Deuteronomy 34:1-12, Matthew 22:34-46
When my oldest son was in kindergarten, there was some sort
of school issue on the ballot, I can’t remember if it was a mill levy or a bond
issue. I attended an informational session about it and after hearing about how
long it had been since any school support issue had passed, how underpaid the
teachers were and how many building repairs were needed, I became passionate
about it. I told my son about it and he too felt strongly so we signed up to
canvass an area of our town (which was then in Colorado). He took a backpack of
snacks and together we knocked on doors and gave people information about the
school issue that would be on their ballots. As anyone who has ever done any
kind of door-to-door work knows … you hear a lot of things when you do that. But
one thing that I heard repeatedly that baffled me was from people who were
retired and casually said “I don’t have kids in the district anymore so it
doesn’t matter to me.” It surprised me. I have always thought of education of
the young as an important foundation for a society and essential to a strong
future for everyone. We all want educated doctors as we age and an overall
better world … right? And who knows what people’s stories are and I don’t
pretend to know what it is like to live on a fixed social security income as a
retired person, but I did find myself thinking about that as I read the Old
Testament lectionary text for today from Deuteronomy. In the story we find
Moses looking ahead, at a future he will not get to see but is for a community
he has deeply invested in.
We enter the story at the end, when Moses is standing at the threshold of the Promised Land. He can see it. This is everything he has worked for, risked for, suffered for, longed for. At home, we have an evening ritual with our kids of reading a passage of scripture and sharing prayers together before bed. At some point we decided to go to the very beginning of the Bible and read a bit each night. When you read the Bible like this, you encounter the story of Moses at the beginning of the book of Exodus. Then follow it through 40 chapters of Exodus, 27 chapters of Leviticus, 36 chapters of Numbers and to the end here in the 34th and final chapter of Deuteronomy. As many of you may know, those chapters are not what I would call “easy reads.” There is a lot about goat and grain offerings, skin diseases, battles, counting of tribe members and difficult to pronounce names. It’s a lot of interesting things with a lot of wisdom to be sure, but not exactly an easy to follow narrative bed time story. So it was exciting to get to the end of Deuteronomy, a build-up of all we have read, the climax of this lengthy narrative that has paused and twisted and turned through several books and many chapters … Here it is … the precipice of Mount Nebo, the viewing of the Promised Land. So many lives lost along the way, so many heart breaks and disappointments for Moses, also so many intense and intimate meetings with God face to face … an unbelievable journey. All to here, this moment. The Promised Land. And so … after all that buildup … Moses sees it … and then he dies … and the chapter ends. It’s a bit of a heart breaking end.
He never gets to go there, and of course we know that’s
coming and he knows that’s coming but if you had never heard the story before-
you might think, something will change. God will intervene and surely Moses
will get to go to the Promised Land. The closing credits of Deuteronomy can’t
be on a mound of dirt over a dead Moses, instead, they should be of a frolicking
Moses happily consuming milk and honey and celebrating the end of the journey,
celebrating the culmination of all they worked so hard for. But no … when you
turn the next page you find the book of Joshua … the guy who gets to take them
to the Promised Land and gets a book of the Bible named after him … Moses didn’t
get either of those things.
I wonder what that was like for Moses. I wonder if he felt
it was all worth it. I wonder if it broke his heart to see it just outside of
his reach. But of course I wonder that as a person living thousands of years later
and thousands of miles away from where he stood. I live at a time when the
world has become much more individualistic and much less communal. When long
time communal institutions like schools, churches and organizations are
declining and even communal workspaces are disappearing in favor of working
from home. When property lines and closed doors are erected to make us feel
safe, but also hold others at a distance. And that is not all bad. Individuals
should be valued and people should have rights and a person’s story should
matter, but I wonder if the world has changed so much that it is hard for us to
even imagine the kind of communal thinking that people had during the time of
Moses. Maybe … Moses wasn’t disappointed and heartbroken like I imagine, maybe Moses
was happy to have done his part for the continuation of the community, maybe it
never even occurred to him to feel robbed of an opportunity that his people
would enjoy. Maybe he got to die with a heart full of hope … hope of a
beautiful future of life in a Promised Land.
Hope is not always easy to come by. I don’t know about you,
but I hear a lot of hopelessness. And it isn’t without reason. There is
horrible suffering in the world, there is oppression, poverty, sickness and
addiction. And we hear on the news about the degradation of our environment,
the destruction of the earth and what feels like a rise in apathy. We all feel
the effects of a more divided country, where the distances between us seem only
to grow, as perspectives and politics become more deeply entrenched. And on top
of all of this there is the looming threat of things like A.I. And fears of how
that might be bad for or even the end of humanity. All of this does not instill
a lot of hopefulness for the future.
And it may feel cathartic or protective or even rational to
throw our hands in the air and say “we are cooked” as young people say today or
“we are done for” or “it’s all going to go downhill.” Because disappointment
hurts and sometimes caring hurts. So it may feel good to try to not care.
But that’s not what I see God doing in today’s readings. In
the reading from Matthew, Jesus is put to the test as the Pharisees ask “which
commandment in the law is the greatest?” And Jesus answers not with a parable
or a long speech but straightforward “Love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And the second is, “You
shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Clear and to the point. Love God and love
your neighbor … both are about connection. Connecting and devoting our hearts
to God and to others. Both are about caring, investing ourselves and our hearts
in God’s creation and in others. Both invite us to invest in something beyond
ourselves … a different kind of Promised Land where thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven. Following a God who cares so deeply that God became incarnate
through Jesus and touched the sick, loved the lonely, championed the oppressed.
And in that last chapter of Deuteronomy, after Moses looks out on the Promised Land he searched so long for and will not set foot on … God buries him. In some translations it says in verse 6 “He was buried” but in the original Hebrew it states “He buried him.” Which, the New Oxford Annotated Bible says is a “clear indication that God himself buried Moses.” Biblical scholar Kat Armas writes, “In Deuteronomy, after Moses dies, God takes him to a hidden place and buries him. I don’t think we sit with that image often enough. Like in Genesis, when God takes the time to sew clothes for Eve and Adam, Empire doesn’t know what to do with this kind of God … [but] give me the seamstress God- the one who bends low to stitch together clothing. The one who digs a grave and prepares a beloved body for burial. Give me the embodied God. The one who weeps and comforts and labors and nurses …” This is a God who cares, deeply. Moses may not have reaped the milk and honey benefits of the promised land that his people would see and taste, but he was lovingly laid to rest by the creator of the Universe. And I can’t pretend to know how it felt for Moses to be cared for so tenderly, but having a relationship with our tender and caring God stirs my heart and calls me to care.
There are promised lands or expectations or hopes or utopian visions we may never get to set foot in. But we are loved and called to live that love into the world and I think that may be better than even milk and honey
Photo is from the top of Mt. Nebo
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