So let us pray. God, you are the one who frees and delivers your people, who calls us into ways of peace and love. Help us wrestle with the way that people have stewarded your story, counter the ways of Jesus. Help us choose your way for our lives when so much of the world wants us to do otherwise. Amen. 

So about 40 years later, since last week, they've now entered the promised land. And the way the story is told is that no one who left Egypt enters the promised land. So this is a whole generation of people that were born in the desert not knowing anything about what slavery felt like, but knew the stories that their parents and grandparents had passed down to them, and then going into the place that they kept being told that would be the one that they would be able to live in. 

And so through armed conflict, the Israelites now find themselves in the place that they believed to be their destiny. I guess it's a little. I don't know if it's where I'm at or what, but something's up with the mic. So they're where they believed they should be. I won't spend too much time focusing on the armed conflict part because the text doesn't even agree with itself. 

The events in Joshua 6 don't follow the way that Joshua says God tells the story in 24. And also, if they're completely eliminated in Joshua, how did they exist again in Judges? Like, there's. And archaeological evidence says it probably didn't happen. So instead, I want to focus on the fact that. 

That how we tell stories matters. Joshua has retold the entirety of Torah that have led up to that moment, and he skips a bunch of the story. Like, it's not the way that, like, we would typically tell the story. Usually when we tell the story of Torah, we tell the story of, like, a relationship. And instead, it's just like these things kind of happened, like, very much jumping. 

We don't get to find out that, like, Abraham decided to almost kill his son, like, we don't get. Or that, like, Jacob stole the blessing from Esau, like, all of, like, the stuff that you would be talking about if this were a television series is left out of the summary. And so with these skipping in the way of the telling the story and then also the inconsistencies throughout the text, we see that the author of Judges, well, of Joshua isn't interested in giving a historical account of any of this, 

which is probably why our Jewish siblings don't consider this a historical text. All of the things that we label as history in our Bible. So Joshua, Judges, first and second Samuel, first and second Kings, they put in the section of their Bible they call the prophets. So it's about speaking the truth of God's existence in community to people that kind of keep getting it wrong. So the author here, as a prophetic text, is more interested in how the stories are told that shape the community. 

Joshua summarizes hundreds of pages into one page, and the way he talks about it is conquest and victory. Throughout Judges, the category of us versus them are blurred. And it's interesting because in this retelling, he's basically saying, well, when we got here, people tried to kill us, so we killed them first. And then we kind of kept going, like, instead of like the full total conquest that's happening in the rest of the story. But really early on, 

the whole Canaanites bad, Israelites good is immediately challenged by the telling of the story of Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who helps the Israelites. And Rahab is later listed in the Gospel of Matthew as one of the ancestors of Jesus. So this not allowing us to think about everything in binaries is a big thing that the author of Joshua is doing, but also the author of Matthew, 

which is probably why you can see why we're talking about this story this year, since this year's narrative lectionary is focused on the Gospel of Matthew. So if the history isn't what matters, what's important here, you might have noticed that Joshua's retelling, or you might not have because of the clear abundance of names that I had to read. But Joshua's retelling of the story is from God's perspective. The people don't have any actions throughout. 

There's like two. Like Abraham went, It's like one of them. But like in the retelling of the story, God is the primary actor in the people's lives. And thus God is calling them to worship the one God who liberated them over the gods of Pharaoh and Egypt. And then while Joshua's retelling focuses on victory and conquest, the people's response expands to God as protector. 

The common English Bible for verse 17 says, the Lord is our God. He is the one who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt from the house of bondage. He has done these mighty signs in our sight. He has protected us the whole way we've gone and in all the nations throughout which we've passed. And then they proclaim that we are witnesses. 

We hold one another accountable to this dedication, to the ways of the triune God over other gods and idols. Very much like how we do our baptisms and our baptismal vows in community. And so because of that, we are witnesses to one another's vows. And we make vows to one another in that space in order to remain committed 

to one another's growth in the ways of God, over the ways of evil, injustice and oppression that permeates our world. In the same way that in less than a week, Ashley and Hunter will stand up here facing one another, but in a way that each other's families will watch them make these vows to one another in a community that is agreed to help continue to shape who they are and who they're becoming. 

So we are each other's witnesses. We are called to steward one another through grace and love. And so if we are each other's witnesses, it's important to how we tell stories. When we tell stories of who we are as a community, who gets to be the primary actor? Now, I could have gone to our About Us page on the website and paid attention to it, and. 

And it's been probably over a year since I looked at it when we switched from one website to the next. But I'm willing to bet that the primary actor in the way that we tell our story publicly is not God, because that's how the American way, because we want to tell our story in what makes us great, so that people come to us to be great with us. Right. But it can also be in the way that we tell stories about our space. 

So currently, everyone that's in the room that's not online, we're all in what we call the sanctuary. Now, whose sanctuary is this? God's sanctuary. But sometimes when decisions get hard, we'll hear people talk about it being our sanctuary or our building, our property. 

Does anybody know the names of the different spaces in a sanctuary? Because I didn't know all of them until, like, this week. And I probably don't know all of them because I'm sure that there's other ones I don't know about. The sacristy, which I can never pronounce right on the first try, probably not even on the 7th, is like the back where we prep communion elements and everything else. And that's where the candle comes from. 

Well, the fire on the stick comes from. And anyone close will hear the multiple clicks of the lighter whenever someone is setting up in there, up here. Does anybody know what this space is called? The chancel, which is why it's the chancel choir, because that's where they Hang out. Took me entirely too long to make that connection. 

The little entrywayish. Anyone know that one narthex. Grocery stores have narthexes also. Now this is where it gets more interesting. Does anyone know what this center part is called? 

It's the nave. I didn't know that until this week. So good job. If we look up at it, what does it kind of look like? A boat. 

Just like how boats have naves. So this is intentionally designed to look like a boat, because there's two different things that's communicated in this space, is that people should be able to find sanctuary and safety and security and God's love. And since it's a nave, we should be going. We should be on the move. 

We should be following the Holy Spirit. This week, Bishop Robin Days pointed out how a good quantity of the UMC interested in returning to the 1950s church, thinking about the good old days, rather than following with the niv the work of the Holy Spirit that God is doing, as God calls us, into new ways of being. 

Too much of the United Methodist Church, she was arguing, is ready to just sit still and ignore the fact that we're called to move. So what would change if we shifted how we tell the story to this being God's sanctuary? Well, we'd have to ask some serious questions that I don't have the answer to. For instance, is there anyone whom God calls us to protect and be in community with, who may not find sanctuary in this place, who may show up and not feel like they are safe and loved and 

have belonging and just to name some categories, Deuteronomy and Matthew. We've got the widows, the orphans, the immigrants, those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick and prisoners. Or if we shift to thinking about this as God's nave, that we are on the ship that God has built for us, that we get to follow the wind of the Spirit, The Holy Spirit guides us and transforms us as a community. 

And so if this is God's nave, it leads to the question of where are we resisting the movement of the Holy Spirit as a community? Whose story or stories are we refusing to be told in this space because of fear of how it might change us? Because the reality is, the more that we get to understand the image of God and others that we would consider strangers or different or other, the more our understanding of God's love has to change. 

And that is scary. And I do not hold these questions as someone who magically has answers, because I don't. Instead, I hold these answers reminding us that we are witnesses. We are witnesses to our call to be in community of God's people to together in this place and time. We are witnesses to one another's baptismal vows and membership vows. 

We are witnesses not in the sense that we need to call people out when they do something wrong, but call people in into community so we can continue to know new ways of being, to know how God is calling to transform us and work through this to together. And so we are called to companion with one another on this journey through God's nave of discernment so that we can then also be witnesses of God's love to the world. So let us pray. 

God, you are the one who guided your people out of captivity across the sea of reeds on dry land and fostered the retelling of this story so that when their descendants came to another river, the Jordan river, and were uncertain as to what it meant to cross a river without a boat, to cross a massive river without a boat, 

they were able to hold tight to the stories that were handed to them and remember with faith to step through the river on dry land once again. You continue to companion with us and guide us and nurture us in ways that we would consider foolish, always giving second chances to a people who never seem to get it right. 

So God, we are so grateful for the ways that you continue to guide us and lead us and nurture us. So may your spirit continue to be the wind in our sails of this nave, guiding your people towards your love so that we can then be empowered by your Holy Spirit to love boldly, serve joyfully and lead courageously. Amen.