What's Past is Prologue
A sermon preached on September 29, 2024
(This sermon is the first in a sermon series based on the Season of Origins and Undoing Conquest by Dr. Kate Common.)
Scripture: Joshua 1:1-9 NRSVUE
(Scroll down for the recording.)
It’s great to be back with you today. As I said earlier, I’m so thankful and appreciative for your support as my family and I deal with my mom’s illness and hospitalization. As of Friday, she has been in the hospital for three weeks. Her recovery will be a long one and it seems likely that she will need to spend time in a rehab hospital and perhaps then time in a skilled nursing facility before she’s able to come home. The important part though is that we’re confident that she will recover.
Four lessons have been and continue to be reinforced for me throughout this process. First, it doesn’t matter how much you disagree with your family or how nuts they make you, if love exists among you and you are still a part of each other’s lives, lean into that love in the hard times. My dad, my sister, and I all approach life very differently and we have divergent views on just about everything, but we were scared—we are scared—and something about being scared together makes this situation easier.
Second, when there’s nothing we can do, prayers and thoughts mean everything. My mom is an extremely private person. When she’s able to get on Facebook again she will be truly horrified about all the updates, prayers, wishes, etc. she received. I’m very rarely a private person. I want people on every continent praying when my family or I need it. I want someone posting daily updates. When we can’t do anything else, there is a certain catharsis in saying a prayer, holding someone in the light, thinking good thoughts about them, or lighting a candle.
Third, no matter how close we are with our biological or adoptive families, our chosen families and our friends who have become family are incredibly important too. In a strange twist, this situation brought to light how isolated my parents are and the degree to which they lack a local community. What did my dad need? Food and food that wasn’t delivered, but his friends, my mom’s friends, were largely in Cambridge where they had lived for 30+ years. What those friends did well, though, was checking in with phone calls, texts, Facebook messages, and more. Always remember to check-in on your friends, particularly when a crisis goes on for a while.
Fourth, earlier this week one of my mom’s physical therapists asked her how she ended up in the hospital. She weakly responded, “I’m an idiot.” Both physical therapists turned red and tried to get a different answer out of her, but she wouldn’t say anything else. The therapists looked at my dad and me for help, but we said, “yeah, that’s about right.” You see this issue started 32 years ago and included a similar surgery and stay in the hospital which just about killed her. Then four years ago the problem returned, and her surgeon told her what she needed to do before he could operate. Over the next four years she put off the surgery with a legion of excuses. Even when the worst symptoms presented three weeks ago, she refused to go to the hospital until even she couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s all to say, go to the doctor, go to your appointments, get checked out, and if you seriously don’t feel well, go to the hospital. It may not always feel like it, but our lives are not just about ourselves. We each are part of webs of connection. Take us away and those webs suffer. You are important. Do at least the minimum to take care of yourselves.
Tonight, our scripture comes from the very beginning of the Book of Joshua. The great exodus of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and forty years wandering in the wildness has ended. Moses has given his final blessing to the people in Deuteronomy 33 and, in Deuteronomy 34, has laid his hands on Joshua anointing him as the leader of the Hebrews. Then Moses dies forbidden to enter the Promised Land by God because he and Aaron did not trust in the holiness of God at Meribah.
We know this story. We know that Joshua will lead the people into battle against the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, and the Girgashites. The Hebrews will engage in battles which have been memorialized in Christian hymns including Jericho where the walls came tumbling down. Eventually, this promised land will be divided among the 12 tribes. This is the Biblical beginning of the political entity known as Israel. As educated and discerning people, we recognize that this Israel is not the same Israel that will be reconstituted after the Babylonian exile, and we know that this is a totally different political creation than the current State of Israel.
But what if I told you that this conquest never happened? That there is no historical evidence of a large group of Hebrews being enslaved in Egypt. That there is no historical evidence that this group left Egypt, wandered in the wilderness for forty years, and then migrated to the historical Canaan. So how do we read a Scriptural account which is so different than the historical fact? The 16th King of Judah was Josiah who is noted in both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles as a reformer who “walked in all the way of David his father and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left,” a clear reference to God’s charge to Joshua in today’s Scripture. To be clear, David was not his literal father, but his ancestor. His father and his grandfather, in fact, had adapted the temple for the worship of a pantheon of other gods. Josiah enacted various religious and civil reforms including significant renovations to the temple. During those renovations the chief priest conveniently discovers a missing copy of the book of the law. But this is no regular copy, it is described in 2 Kings 22:8 as sefer ha-torah. That same description is used in our scripture tonight in Joshua 1:8 to describe the “book of the law” upon which he is to meditate day and night. This book of the law is special because it was either written by Moses or it was drawn from an oral tradition passed from Moses to Joshua.
With this newly discovered book of the law in hand and significant religious reforms occurring, Josiah commissions the creation of history of the Hebrew people. This history quickly becomes more a work of fiction than a historical account. Today we might call Josiah’s “history” fake news. Not only does Josiah have a vested interest in portraying the Hebrews as separate from the Egyptians, Canaanites, and the other ethnic groups who live near and around them, he has a political interest in portraying the Hebrews as conquerors. Against the recommendations of the prophets, including Jeremiah, he decides to attack Egypt. At this point in actual history—the dynamic is left out of the Bible—Egypt is a puppet kingdom of Assyria. By attacking Egypt, he has attacked the Assyrians who would retaliate during the reigns of his descendants; opening the door for the Babylonians, who will conquer the Assyrians, to conquer Judah. Even though his plan doesn’t work, Josiah wants to show the region that his kingdom and their siblings in the North pose a serious military threat with God on their side.
Today we begin our celebration of the season of Origins, a new liturgical season proposed by Dr. Kate Common in her book Undoing Conquest: Ancient Israel, the Bible, and the Future of Christianity. Common created Origins to draw attention to the theme of conquest in the Bible. Whether or not you join us for Bible and Book Study, I encourage you to follow along in Undoing Conquest as we explore the true history of the Hebrews in the region known variously as Canaan, Palestine, and Israel.
Without spoiling Common’s scholarship, I want to outline what the archeological record tells us about the origins and development of the Hebrews. In the Bible we learn that Abraham and his family are drawn from the people traditionally associated with the city Ur, which is in present-day southern Iraq, but that at the time of his call from God he’s living near Haran in what is now Turkey. Haran is likely not a town, but land either owned by or under the control of a man named Haran. Abraham and his people were nomads who moved flocks around the desert finding spots for them to graze.
Now it’s important for the Bible to depict Abraham and therefore the Hebrews as a distinct people separate from the Canaanites who they will later conquer in order to take control of the “Promised Land.” The Hebrews are God’s chosen people, the Bible needs them drawn from the greater whole of humanity. Indeed, while Abraham is associated with Ur and the Chaldeans who live there, he’s never directly called a Chaldean. He’s drawn from general humanity, set apart for a divine purpose, given a new name and new identity by God, and tasked with a special calling.
However, in reality, the Hebrews originated in the very land they supposedly conquered. Their beginnings as an ethnic group are among the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age I Canaanite people who lived among a series of Egyptian-ruled city-states each with its own king who paid annual tributes to Egypt for a semblance of autonomy and for military and economic support when needed. Outside of these urban centers existed rural subsistence farmers and a class of people known as the habiru who were a mix of outlaws, mercenaries, former and escaped slaves, former wage earners and farmers from towns near the cities, and other marginalized people. As Egyptian rule waned largely due to a period of climate change (1350-1250 BCE), more people fled the cities and joined this economic class and nascent ethnic group. Around this same time, the habiru were joined by escaped slaves from Egypt proper whose stories of escape and migration likely contributed to the later exodus narrative.
In approximately 1200 BCE, the habiru and others began to coalesce into 30 or so settlements in the hills just beyond the plains where the Canaanite city-states lay. While many of these people were ethnically Canaanite, they included many others from the region as well as Egyptians and the Sea Peoples from the larger Mediterranean community. Slowly what began as an economic class of marginalized people became an ethnicity and many scholars argue that the word habiru became Hebrew.
While the Bible may not tell discuss the origin of the Hebrews in that way, the Biblical narrative is littered with pieces of the story. For example, Abraham is called from humanity in general just as the Hebrews develop from a group of multiple ethnicities. When Abraham enters Canaan, he settles at Bethel which is a rocky and hilly position north of Jerusalem. The theme of settling in and holding sacred the hills and mountains abounds in the Hebrew Bible, drawing on the geographic origins of the Hebrew people.
While most of us are Bible and history nerds, I’m sure you’re wondering why any of this is important. Other than coming to a better understanding of the Bible, why dedicate time in church? Why create a new liturgical season? The conquest narrative—Joshua and the Hebrews crossing into Canaan and waging war to claim the land promised by God—has been taken out of its context and weaponized for the use in colonial projects. Replacing the Hebrews with Christian Europeans and the Ancient Near East with other continents and locations, the conquest narrative was adapted for use in Australia, Africa, and North America. Here in the United States, we all learn about manifest destiny, the idea that God had ordained for Americans to push west and claim the “open” and “savage” land. In fact, dating as far back as the Crusades, the theme of Christian conquest has echoed the exclamation that “God wills it.”
On Friday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, gave a defiant speech to the United Nations General Assembly. In that speech he said, “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse” (he’s referring to Deuteronomy 28 in which Moses preaches about obedience and disobedience, whether to be a blessing or a curse). What’s important here is that as recently as Friday a world leader invoked the image of the Hebrews entering the Promised Land to conquer it. While Netanyahu would go on to say that he’s committed to peace, he was clear that such a peace could only come with a total Israeli victory against terrorist organizations in Gaza and elsewhere. By resting his message on the conquest narrative, Netanyahu implicitly positions Israel on the side of God who led the Hebrews to victory in the Promised Land which in this imagined history and distorted present reality is the same nation as the contemporary State of Israel. Indeed, this is same God who led European colonialists to victory in North America, Australia, and Africa and who led the American migration west.
As we witness the growth and expansion of the sin we know today as Christian nationalism, it should come as no surprise that the distortion of Biblical ideas and statements is not a new project. What might surprise us though is that the first clear example of the misuse of scripture for socio-political gain is discussed in the Bible itself. And this is why the season of Origins is important. Origins not only invites us into a deeper conversation with the Bible, it calls us to cut through the distortion, the misuse, and the weaponization to find the real origin of the Hebrew people. In finding that origin we can also find our origin with and in the text.
In closing, I turn back to us here. Blue Ocean Columbus is a congregation of deconstruction and reconstruction. We know that we can undo the lies we’ve been taught about the Bible and about Christianity because we are rooted in a God who is so big that they can encompass all of our truths and are still Truth itself. We preach a Jesus who is savior even as we acknowledge that our salvation has infinitely more to do with the grace and love of God than the death suffered by a radical preacher who threatened both the religious establishment and the foundations of empire. The Season of Origins too is about deconstructing a myth and reconstructing truth in the honest reality of a narrative which challenges the very empires and sins which have been built upon its distortion. Amen.