Sunday October 26, 2008 - Pentecost 24, Proper 25, Year A (RCL)
It’s been five months now, five months that we’ve been following the story of the people of God
from the time of the patriarch Abraham
to the great leader,
working our way week by week
through the books of Genesis and Exodus.
And now, suddenly,
we’ve jumped to Deuteronomy,
skipping over the end of Exodus
and all of Leviticus and Numbers, and even most of Deuteronomy.
And if you’ve ever tried to read them, you’ll know why.
The last few chapters of Exodus
are details of the tabernacle, the place of worship,
to be built for God.
Fascinating if you’re into design and textiles,
but for the rest of us, not particularly interesting.
And the there’s Leviticus, the book of laws
that God gave to Moses
up on the mountain.
And again,
it’s really interesting
if you have a passion for laws and culture
and seeing how other people
structure their lives,
and many of our laws today
are derived from these laws,
but there are others that seem, to be honest, to be pretty arbitrary,
not mixing two kinds of fibers, like cotton and linen,
or not eating pork.
And then we get to the book of numbers,
and not surprisingly
it gets it’s name from counting.
Numbers is a whole lot
about the census that Moses decreed be taken
while they were camped at the foot of Mount Sinai,
and then, along with most of Deuteronomy
it has a whole lot more laws
that didn’t make it into Leviticus.
But scattered in between the laws and the counting
is the rest of the story of Moses
from the time the people of God left Mount Sinai
until they arrived
at the border of the promised
land.
They’d been camped there by the mountain
for the best part of a year
when Moses finally decided, with the prompting of God,
that it was time to get on the move.
And off they went, out into the wilderness heading more or less north and a little bit east
toward the promised land.
And one day
they arrived. Not quite
at the promised land itself, but close enough
that it was within a couple of days’ walk.
But of course, they couldn’t just walk in and claim it as home.
Their ancestors might have lived there, but that was hundreds of years before,
and to the people who had settled there in the mean time,
they were interlopers, invaders, a threat.
So Moses called twelve men to him, one from each of the twelve tribes,
and sent them into the land to spy it out,
to see
if the land was good or bad, how many people lived there,
and whether their towns were fortified or not,
and to bring back some fruit.
In other words,
was the land really as good
as God had promised,
and what would their chances be
when they invaded.
And the twelve men came back, forty days later, with grapes and pomegranates and figs, and after a year or so traveling through the desert, the people couldn’t wait to eat them, and were ready to go straight into the land.
But the men also brought news, bad news.
The people are strong, and the cities are fortified,
and there’s no way
that we can defeat them.
All except Caleb
who said that yes, the people were strong and the cities fortified, but the land was good and with the help of God
of course they would defeat them
The people of Israel heard the news. Not what Caleb said - he might as well not have even bothered to speak - but the bad news that the others had brought. And they began to wail,
and to complain: “We should have stayed in Egypt! We’re going
to die!”
And then someone came up with a bright idea.
“Lets just do it! Let’s go back to Egypt.
Moses and his God
have done nothing for us.
Let’s choose a new leader
and get back on the road.”
Moses and his brother Aaron
couldn’t believe it.
After everything God had done
the people were going to turn their backs
and head back to Egypt.
And Caleb, and another one of the spies, Joshua, said “No, you can’t do that. Don’t listen to the others. Don’t be afraid. With God with us, the people in the land wont be a problem. It’ll be fine.”
But the people of Israel
had made up their minds. They were going back to Egypt.
And so they tried to stone Caleb and Joshua.
Now all this time
ever since they left Mount Sinai,
God had kept pretty quiet.
Apart from the one time
they had complained about the food, and God had sent them quail
more than they could possibly eat,
and they never wanted to see quail again.
And to be honest, the people were pretty happy about it. Because last time God spoke, God got mad, and they’d far prefer a silent God
to an angry one.
But now God spoke, and it was with that kind of quiet voice
that when your mother spoke with it,
you knew
meant real trouble.
And what God proposed
to kill the people.
And start over again.
And once again Moses, in fear and trembling, said to God,
“You can’t do it. Everyone knows
that you are this people’s
God. If they don’t make it to the land, everyone will think
it’s because you aren’t powerful enough. Forgive them, forgive them
just one more time.”
And God’s response:
“Okay. I’ll forgive them. Again. But this time
they have to live
with the consequences.
They’re too scared to enter the land?
Then fine. They won’t get to.
For forty years, one year for every day the spies were in the land,
my people will wander in the wilderness.
And when this whole generation has died, all except Caleb and Joshua,
then I will lead their children
into the land.”
You know what happened next.
Or at least you can guess it.
They acted like most three year olds.
Told they couldn’t enter the land, the people decided they wanted to after all. And set out,
and almost immediately
ran into some hill tribes and were defeated.
And they went back into the wilderness
for forty years, forty years
of the same old traveling and camping, forty years
of the same old complaining,
forty years
of God’s feeding
and God’s forbearance.
Until finally we come
to today’s reading.
That generation
that stood at the border of the promised land,
they have all died.
All except for Joshua, Caleb,
and Moses.
And now they are at the border again.
And God invites Moses to climb a mountain
to see the land that he’s been headed towards
all these years,
the land that he
was promised.
But Moses, Moses who has faithfully led the people
all the way from Egypt, led them for forty years,
been the one stuck in the middle between the people and God,
Moses, who should by rights have been leading the people
triumphantly into the land,
Moses
won’t get
to enter the land.
All he’ll get is this view,
and one last word with God.
And then
he will die.
It’s not the happy ending
that I would have written.
This is one story
that didn’t end happily ever after.
Moses
had done everything right,
or as right as he could have done
in the circumstances
but still he paid the price
of other people’s sin.
It’s a hard thing to hear.
Most of us assume
that if we do what is right
we will be rewarded,
that in the end
everything
will be alright.
We assume
that faith will have its reward.
But sometimes in scripture
that that’s not the case.
Being faithful
can be costly.
Part of that is because, as the great poet John Donne said,
“No man is an island, entire of itself.”
None of us
lives in isolation.
Everything we do
affects other people,
and we are affected
by what other people do.
That’s true in life in general
and it’s true in the church.
So sometimes we all suffer
that when some people
do the wrong thing.
that’s the bad side.
But there’s a good side, as well.
When some people do the right thing
we all benefit.
Moses suffered
for the people’s failure
in faith,
but the people benefitted,
they benefitted enormously
from Moses’ faith.
Without him
they could have died
countless times;
because he spoke out for them
to God,
they were forgiven, not just once, but time and time again.
His faithfulness made the difference
between life
and death.
And that was an incredible gift
that Moses gave
the people.
And there is a reward for Moses,
though it’s probably not the reward
that he had hoped for.
Moses didn’t get
to enter the land.
but he did get
to see God,
to see God, face to face.
And his name went down in history
as the greatest
of all the prophets.
The story of Moses leading the people out of Egypt
to the promised land
is a long, complex, and sometimes frustrating one.
And it doesn’t quite end
happily
ever after.
But I find in it
inspiration.
Sometimes
it feels like there’s no point
to being faithful
to God.
Things don’t go any easier for us; in fact, sometimes they’re more difficult.
But the story of Moses reminds us
that our faithfulness
matters.
Even when we don’t see the benefits,
others will.
God may use our faith
on behalf of others.
Keeping faith with God
matters.
And we never know,
we never know
how God may bless us,bless us beyond all our understanding
and our expectations
and our hopes.
Just keep faith...
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2008