But cleave unto the LORD your God, as ye have done unto this day. (Joshua 23:8)

This morning is the last Sunday of the Trinity season. Next week is the "Sunday Next before Advent" followed by Advent Sunday, the beginning of the Christian year.

The lessons and propers for the last half of Trinity have concerned living the Christian life despite the challenges presented by the fallen nature of the world.

The Collect reminds us of what God has done for us, and Epistle stresses the fruits which we are to bear as our part of living in covenant with God. The Gospel attests that, like the woman with the issue of blood, we have been touched by Christ and "made whole", made alive in Christ..

Our Old Testament reading pulls these themes together. Joshua was the leader who had inherited the mantle of Moses, who had led the people to victory and secured the promised land by the power and grace of the Lord.

He was one of the last Hebrews alive who actually remembered the bondage to Pharaoh. He was honored and respected by the people.

But Joshua knew that despite all the success during his time of leadership, the people were nevertheless "strangers in a strange land." There remained within the nation just enough remnants of the foreign, Canaanite peoples and their false religion, (which had included child sacrifice) to make Joshua worry. Some of the young Canaanite women were apparently very pretty and some of the Israelite young men were proposing to these maidens, even agreeing to adopt a few of the family gods if that's what it would take to seal the marriage. And apparently, when Joshua was visiting the various Israelite villages and towns, he was sure that he saw some of his people quickly hiding little golden idols when he appeared in their homes.

Why did this make Joshua worry? Because if there was one thing God had communicated consistently from the beginning, it was that his people had to keep up their end of the covenant agreement if they expected God to bless them in the Promised Land. During the war of conquest, the people had been impressed enough with the power of the Lord that they had been generally faithful.

But now they were in possession of the land, and they were prosperous. The people were building comfortable homes. There was an abundance of food. Every belly was full and there was an ox-cart in every garage.

A generation earlier, Moses had feared that success would bring a falling away from the Lord. Now, Joshua worried that peace and prosperity would soften them.

When the Hebrew people had been weak militarily, and wandering nomads in the desert, they had felt a strong need for the Lord. It was thus natural to depend on God for everything. But now they were comfortable and powerful. Who needed God? I can imagine the new generation who had never known the old hardship of the exodus saying "Let the good times roll."

When fierce Amorite warriors with fire in their eyes were bearing down on you. But now there were many days when the biggest worry was whether to have red wine or white with dinner. How easy to forget Yahweh in good times!

In the chapter which follows our lesson this morning, Joshua takes them to task for their hypocrisy. He asks them if they will follow Jehovah as the only God Yahweh. The people listening to him preach reply with a thunderous, "Yes!" But Joshua won't let this stand. He tells them that he knows they aren't telling the truth. "You don't mean what you say and you know it! I've seen you men dating these Canaanite women, I've caught glimpses of those little statues of Baal." "I know you are going to rebel going to rebel against God and undo everything that God has done for you. Who are you kidding?" But the people are adamant that they will be faithful and obey the covenant, so the book ends with a with a renewal of the covenant and what appears to be a happy ever after ending.

Of course, we all know what transpires next, don't we? Look at The Book of Judges. Joshua, dies, there is a leadership vacuum, the people get fat and happy from all that Promised Land brand of flowing milk and honey and they forget. They forget the covenant, they forget the Ten Commandments. They conveniently forget there is any higher law than their own appetites. And why not- in today's context, their biggest problem seems to be whether to have red wine or white wine with today's caviar and brie.

Soon their society begins to fall apart. Soon chaos reigns supreme in the very place that should have been an island of God's cosmos. The parallels to our day should be painfully obvious.

This is an unhappy but all-too-familiar story. But perhaps for us Christians the real difficulty of Joshua 23 and 24 is how conditional it seems to make God's love appear. Of course, God's love was not conditional. Whatever its sins, God still loved Israel. But Israel was like a rebellious teen-ager with a new car and a new credit card. How many parents have had to deal with a rebellious over-indulged child? Taking the keys away and suspending the credit card is seen as being an unloving act from the child's viewpoint, but is actually an act of love. So God's faithfulness is never in question. In fact, no matter how unfaithful the people are, God's faithfulness keeps coming up again and again.

After a while it becomes obvious that despite infidelity on the part of Israel, the one constant in Israel's history is that God is going to keep reaching out to Israel even in the face of terrible sins and rebellion.

In truth, God is never done with his people. He keeps right on loving them, keeps weeping bitter tears of hurt over them but he never stops coming back with open arms, essentially saying, "Repent and return to me and we will begin again."

God says, in effect," Israel, you really messed up during the Judges, but I'm sending you s Samuel to begin a new day. I warned you that Saul was not the greatest choice for king, but now I'll give you David and then I'll give you Solomon."

"Because you rejected me and my laws, you ended up in exile in Babylon, but watch how I work through even the wicked king of Persia to bring you back out of that exile so that you can come back home." The repetitive and predictable nature of the cycle is part of the message. Israel is compared to a harlot married to a faithful, noble husband.

When Israel is faithful, it prosper, when it falls away it suffers. But God's cove is constant.

Finally there arrives a day when God no longer sends intermediaries like Samuel, David, Solomon, Elijah, or Isaiah. Instead God comes in person, appearing in the flesh, through Jesus the only Son of the Father. Now people can see what God is like with their own eyes and hear the voice of God with their own ears. Jesus, the Incarnate Son, brings together the abiding faithfulness of God and unties it with man as God intended man to be. .

In Christ, God responds to our rebellion and sin in mercy and not in judgment. Instead of hurling down lightning bolts and sending floods and pestilence, God sends his Son.

Soon we will begin the season of Advent, and from Advent until the Ascension, we will focus on the person of Jesus Christ and what His birth, life, death and resurrection mean. In Christ, God takes our failure to be faithful and instead of using it as a reason to damn and destroy the world, he uses it as a reason to send his Son to destroy death and hell.

If we recognize the pattern of our own lives in the pattern of Israel's history, it is good to remember that just as God loved them even in their unfaithfulness, so he loves us. Just as God called then to repentance and renewal, so he calls us. So when we see what appear to be "bad things" happen in our lives and in the lives of our families, our church, and in our society, we must remember that these things are for our own instruction. God has not visited us with these things so much as he has allowed us to learn from negative experience what is really good for us.

The wonder of God's faithfulness is that God everything about us. God knows us better than we know ourselves.

This morning we are invited to the altar to receive the Body and Blood of Christ - not because we deserve it, or because we have lived a perfect life of obedience, but because God loves us. "Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will give you rest."

God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have ever lasting life."

"If you are in love and charity with your neighbor, and intend to lead a new life… draw near with faith and take this sacrament to your comfort…"

God doesn't dwell on the past, he offers us a glorious future both now, in this life and in eternity to come if we will cling to him in faith.

But cleave unto the LORD your God, as ye have done unto this day.