Scripture Passage

Deuteronomy 34:1-12

Sermon Text

Thank you very much choir and praise team. Uh, that was German, right? Alright. I mean, it’s wonderful. Isn’t it? That we get to worship God and in all sorts, all the variety of creation. So, that’s really how we praise and worship God. So thank you very much. I’ve been suffering through a nasty cough this week, so I pray that my voice, remains and that you bear with me if I start breaking out the cough, but let us hear the word of the Lord for now. Today’s passage is taken from Deuteronomy 34:1-12.

“Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain—that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees—as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants’; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended. Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him; and the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the Lord had commanded Moses. Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.” This is the word of the Lord.

Does Your Life Begin and End With You?

So I want to start off with a question. I asked this to the Hi-C at the lock-in on Friday. Do you believe that your life is just a random isolated existence, or do you believe that your life is connected to a bigger story? So phrasing it differently. Do you believe that the significance of your life begins and ends with me? Or your family? Or is significance of your life connected with something bigger than yourself? I really believe that how we answer this question makes all the difference in how we look at life and how we respond to the challenges of life. So it’s therefore really important, I think, to examine what we really believe at the core of our existence, because in life things often they don’t go as we expected the way that our life looks today is often different, from what we expected, it might look like. How do we respond when this is the case? So today’s passage is about the end of Moses’s life. His life can generally be divided into three stages,. The first 40 years of his life, he lived a very privileged life in Pharaoh’s palace as a Prince. The next 40 years of his life, he was chilling. He was married, lived out in the country, in the pasture, raised sheep, cattle had wife, kids, very settled life. But then it’s the last 40 years of his life that he’s most remembered for. That’s when God called him to go back to Egypt and help deliver his people from slavery.

So that last period of his life, it started off with a bang. You know, Moses came in with tremendous power. You guys, have seen the Charles Heston movie with the staff and everything. He brought plagues upon Pharaoh and he did all these wondrous things and he brought his people and he parted the red sea. Great power he displayed. It started off with an amazing display of power. Surely with that start, Moses would take them across the finish line, into the promised land, but then something happened. He kind of fizzled out. They did all this, they got out of Egypt, but then they were stuck in the desert for 40 years. And that’s where he died. So, if we look at his life in isolation, I don’t know, we can look at it maybe as kind of a failure or disappointment.

Peyton Manning, you guys know that name? He was a star quarterback in the NFL. You know, he’s this guy, he broke all sorts of records and, and he was a great quarterback, but he started to develop a little bit of reputation. During the regular season is when he smashed all these records and did really great, but come playoff time, I don’t know, somehow like teams ended up losing a lot. It was in the middle of his career when he finally won a Super Bowl. But people are still kind of asking: Was that kind of luck? Was that really because of how great he is?And questions remained. So his reputation, it was questionable. Would he be remembered as one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, or would he be remembered as a good regular season performer, but kind of choking the playoffs? And so finally, in his final season, he finally won a second super bowl, thus kind of cementing his legacy. So, I mean, I think for professional athletes, that’s kind of how they want to go out. They want to go out and glory. Right? And I think in life too, we kind of want to have that kind of storybook ending to our life too. We want to look back and say, yeah, I’ve done all this.

Disappointment in Life

But in real life, I think things often, they don’t turn out the way we expected or wanted. I don’t know. Maybe my job or career has been kind of a disappointment or maybe my marriage was not what I thought it might be or going through the routine of waking up, racing out the door, fighting traffic, doing my work, coming home, rinse and repeat. Is this what my life is amounting to? So if we see the significance of our lives, just beginning and ending with me, then I think it’s easy to become disappointed and resigned about life. And I think that’s precisely one of the reasons why in modern life today, so many of us are dissatisfied. Because it start begins and ends with me, I have to achieve all these goals. I have to do this and that, my life has to match that picture that I’ve kind of created. And we place a lot of expectation and pressure on ourselves. And this is mostly because at the end of the day, my life, the significance of my life begins and ends with me. But how did the writer of this passage see Moses his life? He didn’t see Moses as falling short. Rather he referred to Moses as the greatest prophet that Israel had ever seen. What led him to claim that? I think he was able to say this because he saw Moses’s life as one part of a long and continuing story. The story began with God, making a promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give the land to his descendants. And then eventually Moses played an important role in delivering his people out of Egypt so that they can make their way to the promised land. But it wasn’t Moses who would deliver them to the promised land.

It was the next generation, Joshua full of the spirit who would eventually lead to the next generation. So, instead of seeing Moses’s life as a failure, this perspective allowed the writer to see something else in Moses that his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated. In other words, Moses lived a full life and did everything in his part and that he could do. So at that time, he saw clearly when they’re in the desert, okay, this time we need to really prepare ourselves spiritually as a people, we can’t just cross in. We need to enter as a people of God. He saw that clearly. And with that sight, his energy remained to the end of the day. He did everything he could to finally have his people enter into covenant with God. So that when they did enter the promised land, they could enter in as a people of God, not just a random scattering of former slaves, but no, as a people of God together.

And this was why they could celebrate the life of Moses and appreciate the immense role that he played. So many scholars actually believe that this passage and the book of Deuteronomy was written much later on during the period of exile. So after, King David and King Solomon Israel was divided into two kingdoms. The Northern kingdom of Israel, the Southern kingdom of Judah. The Northern kingdom of Israel was eventually obliterated. And then the Southern kingdom of Judah, they held off for a while, but eventually Babylon came in and they conquered Judah. And what, what Babylon did was they took all the elites of Judah, the elite members, the landowners, the scribes, the scholars, and they took them to Babylon. Today, we would call this forcible migration or, they deported them. They took them with them to Babylon.

Now this was a deeply traumatic experience for the people. I mean, clearly things hadn’t gone the way that they had expected. God had promised their ancestors, Abraham, this land. But now without this land, who were they? The experience of exile left a deep, psychological imprint in their consciousness. And we can see this clearly in this Psalm of lament in Psalm 137. “By the rivers of Babylon there, we sat down and there we wept. When we remembered Zion on the willows there, we hung up our harps for there. Our captors asked us for songs and our tormentors asked for mirth saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion, but how could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:1-4)

A Part of God’s Story

If these people believe that their existence was just an isolated existence, I think their history would have ended there. The exiles would have probably just focused on surviving the next day. And they probably would’ve melted into Babylonian society and that’s it. But they struggled. They refused to believe that their life as a people had no meaning. And so they wrote passages like the one we read today to give them strength and hope. So like Moses, perhaps things haven’t gone the way we’ve expected them to, or that we would have imagined. But so we’re not going to slip into despair and hopelessness. Instead, we will see ourselves as part of God’s continuing story. And that this difficult thing we’re going through is one chapter in a long part of God’s story. Our history will not just end in defeat and shame. I think that’s how they interpreted it.

So this period of exile, it was only about seven years in total. Actually think about it. It’s a blip, right? But it ended up being one of the most fertile periods for them spiritually and intellectually. And actually this period produced about half of the old Testament as we know it. Whether they wrote it themselves or edited previous works. So your life, life is uncertain and unpredictable. There are some things we control and many things that we can’t, but how do we see our lives? Do we see it as an isolated experience beginning and ending with me? Or do we see it as one part of God’s long and grand story? So Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, I like this guy a lot. He’s an icon today. He stands for a life dedicated to bringing reconciliation into society, but his life, it was also cut tragically short.

The dude died when he was 39 years old. He actually used the story from today’s passage as the backdrop for his final speech that he gave the night before he got killed. Here’s the last paragraph of that speech. I wish I can repeat his baritone, but I can’t, I’m just going to read it. “Well, I don’t know will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn’t matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountain top. 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 so 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.” How prescient he knew that the outcome of his life was not in his control, but he had a deep faith and belief that his life was part of this greater story. God’s story. So like Moses, all you wanted to do was just do his best and live his fullest, trusting that God’s work would carry on with or without him. And this is what Saint Paul also felt when he said this in Philippians, “I am confident of this, that the one that’s being God, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 1:6)

You know, back in his day, Saint Paul, he wasn’t a Saint. He was just Paul. He wasn’t widely popular during his time. His life actually became a lot more difficult, once he started following Jesus. He was opposed viciously and violently throughout his ministry. But he knew, he believed deep down that he was part of a part of God’s greater story. And that gave him tremendous confidence and energy. He didn’t know then what kind of impact his life would have, because he was, like I said, he was marginalized among that Christian community. Only in time would his writings come to have the greatest influence in Christianity next to Jesus himself. So my friends, when we place our lives in God’s hands and truly trust that we are part of God’s story, it changes everything. It gives us sight and vigor. No longer is my life just about surviving and adapting to my environment.

I believe that there is a story being told in my life and that there is a story still waiting to be written. When we place our lives in God’s hands, our eyes are open to new possibilities that God has laid out for us. When we bring our lives into God’s story, we begin to realize that my life doesn’t just begin and end with me, but that I am connected to God’s greater plan and purpose for this world. The story of God throughout the Bible has been about God’s persistent, reaching out to a broken humanity. People have sinned and rebelled against God and against God’s intended order of love, justice and harmony. And that has resulted in so much brokenness in our world. But God, it’s a story of God, constantly calling to us to be healed ourselves and to be agents of this love and healing in this world.

And we are invited into that story. Moses did his part to the fullest. He delivered people from bondage and prepared as people in the desert. People like Martin Luther King Jr. did his part in spreading the message of racial reconciliation. St. Paul did his part in communicating the good news of faith to non-Jews. God’s story has continued unabated and people have responded with figure. Evil and brokenness have continued as well, but so has God’s story of trying to repair that. Our call, my friends is to also enter into God’s story. As part of God’s story, we resist becoming numb to the daily routine of our lives. We fight from being reduced to a mere corporate machine or consumer of goods, rather with the unabated vigor that God provides us, we carry on as part of God’s story. The world is in need of love, justice and truth so much so in this day and age.

As Reverend Kim preached last week, we need to see the Imago Dei, the image of God in others, and affirm that in others, especially when others might tell them that they are less than that. The good news is that we are not alone in this story. We have God and we have one another. God’s story is like a great river, great and long river. We are all little streams that feed into this river. Each stream has its own background, its own shape, its own history, its own experiences, but each stream brings that uniqueness into this great river. In that river, we become one body participating actively in God’s story and heading together toward a destination that God has in mind. So let us see ourselves, our lives as part of this great story and let us live life fully with sight and vigor as active participants in it. Let us sing.