Sermons
October 18, 2026 (Proper 24)
“In this house, we believe…”
Joshua 24:1-15
Have you seen those yard signs that begin with “In this house, we believe…”? Most of them are followed by a list of fairly liberal talking points, although there are versions that are much more conservative. I’ve seen quite a few of them when I have ventured over into the suburbs on the Kansas side of the KC metro area.
Personally I’m of two minds about them; on the one hand, I’m glad people are willing to state their positions publicly. But on the other hand, I’d rather you show me what you believe through how you act and how you treat other people, rather than just telling me with a sign in your yard.
And now there are parody signs. One I found online said, “In this house we believe in chocolate for breakfast.” I can get behind that!
In a way, what Joshua is asking in our reading for today is for us to proclaim, “In this house, we believe…”
- …that God has brought us out of slavery and placed us in our own land.
- …in God’s commandments.
- …in serving God.
- …in loving God and our neighbor—since those are, in the teaching not just of Jesus but in the teaching of many other rabbis of his day; and they’re both right out of the Torah—from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, respectively.
But I am certain Joshua didn’t intend for the people to put up yard signs and think their work is done.
Before Mike and I got married, our pastor gave us a little booklet with information about the church and some guidelines for the wedding ceremony and reception. I’ve adapted it for my own use over the years. The booklet includes several options for vows.
John’s introduction to that section of the booklet mentioned that a lot of couples ask for “the wedding vows that are in the Bible.” Folks evidently have the idea that there are vows in the Bible because when you see a wedding happen in a movie or on TV, the minister is usually reading the vows out of a little black book with a gold cross on the cover.
But that’s not the Bible; it’s the Book of Common Prayer, which has been the resource for public and private worship in the Anglican (in this country, Episcopal) Church for nearly 500 years now.[1] The vows that come from the Book of Common Prayer, however, do remain the most popular vows chosen by couples preparing to get married.
In the Name of God,
I, Groom, take you, Bride, to be my wife;
to have and to hold
from this day forward,
for better for worse,
for richer for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
until we are parted by death.
This is my solemn vow.
Some couples will forgo actually repeating the vows themselves, and simply answer “I do” when the pastor asks them in the form of a question; but the vast majority of couples, in my experience, ask for these vows, regardless of how many other options they’ve been offered.[2]
The reason I mention this is that in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), the metaphor of marriage is often used to describe the relationship between God and God’s people. (We actually see the same metaphor in the New Testament, too, most notably in the book of Revelation.) That’s especially true in the prophetic writings, particularly in Hosea—although generally, as in Hosea, in a negative sense.
The people made vows at Sinai, promising to serve faithfully the Lord their God who brought them out of enslavement, and to keep the commandments God gave them. And in our reading for today, at the end of Joshua’s life and his time as leader of Israel, he asked them to renew those vows, just as married couples will sometimes renew their vows at significant anniversaries.
I have my suspicion that recitation of the formative story and renewal of the covenant vows were a frequent part of Israel’s religious life, although I don’t know for sure. This is the context in which the familiar verse is found, the one about “choose this day whom you will serve…” The verse doesn’t mean something different when we look at the context, but is strengthened.
But it turns out that, even though that’s where our reading ends this morning, it isn’t the climax of the passage. It’s not the most important verse. That comes in verses 23 and 24:
“So now, put aside the foreign gods that are among you. Focus your hearts on the Lord, the God of Israel.”
The people said to Joshua, “We will serve the Lord our God and will obey him.”
The people had, by this point, a pretty good understanding of who God is and what he expected of them. They had the Law, given by God through Moses. They had seen—as they themselves have said—the wondrous things God had done for them in bringing them up from Egypt and into the Promised Land. And a few times they’d witnessed the consequences of disobeying God, like that time when they danced around the golden calf Aaron made for them. They were clear-eyed about what they were promising.
That did not, however, mean they kept their promise. Turn the page into the book of Judges, and that’s made very graphically clear, as it is throughout most of the history and the prophetic books found in the Hebrew Bible.
“We will serve the Lord our God and will obey him.” We meant that. But somehow, in the dailiness of life, we got off track; we failed to keep the covenant and ran after those foreign gods we had a hard time putting aside. It happened more than once. Over and over in the book of Judges we slipped up—actually, “slipped up” is way too mild a term for what happens in Judges. Then when we had kings, they weren’t any more faithful than the common folks—and next week we’re going to hear about one of those serious slip-ups.
By the time of the prophets, Amos and Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, God had decided we were hypocrites. We’d dress in our best and make the right sacrifices on the Sabbath and the other holy days; but our lives in between were a morass of selfishness, sin, and injustice.
So over and over again God said, “Come back to me. We will renew our vows, and we can start anew.”
I doubt I’m the only one who sees in Joshua 24 more than just a story. It appears to be a liturgy. The story of how Israel became God’s people is recited and the people are called to renew the covenant God made with them. The people respond by acknowledging the story and promising to serve God. Then Joshua reminds them of the consequences if they fail to do that; and once again they repeat their promise. The people are called on to put away their foreign gods; and they respond by promising, a third time, to serve the Lord and obey his commandments.
It very possibly could have been a liturgy they went through regularly—maybe annually, at the new year or as part of the Passover observance.
I wonder what would happen if we Christians did something similar on a regular basis. What if, after hearing our story, we were invited to promise that we would follow Jesus and serve God his Father, and set aside all the things that try to push their way into the place in our lives that only God should occupy? What if we made this part of our weekly worship?
Actually, you know what? We do. It’s not quite as formal as what we see here in Joshua 24, or as the annual covenant renewal ceremony some United Methodist churches have around New Year’s Day. But we do have an opportunity to respond to the good news of God’s liberating love and promise regularly to be God’s people.
In fact, that opportunity begins right now.
[1] The most recent revision used by the Episcopal Church in the U.S. was published in 1979, but in 2024 the church authorized use of liturgies from other print and digital sources. A splinter group, the Anglican Church in North America, published their own revision in 2019.
[2] I typically use these vows when a couple shows up asking to be married on the spot and there isn’t time to offer them other options. In the recent past it was a trend for couples to write their own vows, but that trend appears to have run its course; in all the weddings I have done, I have never had a couple choose to write their own vows.