Joshua 24 is a scary text!  The passage makes us wonder: Why don’t we remember the faithfulness of God?  (After all, God is always present.)  Which God do we really serve?  Do we really believe there is enough?  Enough land.  Enough faith.  Enough room. Enough oil. Enough hope.  If there is enough, why do we live in disbelief of God’s lavish providence?  We have seen the costs of such disbelief and commitments made in fear.  We have seen genocide, religious war, slavery-born economies and the scape-goating of others as the “abominations” of the world.

These are indeed scary and humbling texts.  They invite us to reexamine the things “our ancestors have told us.”   The book of Joshua is revisionist history, a retelling of the settlement of the land from the perspective of those who have already experienced its loss. 

In Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25, Joshua presides over a rededication that equates God’s protection with their past military conquests.  This historian sketches a backdrop against which tolerance, syncretism and religious-racial mixing will be held up to condemn the people as violations of covenant faithfulness.  Today’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are painfully aware that the “faithfulness” admonished here relies on judgment, separation and even elimination of the others. Sadly, countless preachers and religious folk have chimed in with their own zealous glee to the tune of this jealous God.

“We will not hide them from our children,” the psalmist says of God’s glorious deeds in Psalm 78:1-7.   The psalmist urges a hope-producing recital of God’s deeds we have heard and known. What counts, though, as evidence of God?  What bears witness to God’s faithfulness when we find ourselves in displacement, exile or persecution?  Clearly, our connection to the tradition – to the saints and heroes who came before us gathered at significant life-forming places as Shechem, Thessalonica, even Stonewall. Our faithfulness depends, in some way, upon passing on these faith stories of our deliverance to generations yet to come.

	What are the significant people and places in our past that remind us of God’s liberation and justice?

Today’s texts, however, invite a distinctive question:  In this passing on, will we hide the grotesque deeds that have been done in God’s name?  Bear witness to them?  Take responsibility for them?  Perhaps it is a greater faithfulness – a watchful, repentant faithfulness – to choose against hiding our sins from our children?

Today, we are still called to be witnesses, against (eventually for) ourselves.  LGBT communities are a journeying people, not perfect and yet daring to speak out for God’s radical welcome.  We desire not only safety and peace, but genuine faithfulness and partnership in God’s everlasting covenant.  We take our place with ancestors of old, daring to bring our whole stories – choosing to say “yes” to the liberating God who affirms and rescues.  Yet we can’t stop there.  As people of all races, religions, gender identities and abilities, we bear witness that the “sayings of old” have too often confused God’s protection with the victories of human violence.  Exclusivism has over and over again proven to be a false god, a false security, born only of our age-old fears.  We must be ever watchful and aware of this.

	What are the ways tradition and the past have been used to preserve inequality and injustice?

“Watch; keep awake!”   The tale of the virgins who have oil, and those who don’t, keeps us guessing whether we are “in or out” in Matthew 25:1-13.  Matthew’s gospel typically leaves the question of inclusion unsettled.  The passage challenges everyone and here it even challenges the Jesus’ disciples!  Later in this same chapter, in a similar way, we ponder whether we will be found as “sheep or goats?”

Matthew’s story nevertheless calls us to self-examination. We are called in this day to challenge the very idea of rigid categories of dualism, and to reveal the harm they have done to us.  The transgender communities, in particular, have borne the cost of our addiction to dualistic and simplistic gender categories. We rightly resist Matthew’s discrimination between the insiders and the outsiders, but will we conserve the “oil” which will prepare us to choose otherwise?  How will we choose to prepare while we wait for complete understanding and justice?

	When, if ever, is division and separation a faithful response?  What is God’s call today regarding “insiders” and “outsiders?”

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 is often misunderstood exactly along the insider/outsider lines of triumphalism and exclusivity we see in Joshua and Matthew.  Yet Paul addresses believers who are afraid that they have missed out.  Paul articulates a different kind of hope, born in God’s goodness proven in Jesus Christ.  Rather than serving the triumphalists’ agenda, this pastoral word admonishes us to look to Jesus’ life for a pattern of resurrection lived – however partially – in the here and now.

As witnesses, we’re indeed called to be watchful and to be ready – to keep our oil burning.  How else will we be prepared to recognize the face of God in those who look different and who live and love differently than we do?   We need to be ready at a second’s notice to demonstrate justice and hospitality toward all of God’s people in the here and the now.  Such humble, open readiness, such “oil” is sustained neither by arrogant certainty that we are “in,” nor by paralyzing fear that we are destined to be “out.”    It is sustained by a mysterious hope that God’s goodness is proven, faithful and trustworthy.  The criteria for recognizing this covenantal goodness can be found in the good news of a repentance unperverted by judgment and exclusion.