The Joshua* Option: Living through the Pandemic

 

n recent years many have offered “options” for forms of life the church might practice for greater faithfulness in life and witness in these strange times of this still young and highly troubled 21^st century (e.g. the “Benedict Option”). As far as I am aware, though, none have offered such “options” specifically for the Pandemic. So I offer the “Joshua Option” as a contribution toward that end.

I will use chs.1-5 in Joshua specifically as the basis for this option, an allegorical riff on the people of Israel crossing the Jordan into the promised land for the first time under the proviso “for you have not passed this way before” (3:4).

Where We Are At

The American church today stands before a “river” it too must cross into an unknown and at this point unknowable future. “Nobody really knows” is the only honest way to face up to this “way we have not gone before.” Joshua could at least send spies into the land to reconnoiter the surroundings (Josh.2). We have at best educated guesses by seasoned observers to go by. And one thing most of these observers agree on is that the pandemic will last longer, cost more, and make a bigger mess of things in the church and the world than we can yet imagine.

Both Joshua’s Israel and today’s church have divine promises that the land they are called to enter “across the river” is promised to them (Josh.1:11; Rom.4:13). Yet in this liminal moment where we are no longer who and what we were and not yet who and what we will be much uncertainty and ambiguity surrounds their ventures in river-crossing. Living in liminality has its costs.

Christian leaders are at present paying these costs as they experience the following feelings, according to The Missional Network:

1.       We can’t assume we know where leaders are at and what they’re wanting at any particular time across the trajectory of this unprecedented unraveling.

2.       They are at a point where they’re looking for something far deeper than how-tos.

3.       There’s an awareness that this unraveling isn’t just about our roles as leaders or the challenges of pastoral care and worship in Covid. Something deeper is happening to the whole society.

 

Joshua points to two other realities the church in this moment shares with their ancient spiritual forebears. In ch.5 we learn that this new generation of Israelites (the first had died in the wilderness because of their sin, you remember) arrived in the land with the males uncircumsized! The chief sign of the covenant (Gen.17), their mark of constituting the family of their God, they had neglected to give this new generation.

So serious was this matter that even as they entered the land the first thing Joshua required of them was that their males, their warriors, undergo circumcision (5:2-9). In the first blush of invading the land Israel’s warriors were rendered militarily impotent for several days, vulnerable to enemies who might choose then to attack them. This suggests that a (large?) degree of spiritual lethargy (sloth) afflicted the people and their leadership (including Joshua and even his great mentor Moses!).  

The good news here is that we nor our leaders have to have our act together before we can begin crossing the river of our pandemic. We just need to be willing to move when God calls us to move. That is good news indeed for an American church mired in a deep malaise for numerous decades now that has sapped its vitality.

A final reality Joshua offers that we today may well resonate with is the strange story of Joshua’s encounter with a theophany in the form of a man wielding a drawn sword (5:13-15). This figure identifies as a “commander of the armies of the Lord” (v.14). And he informs Joshua that he is on neither Israel’s or their enemies’ side and orders Joshua to remove his sandals because he is standing on holy ground (v.15; the same direction Moses received when he met God at the burning bush in Ex.3)!

A powerful reminder that God always pursues his own agenda and not ours. And we need to keep clear about that! That keeps us open to God’s leading and to our willingness to follow when God does new and surprising things – almost certainly to be the case when we cross the river of the pandemic.

What We Can Do

Israel meets God in the encounter of Joshua with the “commander of the armies of the Lord” after they had crossed the river and celebrated Passover (v.10). I can’t help but think of baptism and Eucharist as the realities we indwell and out of which we live to encounter God and serve God faithfu8888888lly in the world. In baptism Christ’s life becomes ours and in the Eucharist our lives become Christ’s.

Regular reminders and celebrations of baptisms recent and older and a weekly (in my view) celebration of Eucharist are practices we can begin in our liminality and continue whenever we enter into the new reality on the other side of our pandemic.

And in these practices, and most importantly, God promises to meet us with new life that enables us to better align our lives and stay in sync with him as he moves through our new reality.

Crossing the River

The Israelites camp out at the Jordan “three days” before beginning to cross it (v.2). Is it much allegorizing to see in this “three days” a reference to the resurrection of Jesus? I’m going with it anyway. As a church which has either intellectualized or ignored the living presence or the risen One, we desperately need to recover the reality of the resurrected Christ. Without it we lapse into mere religion or moralistic activism, both of which miss the point of Christian faith. Bonhoeffer nails it:

“Easter? Our thoughts are more about dying than about death. We’re more concerned about how we shall face dying than about conquering death. Socrates mastered the art of dying, Christ overcame death as ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς (1 Cor. 15:26). Being able to face dying doesn’t yet mean we can face death. It’s possible for a human being to manage dying, but overcoming death means resurrection. It is not through the ars moriendi but through Christ’s resurrection that a new and cleansing wind can blow through our present world . . . If a few people really believed this and were guided by it in their earthly actions, a great deal would change. To live in the light of the resurrection—that is what Easter means.” (Letters and Papers, 322)

The other thing Israel’s crossing the Jordan can help us with is the importance of memory (3:14-4:24). Both the Ark and the memorial stones remind us the importance of indwelling God’s story. In a time of change, uncertainty, and fear, we need to remain wedded to God’s story. Israel did; and so do we. Roberto Calasso, in his latest book, The Unnamable Present, catches the mood of our moment in its title. Its opening words capture the grief and trauma:

“For those who are living at this moment, the most exact and most acute sensation is one of not knowing where we are treading from day to day. The ground is brittle, lines blur, materials fray, prospects waver. Then we realize more clearly than before that we are living in the ‘unnamable present’.” (3)

 

Jesus, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Heb.13:8), is also at the same time, the One whose identity for us in our day and time (Bonhoeffer) we discover in reflection on how he must be who he always is in the circumstances in which we live. At the intersection of memory and hope, both derived from the faithfulness of God to his promises, is the only place where we can make this indispensable discovery. And make it we must!

 

Well, that’s the Joshua Option as best I can explain it. I believe it is grist for the mill our corporate reflection as we reside in our liminality awaiting God’s movement for us to follow into the new reality we await.