“Be Courageous: God is Our Help” Joshua 3: 1-13

Spiritual writer Anne Lammott authored a book about prayer a few years ago where she stated that perhaps the most sincere form of prayer is to ask for help. To come before God, in all humility, and say that a situation is simply bigger than you and that you can no longer handle it on your own. To ask God to help you. But there is a difference between asking God for help and saying that God is our help.

We are now in the second week of our sermon series on the book of Joshua. Last week we discovered that the book of Joshua invites us to be courageous with our faith in different ways than perhaps we had previously imagined. Joshua was the leader after Moses who had to have courage given by God to lead the people, finally, to the promised land. Today the Israelites, under his leadership, are taking the first steps in that direction. 

The time has come. The people have been wondering for forty years in the dessert. Have faced the death of their parents, loved ones, and even their leader, but now they are going to take the first step towards the land that God has promised them - the land they left captivity in Egypt for - the land flowing with milk and honey. They prepared for this day - they had set aside three days to spiritually and physically prepare for the journey and now it was time.

If you were going to go on the journey of a lifetime what would you take? A few years ago there were lots of hypothetical questions asked in this manner - like if you were on a dessert island what three things would you take with you? I lived out a more practical version of this question when I was in France during seminary. I spent a week in a community called Taize, where thousands of young adult pilgrims from around the world gathered to pray each week. We were instructed to only bring a hiking backpack - so the question became what do I really need to fit into this backpack and what can be left behind. 

The Israelites were used to moving from camp to camp, but this was still a hard question. They had learned to trust God for their provisions in terms of food and water each day, but surely in forty years they had also accumulated some stuff. And now they were being asked what they would carry with them on this final leg of the journey. But there was one thing the community knew they couldn’t leave behind. The ark of the covenant. Before there was ever a temple built to worship God in, the Israelites had the ark, containing items that reminded them of God’s presence in their daily lives. The ark contained different items from their journey, most notably the ten commandments. They not only refused to leave the ark behind, despite its size and weight, but they gave the ark the place of prominence on their journey. First and foremost.

When the ancient Israelites made the statement that God is their help it came from this understanding of the prominent place God had in their lives - first. They recognized, on an almost daily basis, that everything they had came from God as a gift, not a right. They recognized, every time they saw the ark of the covenant leading them, that they were people of the covenant. The covenant of Noah - that the earth would no longer be destroyed completely by water. The covenant of Abraham - that they were the chosen people. And the ten commandments -  that they were brought out of slavery in Egypt to follow God. 

When the ancient Israelites said that God was their help they recognized that they had to ask God to help them every single day. Which they were most certainly doing now. They were even told to concencrate themselves, not because what they were going to now do, taking this first step to cross the Jordan, was of their own merit, but because it was a holy and set apart moment for God’s glory. It was God who was going to do amazing things amongst them, not the other way around.

Oh how far we’ve come from the ancient Israelites crossing the Jordan that fateful day. Not that they got every moment right, but we have seemingly lost their dependance on God. We have become the society that has bought into the lie that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Yes, we ask God for help, but usually when it is only a last resort. And we no longer mean a total dependance upon God when we claim that God is our help - instead we seem to mean that God will help us accomplish achieving our wants and desires instead of seeking after the heart of God.

We need to renew our hearts. Renew our minds. And renew our covenant with God by putting God in the rightful place, first and foremost, with us following. No matter where God may lead. I love what happens next with the ark of the covenant - those carrying it stop right in the center of the Jordan. Right in the center. Dead halt. The Israelites didn’t rush past the ark - trying to out pace God. They stopped too. And the waters parted, like they did so many years ago with the Red Sea, so that the Israelites could cross on dry land.

How often do we try to outpace God? Thinking that we know a better way or an easier way that backfires, only then leading us to cry out for help. What would have happened if we would have said that God is our help in the first place and meant it? Following God’s directions instead of our own? Would things have turned out differently?

We cannot re-write the past, but we can consider how we will pack as we move forward into the future. We can consider if we will put God in a place of prominence in the coming year or if we will try, once again, to do things our own way first. 

Let us start anew today, as we reclaim who we are on this special day for United Methodists - Covenant renewal Sunday. Wesley understood that at times we, as the Church, loose our way and forget our identity, which often leads to us not following God fully. So each new calendar year a service is held for us to recommit ourselves to the teachings of Christ. 

My friends and family will tell you that I strongly dislike broken promises. In our present culture, we seem to make promises left and right that we have no intention of fulfilling. Or we make promises that we try to keep for a short period of time and then give up when it becomes hard, returning to our old habits and patterns instead. But if there is any place that the words “I promise”, or “I vow”, or “I covenant to” should matter it should be the Church. For God has made an unbreakable covenant with us through Jesus Christ, who we strive to both worship and emulate. 

Some promises we can only make once, like vows of membership or promises made at our baptism. But John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed that we needed a reminder of those promises. Like celebrating an anniversary or the people of Israel remembering God’s covenant when they saw the ark of the covenant, as Methodists we gather once a year to reaffirm what we believe and who we covenant to be together. In your bulletin you should have found a copy of the Wesley covenant prayer this morning. I’d like to invite you to take it out and read over it. In a few minutes we will read this covenant aloud together, saying that we want God to be first in our live and that we will submit to the will of God, whatever that may be. This is our binding promise for the year, one we will remember when we gather together for worship or fellowship. One that puts God first in our lives. Amen.