Martin: Are Joshua’s victories
cause for celebration?
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, July 20, 2009
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Emily Martin spoke at the final session July 15 of the Churchwide Gathering of Presbyterian Women. Her talk, “Celebration?,” was based on Joshua 21:43 – 22:8.
At first glance, she said, “the text gives us reason to celebrate – God kept His promises.” But then, she read the whole book of Joshua.
“At first it was a wonder … it makes you want to celebrate,” she said, “but when the walls come tumbling down so does my cause to celebrate. When the walls come down [the Israelites] destroy everything in Jericho.” They slaughter everything, she said, “supposedly at the Lord’s command. Well, everything but the silver and iron that was worth something.
“That takes the celebration right out of me,” Martin said.
“Is discipleship the deliberate taking of life – not only soldiers, but women and children and the elderly?,” she asked. “How can we be a light to the nations if we have no qualms about destroying them?”
“The worst part,” she said, “it is still happening in Israel and Palestine, in Afganistan and the Sudan and in our inner cities. … It is almost always justified in some way. No one’s victory really lasts and the violence happens again and again.”
Martin said that maybe Joshua “is like a mirror that we see our own reflection. To celebrate we have to be safe and to be safe we have to be in control that usually means drawing sharp lines between those who are right and those who are wrong.”
But, she said, you can’t celebrate with a guilty conscience. The book of Joshua ends not with celebration,
but with a command of obedience. “If we let ourselves wonder what those commandments are, we find at least 10 in Deuteronomy.”
The commandments tell how to treat the neighbor and a stranger. “We are supposed to love them as ourselves,” she said. According to the creation account in Genesis, all are family, so “all of us, in spite of our present diversity, began as kindred and neighbors.
“My hope that together we will follow Christ down that path of gratitude and obedience,” she said. “That God calls us to another type of churchwide gathering that will include all God’s creation.”