How many of you have ever gotten up from your chair and gone into the next room to retrieve something, but between the time you left the first room and got to the next room you forgot what it was you were going to go get? No, this is not a sermon about growing older, even though the experience I just described tends to happen a bit more frequently the older you get. This is a sermon about remembering where you are and what you are doing.

Very early in the 1990’s this church called a young new pastor by the name of Dan Meyer whose rather short ministry saw some important new developments in church life, not the least of which was the undertaking of an ambitious building and renovation project for the church campus that saw an upgrade of the parking, the renovation of the Education Building, and the construction of the Fellowship Center. In early 1996 Dan moved to another call, and in late 1998 yours truly came on board. Shortly after my arrival here, the planning began for another, and this time more extensive, campus project to meet the needs of a congregation that was growing in both numbers and in the scope and complexity of its ministry. For approximately 8 years we have been working with the congregation, with an architect and builders, and with the various government agencies involved in preparing to build a new sanctuary, a new music complex, a new education building, a new administration wing, and expanded parking. Because of the many layers of planning and approval it has taken a long time to get to where we are today. You might say that we have finally reached the end of the beginning, because next Sunday, we will take the first major, concrete step in our campus expansion project, as we move our worship services out of this sanctuary and into the Fellowship Center, which will become our temporary worship home. This is an historic day for this congregation because this is the last Sunday we will have full worship services in this sanctuary before it eventually becomes a chapel. We are at the end of one major phase of a journey together and on the threshold of the next phase. But it has taken us a long time to get here. And as in those times when you forget why you went into the next room, we need to remember why we are where we are at this exciting juncture in church life.

This kind of moment in our church’s life is one that has been repeated countless times in the history of God’s people from the very earliest days. One of the most historic and most important for the entire story of the Judeo-Christian family occurred in the middle of the thirteenth century before Christ and is told in the Old Testament book of Joshua from which we read together a portion a few moments ago. To understand the story you have to know the whole story that leads up to this particular moment. You will remember that long, long ago God spoke to Abraham and told Abraham that he must leave his homeland and go to a new homeland, and there God would bless Abraham and his descendants and make them into a great nation. Abraham obeyed God. From Abraham came Isaac, and then Jacob, and then Joseph. With each generation after Abraham, God’s chosen people grew in number, and then in the time of Joseph, to escape famine, they migrated to Egypt. Abraham’s family was enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, but was then led out of captivity by the great prophet Moses. Under Moses the Hebrew people wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. The leadership of the people passed to Joshua, and Moses died just before the people entered the land promised so long ago to Abraham, the land of Canaan. The book of Joshua tells the story of the Hebrews’ conquest of Canaan under the great general named Joshua, and then, at the end of the book, Joshua himself gathers the people together at one of their most important sites, the place called Shechem. God had spoken to Abraham at Shechem, and Jacob had land there. Shechem was a holy place to the Israelite people. When Joshua calls the people to gather there, they have ended years of warfare and conquest. They have lived the reality of God’s promise to give them this land as their own homeland. But it has been many, many generations since the promise was first given to Abraham, and many, many generations since the promise was reiterated under Moses, and many, many years since Joshua became the leader. Joshua now is an old man, ready to die. It is time for him to remind the Hebrew people who are becoming the nation of Israel of where they have been so that they can know where they are and so that they can know where they are going in the future.

If you think it is hard to remember what you were going for as you walk from one room to the next, then think of how hard it can be to remember why you are where you are and why you are who you are from out of events and people and experiences that stretch back hundreds and now thousands of years. As he prepares to turn over the reigns of leadership, Joshua retells the essential parts of the history of the people. He tells how God called Abraham, how God saved them from slavery and potential destruction by the Egyptian army, how God was with them in the 4 decades of wilderness wandering, how God gave them victory after victory so that they could inhabit the Promised Land, and how God did indeed give them this land as their own. After so many years, so many battles, so many challenges, so many detours, the people have arrived and they are at the end of the beginning and the beginning of the next stage of their journey toward becoming a nation. And Joshua essentially tells the people two crucially important things: the first is that it is the power of God that has brought them to this point, and the second is that they are now faced with a decision about whether or not they will continue to serve and worship this God or choose another. Let me simplify the message a bit: God has acted, how will you respond? In what would become some of the most famous words of scripture, Joshua says, “…choose this day whom you will serve…but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Under the leadership of Abraham and Moses and Joshua and all the others in between, the people of God faced many challenges to their faith and to their faithfulness as they trudged along in the great journey that God had set before them. Those challenges are the same for individuals as they are for the community of faith. Those challenges exist today and they exist for us as we take this next bold step forward in our life as a congregation. One of those challenges is fear. What if we have not correctly understood God’s plan for us? What if God abandons us along the way? What if God does not give us the resources of faith and strength and will to carry through with his vision? The Bible is so clear about this fact that God’s servants are often terrified of what may happen as they obediently respond to God’s call. But the Bible is also so clear, that when God truly has called he is always there to carry us through the rough waters and help us survive and even conquer the things that would harm us and derail God’s plan. What if God does not want us to expand our ministry here? What if God will not bless us with the resources necessary to carry out these plans? What if…you fill in the blank? To answer the fears of becoming a new nation, Joshua reminded the people of the faithfulness of God throughout their history. To answer our fears of continuing forward in faith, we need only remember God’s faithfulness to this congregation over the last half century.

Another challenge for God’s people on this long journey is discouragement. Abraham and Sarah were discouraged when they went so long without becoming parents. The Hebrew slaves were discouraged when all they did was make bricks for Pharaoh. The freed Israelites were discouraged when they saw the military power of the cities of Canaan. And we can become discouraged when we see how long it takes, and how much money it takes, and how much energy and patience it takes, not only to expand a church campus, but to undertake new ministries and to try new approaches and to reach out to a culture that seems to have no use for us and for our Savior. How discouraged must Joseph have felt when his brothers sold him into slavery? How discouraged must the Hebrews have felt when they ran out of food in the wilderness? How discouraged have we often felt when a new church program failed or a treasured leader in ministry has left us or yet another layer of government regulation has slowed our progress in building a new church? But God is never discouraged, and God is always faithful, and God’s plan always wins out in the end.

Yet another challenge we people of faith have always faced is distraction. The generations of Hebrews who lived in slavery in Egypt surely wanted to be free but they also became very accustomed to life under Egyptian rule and they were not entirely sure they wanted to leave when the time came. Once they had left it was not long before they had given up their worship of the God who had saved them and were making for themselves an idol of gold that they could worship. And in later years, long after Joshua and long after the nation was well established, the people became preoccupied with daily life and very used to the presence of pagan gods, so much so that they often adopted the ways of the pagans whose land they had inhabited. It is easy to forget who you are and what you are about. It is easy to grow so accustomed to the way things are that you cannot see that they could be better, that they need to change in order to grow, that God never lets us stand still for very long, not if we’re listening to him. God wants to do more great things with this church, and we cannot let ourselves become distracted by other concerns in life. Perhaps most importantly, we must not become so preoccupied with the buildings in which we have our church life that we become distracted from church life itself: our worship, our learning, our mission and service, our fellowship, our growth into mature disciples of Jesus.

Still another challenge for folks like us who journey along with God is exhaustion. Following Jesus is work. Following Jesus is hard. The work of building new buildings or building new relationships or building new ministries or building new beachheads for service and mission is just that: work. And work can be tiring. Think of how many times the Hebrew people built and then rebuilt their temple. Think of how many times the scribes copied the text of the scriptures on the long scrolls of sheepskin. Think of how many times the people strayed from the true worship of the true God and a prophet would be called on to tell the people to quit going after other Gods and remember the one true God who had saved them. Coming to worship and teaching a class and paying your pledge and living by Christian standards in your job and your marriage and your family are all work, hard work. But God is an endless source of energy, soul energy. And so we keep working, patiently, persistently, hopefully. We keep coming to God to ask for that which he always wants to give us: the will and the power to do his work in the world.

All of these challenges in our journey with God—and I’ve only mentioned the major ones—can combine in such a way that we simply get lost along the way. We lose our perspective. We cannot see where we are, or remember where we’ve been, or remember where we thought we were going. Every big and worthwhile thing in life is that way. You can forget why you wanted to go to college. You can lose sight of the reasons you married the person whose ring you wear. You can lose touch with why you chose your career. You can forget why you fell in love with Jesus. You can lose sight of the reasons you chose to turn your life over to God. You can lose touch with why you decided to spend large sums of time and energy and money to expand your ministry and to develop your ways of being a church.

These days you can buy a little system for your car that talks to a satellite up in space that instantly knows where you are and can even tell you how to get somewhere else. All of you have seen them and we all think they are pretty cool. The only thing about them that I’m not sure I completely understand is why they always speak in a female voice, but I’m sure someday I’ll understand why, and I’m also sure it will be my wife who tells me why. To keep yourself on track in your own personal discipleship and to keep yourself on track as a church body, you need GPS: God’s Positioning System. God’s Positioning System is quite simple really. All you have to do is what Joshua did: go back and tell the story again. Go back and remember what God has done for you. Go back and look hard at how you came to the place where you happen to be and then you will remember where you are. Connect yourself to the story of God’s people and then you will know where you are in that same story.

Where are we, The Village Church, in God’s story? Nearly 52 years ago a small band of God’s people here decided that it was time to start a congregation, and they did. They worshiped for a time in the Garden Club down the street, but then they built a small church as their very own church home. Their plan was to use that church for a few years until they could build a larger one. Well, that “few years” is finally over. This sanctuary will become the chapel that it was always meant to be, and a couple of years from now, we will have an expanded and enhanced church facility that will better support our existing ministries and better support the ministries that we believe God is calling us toward in the future, ministries that include more and better children’s and youth programs, more and better mission opportunities, more and better worship experiences. This church has never stood still for very long. We have always changed, always grown, always tried new things, always responded to the challenges of the future. In a way, all the change that will happen here is really not change at all: it is simply in keeping with who we have always been and who God’s people always have been. Two years ago, when we first began our fund raising efforts that have now garnered over 5 million dollars, we said that we are “blessed to be a blessing.” And that’s what we’re still all about: not buildings, but blessings, the blessing of knowing Jesus in our own lives, the blessing of sharing Jesus with others, the blessing of doing our part to continue a story that goes all the way back to folks like Joshua and Moses and Abraham.

The story of Joshua speaking to the assembled people of Israel at Shechem is often called by biblical scholars a “covenant renewal” ceremony. It was something like two people renewing their marriage vows after years of marriage. As we move into a new and challenging and exciting season of life here at The Village Church, we need to remember and to renew our vows, as it were. To move beyond the fear and discouragement and distraction and exhaustion that come with any bold step into the future, we need only to remember the faithfulness and power of our God, and we need to join Joshua and his household in vowing again to serve the Lord, the one True God, the one who called Abraham and who sent his Son, the one who calls us to serve him faithfully in our time.

Amen.