Today’s
Scripture Reading (January 1, 2019): Joshua 5
Happy New Year! It is the grand day of starting
over. At midnight last night, we crossed over one of the great boundaries of
life. We turned the page from the one that was filled and marked with both the
good things, hopefully written in big bold letters, and the scratch marks of
life that seem to carry us in the opposite direction from where we want to go,
to the page that we greet this morning that is blank and full of possibility.
I know, nothing has really
changed between last night and this morning. The truth is that our habits, both
good and bad, continue to plague us as we move from year to year. But we also have a need for spaces where we can place down
markers and be able to say that, maybe, here we can have a clean start. Here is
the place where we can change and do something different. I am actually a big believer in New Year’s
Resolutions. I know that these changes that we promise ourselves seldom
actually take hold. But a New Year’s Resolution is an admission that we make to
ourselves, and we may not make this admission to anyone else, that there are
things in our lives that we need to change. There are characteristics of our
lives that we want to improve. And today we make one more attempt to do exactly
that.
Joshua and the rest of Israel were now on the other
side of the Jordan River. It is unlikely that they had been here as a group or
a nation since the day that Israel (Jacob) pulled up the stakes of his tents
and traveled with his wives, children, grandchildren, and, likely, great-grandchildren and moved south to join his
lost son, now found, Joseph in Egypt. And that moment had been almost five
centuries in the past. But, now, they stood on the hallowed ground of their
ancestors. Now they moved into a distinctly different future, one filled with
hope and promise.
Oh, there is no doubt that they carried their old
habits, both good and bad, with them. There is little doubt that they would
trip in the future over the things of the past. But at this moment, there was at least the possibility of doing things
differently. A generation had died in the wilderness. A new generation had
risen up and was ready to move into the future.
But there was also a problem. Since the days of Abraham, the descendants of the
patriarch, which would have included the Israelites, Ishmaelites (the ancestors
of Muhammad and his brothers in the desert), and the Edomites were circumcised as a mark of the favor of God.
But the new generation had not been circumcised. In the wilderness, there just
wasn’t the opportunity to fulfill the commitment of Abraham. So, here, the
nation pauses. And as they considered the blank page that now lies in front of
them, they begin by fixing the failure of the past.
And that might be the thing that we forget. To march into the wonder of the New Year before
us, we need to be willing to repent of the failures of the past. Only then can
we become the people that God has intended us to be. So, Happy New Year! And my
prayer is that we might be strong enough to greet the blank page before us and
change what needs to be changed so that
we can truly be called the people and children of God.
Tomorrow’s
Scripture Reading: Joshua 6
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