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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's October 30, 2005 Sunday worship service. The View from Pisgah I Thessalonians 2:1-8; Deuteronomy 34:1-12 Bethel 10/30/05 Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD Whenever Hollywood cranks out a movie about him, they always give the part to somebody like Charlton Heston with some fake whiskers glued on. The truth of the matter is that Moses probably looked a lot more like a weary boxer after having gone ten rounds with Muhammed Ali than some handsome movie star. (Beuchner in Peculiar Treasures). Forty years of tramping around the wilderness with the whining Israelites was enough to take it out of anybody – what with all the complaints about the food, the water, not to mention the constant necessity of interceding with God and pleading with the deity to give the people just one more chance after they committed apostasies like making and worshipping a golden calf. Forty years is a long time to spend with the same motley, complaining bunch in a dry and barren wilderness, although as the old joke goes, if Moses had been a woman, he would have gotten to the promised land a whole lot faster since she would have stopped and asked for directions! But the hardest blow of all had to be what happened, or more precisely, what didn’t happen at the end. Moses wasn’t allowed by God to enter. When he finally arrived at the land of Moab on the west bank of the Jordan River, when the promised land was merely a stone’s throw away, when it seemed that his life’s destiny would be fulfilled, Moses climbed to the top of Mt. Pisgah where the land the Israelites were to conquer stretched out before him as far as the eye could see. “And the Lord showed him the whole land: “Gilead as far as Dan; the whole of Nephtali, the territory of Ephraim and Manassah, all Judah as far as the western sea; the Negeb and the Plain; the valley of Jericho, the Vale of Palm trees, as far as Zoar.” This is it: the object of a lifetime, the culmination of a life’s work. The view from Pisgah was all that one could desire, all that one deserved. And Moses was the leader who, through thick and thin, had gotten them there. And then comes a cruel twist of grossly unfair irony. God said, “”I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” (Deut 34:4) Moses died on the mountain, at the command of God, kept from his life’s goal, and even his burial place had no memorial tablet or shaft of stone to prompt future generations to remember him. After staying 30 days on the Plains of Moab to mourn the death of their leader, the people returned to their basic mission under a new leader, Joshua. And for all intents and purposes, they left not just the corpse of Moses but the memory of him behind, as well. The biblical record doesn’t tell us how Moses felt about being denied entrance, but we can speculate that it was, perhaps, punishment for his hot-tempered ways in his early career, for recall that in his younger days he did murder an Egyptian in a fit of rage; or maybe, it was because Moses, when he stood awe-struck before that burning bush and got his marching orders to go and free the Hebrew slaves, that God never completely forgot his lame excuse about his inability to speak in public. As with all of us, Moses’ life was not, at times, all that saintly, but still, one would think he deserved better than what he got there atop Pisgah. It seems harsh that he did all the work but got none of the reward. I suppose the same can be said for us. Who among us has not felt cheated, in some way, denied something we think we deserve? We stand on Pisgah and look towards what has been our life’s goal. And what do we see? Many look out and see an inheritance that will never be collected, a future never to be fully enjoyed. They become bitter, angry, resentful. When opportunities or rewards are denied us, we might blame ourselves, luck, or even God, but the truth of the matter is that it hurts and we may even begin to question God’s larger purposes for our life. Whenever I hear the word “Pisgah,” my mind, for some strange reason, immediately begins to hum the old gospel hymn that I learned as a child in church, “Sweet Hour of Prayer!” and particularly the last verse of that 19th century gospel hymn. Through the combination of word and melody, music can embed certain feelings deep in memory, the feeling of release and reward when the light goes out for the final time:
The experience Moses had on his own Mount Pisgah was, for him, given the panorama of his life’s work all around him, a time when, at the end of his life, like all of us when we approach the time of our dying, a time when he had to face the fear of death basic to the human make-up. Before each of us drops this “robe of flesh,” we can hope that each one would have opportunity to survey the peaks and valleys of our lives, to take inventory of accomplishments and contributions, but also limitations, even failures, to acknowledge the triumphs as well as the disappointments. As a wise person once said, “the way you go out is more important than the way you came in.” (Journey into Freedom Newsletter, Oct. 2005) The psychologist Eric Erikson says that old age brings to each person the crisis of whether we will succomb to that primal fear of death, which can result in deep debilitating despair (the feeling that nothing we have done has been really worthwhile), or, on the other hand, old age and the approach of death can bring to us a sense of integrity, a feeling of having achieved soundness of mind, a state of completion and satisfaction. Integrity has to do with having peace at the end, a basic trust that “the abyss of God’s love is deeper than the abyss of death.” The test of faith, as one person has said, is “to grow old without resentment, free of defensiveness, to lose power without an increase in self-pity.” (Coffin, Credo, 165). I can imagine that Moses, despite the disappointment of not stepping across the Jordan and actually putting his feet upon the land of promise that he, nonetheless, had integrity – integrity enough -- to realize that his life as a whole had made a difference. Moses did not enter the promised land, which was the goal of his life, but he did see God face-to-face, which is the goal of every life. A leading social prophet of our day and past pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, William Sloan Coffin, says that “the one true freedom in life is to come to terms with death, and as early as possible, for death is an event that embraces all of our lives. And the only way to have a good death is to lead a good life. Lead a good one, full of courage, generosity, compassion [and integrity], and there’s no need at the close of day to rage against the dying of the light. We can go gentle into that good night” (Coffin, Credo, 167). When we take in the view from Mt. Pisgah, we do well to remember that, while it was the end for Moses, it was but the beginning of a whole new adventure for the people of God, and hence for us. The future will always have its ambiguity and paradox, and the future will always be the place we can’t quite ever get to, but the future is where God sets the promise and towards which he sets the hearts of the faithful. The future is God’s time, that time in which our partial sight will become complete and we will know fully even as we are fully known. One day, we will see and understand with the eyes of the heart. Moses saw in his own view from Pisgah the fulfillment of the promises of God, and he knew that what he had worked for, others could now enjoy. The final measure of his integrity was that he had helped make a way for others, that others who followed would be able to stand on his shoulders. And that’s really how it should be for us. Amid all the headlines of this past week, headlines that simultaneously bring sorrow and deep anxiety about the state of our nation and the world, I have thought especially about a specific headline -- the death of 92 year old Rosa Parks and the story of her brave refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man, thus helping to spark the modern Civil Rights Movement. Now there is someone to respect and to admire, someone who knew integrity, and not just at the end, but throughout her days. You can tell by seeing her picture or hearing her soft-spoken speech that she was a person of deep humility and reverence and compassion, yet she knew what was right and she lived by the integrity of her convictions. And when her body lies in state in the Rotunda of the capital in Washington tonight and tomorrow, we can see that there is someone who had her own view from Mt. Pisgah of the promised land, even though we also know that her life’s dream of racial justice and equality is even yet to be fully realized. The last sermon that Martin Luther King preached in Memphis in 1968, before his assassination, was about going to the mountaintop. He had had a premonition about his own death, and he was not sorrowful but he was ready to go, he said. Like Moses, he had seen the promised land and he was sustained by a vision of the things that are yet to be. King, like Moses, never got to enjoy all the fruits of his labors. None of us, of course, ever really does. “The justice of God is not that we are allowed to complete what we have begun, but rather it is the grace of God that we are allowed to participate in what God has begun.” If when you grow weary of well-doing or feel as if your labor has meant nothing at all, or in the words of the old hymn, There Is a Balm in Gilead, “if you ever feel discouraged and think your work’s in vain,” I invite you to think about Moses and his view from Pisgah. And be thankful that what God once began in you and in others, God promises to one day bring to completion. Thanks be to God! Amen!
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