Sermon: Following God into the Empty Horizon

Joshua 5:9-12

As we have been journeying toward the cross, we have jumped back and forth through history catching a glimpse of the people of God at different points in their journey and seen how God has worked in them and through them. Last week we caught a glimpse of God’s people living out the consequences of choosing their ways over God’s ways and the promise God made to them and the life which could be theirs if they were to trust God and live the ways God called for them to live. We heard God speak of a renewed covenant, one in which would wash the people clean of hundreds of years of unfaithfulness and turning from God, giving them an everlasting covenant dependant upon an everlasting God. The Sunday before last we looked at Abraham at a low point in his life, after he had turned from God and what God had planned for him and saw how God in all God’s graciousness reach out to him and reinstated the very promise God had given to him in the covenant God had made with him. The week before that we stood with Israel on the very edge of the Holy land as God called for them to trust and follow, and give of their first and very best. That week we heard God ask them to return to God the first of the first crops which would be grown in land yet to be conquered, in fields yet to be planted. God asked them up front to trust God and God alone to give to them what only God could give to them and what God promised. This week we encounter the people of Israel on the other side of that first harvest.

Just in case we are at all fuzzy on where we are in the Israelites’ history; let us all make sure we understand where we are. These are not people whom God brought up out of Egypt, nor are they the people whom God saved from slavery and oppression at the hand of the Egyptians. Not one of these people had seen Moses turn the Nile to blood, or see the land of the Egyptians be over run with flies, gnats, locusts, and frogs. These were not the men and women who worshipped the golden calf in the desert nor were they the ones from whom Moses veiled his face when it shone with the glory of the one and only living God, all those who saw the sea split and the water come pouring out from the rock are dead, and the people whom we encounter in this story are their children and grandchildren.

You may remember that God had promised the people who had come up out of Egypt that they themselves would not set food in the holy land. God had taken them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, across the sea, to the mountain where God made a covenant with them and they promise that God would be their God and that they would be God’s people, that they would love, and trust God in all things. And God led them straight across the desert, with not a few miracles along the way, and they had quickly arrived at the very edge of the land God promised to give to them and they had refused to trust God. The land looked too good to be true and the people in the land looked too frightening to entrust victory over to God. So God told them that they would all die before God would bring them into the land and they all did.

The people in our story today spent the majority of their lives walking circles around the desert, making laps around the mountain of God. And then when the last of their parents and grandparents had passed away, God lead them into the promise land and God did what exactly what God said God would do. God led them into Canaan in the same way which their parents and grandparents had been lead out of the land of Egypt, by allowing them to cross a body of water on dry ground. God had parted the Jordon before them as they had crossed it and God then proceeded to drive out before them all the kings of the land which surrounded the place of their crossing. These people are finally in the Promised Land, God has shown them that by the strength of the Lord and the Lord alone, they are able to drive out the people who live in Canaan and it is truly God who is in control. They are now living in a land which they call their own instead of wandering from place to place with no place to call their own. They have fields, they have watched the miracle of life begin in the life of the tiny plants which sprouted up in the land which God had given to them, all the while continuing to live off the bread God placed on the ground each morning and the quail which the Lord had land in their yards each evening. The plants had grown and the harvest has come and with the first harvest they have given to God what is God’s and they have taken what they have grown with their hands and with the help of God and they have celebrated their very first Passover since they have come to live and work the land.

Their entire lives these people have lived traveling from place to place. Their first memories were of going out with their mother in the morning and carefully collecting the miraculous bread called manna off the ground. Each of them can remember playful evenings watching the birds fly into camp and land right before them. They had chased the birds in games of catch and then had gathered them up for dinner. They had lived the entirety of their lives knowing that the manna would fall in the morning and the quail would come in the evening. What took faith and trust in God for their parents was common place for them. This was just the way God worked. This miracle of provision was just the way life was. Manna fell in the morning and quail practically alighted in the cooking pot each the evening.

But now they have entered the Promised Land, they have crossed the Jordon. They have come to live in the land of the promise and God is calling for them to trust God to help them continue to drive out the people whom inhabit the land of Canaan. They need to trust God for their future just as they have come trust the Lord in the past. Things do not stay the way they are forever. Before they were sojourners, before they were nomads, without a home wandering aimlessly through the desert. Then they were a people moving into the land driving out the enemy forces before them, now they are becoming a little settled on the outskirts of what will one day be the vast nation God has promised to them. They have homes, they have fields, they have a harvest and everything is about to change.

As we look at them and their lives, we would say that their lives have been far from normal, but it was normal for them. It was the way life was. The manna always fell, and the quail always came. Wandering around the desert was a way of life. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night was how they saw God. But these common place miracles were about to change. How God choose to work among them was about to change. Their way whole of life was about to change, how they trusted God was about to change. They were going to bed with the unleavened cakes and the parched grain from their first harvest in their bellies and in the morning they would awake and the world would be completely and utterly different, for them this new world, they would find all around them with the coming of the morning light, would seem almost utterly unrecognizable. With the new day, with the new dawn would come a new way of life. The text tells us that after their first Passover, after they had eaten the unleavened cakes and the parched grain from their first harvest in the land of promise, the manna fell no more and the quail no longer alighted on their lawns each evening. The entire way which God had always worked in their lives changed.

Israel was in the middle of a huge time of change. The world has been turned upside down; God has been turned upside down. God has always sent the manna in the morning. The quail has always come in the evening. This is the way God provides. This is the way God works. God is an everlasting God. God is an unchanging God. The manna will always come, the quail will always arrive, this is how we know God is with us, this is how we know God is at work and then one morning on the cusp of the most wonderful thing God has yet done for us, the manna does not appear and then that evening even as we stare at the eastern sky long after the sun had disappeared behind us the quail never came. Where is our God? What has happened? Things have changed? Nothing is they way it use to be? How can we trust a God who no longer works in the ways we have become accustomed to God working? What will we do now? What will happen now? Where is our God when the manna is not on the ground and the quail does not alight at our feet?

This passage is sandwiched between the crossing of the Jordan, the driving out of the first few unnamed kings of the land of Canaan which followed, and the battle of Jericho. We can look at the story and see the battle of Jericho on the horizon but they saw nothing on the horizon. They stood there that evening looking to the horizon for the quail and the horizon looked empty. There was nothing there. And God said to them, “trust me, it will be alright. I am still at work. I am still here, but you are going to have to trust me with a new thing. You are going have to trust me in a new way. I will work but I will not work in the ways to which you have become accustomed. I know manna-less mornings and the quail-less horizon looks empty but if you will follow me into that horizon if you will go with me into this new morning I will blow your mind.” (with a trumpet none-the-less)

We know how to trust God with the things we trust God with right now. There are ways in which we know God works, there are ways which we have always known and seen God. We are comfortable with the way God has been working. We are comfortable with the miracles that God is giving to us daily, in fact often times we take them for granted. We have been trusting God. We have being living life the way we have always lived life and have trusted God with the things we have always trusted God and God sees our complacency. God sees that we no longer really see the work which God is doing in our lives every day. We have come to expect the manna; we have taken the quail for granted. This is what God looks like, this is how God works. This is our reliable, unchanging God, we know who God is, we know God. Or at least we think we do. And then one day we wake up and the manna is not there. And we stare long into the night waiting for the quail to come. God looks at us and says, “The time of manna and quail is over. I need you to trust me in a new way. I need to you to know that I am not a tame God, who does what you expect, when you expect. I have brought you this far. You no longer need me to work in the ways I have always worked. In fact if I continued to do so, you would not grow, you would not become the people I am calling for you to be, you would not become who I know you can become. So stop staring into the horizon waiting for the quail to come and take my hand let me show you what is beyond the horizon, let me lead you into a new morning and if you come I promise what I have for you on the other side will be greater and bigger and much more exciting than manna and quail, follow me and I will truly blow your mind.”

We are the people of Israel. We are staring at an empty horizon wondering where our God has gone. All the things we have relied on in the past, all the ways God has worked in us and through us are gone. Manna was a wonderful miracle, the quail was truly a delight but this morning we looked out our window and the manna was not there and this evening the quail did not come. It feels as if we have been abandoned. God has pulled the rug out under our feet. God was at work, we saw it, we knew it and last night we went to bed with full bellies and this morning we woke up to a new world. One we are not sure we like, one where God is harder to trust and the ways God is choosing to work seem too hard to understand. We are looking into the darkening horizon wishing, hoping for quail which will never come. All the while God is standing before us calling for us to follow, to go where only God can lead and God promises to do amazing things beyond our wildest imaginations. We, stand looking at a horizon, an empty horizon but if we would only follow God we would see the miracle of Jericho is beyond that horizon, we just can’t see it yet.

I have said it before and I will say it again and again, we are living in a time of change. The world around us is changing more rapidly than many of us would like. Things are changing all around us and it is scary. But God is here God is leading us. We are the people of God following God into the promise land, trusting God in this land, this neighborhood, this new world which is all around us, which God promises to win for us. But first we have to trust God. We have to trust God with God’s promise. We have to trust God with the way God chooses to work and sometimes that means that God will no longer work in the ways God has worked in the past. Sometimes it means giving up the very works of God we have come to rely on, the very works of God we have always known, so that God can work in new ways, so that God can do new amazing things in our midst. This is scary, the miracles, the ways God has “always” worked are like the manna and the quail. They are wonderful, miracles which showed us that God was at work amongst us, but now they are gone and God will work in a new way. We just need to stop looking to the ground in the morning and staring at the horizon in the evening, instead we have to take Gods hand and walk with God toward the unknown, which lies beyond the horizon and trust God with the dawning of a new day.