I Never Made It to the Promised Land & I Feel Fine

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost, October 25, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

I’ve always found it curious that after the entire sweep of the Exodus narrative--from Moses being pulled out of the reed basket in the waters of the Nile, to his near-lynching at the hands of irritated and thirsty Israelites, to the manna and the quail and water from the rock, to his glimpse of God’s hind parts from his vantage point in the cleft of the rock--should end with Moses only glimpsing the Promised Land from afar. As it says in Deuteronomy, “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.’” Huh? 

To add insult to injury, Moses promptly drops dead even though his eyes are still good and he is still spry at a youthful 120. And to top it all off, the greatest of all the prophets is buried in an unmarked grave. Hardly the triumphal entry into the land of milk and honey one would expect! Like all things in Holy Scripture, however, with a little prayer and pondering, it starts to make a kind of sense. Not from a worldly point of view, of course, but from the logic of the story of God’s love affair with God’s people, of God doing whatever God needs to do root and ground God’s people in the knowledge of their belovedness so that they can be that love for others, it coheres. How?

Moses not entering into the Promised Land provides us with a valuable lesson for our day-to-day human lives. We live in a goal oriented society. We are results-driven. Hardly do we accomplish one task than we are on to the next without a moment’s pause for reflection or thanksgiving. The to-do list is our master and our precious, precarious, infinitely fragile human life gets reduced to ticking boxes. We become human doings rather than human beings. We get duped into thinking that it is our accomplishments, our resume, how productive we are, that determines our worth. The busiest bee ascends to the highest heaven.

Now interestingly this mindset is precisely what Moses sought to free the Israelites from in the first place. Under Pharaoh, the Israelites internalized the identity as producers, as brickmakers. Their worth was counted in how many lumps of earth they baked in the kiln and stacked up for Pharaoh’s foreman. A good day was measured by a record number of bricks, and a good person was someone who fashioned a lot of bricks. This, rightly, drives Moses crazy. Moses knows that true liberation doesn’t just mean liberation from slavery under Pharoah. Moses knows that the Israelites also need to be freed from the identity of themselves as mere producers, cogs in the wheel of profit that only adds more coins to Pharaoh’s coffers. Moses takes them out of Egypt in a geographical sense, to be sure. But the interior journey to freedom from the producer identity takes longer. Forty years to be exact. That’s how long it takes for that sense of identity that measures itself solely by its brick count to collapse and for something new, something true, to emerge in its place.

That new identity is twofold. The first part is the recognition of God as God, as the Living God who is above all other Gods. The second part is the recognition of God as loving, merciful, and kind. Not loving in a vague, amorphous way, but in a minutely specific, personal way. The Israelites gradually come to see that they aren’t just nameless, faceless bees in Pharaoh’s hive, but infinitely precious, children of the Most High who knows them each by name and delights in their uniqueness. More than that, they come to know that this God has made a covenant with them, one that God will never break. It’s the covenant that we pray each week in the Eucharistic prayer--”Again and again you called us to return.” God never gives up on us. Even when life feels like water rising up to our neck, even when life feels like a barren desert with not a drop to drink, God provides. God with us. God for us. God ahead of us preparing a way out of no way. God the water from the rock. God the manna from heaven. God the pillar of fire in the depths of the night lighting our path.

The locus of the Israelites’ identity shifts from scarcity, lack, and fear to trust, abundance, and provision. Their identity shifts from being mere producers to beloved children of God. Their identity shifts from their worth being determined by what they do, to being loved beyond measure just for who they are--beloved children of God, made in God’s image and likeness whose ultimate purpose is to enjoy a life of peace, of rest, of abundance and provision in union and communion with Him. So for Moses, the geographical “land” is really of secondary importance. Far more important is that the Israelites have begun to see themselves for who they really are. They’ve shaken off the identity of mere human doings and learned to rest, to trust, to float in the ocean of love that is their belovedness. That they have a place to hang their hat is surely a good thing, but it pales in comparison to the knowledge of the living God for whom each of us is made and without whom we know only restlessness and strife. Moses can die happy knowing that--at least for now (!)--the Israelites have learned that the promised land is not a geographical location “out there” but an internal disposition of surrendering and trusting in God, in surrendering to and trusting in their own belovedness.

That’s why, especially in the exile, Isaiah keeps reminding the Israelites of their story. It’s tempting for them to let circumstances determine their actions. It’s tempting for them in exile to ignore the widow, the orphan, the stranger in the land. It’s tempting for them to quarrel. It’s tempting for them to neglect their common worship. But, Isaiah says, that’s not how this works! Remember who you are! Remember whose you are! The story is not finished. God’s not done. Don’t fall prey to that old story that took so long to undo! You are not alone. Darkness is not dark to God. “Within our darkest night you kindle a flame never dies away,” as the Taize chant says.

Moses being buried in an unmarked grave makes perfect sense in this context. Moses’ whole reason for being is to teach the Israelites who and whose they are. Moses doesn’t want the Israelites to worship him, to turn him into an idol. Moses is great, the greatest of the prophets, in fact, but he’s not God. It’s human and holy to remember him, to celebrate his mighty acts of power, to weep and mourn his passing, but worship is afforded to God and God alone. The unmarked grave turns the Israelites to transformative encounter with the living God and away from mere ancestor worship and tribal identity. God warns the Israelites when they are yearning for a King like other nations of this same thing. “Nothing wrong with Kings, I suppose,” God says, “as long as you don’t make Gods out of them, as long as they don’t make Gods out of themselves.” And the New Testament abounds with examples--Jesus disappearing after the disciples recognize him the breaking of the bread on the Road to Emmaus, Jesus telling Mary on the morning of the first day of the week not hold on to him because he has not yet ascended to his Father, Paul telling his readers that he won’t be returning to them, but they know what do and whom to follow. God’s not confined to a particular person, or a particular place (be it the Promised Land, the Temple, or a Cathedral). 

God is always and everywhere present to each of us. All that’s required is that we turn to him. Open to him. Receive him in our hearts. Allow his grace to well up from within the hard rock of the heart and irrigate our souls and then flow out as that living water to others. The Promised Land is not a geographical location (even less is it one to be walled, fenced, and settled in the name of “God”). The Promised Land is wherever and whenever we turn to God with open hearts and open hands. Even here and even now. God’s presence goes with us wherever we are and whenever we are present to that presence by that tiny act of consenting to God’s presence and action in our lives. God’s rest is available everywhere. Even on the journey we are always at home. 

I like to think Moses doesn’t give a fig about entering the Promised Land because he knows the very place he was standing is the promised land, the very place he is standing is holy ground, the very place he is standing is the gate of heaven. Do we?