I want to ask you about if you're a fan of something or not. How many of y'all like Time Hop? Do you know what I'm talking about? You know on your Facebook feed at pop stuff like what you were doing seven years ago?
Or is that this whole, have any of y'all ever gotten in trouble because of Time Hop before? Have any of you ever embarrassed yourself on Time Hop? Who is secure enough of themselves when that picture shows up? This may be not the most gratifying to actually share your embarrassment with other people?
Like that popped up this week, and I was not man enough to share that picture. There's fun parts about it because it's a great way to remember things. It's a great way for us to remember fun parts of our life. It's a great way to remember when we used to be skinnier.
It's a great way for us just to realize, hey, this is special in my life. There's sometimes also embarrassing. I'm really, really, really glad that I'm old enough for the majority of my college career. Facebook was not around neither were camera phones.
How many of y'all are else are glad that you're old enough to not have to pay for camera phones? So nice. I was in college for seven years, and so I did catch up in the tail end of it. I was really good at college.
And I did the research, and this is so proprietary. They're very secretive. But TimeHop even has an algorithm to which they try to determine the difference between good memories and bad memories. It's just amazing at all this work that goes into us remembering, and this week I don't really get into it, but I went and downloaded the app on my phone because I want to see how detailed it was this week.
And it freaked me out because it was years of stuff that I did on Thursday. And it's like, wow, this is scary. This is all safe somewhere in the cloud. But remembering is a funny thing.
How many of y'all like to remember? We all think we like to remember. But all of us also have those things we don't want to remember. How many of you wish you were better at remembering?
I'm very forgetful. You tell anybody who's around me for more than five minutes, they'll tell you how forgetful I am. I wish I was better at remembering in that regard. But I also wish that especially at night that I wasn't so good at remembering things because all of us sometimes we can struggle with things that are just years in the past.
And they can kind of come back sometimes and they remind us. So remembering is just this really complicated thing. And today we're going to talk about remembering. We're here celebrating the anniversary, the birthday of Foundry.
And we're going to talk about remembering. But we're going to really just kind of dig the biblical idea of remembering. Because it's important and it's thick. It's all throughout scripture, especially in the Old Testament that remembering is something that is just super, super important.
One of the interesting things is the very first time that remembering is mentioned in scripture is God telling his people that he will remember them. Think about that. The very first occurrence of remembering that we find in scripture is God telling us that he is going to remember something. It immediately just sets the tone right there that time exists in a different way in God's eyes and God's world.
We as God's people, they were called to see time functioning in a little different of a way. Remembering is also a huge part of worship. And most of the Old Testament we read and we see and we learn things about remembering. It's inside of the context of worship.
That God's people, they gathered together in a corporate act of memory. That sounds really fancy. But there's something about when God's people are together what they're remembering. Is it remembering who God has been and who God is done for them.
That remembering is an act of worship. And the Psalms all throughout them we read about remembering is these moments of transformation that remembering leads us to transformational situations. That us recalling the things of the past that we've experienced and that others have experienced. Remember this is a corporate act.
This is all together. But they're interpreting, they're remembering, it's us interpreting our own present circumstances and light of God's continued faithfulness. Remembering causes us to see things with spiritual eyes and to hear things with spiritual ears. So remembering is just deeply important in scripture.
So we're gonna go to the book of Joshua today. We're gonna talk about an instance of remembering that was important in the life of God's people. Kind of finish up a story that we've also been dancing around for the last few weeks. And so you can open your Bibles up to Joshua chapter four.
It'll also be on the screen behind me as my friend Alan calls it a big Bible. I like that so much. You can also look on your phone and read off your phone. But this is the words of Joshua.
So when all the people who crossed the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, now choose 12 men, one from each tribe. Tell them, take 12 stones from the very place for the priest or standing in the middle of Jordan. Carry them out and pile them up at the place where you will camp tonight. So Joshua called together the 12 men he had chosen, one from each of the tribes of Israel.
He told them, go into the middle of the Jordan in front of the ark of the Lord your God. And each of you must pick up one stone and carry it out on your shoulder. 12 stones in all, one for each of the 12 tribes of Israel. We will use these stones to build a memorial.
In the future, your children will ask you, what do these stones mean? And then you tell them, they remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the ark of the Lord's covenant went across. And these stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever. And then verse 19, the people crossed the Jordan on the 10th day of the first month, they camped at Gilgal, just east of Jericho.
It was there at Gilgal, that Gilgal, that Joshua piled up the 12 stones taken from the Jordan River. And Joshua said to Israelites, in the future your children will ask, what do these stones mean? And then you can tell them, this is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground. For the Lord your God dried up the river right before your eyes and he kept it dry right until you were all across.
Just as he did at the Red Sea, when he dried it up until we had all crossed over. He did this, so all the nations of the earth might know that the Lord's hand is powerful and so you might fear the Lord your God forever. And so there's a story, God's people at the end of the Exodus, at the end of this long, long, long, long, long, long, long period of waiting there. They're sitting there and they're right across the river.
In the middle of this, see the ark of the covenant, everyone who grew up in the 80s, knows the writers of the lost ark, yes, that ark. And they're standing there and said, go get 12 stones, go get some big rocks, and we're gonna carry these across and we're gonna use them for something. Now, I typically will instantly question why I consider it to be useless work. When anybody else do that?
You ever think about this, listen, how did you go get a rock from the middle of the river and we're gonna carry this in? And I kind of look at the map and I look where the Jordan river is and where Jericho is, we know where Jericho is and I kind of do the approximation there and they say they're going to this place called Gilgal and in Hebrew, it's not necessarily a single place, it's like their word for like a temporary fort. And so it's like, no matter what, these guys are having to carry these rocks at least a few miles. I get nervous to ask people to do things for me because I'm scared I'm gonna overburden them, but I would feel really bad asking somebody, hey, can you go get a really big rock and carry it for a few miles for me?
But there's a purpose to this, they're building a marker to memorialize what has happened. And today we're talking about that idea of markers and I'm not gonna ask you to go and get rocks and carry them somewhere to build a rock tower because that'd be kind of weird for us now. But we do have a marker as a church and our marker is our mission. We're gonna get three ways of remembering this morning that help us to understand that.
The first thing that we do is we practice remembering. We remember we take note of what has been done. Now there's a chart we showed a few weeks ago. How many are patient people?
Okay, how many are not patient people? Okay, let's look at the greatest example of biblical patients I've ever seen in my life. So we got this chart. So this is Abraham to Joshua.
This whole thread we've been running and talking about. So you see Abraham and then Abraham's son Isaac and then Isaac's son to Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel and his son Joseph. And then we have a whole 400 years in Egypt. Then we have Moses, we have 40 years in the desert and then we have Joshua.
We added all these up. This is over 800 years of waiting. So this stone, this pile of stones they're calling, they're calling and they're caring to build this memorial is marking the end of this over 800 year season of waiting in preparation. They have a significant more amount of patience than I do.
But they're waiting because they didn't remember well. So like right there at the Moses Cut-Off, they were actually, they could have gone over at that point in time and they started sending a couple spies out and Moses picked two men, he picked a man named Caleb and he picked a man named Joshua. We're reading a story now. And he says, I need y'all to go run recon, go scope things out, go find out what things are going on, what we need to be prepared for.
And these three 12 men, there were two of the 12. They came back and they told a story of impossibilities, told a story saying, hey, listen, we don't have the ability to do this. These people are big, it's scary. I don't want to go over there.
Is there any way we can get out of this? And because of that, they had to wait another 40 years for that generation that doubt to die off literally. If Caleb and Joshua, two men out of thousands, they're the only people who remember what it was like in Egypt now but to cross over. They could have been over there earlier, but they were bad at remembering.
They did not remember well, you have to wonder those people, as they were waiting for those 40 years because of their failure to remember well, you've got to wonder if they realized how much they contributed to the situation. When I was a kid, my dad was a youth minister, my mom was a school teacher. Both of my parents worked with kids. And because of that, I was never able to get away with anything.
You know how, any of y'all are lucky enough to have the parents that would always stick up for you? My dad was the first one, oh, he's an idiot. What do you know? Because I knew I was capable of one thing my dad always asked me every time something would happen and I'd come home and I'd be complaining or whining, my dad would always ask me, what did you do?
How did you contribute to the situation? And I'm thankful now when I was a kid, I wanted to stick up for him. I'm like, come on dad, please seriously? Or my mom, she's like, no, I know how bad you are.
I'm not gonna call your teacher. You completely deserve this. I'm glad they did that now because it makes me look back in my own life when I'm really impatient and I'm trying to move things forward, I'm trying to rush things too much. Cognizant of how I can contribute to situations.
I remember where I've gotten myself in pickles in the past. We've got to remember, well, it's our present action. We have to think about this. We have to put ourselves in environments.
They're going to contribute to our faithfulness. Put ourselves in environments where we can contribute to how God has been faithful to us and to those around us. Ask ourselves that question. What are we contributing here?
Are we contributing stories of faithfulness? Or are we contributing story of faithlessness? When we remember we're letting God speak to us a better future, a future that he is moving us towards. The second thing is my favorite words.
I like the fact that in my occupation, I get to make up words. And I have friends who make up even better words than I do. My friend JD uses this word. He says, remember us.
This active embodiment of remembering. You need to remember us this. And what's funny is in this passage, we see rememberization going on. The back section we read, just look at the tenses of this.
And Josh says, Israelites in the future, your children will ask. He's putting us into the future. Your children will ask, what do these stones mean? And then you can tell them, this is where the Israelites cross the Jordan on the dry ground.
For the Lord your God dried up the river right before your eyes. And he kept it dry until you were all crossed, just as he did at the Red Sea. When he dried it up until we had all crossed over. We put ourselves, no matter where time is happening, that we put ourselves in the middle of stories of faithfulness.
But we realize that because of the story of God and God's people, that we are part of these stories of faithfulness. We remember us. We are moving beyond recollection. And we're into rehearsal.
This includes the present action. This is the worship piece. Where the worship part of remembering is huge because worship is an active embodiment of what God is doing on this earth. And the Psalms are always telling us to remember God's saving activity.
And I rememberization of God's saving activity be a bridge to our present and remind us of a saving future. That is to come. The marker we hold up is our mission. The marker we hold up is our faithfulness.
And our own stories of faithfulness. The last thing that we can learn about remembering here is that we understand to recall. I remember my favorite part about playing Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo Entertainment System was the reset button. Just how many times did you really, really mess your game up?
And you can always set reset. Think about it. I haven't all done this. I'm really bad at video games.
I'm so bad at video games. I quit playing them. I was like nine years old. But how many times have you started playing a video game and you literally die, you lose your man in the first 30 seconds and you keep hitting reset, reset, reset.
Have you all done this before? To start from scratch, you get this idea of the perfect game in your head. When Marithon I first got married, we needed to get new cell phones. And I needed an indestructible cell phone because I am horrible.
I can break anything. And we went to the singular store back then, not the AT&T store, the singular store. And I asked the guy, I was like, what's the most indestructible cell phone you have? He said, it's the Nokia Engage.
It's a video game cell phone. That's back when getting a video game on your cell phone is a very big deal. And it came with Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Oh my goodness.
Y'all want to talk about wasting time? That's when I went from amateur to professional. But I hit reset on that game because I had this idea. I want the perfect game.
I'm horrible at video games. I will never play the perfect game. But I would always hit reset because I'd learn from my mistakes. Like, you know what?
I just need to hit that a little bit different of an angle. Or that little mushroom guy's coming to me more. But I need to jump. I hit this brick.
We learn from our mistakes. And we keep it in reset button like that. We're trying to avoid the things that have stopped us in the past. That's what hitting reset through remembering is we realized, you know, the last time I did that, it did not work out so well.
The last time I did that, it had the capacity to destroy me. The last time I did that, I did not grow closer to who God has asked me to be. I grew further away from it. We recall things.
We're actively learning from our mistakes and we're allowing that to speak a different present into our life. And this moment, they're hitting reset. The second they crossed over the Jordan River, those vessels, we always say, there's two generation movies we can talk about the story of Moses. And you either know the Ten Commandments or Charlton or the Disney Channel, Prince of Egypt.
That's the two ways we know the story. But the moment they crossed over the Jordan River here, there wasn't any more mana. Food wasn't coming down like miraculously appearing in the morning when they woke up. Like all the miracles that were sustaining them throughout the Exodus, once they crossed that river, there were no more.
They hit reset. But God's provision for them now is coming in a completely different way. But he was calling them now. You were going to be eating the fruits of this land that I have given you.
This crossing in Jordan was them hitting reset as well. They celebrate Passover, this festival and this feast that marks who they are and how they belong to God at this moment. We hit reset. It's almost that we're saying, in light of what we know now, these are decisions that I'm going to make.
These is how I'm going to avoid pitfalls. This is how I'm going to get through things. Sometimes it can be frustrating when we see something or somebody and we perceive them to be an overnight success. I read this one time though.
That might have been an overnight success, but that night was really, really, really, really, really long. Now the Israelites show up on the scene here across the Jordan River and there's hundreds of thousands of them. But they spent 40 years in the desert learning what it was like to be the people of God. A whole generation had to die off while they were learning what it was like to be the people of God.
But when they hit reset button and they crossed over the Jordan River, it was a completely different ball game. And each of us have our own stories of faithfulness. My stories of faithfulness will look differently than what your stories of faithfulness look like. But when we combine these stories of faithfulness together, we have something that's just very, very strong.
It's one of the markers that we carry. But the marker that we have and said that our marker is our mission. This is a present that's lived out. And it's fueled by a future passion.
But we have it because we have a past and we have a strong foundation. We have stories of faithfulness that each one of us can contribute. I want to read to you a couple of firsts that have just been running through my head these last few months that are just very appropriate for us today as we talk about this. And what our mission is in our marker.
I shared this a few months ago this summer. But John 1412, I'm going to read this. Just think about this. I tell you the truth.
Anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done and even greater works because I am going to be with the Father. Think about that. Anyone who believes in me will do even greater things. I mean, this is Jesus talking.
It's not a disciple. It's not some random misfit that there's tons of them in the Bible. It's one of the reasons I love the stories in the Bible. This is Jesus talking.
Saying, you will do even greater things than I have done. Does that not sound audacious to anybody else? Does that not sound wild? Like you will do even greater things than I have done.
Your faithfulness will teach you things. Your faithfulness will cause you to do things. The stories that you have will push you towards a future. If there's greater than what even I have done.
That's crazy. The only thing that fuels those type of decisions and those type of movements is just a belief that you're alongside of the God of the universe. And I just say a throwback here, but at 4319, God says for I am about to do something new. See, I've already begun.
Do you not see? I will make a pathway to the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland. You know, for those of us who think that we're just simply not good enough for Jesus to do greater things through and with, that should be the passage we get tattooed on us.
So I'm about to do new things. Things that have never been done, never been seen before. We're going to create new words with what I am doing. And I'm going to clear a path through the wilderness.
Like all the junk that we carry in our life, that we feel like stops us, that slows us down, that it can hang us up, that causes us to stop. This is a prophet of Isaiah saying, God is coming and he is cutting a clear path through all of your junk, for you to see and for you to follow. It's taking you to a place. Like roads are not just put there for the sake of having a road there.
If you're a civilization, you weren't that less than the hard way. There's a place God is taking us. He's cutting a clear path. He's straining the road down.
He's clearing it there. He's asking us to do new things. God has a better future for those who are faithful. And that future is found in what God is doing.
For us as a church, the marker that we're building, the stones that we are carrying, this witness and this memorial that we are erecting is the mission that Jesus has given us. The mission that we believe is unique and specific. And it's called to be here where we're living right now. And it was talk about our memory a little bit as a church on our birthday.
It's appropriate to do that. Our memory, what does it look like? You know, Foundry started three years ago with five families in my backyard. Bishop said, hey, listen, we need to do a new church in North Washtop Parish.
We want you to go do it. Go. I remember it was like five families, some kind of, they weren't very good hamburgers. I made them.
They weren't very good. The same obstacle course is out there. I think that was an obstacle course from our front yard though. Five families.
And look who we are. Look who we are now. So it's five families, grew to about 50 people who met for a year who prayed and worked for this to happen. One of the things that we prayed and we worked for was asking ourselves the question, what kind of church is God calling us to be?
And one of the things, this is just part of it. One of the things we kept seeing time and time and time again, written like literally on these big pieces of paper, we showed a video about that a few weeks ago was we want to be a church that's non-judgmental. We want to be a church that's accepting. We want to be a church that's approachable.
We want to be a church that's easy for people to come to. And we didn't strategize on how to do that. We made the decision to just live our life together and to live our life in public and to think about what does it look like for a church to instead tell you on Sunday morning that you need to make every single day look like this, this perfect, well executed, nice, neat little packs together and say, you know what? We didn't bring in all the crap that you had to deal with on Monday through Saturday.
And that's all right. As we've over the last few months, we've tried to formalize some of these things into more official statements. We've decided the best way to talk about this is to say we honor real life. We have a real life and we honor all of our stories of faithfulness and we bring them here.
That's part of our mission. So for two years, we've been saying Jesus is big enough. No matter what happens, no matter what comes to you in life, no matter where you've been, no matter where you're going, no matter what, Jesus is big enough. And so for two years here in this room, we've actually moved, some of y'all might remember, we used to face it that way.
We don't do at least a lot easier to set up this way now. But for two years, we've seen professions of faith and we've seen baptisms and we've celebrated sacraments together and we had a Christmas Eve service this year and we've done all sorts of different things that we're doing as a church, but we've grown together and being real people with each other. Right? But what does it mean to be a church in the community?
I thought that I was either gonna get fired or get written about in a newspaper and we decided to do an ash Wednesday service at a cigar shop. And Joey Pinnett got his picture on the front of the paper for that day. What does it mean to be a church that's fully in this community that honors the real life where everybody is at? That's one of our markers is that part of our mission.
We talk about our future. One of the things that I'm happy to tell you right now is we know we've voted five months ago to take on this cooperative relationship with St. Andrews. Now, well, we're working towards this.
It's taken a little bit long expected from the legal side of it, but we have all the money we need now to buy that five acres of land. We have that. That relationship is moving forward. We see a future that's there and that future's not there to get us out of this jump, but that future is there to give us another environment where we can impact people, a place where we can grow, a place where we can have more.
We know right now that folks need things to grab onto people. There's some level of church involvement and activities that we really need and this is a relationship that's gonna allow us to do those things. But the biggest thing it allows us to do is to move forward with our mission, to move forward with our vision of Jesus being big enough, no matter what. Now, we can live into this future because we've had our past.
We can live into this future because we're experiencing our present right now. The marker where every single one of us is carrying a big rock out of a dry riverbed today and every single day of our life, that marker is the mission that we've Jesus given us as a unique mission for this community and as a unique mission for the middle of the parish and that we are accomplishing that. We're only accomplishing that through you. So remember well and remember often and remember into the future.
Jesus, thank you so much for remembering us. For remembering us no matter what. When things are well and when things are not so well. And in your word, you say that the only thing that you choose to remember is our love and that you willfully choose to forget our sins.
And that happens because of the life we have placed ourself inside with you. So Jesus let us see clearly the next steps that you want each and every one of us to take. Can we take those steps as individuals? But we also take those steps together as a church that you've called in existence called Foundry.
We thank you so much for that. Amen.