins we perceive to be damaging our own personal happiness and well-being: gluttony that makes us fat and strains our hearts; greed that makes us discontented with what we have; lust that leaves us feeling terribly guilty; anger that ruins our inner peace. But Achan is here to remind us that our sins have much deeper and more pervasive consequences than just our own individual spiritual condition.

         Until God revealed it to Joshua, the Israelites couldn’t see how Achan’s sin led to their defeat. What we often cannot see is how our individual sins affect and damage others. We imagine that what we’ve done is purely private. But there is no such thing as a private sin. Despite what courts might decide, there is no such thing as a victimless crime. The wrong things we do and the right things we fail to do are stones tossed into the social ponds of our lives and their effects ripple outward, even if, like Achan, we keep the sins themselves secret.

         Sin is a corporate, not a private matter. “Corporate” doesn’t mean just the sins that people commit as a body together, like slavery or discrimination. It means that all sin affects the whole body of the human community. You have a cold and just your throat and your sinuses are suffering, but all of you suffers. The disease of sin in one part of our corporate humanity affects us all. That’s why God let Israel be defeated at Ai because of one man’s transgression.

         In the Friday Register-Guard we read about the sentencing of Vickie Monfore who embezzled 1.5 million dollars from local printing company IP Koke, ruining it and almost destroying another company. 85 people lost their jobs. One person sinned and our whole community suffers the effects.

         So our thinking about sin in Lent should not all be focused on our individual selves. As I ponder my sins, I will understand them and be better prepared to let God work on them, if I consider how they affect those around me, how what I do privately affects my wife and my daughters and even affects you as the people I serve. The same is true of us all. What are we be hiding beneath the floors of our tents which brings shame and defeat to the people we love, live and work with?

         Just like Israel we sometimes see the dramatic and horrifying effects of private sin when it explodes in violence or is revealed in shameful exposures. A professor’s privately nursed hatred and envy leaps into view as she shoots her colleagues at a faculty meeting. A church leader’s secret penchant for child pornography is disclosed and brings heartbreak and loss of faith and disillusionment to hundreds of people he served. In Joshua 7, the consequences, the lost battle, were public first, and then the hidden unfaithfulness was revealed by casting lots.

         Joshua may have written names on broken pieces of pottery and drawn one out of a pile. Imagine Achan observing the process in verses 14-18, as the first draw from the names of the twelve tribes came up with his tribe, Judah. You can feel Achan’s pulse quicken, his muscles tense as they then draw his clan, the Zerahites. Then out of the clan the name of his extended family, Zimri, is pulled. Then verse 18 says they came forward, man by man, one by one, until Achan himself was singled out and chosen. Yet he waits it out until the bitter end.

         Even if Achan had never been found out, the damage was still done, the battle had been lost. Even if your and my sins remain our own private little stashes of filthy loot, the damage is being done. Our pride and envy and greed and anger and lust is hurting not just us, but tarnishing our relationships, weakening our families, dragging down our church, harming even the fiber of larger society and our nation. There is no private sin. In the end, Jesus said in Luke 8:17, “there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”

         Lent is the opportunity we give ourselves in the Christian church to single ourselves out before it’s too late, before our secrets are exposed and the damage of our own sins are revealed before everyone we love and care about. That’s why we made a corporate confession of sin during Ash Wednesday worship last week. That’s why my office is open to anyone here who would like to own up to a sin you’ve been hiding. If you ask me to, I promise to hear your confession as confidentially as any Catholic priest would. I am sure there are other spiritually mature people in our congregation who would do the same.

         Better yet, Lent is the opportunity to address our temptations to supposedly private sin before they become actual transgressions. That’s why we read from Luke 4 this morning how Jesus dealt successfully with the temptations that faced Him in the wilderness, quoting the Scriptures at every turn to turn aside the lures Satan cast before Him.

         Compare what Achan says about his temptation and what Jesus did with his. In verse 21 of Joshua 7, Achan says, “When I saw in the plunder a beautiful robe from Babylonia, two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold weighing fifty shekels, I coveted them and took them.” He saw them, wanted them and took them. He admits his very first sin of coveting what he saw, lingering over the beautiful cloth and the shiny treasure. Sin often starts with what we see or what we imagine in our mind’s eye. Genesis 2:6 says that Eve “saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye.”

         When Satan tempted Jesus, he used the same old trick. He showed Jesus stones and urged Him to imagine it turning into soft warm bread. He took Him up a high mountain and put all the kingdoms of the world before His eyes and invited Him to picture Himself as ruler of it all. But Jesus refused the first step. He refused to covet what He saw. He turned His eyes away and lifted them to heaven and looked toward God and His Word. And there’s our hope.

         Not that you and I can simply decide to be like Jesus. If you’re like me, you may identify more than you would like with Achan or Eve. You see it, you like, you want it, and you can’t seem to help it. Whether it’s a new car or a promotion or a pretty face, your eyes light on these things and you covet them, just like Achan, not like Jesus. If I leave us today simply with the message that that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, we may as well all go home in despair. Achan is us.

         That’s why the message for today is only partly in the truth that sin is not private. The really good news for you and me is that just as sin is not private but corporate, salvation and freedom from sin is not private, but corporate. Our hope in temptation is not that you and I can deal with it, but that Jesus dealt with it. Just as the sins of one person can affect many others for the worse, so the goodness of one person named Jesus Christ can affect us all for the better. This is what Paul explains in Romans 5:18 as he compares the sin of Adam with the perfect righteousness of Jesus, “just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all.”

         Our Gospel lesson this morning is not just hurray for Jesus, He beat the devil. It’s hurray for all of us. Jesus’ victory over temptation was a victory for us all. You tune in the Winter Olympics and watch skiers and skaters and hockey players wearing red, white and blue stand on a podium and receive medals. It feels like a victory for our whole country. In a deeper and even more profound way, the victory of Jesus over sin is a win for every human being. It means we are not hopeless and helpless when those tempting sights appear. Instead, we can share in a victory that’s already won.

         Christ saved us by doing what we should have done, what we always fail to do, what we simply cannot do. And by the amazing grace of God, what He did counts for us. His righteousness is a corporate righteousness which wipes out all our corporate sins. When we believe in Jesus Christ and are baptized, we are made part of Him, part of His Body, and all the good and blessed effects of His righteousness are applied to us. As we read from Romans 10:13 this morning, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

         As theologian N. T. Wright and others have helped us understand more fully, the Gospel message of Jesus Christ is less about one’s individual salvation and more about the founding of a new community, a new corporate body who together receive the grace and salvation that comes to us through the perfect life, sacrificial death and glorious resurrection of Jesus. The ancient Israelites and the people who lived in Jesus’ time understood this better than we do. It wasn’t so strange to them that one man’s sin might ruin things for everyone. And when the time came, it wasn’t so strange to them that one Man’s perfect life could redeem everyone.

         The question that puts to us, then, is not so much “Will you get your sins forgiven so you can go to heaven?” or “Have you repented of your sins and asked Jesus into your heart?” Those aren’t bad questions, but the biblical way of thinking is more about your part in a community and how that community affects you and you affect it. That’s why Romans we heard Romans 10:9 talk about declaring your faith in Jesus with your mouth as well as believing in your heart. Faith in Jesus is a public affair, a corporate undertaking. We say it out loud in community, not just silently in our hearts and minds.

         The novel that made John Grisham famous was The Firm. It’s the story of a young attorney named Mitch who is wooed straight out of law school by a small tax-law firm in Memphis. They offer him an incredible starting salary and a lease on a new BMW, and they pay off all his student loans. The temptation is incredible and he accepts.

         When two people he works with die in a strange accident, and he learns of three others in the firm who died in murky circumstances, Mitch gets suspicious. Eventually he is contacted by the FBI whereupon he discovers that his firm is a front for the operations of a crime family in Chicago. Mitch fears for his life, but decides to work with the FBI to find evidence of the firm’s criminal activities. I’ll leave the rest of the story for your own entertainment, but the big decision Mitch faced in the middle of the book was whom to work for, the firm tempting him with riches or the forces of justice trying to prosecute criminal activity.

         My analogy breaks down a little, because in the end Mitch discovers he can’t even rely on the FBI, but his basic dilemma in the middle of the story was whom to work for, the bad guys or the good guys? That’s the question Achan and all of us face. Whom will we serve? Which corporation are we going to be a part of? Will we join our lives to Satan, to the forces of evil, or will we incorporate ourselves into Christ and enjoy His goodness and righteousness? Lent is a time to help us move in that second direction, more and more into the corporate body of Christ.

         Lenten disciplines like prayer or Bible study or fasting seem like individual matters, like our own private commitments and devotion. But just as there is no such thing as private sin, there’s no such thing as private Christianity. What we do to grow spiritually is meant to grow us more and more into being part of the corporate Body of Christ. Just as a secret stash of sin in our lives damages others in ways we may not always perceive, a quiet measure of love and devotion to our Lord brings health to others in ways we don’t expect.

         Your prayer can bring help to someone sitting across the sanctuary this morning. Your thoughts on a Bible passage you’ve read carefully may encourage someone sitting with you in Sunday School or in a fellowship group. The fasting of our students this weekend will benefit people in Haiti and Sudan and around the world.

         John Donne wrote his famous reflection with the phrase, “no man is an island,” to remind us that what happens to others affects me. Our lesson this morning is a reminder that what you and I do affects others, for good or ill, along with the gracious word that what Jesus has done affects us all for the best.

         I invite you to consider what’s hidden in your tent this Lent. If it’s sin, then put yourself into the perfect hands of Jesus and let Him help you dig it up and get rid of it. Your private vice may be hurting others in ways you don’t know. But if it’s faithful prayer, generous giving, humble service, or devoted worship under your tent flap, then you may be helping and blessing people around you in ways you can’t imagine. As Jesus resisted temptation there in the wilderness, He was saving the world. As you follow Him and enter into His life, resisting your own temptations and loving as He loved, you help Him save the world.

         Amen.

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