Stones Of Memory

“And the people of Israel did just as Joshua commanded and took up twelve stones out of the midst of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, just as the Lord told Joshua. And they carried them over with them to the place where they lodged and laid them down there. And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the covenant had stood; and they are there to this day.” – Joshua 4:8-9

If I asked you to think back on a time when you most experienced God’s power in your life, when you knew without a shadow of a doubt that what was happening was due to God’s might and not yours, when would that be? Would it be easy to remember, or difficult?

As at the shore of the Red Sea, here God has led his people to an illogical location before an untraversable body of water under a new leader. The traditional crossing point for the Jordan River was the city of Adam, 17 miles north of God’s chosen crossing point. Near Adam, the Jabbok River joined the Jordan from the east, and Wadi el-Fara from the west, making anywhere south of that point difficult to cross, and the riverbanks were already swollen that time of year from the winter rains. But as with the Red Sea, God moves the waters of the Jordan River for the people to cross on dry ground, in perhaps a more orderly and militaristic fashion this time, but again to establish His power, the people’s belief in their leader, and fear of God himself (Exodus 14:31, Joshua 4:24).

This time, God asks them to take a souvenir. One man from each tribe hefts a stone from the bottom of the river and sets it somewhere it never would have arrived naturally: up on dry land. Unasked, Joshua also marks the place where the priests’ feet stood, like an invisible memorial to say, we were here. Our feet touched the bottom, and because God made a way, we rose up from the water to walk into new life in the land of covenant promise. It was all by God’s power. These water-stones, these land-stones, they hold that memory, the memory of salvation itself. 

One would think it would be hard to forget an experience like that, walking across ground no person in recent history had trod, the only thing between you and certain death the hand of God holding back a wall of water to your right, passing by an ark with the fearful presence of that very God along the way. Yet we forget. We forget the magnitude and reality of God’s saving power. We need prompts to remember. And the remembering is to be done together: brother to brother, parent to child. They all crossed together. God’s power stayed death and provided a way for their loved ones as much as for them. They didn’t all heft one big rock, but each tribe brought their own, the memorial they created an amalgam of shapes and sizes. 

How do we remember? How do we remember together? What memorial stones have we set up in our lives? What do we leave for our children that is so obvious, so unavoidable, that they can’t help but ask about it?  Maybe our memory reads like a journal, tastes like the eucharist, sounds like song. Maybe it’s found in liturgy, testimonials, stories, holiday traditions. Our memories are fickle, but our God is unchanging, and the point, I think, is that God’s power works not only during the moment but in the revisiting of that moment, in the stories told of that moment, and it is worth some labor to make sure that happens.