Step Into the River: For the Week You Did Not Choose

Step Into the River: For the Week You Did Not Choose Preview · Opening of the manuscript The care list still has Thursday's name in the margin. Visit when it settles. The man whose scan arrived on a weekday he did not pick sits two rows back. The woman who has the follow-up on Tuesday sits with a casserole dish she already knows how to make and a church that already knows how to wait for dry ground. Nobody asked who would put a foot in the water while the river was still up.

A deacon two seats over signed the last note that said we are praying. He also signed the first delay that left the named household under a quieter sentence. He has a theology of this stall: keep the sanctuary public and the first step indoors until the bank looks safe.

This is a sermon for a church sitting with people who did not choose this week and still selling dry ground as care. If you preach Joshua 3 as a map of anyone's private courage, you will lie. If you preach it as Israel at harvest flood, priests carrying the ark, soles in the Jordan before the water moved, you give this church a living God who goes first, and you take away the cheap care that hides behind waiting for a better bank.

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Hear the crossing as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "Yahweh said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to magnify you in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. You shall command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, saying, ‘When you come to the brink of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.’” Joshua said to the children of Israel, “Come here, and hear the words of Yahweh your God.”