Joshua 6:1-9     What Are the Keys to Our Community?    Feb 18, 2007

     How many of you regularly loose your keys and search around the house for them?   The search for keys is an ongoing saga at my house.  I will call out, “Does anyone know where my keys are?”  It seems to happen at the worst times when I am already running late.  I feel panicked.  It all seems silly when the keys are found, but the reality is that without the keys, the car does not go, the office does not open, and I cannot get back in the house. 

  As Joshua faced Jericho, a city locked up with violence, sexual corruption, and hatred, Joshua needed the keys for the entryway into the city.  And those keys would be provided for him by God.  Today is our last message from the book of Joshua.  All our talks have led up to this moment.  Joshua and the people of Israel will conquer this city and begin to liberate this land from the evil rule over it.  We too are called by God to liberate our community from the bondage and evil that rules over it.  Our weapons are not swords and spears.  Our weapon is love which conquers all foes.  But we are like Joshua.  We face a locked up community and we need the keys to open hearts and minds and spirits to a new life.

 The good news is that every city, every community, has entry points and keys.  And God gives those keys to the Church.  Jesus said to Peter in Matthew 16, “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of God.”  Jericho seemed impregnable but Joshua just needed the right keys.  God said in vs. 2, “Look, I have given Jericho into your hand.”  Our community, our nation, our world may seem hopelessly lost.  Every night on the evening news, we are assaulted by the bad news of war, violence, crime, environmental disaster, political corruption.  And around us, we hear the sad news from our very neighbors about divorce, bankruptcy, depression, teen conflicts.  But God has given the Church the keys to save the world.  God says to us, “Look, I have given your community into your hands.”  Yes, the walls are high and thick and strong.  But I know that someday those walls will fall down.  As we pray each week, God’s Kingdom will come.  God’s will shall be done on earth as it is in Heaven.  The walls will all fall down.  Our task in our own lives and in our own day is to bring the Keys of the Kingdom of God to the walls that exist in our own Jericho, in our own community. 

 What are these keys that will unlock the walls?  Look at Joshua chapter six.  I want to speak very practically this morning about the future of our church and our work in this community.  What are the keys that will open the closed hearts of people?  The first key is Joshua Leadership.  We started this six week series talking about Joshua leadership.  You can go back on our web site and re-read that sermon.  Joshua had to be a new kind of leader because the old leader, Moses, was dead.  The 21^st century will require new leaders different form leaders of the past.  Notice in vs. nine that Joshua and the priests did not lead this march out front.  There were men in front of them and men behind them.  Joshua and the priests were in the center of things.  

In 1990, Frances Hesselbein became the CEO of the Girl Scouts of America.  Over lunch one day, a NY Times columnist interviewed her and asked how it felt to be on top of such a large organization with a volunteer force of 650,000.  Hesselbein began rearranging the lunch table, creating concentric circles of plates, cups, saucers, connected by a web of knives, forks, spoons.  Finally, Hesselbein pointed to a glass in the middle of the table.  “I’m here at the center.”  She said.  “I am not on top of anything.”     Joshua leaders are at the center as servant leaders.  They are not on top, not executive dictators.  Joshua leaders are not working just for themselves, but they are ambitious first and foremost for the cause, the movement, the mission.  They will lay aside their own agenda to win and desires to be out front, and instead, they put place themselves in the center.  The first key to opening our community to the love of God is servant leadership.

  The second key is getting the right people on board the bus.  Look at verse 4.  Joshua chose seven priests to walk with him at the center. Blowing the trumpets.  This is vital to unlocking the doors.  Without the right people on board, our church can never move forward.  More important than the amount of money we have; more important than the facilities we have; more important than the programs we have; most important is who we have on board the bus. 

   In 1976, 25 year old Roger Briggs began teaching physics at a public high school in Boulder, Colorado.  He soon began to think, “Our schools could be so much better.”  But what could he do?  He was not principal or superintendent or governor.  But he decided to do something.  He made his own corner in the science department of the school into a beacon of light, of quality, of creativity.  In time, Briggs became the chair of the school’s 14 person science department and set himself the goal of making it the best.  How did he do it?  The same way all great leaders do.  He got the right people on the bus.  Briggs filled the faculty with people compulsively driven to make whatever they touched the best it can be.  Not because of high salaries.  Briggs could not offer public school teachers high salaries.  He did offer them hard work and a chance to change their community.  He knew it would be harder to get the wrong people off the bus, so he focused on getting the right people on the bus.  A key point was instead of the common attitude that all teachers would receive tenure unless they seriously messed up, Briggs told teachers, “You will probably not receive tenure unless you prove yourself to be an exceptional teacher.”  Today, Boulder High School’s science department stands as a pocket of greatness.  Briggs had limited powers.  He was not on the top.  He was at the center of the school system.  But he made one key decision: Get the right people on board.  Our church in recent years has focused in our nominations to get the right people on board.  But we must increase these efforts in everyway to get the right people in position to open the doors to our community. 

  The final key we see here in Joshua six is in verse 3-4.  They marched once around the city for six days and seven times on the seventh day. This was God’s plan for Joshua, his leaders, and the people.  Listen.  This is most important.  The key to capturing Jericho was to have this piercing clarity about their mission and then to refuse to do anything else but their mission.  I am sure that by day three, there were some people who thought of other ideas about how to capture Jericho.  I can imagine around the campfires at night, people saying, “Well, you know, we could try such and such.  All this walking is not doing a thing.  We could go to another city that does not have such high walls.”  There were probably many other ideas, but Joshua and his leaders held to this one focus.  They knew their mission and they stuck to it for the long haul, for seven long hot days. 

  If Augusta Road UMC is to break down the walls of our community we must discover clearly, with piercing clarity, what is our mission.  What does God want us to do in our community?  Not what do we want to do.  Not even what are the needs of the community.  But clearly, what is God’s mission for us?  And then, when you attain such focus, you must have the relentless, hard discipline to say, “No, thank you” to all other ideas and opportunities that do not fit your mission.  Now most churches have a rather vague idea of their mission and so almost any new program, project or idea can seem to fit in with that vague mission.  I must honestly confess that in my own past, I have loved creating more programs.  It feels like so much is going on.  But when we have a crystal clear vision of our mission, then so many things are cut away.  We are no longer firing a shotgun around our community and hoping to hit something out there.  Instead, we are aiming a laser beam at the crucial areas of the wall so that it will fall down.  Joshua had one single plan that came from God.  Walk around the walls and blow the trumpets on the seventh day.  And with that clear plan and no other plan, the walls did come down.  We must ask ourselves, “What is our mission?  What programs in our church make that mission move forward?  And what programs need to be put aside?”

  How do we discover our God given mission?  There will be much prayer.  And in prayer, we must ask—What is God laying on our hearts that we feel deeply passionate about?  What few things do we do where we can be the very best?  And how can we develop the resources of people, money, facilities to move forward our mission? 

   Joshua held three keys to open the walls of Jericho.  First, his own servant leadership at the center.  Second, he got the right people on board with him.  And third, he had a focused mission and he let nothing turn him from that mission over the long haul.  Those are the same keys that will carry you far in your own life.  Those are the keys to opening the hearts of our community to hear about God’s love in Jesus Christ.  I end this sermon series today.  But I pray this church is just getting started.  May you feel the deep passion of God’s mission for you to become a pocket of greatness, to make a difference, to change your world.  Amen.