Sermon: A View of a Promise

Texts: Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17

Date: October 23, 2011

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

          The first part of Chapter 34 of Deuteronomy is curiously devoid of emotion.  Moses climbs Mount Pisgah for a glorious view of the Promised Land toward which he and his raggedy band of Israelites have been meandering for forty years.  Just imagine how many times a 7 year old boy could ask “Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?” in 40 years; that’s one measurement of the duration of this epic journey.  It hasn’t been a bed of roses.  There have been some pretty lean days in terms of the availability of water and food.  There have been conflicts and illnesses, snakes, a terrible episode of idol worship and a violent house cleaning afterwards, all kinds of difficulties.  Moses has probably had plenty of moments of wishing God had found someone else to lead this liberation expedition.

          Then he gets right up to the border, right up to where he can peek at it--the Promised Land as far as the eye could see--but God would not let him lead the people into the land.  Seriously?  Instead, he gets to die, and the people get to go on without him, under new management.  Seems kind of harsh, God.  I mean, Moses was already 120 years old; why not another month or two so he could enjoy the fruits of his labor, this laborious journey over so many miles and years?

          I found myself wondering if Moses knew before he climbed up for the grand view that he was not going to be making the trip himself.   It would make a difference in just how askance one might look at God, the degree of askance-ness, if you get my drift.  It would seem super mean to get Moses climbing up the mountain for a view of the destination and then surprise him with the news that he was not going the rest of the way after he arrived at the top, arthritic knees and all.  So I did a little investigation, and found out that this was not the case.  In the way the author of Deuteronomy tells the story, Moses has known for quite a long time that he was not going to be allowed to complete the journey.  The reason for this is not entirely clear; in Deuteronomy it’s because of the people’s bullheadedness, and in Numbers it’s because of a relatively minor mistake Moses made that God took all wrong.  To get all huffy and look askance at God who did not reward Moses for all he had done with a trip into the actual Promised Land is from the biblical writers’ point of view, inappropriate.  It just is what it is.  Moses seems to accept this fate with composure.  He seems quite content with a view of the Promised Land.  He was under no illusions about his eventual arrival when he climbed up for a view. 

          I suppose Moses might have even thought of this trip up Mount Pisgah as a great treat, rather than viewing it (as I did at first) as a kind of mean, tantalizing slap in the face.  If he has known or at least suspected he wasn’t going to make it all the way to the Promised Land for a long time, maybe even a view is more than he had expected or hoped for.  It doesn’t seem to me like a great reward after all that trouble, but it’s a lot better than falling short and getting no view at all. 

          I couldn’t help thinking of another famous reference to seeing the Promised Land, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s very last sermon.  I re-read it a couple of days ago, and it is a thing of beauty.  As you may know, it was a sermon delivered at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, after Dr. King had arrived to participate in the sanitation workers’ strike there.  There had been threats against his life; but this was a condition in which he had been living for many years at that point.  He mentions the threats in the sermon.  And then he says:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.[1]

The next day, like that other great prophet Moses, his life came to an abrupt end.  Unlike Moses who died at an advanced age, his life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet.  The murder was an evil tragedy; but its blow is softened somehow by knowing that he had been to the mountain top, and had been graced with a view of that for which he had struggled so long.  

          As I’ve mulled over this story this week, it has struck me that this episode in Moses’ life is quite archetypal; that is, it is a pattern that plays out in human life again and again.  Think of the Promised Land as something like what Jesus was pointing to when he spoke of the Kingdom of God—not a physical place so much as a holy way of life, a beloved community.  You’ll have to think poetically, and set aside for the moment the incredibly messy and grim politics of Israel and Palestine in the physical place referred to as Promised Land.  In the poetic or metaphorical sense, the Promised Land is something toward which we journey, but not a place that we fully arrive—yet. 

          The speaker I heard at the Turner lectures week before last, John Caputo, has a lot to say about Promise.  He describes what he calls Events—an imperfect name for something that’s outside our material existence, outside the limitations of time, but at the same time something very real that calls to us.  Justice is such an event.  The Kingdom of God is.  Others he discusses are Democracy, and Jesus, and God.  At one point in the lectures he said, “God is the name of a Promise, a Call.  We’re not ever entirely sure what God is calling for or how to respond.”   The not-knowing points toward the ultimate mystery of God, the ineffability that so many mystics of every religion have pondered.  In Caputo’s book What Would Jesus Deconstruct? the author speaks of the faith journey as setting out for a shore we can never reach and being exposed to a secret we can never plumb.[2]  It’s not that we have no experience of God, but that if we think we know exactly who God is and what God is up to, it’s no longer God we’re talking about.  A famous line from the Tao Te Ching says well what many religions have discovered:  “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.  The unnameable is the eternally real.”

          Even though we cannot fully grasp the One who calls us, nor even what precisely we are called to do, the Promise is a powerful lure in our lives.  Caputo says, “God doesn’t exist; God insists.”  He speaks of God as the possibility of the impossible, the “wholly other.”  God is the one who brings us the unforseeable, the incoming of what we did not see coming.  When we are on the true journey of faith, it is always toward something unknown and unknowable, unforeseeable and impossible. (It is therefore always a little frightening to respond to the call of the Spirit.) The spiritual journey comes with a compass that points to a non-geological True North, but it doesn’t come with a map, nor does it end with an arrival.  It is forever a journey toward the impossible. 

          In one sense that sounds rather depressing to say out loud.  Yet I, along with many of you, have been on this journey toward the impossible—the promise of the Kingdom of God—for much of my life, and even though I don’t think we’re going to “arrive” at the Kingdom fully realized during my lifetime, I don’t find the journey depressing.  Occasionally dispiriting, perhaps, but still completely worthwhile— rousing, absorbing, exciting.  I know enough of you well enough to conjecture that you feel the same.  The Promise, the insistence of God has got hold of us and is making life immeasurably richer.  Journeying toward the Kingdom of God  involves what Caputo calls a prayer for the impossible.  It is a prayer for not what is straightforwardly possible but for the possibility of the impossible.  He writes, “What is ‘possible’ in the straightforward sense is foreseeable future, the future we can reasonably anticipate and plan for and that can be called the ‘future present.’  That, of course, is of the utmost importance.  We can and should foresee and plan for the education of our children and for our own retirement; we should plan our calendar and our time commitments.  But by the impossible…[we] mean something that exceeds the horizon of foreseeability and expectation…the possibility of something more ‘unconditional,’…the ‘absolute’ future, the future that takes us by surprise, the one that lies beyond our horizon of expectation.”[3]  This future that takes us by surprise is the place hope and promise come from.  It’s the place where God dwells. 

          This is all a fancy way of saying that we believe God is still creatively involved in our world, soliciting us as partners in creatively moving toward life more beautiful, life more loving, more just, more peaceful.  Because God is active, the horizon we journey toward is beyond what we can reasonably expect to see complete in our lifetime but is still a promise that entices us forward. 

          We have, in a way, inherited this journey from our forbears in faith.  Psalm 90 opens with those majestic words, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.”  The psalm evokes the sweep of time, and puts our all-too-brief human lives up against the scale of God’s eternity.  It pleads for the Lord to make God’s work and power manifest to the current generation of servants.  It closes with a poignant prayer, “Prosper for us the work of our hands—O prosper the work of our hands.”  What this psalm stirs in my imagination is a picture of generation after generation of faithful people who journey with the everlasting God for the brief duration of their lives, knowing they are part of a venture that began long before they appeared on the scene, and which will go on long after they have flown away from this life.  The prayer at the end speaks to me of hope that what we contribute in our turn will be a beneficial part of God’s great work, the unfolding of the promise of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. 

          A poem by William Stafford I ran across this week expresses this sense of continuity beautifully:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change.  But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 You’ve seen little classes of pre-schoolers out on the sidewalk holding tight to the yellow rope that their gentle teacher has provided for them so they don’t get lost.  The journey of faith is, perhaps, a bit like that.  Whole faith communities (like this one, blessed be!) grab hold of the thread and walk together, feeling the tug of the Promise, the lure of the Kingdom of God beyond the foreseeable horizon, as the thread both trails behind us to earlier generations and unspools ahead of us out of sight but not out of holy imagination.

          What keeps us going?  Among other things, various companions on the journey keep having mountaintop experiences and bringing us back a report.  People are graced with sweeping views of the Promised Land, the Kingdom of God, on a fairly regular basis.  Some are what would qualify as full-blown mystical experiences.  Others are more like flashes of insight about what’s really happening in the midst of what looks like a perfectly ordinary occasion.  That is to say, the Kingdom of God, as Jesus taught us, is always both off in the future and breaking into the present.  Once in a while the Kingdom shows up in a powerful way, when we hadn’t necessarily planned for it or expected it.  I’m so blessed to say that I get pretty regular glimpses of the Kingdom unfolding.  It happened in the spring when I was unexpectedly forgiven for an offense some years back; when I saw one of my beloved communities (family campers) gathered around a cross-shaped arrangement of candles as they shared their griefs and losses; when the scripture comes alive in a study circle in the midst of laughter and tears, and Jesus lives again…I could yammer on and on.  It is a rich and humbling blessing to have been on the scene, and maybe even contributing to, the Kingdom unfolding.

The Kingdom of God breaking into the present is like an incursion from the promise of the complete future harmony that God plans into the present.  “Incursion” is a bit of a violent word; Thesaurus says, try “infiltration,” or “movement” or “arrival.”   Robin Meyers, who lectured at University Congregational Wednesday, would probably suggest “subversion.”  The Kingdom breaking into the present is God claiming this time and this place as holy, a time and place that is in tune with the God’s aims.  Such occasions may be fleeting, but they work together to bring the realm of God more and more into reality.  I think such occasions must have been what Dr. King had in mind when he says he has seen the promised land.  He had seen changes take place; he had seen people rise up and claim justice and freedom with great courage.  Although the work was not complete, he had seen episodes of arrival, and he had a view from the mountaintop.  Similarly, though I have not participated in movements as dramatic as the civil rights movement, I have seen enough to say that I, too, have been to the mountaintop—or if not clear to the top, halfway up where the trees open up along the trail and one gets an excellent and stunning view.

            There may be those among us who have never felt they personally had a view of the Promised Land or a glimpse of the Kingdom of God breaking in.  Either that, or the view was so long ago and far away that it has the vagueness in memory of being driven up to the top of Mount Constitution in your father’s station wagon when you were six years old.  I sincerely hope that you can hang in there on the journey even so. 

Stafford’s metaphor of thread reminded me of one of the old Greek myths about Theseus.  He was a prince who volunteered to go when the requisite number of youths was being sent to be sacrificed to the half man-half bull Minotaur which lived in the heart of a dark and complex labyrinth.  His aim was to slay the monster and come out alive.  Ariadne, whose father was the one demanding sacrificial youths, fell in love with Theseus.  When he was about to enter the labyrinth, she gave him a sword, and just as importantly, a spool of thread.  He could attach the thread to the doorway and use it to find his way back out of the dark and confusing labyrinth trail. 

          I wish I could, or we as a faith community could, hand anyone who feels quite lost this thread we have ahold of.  It’s a gift that comes with a promise that even though you can’t see the way, even though you’re in a deep valley or a dark passage rather than on the mountaintop, if you hold on to this thread, you won’t get lost.  The thread grasped by this company trails back in time a thousand generations, and leads forward to a place we have not been but which has been promised to us.  We join those who trust that promise, journeying toward the impossible with faith that with God all things are possible.

          As we journey, as we contribute what Matthew Fox calls “the small work in the Great Work” of creation, let us join our voices with those who came before us and those who will come after us in the prayer of the psalmist: “Prosper the work of our hands—O Lord, prosper the work of our hands!”  Let us be among the company of those who welcome and even pave the way for the Kingdom’s arriving, today, tomorrow.  Let the work of our hands in some small way embody the work of Christ.  And when it’s our turn to climb up for a view of the Promised Land, may we go with eyes and hearts wide open.