20081026Deu34

The Death of Moses

Today’s text is about the death of Moses. It is basically his obituary. Nobody likes to talk about death. But it is the final reality of life. We think about those who have passed away and we feel the deep ache that we will never again see them in this life and sometimes, even the assurance of seeing them again in heaven seems like a hollow promise. When we first read this text, we as humans focus not so much on what Moses did and the legacy that was his life. We focus on what he didn’t get to do. He didn’t get to enter the Promised Land, the destination toward which he led the Israelites for over 40 years. There is a lot of mystery that surrounds the death of Moses. Why didn’t he get to enter the Promised Land? Where is he buried? Why isn’t there some great shrine there to this one man who walked with God, and in shaping the band of Jewish refugees into a nation and the people of God, literally changed the world, changed culture and civilization even into our own time? This text raises a lot of questions. It raises more questions than it answers.

There are two underlying themes to the life and death of Moses that is described in this passage. Call and change. Those are the two things that categorized Moses’ life and the two things he had to facilitate in the lives of the people who followed God under his leadership. And across the centuries, those two things haven’t changed in the Kingdom of God. There is a saying that made the rounds a few years ago and it still holds true today: God loves you enough to meet you where you are (CALL) but He loves you to much to leave you that way (CHANGE).

God, through Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, meets us where we are emotionally, spiritually, physically. He meets us in prayer, in the Bible, in each other and in the situations and circumstances of our daily lives. He met Moses on a mountaintop in a mysterious burning bush. He met the apostle Paul on the Damascus Road. He met John Wesley in the middle of a stormy Atlantic Ocean and in the words of a teacher in a Bible class meeting. He met me in the words and actions of my faithful grandparents and in the soaring Christchurch Cathedral on Oxford, England. He meets each of us to assure us of his love and his saving grace. We have heard dramatic conversion stories, dramatic call stories, like the one from L.L. Nash, an early pastor of this church that I shared with you last week. But it is not just preachers and clergy that are called to God’s service. We are ALL called into God’s service. Yes, Moses is a towering, colossal figure in the three major religions of the world, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The Apostle Paul stands over us as a true Christian, one who was converted to belief in Christ and then proceeded to convert the world around him. The pastors who have stood in this pulpit, all the way down to me, have been called to be servants of God in this place.

But just as importantly, perhaps more importantly, YOU have been called to serve God in this place. God’s call on your life is that holy nudge, sometimes the holy shove you feel when you think about the place you’d like to serve. It’s the way your mind spins in a thousand creative directions when someone brings up an area that needs attention, a place where the church could be a stronger witness or a stronger agent for good in the world. Your call is the place where you are uniquely gifted by God to serve Him and only you can accomplish that task.

But God does not require what he doesn’t empower. And that’s where change comes in. Serving God, fulfilling your call, will take all you have but it will give you more than you can ever ask or imagine. In the beginning, we take baby steps. We change in small ways in response to the call of God in our lives. And then, as we grow in Christ and in working with the Holy Spirit, the changes get bigger and bigger, until one day we look around and our lives, ourselves are totally different than we ever expected them to be but better in good and life-giving ways.

Change is hard. When things are good, we want them to stay that way forever. How many of us as parents think of that moment when you held your new baby in your arms for the first time. We want that moment to go on and on. Where we can hold our children safe against us and nothing can hurt them and nothing can hurt us. But, as Bill Cosby says, babies are false advertising. They draw you in with smelling good and looking cute and begin cuddly. But then they become two and then 12 and then 17. Babies grow up to be teenagers and vital, energetic 30 year olds become senior citizens. There’s nothing we can do to atop that. No amount of Botox in the world can stop the hands of time. The best analogy I know is that we each go through seasons in our lives. A tiny acorn grows into a massive oak tree that will someday die and fall and the process will repeat itself. But we are humans, not oak trees. It matters what we do in the here and now. An acorn can only grow into one thing: an oak tree. But we as humans are gifted by God in a multitude of ways across all the seasons of our lives.

Moses is one of the pivotal figures in the biblical text because we see so much of his life. From abandoned baby to hotheaded young man, from a stuttering, stumbling half-hearted leader to righteously furious prophet,, who destroys the first set of stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. We see him grow from beleaguered shepherd of sheep to beleaguered shepherd of God’s people to the one who looked out across the mountaintop and the river to the Promised Land and then went on with God to that eternal Promised Land.

But, I can hear you thinking from all the way up here, I am NOT Moses. I am just me. But God’s need of Moses was no more and no less than his need of you.

The Gospel text for this Sunday is Matthew 22:34-46. In that reading, the Pharisees and Sadducees are testing Jesus, their last conversation with him before they put their fatal plan in motion. ‘What is the greatest commandment?’ they ask him. And that was a rhetorical question. All good Jews knew the answer already for it was the Shema, the Jewish prayer they each recited at least twice a day: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment and the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

But then Jesus turns the tables on them and asks them a question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” “The son of David” they answer, like the educated Jews they are. And then Jesus asks them a question that seems totally confusing to us. Something about David’s son also being David’s Lord but the bottom line is that Jesus was really asking them: “Who am I?” Am I the Messiah and are you willing to live like it? Or am I just another misguided Jew with political aspirations? The Pharisees could handle Jesus being David’s son. There were many Jewish men who claimed to be of the line of King David. What they couldn’t handle was Jesus’ divinity, the fact that he was also King David’s Lord. And we hear that even in the world today. People are willing to accept that Jesus was a good man, a good teacher but they refuse to accept that he was the Son of God. Why? Because then they’d have to change. Jesus is either Lord of All or he’s not Lord at all.

Jesus called the Pharisees and Sadducees to follow him, to believe in him but instead of surrendering their pride and their comfort, they fended him off with philosophical arguments and detailed reasons why not.

And Jesus stands before you and I today, here in this place and calls us. He calls us to follow him, to change, to live into being transformed by the Holy Spirit to be more like him, our Lord. Will you follow, will you step out, step up, stand up to be counted? Or will you find philosophical arguments and detailed reasons why you just can’t. There are decisions to be made every day in our lives but no decision is more important than choosing who you will follow and how.

Call and change: The two things that characterize the Christian life. Both come from God and lead us to God. No matter how long ago you first gave your heart and life to God, He is still calling, calling you deeper, calling you to change, calling you home.