Joshua 1:1-9

05/22/11 Joshua 1:1-9 Hudson UMC
Today, we honor those who are graduating from high school this afternoon. Though the sermon will be focused on issues pertaining to graduation, I would encourage all of you who are not graduating from High School today to not space out, because I believe that you will find that what I have to say applies to you as well, at least if you have ever graduated from High School.
There is really no example in the entire Bible that really corresponds to our modern understanding of "graduation." To say, of any person in the Bible, that they graduated in the same sense that those are graduating today, would be very much mistaken. However, there are a few examples of people who, if we allow for some pretty serious differences, might help us to understand a bit of what graduation looks like from God's point of view. The closest thing we have in the Bible to a "graduation sermon" or speech is at the very beginning of the book of Joshua, but before we can think about what this kind of speech tells us, we need to spend some time recalling the story of Joshua.
Joshua was born, as with all the Israelites of his time, in Egypt as a slave. He was a young man when God delivered the people of Israel from Egyptian rule and he quickly became a follower of Moses. He, and another man named Caleb, were one of the teams of spies sent out into the Promised Land of Canaan in order to see that the land was good. Unfortunately, though the teams of spies brought back evidence of the fact that God had promised them a wonderful land indeed, they also told the Israelites that the people who already lived in the land were giants, next to whom they looked like grasshoppers. Even though their enemies seemed incredibly big and strong, Joshua and Caleb insisted that they obey God and take the land that had been given to them. After all, what are giants compared to the power of God?
The resulting story would be funny if it were not so tragic. The nation as a whole rejected Joshua and Caleb and decided to leave the land that they had been rescued to have. After they heard that God was going to make them wander in the wilderness for forty years, until everyone who turned their back on him died off, they decided that they should try to do what they had been told to do in the first place. The only problem is that, though they would have been successful if they had gone up to the Promised Land in the first place, they were soundly defeated. Instead of trusting in God's strength and knowing that their victory consisted in their obedience and not in their physical strength, they thought that they could lay claim to God's promise without doing things God's way. In doing so, they transformed a promise into a right, and the result was disastrous.
So, as is well known, the people of Israel did indeed wander through the wilderness for forty years. Over time, everyone who was alive when Israel was delivered from Egypt died off; everyone, that is, except Joshua, Caleb, and Moses, though we will come back to Moses. During this time, Israel ended up in several battles and Joshua served as a soldier and then as a mighty general. Eventually, the people, who were all different than the people who had started this journey forty years earlier, were about to enter into the Promised Land. However, though Moses had led the people for so many years and, in spite of the fact that his eyesight was good and he still had his strength, God was not going to allow him to enter into the Promised Land with the rest of the people because he had not obeyed him as he should have in the wilderness.
What this means is that someone had to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land. They could not just go in leaderless, but needed someone to guide them. This responsibility came to Joshua. This means that he had to fill the shoes of someone who had led the people for decades on end, who was the most important person involved in the deliverance of his people, and try to lead these notoriously stiff-necked people into a new land and try to keep it all together.
And yet, he had good training. He had a tremendous trust in God that he nurtured from a young age, the same trust in God that inspired him to insist that the people go up against astonishingly overwhelming odds, knowing that, if God did not fight the battle, it was surely lost. He had spent years of his life training under one of the most dynamic leaders in the history of the world, learning how to handle people and how to lead effectively. He had served as the leader of Israel's armies, armies who had either been slaves with no military experience, or the children of such slaves, with even less military experience. He had to take people who did not know anything about strategy and discipline and teach them to fight together as a coherent body.
There was lots of training, but training for a job is one thing and actually doing that job is something else entirely. He had to take information and experience he had gained as a second in command and become the one who is in charge of everything. Is it a similar job, absolutely, is there some overlap, certainly. However, to go from being one who serves the one in command to being the one with whom the buck stops, is a very significant thing. The point is that the training did not stand on its own, but had to be taken and applied to a radically new situation, a situation that could not necessarily even be anticipated by the training.
In our modern context, we tend to think of graduation to be more of an end than a beginning. It is the end of high school or the end of college. It is the end of our formal education and now we move on to the next stage in our lives. That was then and this is now. We are no longer high schoolers, so high school no longer plays a role in our lives, no longer shapes the way we think, the way we live. We have served our time, and now we need to direct our attention to college, which we might see as bearing only a passing similarity to high school, or we are on our way to the work force, to be independent.
But that is not what we see in the cases in the Bible that are similar to graduation, and it is not what we really mean in our modern times when we speak of graduation. Regardless of whether you excelled in your academic work or just got by, the fact remains that you have gained skills in high school that you would not have picked up anywhere else. You learned in your mathematics classes to manipulate and understand how numbers relate to one another; you learned in your English classes how our language is put together and how to think critically about what people say and write; you learned in your social studies classes that the world is much bigger than just the part that we can see at this stage in our lives and that we should know something about that world. You learned in your classes on the arts about the beauty that is out there. If you played sports, you learned teamwork and physical discipline. In some ways, though, the most important thing that you learned, whether you liked it or not, is how to do work that you did not want to do and how to learn what you did not want to learn. That skill alone will make your life easier and better, certainly, it will be far richer than if you had not learned it.
The point is that, even if you do not go on to major in any of the major areas of study from high school, even if you do not feel as if trigonometry was something that you needed to learn in order to do the job you will get someday, it all goes toward developing skills and habits that will help you in the future. Your math might look different, but it never goes away completely. The areas of the world you pay attention to might change, but global events will still be important, as we have seen in recent years, to be sure. You may not think that you will ever use the interpretative skills you learned in your English classes, but you will find that you have a better grasp on human nature than you would have if you did not learn them.
All this is to say that graduation is really not an end at all. You have been given a set of skills and your high school diploma says that you are ready and able to use them at any time. You are now better educated than the majority of people in the world. You have doors opened to you that are not open to others and were not open to you all that long ago. You do not only have the ability to walk through those doors, but the responsibility to do so. Graduation is the beginning of a new phase of life.
I am speaking to all of the graduates as one who is a graduate himself, one who, in fact, just graduated again last week. The things you learn at one period in your life, even if they seem useless at the time, often come back and prove valuable in a later season and you will be amazed at how the education that seems as though it has taken forever to acquire will benefit you and those around you as the years go on.
It would be appropriate at this time to think about the stories in the Bible where someone "graduates" in one sense or another. Joshua graduated from being a spy so that he could become a general. He graduated from being a general so he could be the leader of an entire nation. Elijah was one of the mightiest prophets in Israel's history. He achieved tremendous victory, defeating evil king Ahab and restoring God's rule to the people. He was a hero in the land. He had a disciple named Elisha. When the time came and Elijah was going to leave, Elisha begged that he might receive a double portion of the anointing that Elijah had. When Elijah was taken away, this was granted and Elisha graduated from being merely a disciple to being a messenger for God who did even greater things than Elijah.
The last major example that I can think of in the Bible is the disciples of Jesus Christ. They were fishermen, tax collectors, guerilla warriors, and others, who were made disciples of a Rabbi, a great teacher, but more than just a great teacher. They were people who had gone through just the basic apprenticeships that everyone else went through, but they were taken and transformed by the Gospel. Eventually, the day of Pentecost came and they graduated from being just people who followed Christ to being people who not only followed him but were sent out so that other people might follow him. They had received the Holy Spirit and they graduated, but their graduation didn't mark the end of their calling, but a more complete beginning. They had been equipped to go out into the world and make a difference, changing lives and bringing good news. They did not, they could not, call it quits after they "graduated," but had to use the skills they learned and use them to be part of a movement that made a real difference in the world.
When people graduate, we often will speak of rights and privileges that graduates receive in return for all of their hard work. And yet, rights and privileges are only part of it. There are also tremendous responsibilities that go along with graduation. As I said earlier, you have new opportunities that you not only can take advantage of, but must do so, in order to make the world better because you have lived in it. That is the kind of responsibility that lays upon you simply as one who has received an education, our responsibility as Christians is far greater. We have been called, we have been commissioned, we are those for whom Christ has died so that we might live. God has endured much to make us those who can make a difference. Indeed, the disciples knew that their following of Jesus was a matter of tremendous responsibility. In fact, it cost most of them their lives to do what they had been trained to do.
My commission that I would give to all who are graduating today is to rejoice in the opportunities that you have been given, for there are many in this world who have not received them. Go into the world and do something that is worthy of the training you have received. And for those who are in this room who have not yet graduated, approach your work and your life as valuable preparation, for it is indeed valuable, even during the moments where it doesn't seem like it. And for those who are in this room who have graduated once upon a time, regardless of how long ago, remember that you never graduated from being a graduate. Indeed, you are still those who have received training and education and a commission from God. Go forth, remembering that you have been set aside by God for his work, to be God's ambassadors in everything you do, from your daily job, to being a parent, to social events, to anything you can think of. God loves you, Christ died for you, and the Holy Spirit dwells within you, as a child of God. Go forth as commissioned soldiers, who serve one who is greater. Let us pray.

AMEN