Ready To Serve

There’s a story I rather like about the college freshman biology class which kept a rattlesnake in a cage in the laboratory. The students enjoyed the monthly feeding almost as much as the snake did. The entire class would gather around the cage and watch in completely absorbed and attentive silence. “I’m jealous of the snake,” the instructor said, not quite joking. “I never get the class’s undivided attention like this.” A student answered matter of factly, “You would if you could swallow a mouse.”

It takes a lot to catch people’s attention in this TV-saturated age. There are so many things competing for our time and interest. And even if you can catch the public eye, how long does it last? Fifteen minutes of fame is about all you can count on, unless you keep coming up with new and different gimmicks to stay on top of the ratings. We have very short attention spans. Media specialists tell us they are getting shorter and shorter every year. People used to sit still for two-hour sermons... and still do, in third world countries - but nowadays twenty 20 minutes is about average, and some preachers - especially in the churches who’ve embraced the “contemporary worship” approach - try to stick to ten. We’re so busy rushing toward the 21st century that there hardly seems to be any time to reflect even on our present, much less our past.

But survivalists tell us that the only way you can keep on course in the wilderness - if you get stuck out there without a compass - is to mark where you’ve been, and keep assessing our direction by checking back to see if you’re still headed in a straight line or have somehow wandered off course. Because if you lose sight of your starting point, you wind up going in circles.

Wandering off course by forgetting our past is hardly an invention of our own age, of course. Nothing is, really... People seem to remember their history most often when it provides them with an excuse to hate their neighbors, like the Serbians who hate the Albanians for their defeat at the battle of Kosovo in 1463, or the Irish who hate the British for the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

But today is a day to remember for good, not for bad. Today churches around the world celebrate All Saints Day. And one of the reasons we do that is to hold them up as standards against which we can measure our own lives. Are we still going in the right direction? Or have we lost our way?

Joshua, an old man about to die, called the people of Israel together at the end of his long and mostly triumphant leadership of their conquest of Canaan. He called them together to remember - and to decide. And in the same way we too are called together every Sunday, but especially today, to remember, and to decide.

Part of the meaning of this day is to remember the saints in our own lives, parents, teachers, the people we loved, who loved and taught us. And a big part of that remembering is just in telling the story, in recalling and sharing who they were for us. But the bigger purpose in today’s remembering is to celebrate the saints that belong to the whole church, those men and women in whose faithful lives we can see God’s purpose being worked out, and whose stories remind us that we each have our own place in God’s history, and whose examples call us to give an accounting of our own faithfulness.

We need those reminders to stay on track.

In today’s scripture reading Joshua told the story of how God had treated the children of Israel: how he had chosen Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and promised them a land of their own; how he had remembered Joseph in Egypt and raised up Moses to deliver the people; how he had led his people safely from the clutches of Pharaoh and watched over them in the Wilderness of Sinai, and how finally he had brought the 12 tribes across the Jordan and into the promised land, driving out their enemies before them, and giving them a land that they had not labored for, grapes and olives that they didn’t plant.

Joshua tells the story, he holds their history up before them, and then he then calls his people to respond to that history by making a decision. They can decide to follow the God who gave them life, or they can decide to forget God and follow the path of the nations around them and to worship their gods.“Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve Him in sincerity and faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve...but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (v. 14 15)