“We leave here with all kinds of papers, all kinds of blisters, all kinds of stories, all kinds of things we have learned that we can hardly believe it’s all crammed in there,” said Tracy Keenan, pastor of Covenant Church https://www.covenantpcusa.org/ in Columbus, Ohio and a music leader for the conference. “We’re going to be filled to overflowing.”
Keenan encouraged the women to make sure that all they bring home with them — the insights and learning and sense of connection — spills out into their congregations and communities. And “remember that everything God blesses us with is meant to be taken all the way out to the streets,” she said.
That provided, of course, the perfect transition to one of the favorite songs of this 2,500-strong congregation: “Taking it to the Streets,” complete with an enthusiastic dance routine of clapping, hand gestures and hip-wiggling these women have been practicing for days.
At the end, someone shouted: “Thank you, Dave!” to Dave Powers (from the PBS show Piano Guy), who has been sharing his musical chops, simultaneously playing the piano with his right hand and the keyboard with his left.
And they transitioned directly from that into a simple, reverent rendering of “How Great Thou Art.” One white-haired woman who’d been shimmying just a moment before spread her arms, and raised them in quiet praise to the heavens.
Emily Martin, a recent graduate of Columbia Theological Seminary preached the sermon for the closing worship service. She was a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to explore how the church has responded to HIV and AIDS in South Africa. She preached from the 21st chapter of Joshua, in which Joshua gives to the victorious Israelites the spoils of war against the Canaanites.
Martin said the theme of this worship service was “Celebration of Wonders.” On the one hand, the text does show that “God has kept all of God’s promises” to a faithful people, and that’s to be celebrated, she pointed out. Joshua writes of 40,000 adult men allowing themselves to be circumcised, and “Sisters, that has to be counted as wonder,” Martin said.
But she is troubled by some of the other “wonders” in Joshua’s story, how, for example, when the walls come crashing down in Jericho, the Israelites rush in and kill every living thing, including women, children, the elderly, and all the animals. They slaughter everything, “supposedly at the Lord’s command. They burn down the city and everything in it.”
They do that not only in Jericho, but in city after city, Martin said. “I don’t know about you, but that takes the celebration right out of me. How do we celebrate the wonders when the cities are in flames and even the animals are enemy combatants?”
Some of the commentators try to make things more palatable, saying maybe the Israelites were exaggerating, or had to destroy everything to start over in a society that didn’t worship God, or didn’t understand violence the way we do, Martin said. But she knows from history and the daily news that the devastation and suffering war causes is real. “It is almost always justified in some way, but no one’s victory ever lasts, and the violence and suffering happens again and again.”
Perhaps Joshua can be viewed as a mirror in which we can see our own modern reflection, Martin said. We think to be safe, we have to be in control. We draw lines between those who are like us and those who are not. We see each other as enemies, Martin said. “Nobody wants to be honest. Everybody wants to be right.”
But what if there’s another way of looking at things?
Joshua also calls for obedience rather than celebration of the victory, Martin said. Obedience could mean “viewing the land not as ours to take, but as ours to take care of, even as it takes care of us.”
Enemies, she said, could be seen instead as the neighbors we have not yet taken the time to get to know, whose stories we have not yet heard — those whom Genesis teaches us come from a common source of life.
Martin once spent several days on a “street retreat,” sleeping on the streets side-by-side on cardboard with the homeless, with no money, just an identification card, relying on others for guidance and directions. When she crossed paths with a homeless man on the final morning, just before leaving to go home to her own warm bed, her first instinctive thought was, “Oh, one of us!” By spending some time together, “I began seeing the homeless as more `us’ than `them,’ ” she said.
Martin asked: “What if the larger word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, is not so clear about the distinction” between friend and enemy, stranger and neighbor?
What if the distinctions between us are gifts to be cherished?
