Monumental Series

[NOTE: This series uses stones as visual cues for our journey through Lent. This is actually the first sermon in the series. Each week, I have the ushers make sure that everyone has a stone. I ask them to hold the stone during the service and then, at the end, I ask them to come forward and place their stone at the foot of a wooden cross we have at the front of the sanctuary. Each week during Lent they will receive another stone and place that stone at the base of the cross so they can watch the stones pile up. On Easter morning, however, they will come in to find all the stones are gone. A nice, powerful visual.]

Take a moment to look at the rock in your hand. Aside from the shape, what is one of its most obvious and important qualities? Its hardness. Another quality that a rock or stone has is that there are so many of them. Just go outside and look around. We have so many stones around here that we build houses and walls with them.

Look at your stone again. How old do you think that stone is? A hundred years? More like thousands, amen?

All of these qualities, as I have already suggested, make rocks or stone excellent building material. It’s strong, hard, and lasts for a long, long time … which is why stone is such a good material for building monuments … like statues and grave markers. Just walk through any of the church graveyards around here and you’ll find headstones that are 100 years old … or more, amen?

Headstones are monuments … sacred memorials. It’s not about the stone itself, is it? It’s about the person who lies beneath it. The stone is a way to help us remember a loved one, a family member, a friend who is no longer with us. These headstones … these grave markers … bring back memories and remind us that the person buried there once existed and were a part of our lives … and because of their memories, they are still a part of our lives, part of us today.

There are things that God wants us to remember, to never forget … such as the time when He liberated His Hebrew children from 400 years of bondage and servitude in Egypt. God told them to set a day aside as a “day of remembrance.” Do any of you recall what that day is called? “Passover.” “You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord, throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance” (Exodus 12:14). The festival of Passover officially starts when the youngest person at the table asks the question: “Why is this night so special?” And, once again, all around the world, God’s people retell and remember the mighty things that God did for His Hebrew children.

When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the Law … with a capital “L” … carved in what? … stone … he built an altar … a memorial. Exodus 24:4 says that Moses “rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve pillars, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel.”

As the Israelites were about to enter the Promised Land, Moses issued a final warning: “… beware, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 6:12). So that they would never forget, God commanded them to build two very interesting monuments … one in the middle of the Jordan River and one just outside of the Canaanite city of Gilgal.

The Jordan River represented a border between the wilderness and the Promised Land … between where they had been and where they were going. When the Israelites first came to the Jordan River, it represented a barrier to blessing. On the other side was the Promised Land … a land flowing with milk and honey. The Israelites refused to pass through the river because the Promised Land was also flowing with Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites … all very powerful people … but not more powerful than God, amen? And so, they were turned back and the Jordan River became a symbol of impossibility and a memorial to their doubt and fear, their failure and their shame.

But God didn’t want it to be a symbol of impossibility or a memorial to their doubt and fear, their failure and their shame, did He? Forty years later they once again find themselves standing on the banks of the Jordan River … facing the same dilemma: to trust God and cross the river and claim the land that God had promised them or give in to their fear like their ancestors did and continue to wander homeless in the wilderness. To remind them of how it was going to be possible for them to claim the Promised Land … the land that God had promised them … God shows them Who is by going to go before them … Who is going to be with them … the same God that defeated Pharaoh … the same God that went before them in the wilderness. God commands them to build two monuments to remind them of the time that the Jordan River went from being symbol of impossibility and a memorial to their doubt and fear, their failure and their shame to a symbol of possibility and a reminder of the time that God went before them and led them into the land He promised them.