Joshua 22
“Community and Connection”
May 9, 2010 - Sixth Sunday in Easter

         “We would like to make your last hours together as happy as possible.” No, those were not the words of a hospice nurse to a grieving family gathered around a deathbed, nor was it a veterinarian speaking to a dog owner who has to put down the beloved family pet. No, we read those words in a letter from the University of Chicago telling us about Orientation Day activities for parents who are dropping their students off for school there. It was a phrase designed to make a mother’s heart break as she envisions what seems like a too-final parting.

         As the fighting men of the two and a half eastern tribes of Israel assembled for Joshua to bid them goodbye, it seemed like an awfully final parting for them. For a few years now they had been faithful to their covenant with Moses, crossing the Jordan River to fight alongside their kin and subdue the land God was giving the other nine and a half tribes. Now, however, it was time to part, to return to the fields and cities Moses gave them on the east side of the Jordan.

         Joshua dismissing the east-side tribes sounds a little like some of us as we get ready to send our sons and daughters off to college. We realize they’re going to be long miles away, that we won’t have any idea of what they’re doing or any say about whether they do it. Doing their homework, deciding how late to stay out, what friends to hang out with, what movies to watch, even what they eat or drink or, God-forbid, smoke—it will all be up to them. The distance between means they will be on their own.

         So like Joshua in verse 3 we may say something like, “Up until now, ‘you have obeyed me in everything I commanded.’” But then we will encourage and warn and plead with them as they are so far away. “Remember what you’ve learned from us. Remember your faith. Go to church. Hang onto your values. Keep doing what God wants and not what the people around you want. Be the good Christian person we raised you to be.” So in verse 5, Joshua says, “But be very careful to keep the commandment and the law that Moses… gave you… to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to keep his commands, to hold fast to him and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.”

         Yet you know we will worry. Our kids will just be so far away. We know the temptations when you’re young and far from home. Some of us remember what we did, when were that age, away from family and familiar friends. Those memories only make us more concerned. Over the miles we worry for those we love and how they will choose to live without us.

         The mileage separating the tribes going home to east side of the Jordan River from the larger body on the west side was not that great. Some of us zoom over rivers just as large and distances almost as far every day, going to and from work or shopping. Yet in an age of foot travel, of having to wade through any river you crossed, it was immense. Who knew what these friends from Reuben and Gad and Manasseh would do once they were by themselves over on the other side?

         Read a Bible commentary on this text, and you learn the technical names for the divisions of Israel on either side of the Jordan. The two and a half eastern tribes are considered to be on the “far” side of the water, in what’s called “Transjordan.” They are “Transjordanians.” The other nine and half tribes settled down on the west side, which gets the strange-sounding name of “Cisjordan.” They are “Cisjordanians.”

         The prefix “cis” simply means “on this side.” This side. Even in the supposedly neutral language of Bible scholarship, the tribes are seen as they themselves saw it. The bigger group in the west is the main group, the center, the real Israel. Their territory is on this side of the river. Anyone else is on the other side.

         So the Cisjordanians were naturally a little concerned, a little worried, a little suspicious about what those Transjordanians would get themselves up to there on the far side of things. As the chapter unfolds it appears they have every right to be. Verse 9 says that “the Reubenites, the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh left the Israelites at Shiloh in Canaan to return to Gilead, their own land.”

         Notice a subtle separation already occurring just in that phrase, they “left the Israelites.” Consider. The ones leaving were Israelites too! They were descendants of one of the twelve sons of Jacob, of Israel, just like the people they left. Yet just in the word choice there’s an implication, a suggestion, that by crossing back over the Jordan they are leaving Israel, that they aren’t really Israelites anymore. It’s like the feeling that our children going off to college won’t quite really be part of the family anymore.

         And all the fears of the Cisjordanians, the folks who see themselves as the real Israel, seem to materialize right away in verse 10, where we learn that on their way home, just before they crossed the river, “the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh built an imposing altar there by the Jordan.”

         “What’s the big deal?” you and I wonder. So they have another altar. It’s a long way to Shiloh or wherever the Tabernacle is currently parked. We build churches all over town, even churches of the same denomination. Why shouldn’t the east side tribes have an altar of their own at which to come and worship closer to home? What’s the problem?

         The problem is that God clearly designated the single altar of the Tabernacle as the only place for them all to worship. One God, one altar. Anyplace else was a site for false worship, for turning away from the true God. To build another altar was by necessity to worship another God. You see this feeling further on in the text in verse 15 as the question is asked, “How could you break faith with the God of Israel like this?”

         It’s like you would feel if your good, Christian son sends e-mail from college to say he he’s now hanging out with Mormons and beginning to appreciate a lot of things about Joseph Smith, or if your daughter posts a Facebook entry about a midnight ceremony in the nude with a group of Wiccans. That’s how the Cisjordanians, the nine and a half tribes of Israel on the west side, saw the altar the Transjordanians built. It got their dander up. Verse 12 says they “gathered at Shiloh to go to war against them.”

         You’re on your own warpath, buying a plane ticket to fly out to your child’s university, storm the dorm and drag your little apostate home before anything worse happens. Then in a calm moment you look again see your son’s e-mail is dated April 1. It’s his idea of an April Fools joke on the old parents. Or your daughter calls and tells you more and you realize the Wiccan thing is a story about another girl who lives down the hall. It wasn’t your child at all dancing “skyclad,” as they call it, under the stars. It’s a misunderstanding. Your heart slows down and you cool off.

         Cooler heads prevailed on the Jordan’s west side. Instead of starting with a war party, they first sent a delegation headed by a priest to investigate. They’re still upset and the start accusations fly. This is apostasy, they say, like Israel’s sin at Peor in Numbers 25 and like Achan’s sin in Joshua 7. Both led to disaster for the nation. They aren’t going to let something like that happen again.

         But it’s all a big misunderstanding. In verse 22, Gad, Reuben and East-Manasseh respond with a rock solid statement of faith. “The God of gods, the Lord!” Using God’s highest and most sacred name they affirm that He is God over any other god. They repeat it twice and swear they in no way meant the new altar to detract from the true worship of God at His one and only altar in the west. They never meant to actually worship at their duplicate altar, never intended to “turn away from the Lord and to offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, or to sacrifice fellowship offerings on it.”

         No, the altar built on the border between Cisjordan and Transjordan represented the eastern tribes own worries that they would grow out of touch with their brothers and sisters on the far side of the river. They were afraid of what was already being implied, that they would no longer be regarded as part of Israel. It’s a little like your child off at college feeling left out of family events and plans and conversation that she’s no longer part of. They were worried they wouldn’t really belong anymore.

         So that altar was only a “replica” it says in verse 28. “Look at it,” they say. It’s “imposing,” big, verse 10 told us. It’s bigger than life size. It was never meant to be used, but only to stand as an impressive reminder of the one true altar in which the people on the east side had as much a part as people on the west side. It’s a reminder to both that they are one people, with one God. A river might separate them, but a deeper and more powerful current—of faith in God—would always bind them together.

         There’s a nice little moral lesson here, of course. We all need to learn to listen and even investigate before we jump to negative conclusions about others, especially people we love and care about. It’s a good thing to slow down and think and pray and talk before we go to war over what might be simple misunderstanding. It’s a good lesson, but there is a stronger message here, a message that runs throughout the Bible and which we heard today in our New Testament lessons.

         God is in the business of bringing and keeping people together. Ultimately we have a unity in Jesus Christ that bridges all sorts of rivers, that draws people together in one family, one body, no matter how far apart they are. The Israelites here in Joshua 22 were concerned with the keeping of God’s commands, of being unified in obedience to God. In John 14:23 Jesus replies to a question about why He hasn’t yet revealed Himself to the world, to everyone. And He says “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching.” It’s open. Anyone is invited to love and follow Jesus Christ. It’s a unity, a “peace,” as He says a few verses on, that the world can’t give. They don’t need to build an altar to remind them. The Holy Spirit will remind them of what Jesus said and keep them together in His peace.

         In a resonating theme in our text from Revelation 21 and 22, we’re told that “the nations” will be brought into God’s kingdom, into the New Jerusalem, the Holy City that is coming to this world. God means to reach across every river, every canyon, every mountain range, every national border on earth, and bring His people together in Jesus. We may now be separated by race and language and culture, but the aim, the goal, is to show us that we can all be one in Christ.

         An altar was a representation of God’s presence. That’s why the Israelites cherished their altar enough to go to war about any challenge to its supremacy. In the Tabernacle, in the altar of sacrifice, in the Ark of the Covenant, God came down among His people and lived with them. And nothing should separate or divide people from His holy presence.

         The good news in Jesus Christ is that God comes and lives among us in and through His Son. When we believe in Jesus, God is with us, living in us through His Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “My Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.” That immediate and intimate presence of God is also our hope. One day, as Revelation 22:4 says, we will see His face. We will be in His presence, and it will be everlasting light, with no darkness ever again.

         In the meantime, like Israel divided there across the Jordan, you and I are called to discover and live out the unity that God is bringing to us in Jesus. It begins as we learn to do what Phinehas and the chiefs of Israel did, to listen before we fight, to understand before we condemn, to seek peace before war. Robes and holy water and incense are strange to some of us, but we are brothers and sisters in Christ to those who worship in churches that use those things. We may not appreciate hip-hop music, speaking in tongues, or being “slain in the Spirit,” but there are fellow Christians in the services where those worship expressions happen.

         More importantly, we are connected and united in Christ with churches on the “other” sides of our communities. In our area, like Israel, rivers separate us from others. We cross them more easily, but they are still boundaries, sometimes between those who are well off and those who are struggling. It’s not just rivers, but interstate freeways, railroad tracks and sometimes even streets or avenues that divide us from people who have different levels of education or income, whose first language may not be English, who may do work we would not choose to do.

         Let’s find our way across all those rivers of worship style and class and race and culture to meet our sisters and brothers and truly understand them. May we find, and if necessary, set up the reminders we need that we are one people in Christ, just as Israel was one nation in the Lord God.

         One reminder being set up here in central Lane county is a branch of the church network called Love INC (Love in the Name of Christ). It’s a ministry built around a clearing house for various church ministries to those in need. It’s centered around a common statement of faith in the Apostles’ Creed, affirmed by evangelical, mainline, Catholic and Orthodox alike. Food at one church, help with rent at another, volunteers to mow a lawn or drive to a doctor appointment at yet another will all be networked in a visible display of the unity we have in the name of Christ. May God help us cooperate in this effort and hold up before our cities and neighborhoods a tangible sign of the love of Jesus drawing us together in service.

         If you would like to join in the development work for Love INC, I would love to hear from you. However, there’s another smaller effort at visible unity I’d like to share. Living Hope Church, just down 18^th Avenue a few blocks, has talked to us and to the Friends Church about working together to bring a Vacation Bible School to our neighborhoods, maybe in the last part of July. We have almost no children among us. We haven’t done a Bible school in several years. But we could partner to reach out across the street and across the fence to bring Jesus to children who are not far from us at all. Again, I’d love to hear from you if God moves your heart to care for children in this way.

         The president of our denomination, Gary Walter, likes to say that the word “Covenant” in our name means “in it together.” That sums it up, not just for 800 or so Covenant churches, but for all who are in it together in the name of Jesus. Our text ends with the name those eastern tribes gave their big, unused altar. They called it, “A Witness Between Us—that the Lord is God.” In our Gospel lesson last week, Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” As He prays a little later in John 17, it’s by the love and unity of Christians that the world is going to believe in Him, believe that He really came from the Father. May our works of love and unity, both here in our own church and in the wider Christian community, stand as our altar of Witness that Jesus is just who He says, the Savior of all people.

         Amen.

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