The fourth Sunday in Lent...also known as Laetare Sunday.
The name comes from the Latin word for REJOICE, the opening word
in the ancient introit for the fourth Sunday of Lent. Does that
strike you as strange? REJOICE in the midst of a liturgical
season that calls for introspection and rigid self-examination?
At first glance, perhaps we would raise a question, but once we
look at the scripture lessons for the day, we begin to see how
things fit together.
As you ecclesiastical scholars know, every Sunday there are
four scripture passages selected for use in churches that follow
what is known as the Revised Common Lectionary: an Old Testament
lesson, a Gospel lesson, an Epistle lesson, and a lesson from the
Psalms. Depending on the season of the church year, the lessons
for the week might share a common theme, at other times, no. On
this fourth Sunday in Lent, Laetare Sunday, they most assuredly
do - the theme of new beginning - any of which would yield fruit
for a sermon. The Psalm for today, 32, begins "Blessed is he
whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered." For
someone whose lenten self-examination has unearthed things that
ought not to be, this is good news indeed, cause for rejoicing,
even. The Epistle lesson, from II Corinthians 5: "If anyone is
in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has
come!" More good news, more reason to rejoice. The Gospel
lesson from Luke 15 is the New Testament's quintessential story
of a new beginning as the Prodigal Son returns home to an
extravagant welcome and life in his father's house once more.
Let the celebration begin. "Rejoice...and again I say,
Rejoice,"(1) in the words of the Apostle Paul.
Any of those lessons would have been good for a sermon this
morning, but I chose the Old Testament lesson from Joshua 5
simply because it is less familiar. We do not hear a great deal
about Joshua's day in our day. The three-year Lectionary cycle
only has lessons from Joshua two other times - one when the
Israelites crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land with waters
backed up just as with the escape from Egypt through the Reed
Sea,(2) and the other when Joshua makes his farewell speech to the
people and encourages them to choose God rather than idols.(3)
The material we find in the book of Joshua reflects the
culmination of a long and not too pretty history. The people of
Israel had been landless for nearly five hundred years. The
patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons - had been
nomads in the land of Canaan until a famine forced a relocation
to Egypt. Eventually, that sojourn resulted in 400 years of
slavery which only ended courtesy of a miraculous deliverance
into freedom led by Moses. That was followed by a generation of
homeless wandering, forty years in the wilderness, until they
finally returned to their ancestral territory. Now they had
arrived. Promised land. Holy land. Home.
The book begins as God is heard instructing Joshua, the
designated successor to Moses (who is now dead): "You and all
these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I
am about to give to them--to the Israelites." Joshua passes the
message on then sends two spies into the city of Jericho who are
almost discovered, but they hide out in the home of Rahab, an
apparently notorious lady-of-the-evening (our Sunday School
lessons years ago identified her as a harlot but no one ever
explained that to us - remember?). The Jericho police come to
her place in search of the spies, but she sends them on a wild
goose chase, and then helps the men escape in return for a
promise of mercy when the Israelites finally take over. Three
days later the invasion begins and the Israelites cross the
Jordan which has miraculously dried up for them. Once all have
passed over, they make camp at a place called GILGAL, to the east
of Jericho, and Joshua instructs that a twelve-stone shrine be
set up to commemorate the miraculous crossing. He says, "In the
future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?'
tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark
of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the
waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a
memorial to the people of Israel forever." So they do it.
Now we come to chapter 5 and learn that word of the
miraculous crossing had gotten to the powers-that-be in Canaan
and they were scared to death. But the battle would not begin
quite yet. First, there was a ritual to complete. As we know,
since God's covenant with father Abraham, the sign of racial
inclusion for Israelite males was circumcision,(4) and, back in
Egypt, that practice had continued. But since the Exodus and
escape from slavery, as babies were born during the wilderness
wandering, somehow the ritual had fallen into disuse. But now
they were about to return to their ancestral homeland and God
instructs Joshua to reinstate circumcision, so he does. (Now you
are getting another clue as to why there is not a lot of
preaching from Joshua.) Suddenly, the nation hears the voice of
God: "Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you."
The pain and humiliation of slavery is now officially gone. It
is over. A new life is about to begin. Then the text notes, "So
the place has been called Gilgal to this day." Gilgal sounds
similar to the Hebrew verb TO ROLL.
Now, one more ritual to celebrate this new beginning.
Passover. If you recall, the first Passover in Egypt, just prior
to the Israelites' escape, meant the end of slavery and the
beginning of a new life of freedom. Exactly a year later, a
second Passover was held at the end of their time in Sinai
following the giving of the Law as the nation would begin its
next journey to Kadesh-barnea and the plains of Moab. This, now,
is the third celebration - the wilderness journey is ended and
they are about to begin the process of reclaiming their land.
Then there is one more detail noted. No more manna.
Remember your Sunday School lessons and recall that manna was
God's provision for the people following the Exodus. These small
round grains or flakes, which appeared around the Israelites'
camp each morning with the dew, were ground and baked into cakes
or boiled.(5) The name may well have come from the question the
Israelites asked when they first saw the stuff: "What is it (Mah
nah)?"
You may also recall that the Israelites got tired of nothing
but manna and complained right bitterly about their diet: "If
only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at
no cost--also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.
But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this
manna!"(6) God responded by giving them a quail feast, so much
quail that... Well, listen:
"Tell the people: 'Consecrate yourselves in preparation
for tomorrow, when you will eat meat. The LORD heard
you when you wailed, "If only we had meat to eat! We
were better off in Egypt!" Now the LORD will give you
meat, and you will eat it. You will not eat it for
just one day, or two days, or five, ten or twenty days,
but for a whole month--until it comes out of your
nostrils and you loathe it--because you have rejected
the LORD, who is among you, and have wailed before him,
saying, "Why did we ever leave Egypt?"'"(7)
Well, that was then. This is now. A new beginning. No
more manna. God does not have to provide directly any longer.
As the lesson ends we read, "That year they ate of the produce of
Canaan." A new life had begun.
To begin again. That ultimately is the aim of our lenten
journey. We do not undergo that process of self-examination and
identification of those things that separate us from God and one
another as merely an intellectual exercise. There is a purpose
to it - with God's help, to fix what is broken, then to start
fresh. The good news is that to begin again is a story that is
repeated from the day of ancient Israel on up to tomorrow's
newspaper.
For example:(8)
A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard
just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she
listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few
times, and she seethes inside. "I hate you!" she screams at her
father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument,
and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed
scores of times. She runs away.
She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with
her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because
newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs,
drugs, and violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is
probably the last place her parents will look for her.
California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.
Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest
car she has ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch,
arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that
make her feel better than she has ever felt before. She was
right all along, she decides: Her parents were keeping her from
all the fun.
The good life continues for a month, two months, a year.
The man with the big car -- she calls him "Boss" - teaches her a
few things that men like. Since she is underage, men pay a
premium for her. She lives in a penthouse and orders room
service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the
folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring that she can
hardly believe she grew up there. She has a brief scare when she
sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the
headline, "Have you seen this child?" But by now she has blond
hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she
wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of
her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.
After a year, the first sallow signs of illness appear, and
it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean, and before she knows
it she is out on the street without a penny to her name. She
still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they do not pay much,
and all the money goes to support her drug habit these days
anyway. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal
grates outside the big department stores. "Sleeping" is the
wrong word -- a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can
never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough
worsens.
One night, as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of
a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no
longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little
girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to
whimper. Her pockets are empty and she is hungry. She needs a
fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under
the newspapers she has piled atop her coat. Something jolts her
memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse
City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden
retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossoms in chase
of a tennis ball.
God, why did I leave? she asks herself, and pain stabs at
her heart like a knife. My dog eats better than I do anymore.
She is sobbing now, and she knows in a flash that more than
anything else in the world she wants to go home.
Three straight phone calls, three straight connections to
the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message
the first two times, but the third time she says, "Dad, Mom, it's
me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus
up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If
you're not there, well, I guess I'll just stay on the bus until
it hits Canada."
It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops
between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she
realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of
town and miss the message? Shouldn't she have waited another day
or so until she could talk to them? Even if they are home, they
probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given
them some time to overcome the shock.
Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and
the speech she is preparing for her father. "Dad, I'm sorry. I
know I was wrong. It's not your fault, it's all mine. Dad, can
you forgive me?" She says the words over and over, her throat
tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn't apologized to
anyone in years.
When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes
hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over
the microphone, "Fifteen minutes, folks. That's all we have
here." Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself
in a compact mirror, smooths her hair, and licks the lipstick off
her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and
wonders if her parents will notice. If they are there.
She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect, and
not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind
prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a
group of 40 family members -- brothers and sisters and great-aunts
and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to
boot. They are all wearing ridiculous-looking party hats and
blowing noisemakers, and taped across the entire wall of the
terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads "Welcome
Home!"
Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She looks
through tears and begins the memorized speech, "Dad, I'm sorry.
I know..."
He interrupts her. "Hush, child. No time for that. No
time for apologies. You'll be late for the party. A banquet is
waiting for you at home."
To begin again. It is possible, and that is good news
indeed. "Rejoice...and again I say Rejoice."
Amen!
1. Philippians 4:4
2. Joshua 3:7-17, Year A, Ordinary 31
3. Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25, Year A, Ordinary 32
4. Genesis 17:10-14
5. Exodus 16:13-36
6. Numbers 11:4-6
7. Numbers 11:18-20
8. Adapted from Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace? (Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan Publishing House, 1997)
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