The Promise of Tomorrow

This is a sermon/message that I presented at Tompkins Corners United Methodist Church for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, 27 October 2002.  This was also Reformation Sunday.  The Scriptures are Deuteronomy 34: 1 – 12, 1 Thessalonians 2: 1 – 8, and Matthew 22: 33 -46.

————————————

When I first moved to New York some three years ago from the hills of eastern Kentucky, most of the people I knew wondered why. “Why,” they asked, “would I want to leave the hill country for all that concrete and steel?”

So it was that I had to explain that Beacon and the area where I would live was much live the eastern slope of the Appalachian Mountains with broad valleys. And that the Hudson River at this point, though deeper, was a lot like the Mississippi River north of Davenport, IA, where I once lived.

We all have preconceived notions about the various parts of this country. And of all the places in this country, the one place that I think defies our notions about what it is like is Texas. Much is made, sometimes in jest, about the size of Texas. Now, Texas is not the biggest state in the Union; Alaska holds that honor. But it is the size of Texas that probably defines what it is. And if the size of Texas defines what it is, can you imagine what that means for Alaska?

From where I lived in Odessa, Texas, which is in the western part of the state just north of the Big Bend country, it is possible to drive over 300 miles and still be in Texas. And in the one direction that you can drive and leave Texas, you end up in another time zone.

For orthinologists, Texas presents a challenge. There are five major flyways, routes birds take during migration. Three of these highways in the sky pass through Texas. Until Roger Tory Peterson wrote “The Birds of Texas” for the Texas Wildlife & Game Commission in the early 60′s, most “birders” had to carry two or more bird books in the field for identification.

The geology of Texas also confounds people. In the 1930′s, the first big oil boom in the country was in the oil fields of east Texas. From a geological standpoint, the rock formations where the oil was found were much like the oil fields of Pennsylvania and it was thought that this type of rock formation was necessary in order to find oil. But at least one geologist looked at the rock formations and felt that there was oil in the Permian layers of rock deep below the stark landscape of west Texas. Most people were of the opinion that the only oil to be found was in east Texas, believing that the barren and stark landscape of west Texas was a reflection of a lack of resources below ground. But this one geologist, whose name escapes me now, urged the state of Texas to buy up the mineral rights to the land in west Texas.

And some seventy years later, his judgement about what was beneath the rocks of west Texas has continued to be correct as the oil pumped from the Permian Basin continues to fund the educational coffers of the University of Texas and Texas A & M systems. In fact, most of the oil in the world today is in the Permian rocks, not in the Pennsylvanian rocks as so many people thought.

Standing on the Edwards Plateau, the dominant geological landform of west central Texas, one cannot see that riches buried beneath the ground. No view from the mountaintop will ever show you what is deep within the valleys below.

It must have been frustrating for Moses in those last days of his life to be standing on the mountain overlooking the land to which he had lead his people. It must have been frustrating to have spent all that time in the wilderness knowing he would never see the Promised Land and that it could have been different.

For some forty years before, the nation of Israel stood poised to enter the Promised Land, just as they did in the Old Testament reading for today. It seemed as if they had learned nothing about trusting the Lord. Throughout the Exodus, the people of Israel continued to show a distinct lack of faith that the Lord would provide and on the verge of entering their ancestral homelands, they could not trust in the Lord. They felt it necessary to send in spies to make sure that it would be safe to enter.

Twelve spies, one for each tribe of Israel, choose a representative to see what promises, what riches were hidden in this land they had just spent forty years to reach. Ten of the spies came back with tales of terror and fears, claiming the inhabitants were superior in strength and incapable of defeat. Only two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, came back with the promises of a land filled with milk and honey, of promises that the inhabitants could be defeated as long as they trusted in the Lord.

But the people of Israel choose to accept the tales of fear and terror from the ten rather the hopes and promises of the two. And the penalty was that the nation of Israel would wander in the wilderness for another forty years, a time when all those over twenty would die and leave the Promised Land for the next generation. Only Joshua and Caleb, because they trusted in the Lord, would live to see the entry into the Promised Land.

I find it interesting that we still use tales of fear and terror even today. We try to take advantage of every situation for our own good. Rather than seek the future and what it holds, we try to stay in the present. Look at the election ads that are running now. Most, if not all, tend to focus on negative things, on why the opponent cannot do the job. And very seldom do you see an ad that focus on the promises of tomorrow, that offers a vision of what can be. There may be fleeting visions or statements but they are quickly removed by attacks on the opponent’s views.

A lawyer comes to Jesus in today’s Gospel reading, seeking to test Jesus’ knowledge of the Law. But the answer he seeks is not one of edification but rather of justification. Does Jesus’ knowledge match his own?

The answer to the lawyer’s question is from the great Jewish confession of faith, the Shema. The confession is called this because it begins with the Hebrew word shema meaning “hear”. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” And then Jesus follows this with the statement that one should love others as one loves themselves. Because we want the best for ourselves, we should want the best for others. We look at the Ten Commandments, we are reminded that we need to love God first and then love others second.

Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is directed toward those who criticized his ministry. Those who felt threatened by his ministry did so because Paul challenged their beliefs. Their criticisms were meant to show that all that Paul did, he did for himself and his own gain. Paul’s rebuttal was that he neither sought nor wanted glory and gain for himself but rather that all glory and honor should go to the Lord. Paul reminded those who would criticize him that God was the witness to his actions and that he was God’s servant.

For the ten spies the entry into the Promised Land was a threat to their own safety, not to the safety of their people. So they were not allowed to enter into the Promised Land. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes all saw Jesus as a threat to their lives, to their way of living. And it should be a threat for they were doing nothing to insure that others gained, only themselves.

Much like Moses, we stand on top of the mountain looking into the Promised Land. It is easy to stand on the mountaintop and not see anything or not be sure what you are seeing. That makes it easy to be fearful, that makes it easy to turn away and keep what you have close to the vest. When Daniel Boone first stood above the Cumberland Gap, the broad passage between North Carolina and Kentucky, the great opening of the west to the people seeking new lands and the promise of a new life, he must have wondered what was out there. The Cumberland Gap is just south of where I lived in Kentucky and there were many days when the valleys of that area were shrouded in clouds, making it impossible to see what lie on the ground below.

But Daniel Boone chose to go forward, leaving a safe established life for a future in Kentucky and later in Missouri. Moses stood on the mountaintop, knowing that there was a promise in the land that lie below his feet and though he would not get the chance to go to do so, those that trusted in the Lord would reap the rewards.

We stand on a mountaintop, perhaps not one as tall as the one Moses stood on, but still one that gives a great vision of the future. Shall we, like the people of Israel some forty years before, not trust in the Lord and only in ourselves or shall we trust in the Lord as the additional years of wandering had taught them to do? If we fail to trust in the Lord, we will die, like the elders of the tribes. But if we trust in the Lord, then the promise of tomorrow will be a good one and one in which we can hold. That choice is ours.

What’s Next

This is a sermon/message that I presented at Walker Valley United Methodist Church for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, 24 October 1999.  The Scriptures are Deuteronomy 34: 1 – 12, 1 Thessalonians 2: 1 – 8, and Matthew 22: 33 -46.

————————————

There are moments in each person’s life that always stick in your memories. July of 1973 and June of 1976 are such times for me because that is when my two daughters were born. The summer of 1999, when I married Ann and came here to Walker Valley, is another such time.

But the spring of 1968 will also be one of those times, although not necessarily for the good things that happened. The spring of 1968 was the time of my graduation from high school in Memphis. Such was a good time because it marked the end of my high school education and meant that I could return to Kirksville and finish my freshman year of college at Truman State University, then known as Northeast Missouri State Teachers College, something I had started some two summers before.

But it was also the spring when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Now, a little over thirty years later, I admit I paid little attention to the sanitation workers’ strike that brought Dr. King to Memphis. We didn’t live in Memphis proper and so the strike was of little to concern to my family or I; besides my mind was on senior things and getting back to Kirksville. But I realize know the profound indifference that we showed a group of men who did work that no one else would do and for which the hours were long, the pay low, and benefits non-existent.

And though it was 1968, for all one could tell back then, it might as well have been 1868 for all the concern the white government showed its black employees.

Dr. King came to Memphis to help publicize the strike and point out the inequities that existed not just between workers of different races in that city, something hardly unique to Memphis back then and perhaps even now, but between rich and poor throughout the country.

And on the night he was killed, Dr. King borrowed from the Old Testament reading for today to say that he too had been to the mountaintop and he had seen the Promised Land. He, like Moses, said that he might not get there and I have never known where he was being prophetic or not with that comment coming less than 24 hours before he would be shot.

But Dr. King’s presence that spring did a lot to change Memphis. I cannot say if it was the good of all or not. But Memphis is no long the sleepy little Delta river town it was before he came.

Today, like Moses, we stand at the mountaintop and see the Promised Land. But, unlike Moses, we have a chance not just to see the Promised Land but to enter it as well.

Moses does not get to enter the Promised Land because of what had happened to the Israelite people some forty years before. Still, for all he had done, God allowed Moses to see the Promised Land before he died.

But this was not the first time that the Israelites had prepared to enter the Promised Land. In the Book of Numbers, chapter2 12 through 14, we can read about their arrival at that edge of the Promised Land and how they sent spies into the Land to see what was there. In Numbers 13: 26 – 29, we read that the first part of the spies’ report was truthful (the land was rich and flowing with milk and honey) but the goodness of the land was offset in their fearful eyes by the power peoples who lived there. In verse 30, only Caleb and Joshua gave a report prompted by faith in God.

In verses 32 and 33, the other spies quickly distort what they have found, showing a lack in faith in the power of God. God punishes the Israelites, in 14: 34 by having them continue their wanderings in the desert for forty years; one year of every one of the 40 days of the travels of the spies became the numerical pattern for their suffering. For 40 years they would recount their misjudgment, and for 40 years the people 20 years old or more would be dying, so that only the young generation might enter the land. Significantly, Israel’s refusal to carry out the Lord’s commission to conquer his land is the climactic act of rebellion for which God condemns Israel to die in the desert.

Because they refused to trust in the Lord, the same Lord who had brought them out of Egypt and destroyed the Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea, the same Lord who fed them every day of their journey and gave them water to drink when it seemed that there was none; they were punished.

Now, today we stand on the mountaintop looking into the Promised Land but our vision is not so clear. The mists of time cover the valley and make the future fuzzy and unclear. What can we do to make it clearer?

In the Gospel reading for today, we read

One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “”Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

When we love God with the total commitment of heart and soul and mind, as Jesus said, we put God first in our lives. The writer and theologian, C. S. Lewis, wrote

All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organization which exploits, its own supernatural ends, these natural materials. No doubt, in a given situation, it demands the surrender of some, or all, our merely human pursuits: it is better to be saved with one eye, than having two, to be cast into Gehenna. But it does this, in a sense, per accidens – because, in those special circumstances, it has ceased to be possible to practice this or that activity to the glory of God. There is no essential quarrel between the spiritual life and the human activities as such. Thus the omnipresence of obedience to God in a Christian’s life is, in a way, analogous to the omnipresence of God in space. God does not fill space as a body fills it, in the sense that parts of him are in different parts of space, excluding other objects from them. Yet he is everywhere – totally present at every point of space – according to good theologians. (From From the The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis)

If we love God with all our soul, our heart, and our mind, then all that we have gets put to use in a better way than were we to try to do it ourselves. Jesus also said that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. For whatever the future may be, we will not be able to survive in it if we treat others with hatred and mistrust.

I know that one reason that I feel the way that I do and why I see the church as an agency for change in the coming years is because I saw church leaders involved in the changes of society in the 60’s. It is interesting to note how the involvement of the church in today’s society is met with cynicism and distrust. Yet, what church leaders and members did in the 60’s wasn’t met with overwhelming acceptance either. Many of the pastors who I knew in Kirksville who fought for social justice in that sleepy Missouri farm town paid the price for their actions, both professionally and socially.

Those who opposed the actions of the church then, and perhaps now, see the church as something done on Sundays only with the rest of the week devoted to other things. When you leave God at the door of the church on Sunday, you are not trusting God to help guide you through the week, and a faith such as that will die. A church whose actions stop on Sunday with Sunday School and worship service will not live long.

But the opposite will not work either. The world that Jesus came into was a world of laws and regulations, so strict and encumbering that one could not breathe. It was impossible to relate to God personally. I do not want a future where my relationship with Jesus is one dictated by rules and regulations. Jesus pointed out that out when he said that the two commandments summed up the law and the prophets. Our relationship with God, through Jesus, is an individual one, not dictated by what others tell us.

By our actions, and they can be the simple actions of daily life, we can show others what Christ means to us. Not everyone is capable of preaching a sermon but then not everyone is asked to preach a sermon. We are asked to work for the church as a group, not as individuals.

There are some that work for the church and want to quit. Remember what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians

You know, brothers, that our visit to you was not a failure. We had previously suffered and been insulted in Philippi, as you know, but with the help of our God we dared to tell you his gospel in spite of strong opposition. For the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you. On the contrary, we speak as men approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts. You know we never used flattery, nor did we put on a mask to cover up greed – God is our witness. We are not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else.

As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you, but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.

Paul understood and tried to tell others that the work of presenting the Gospel message was not an easy one to do. But he also pointed out that the reasons why the message is presented must come from God, not from our own motives. If your work is true in that sense, then you have nothing to fear.

There are some that will not work for the church, saying that they do not wish to endure the hardship and trouble that will surely come if they do. For them, they need to remember why the Israelites saw the Promised Land for the second time.

So we stand at the mountaintop, looking into the future that is the Promised Land. We can fear the future but this only means that will continue wandering in the wilderness. Or we can choose to open our hearts and hear the Gospel message of the grace of God and salvation through Christ. Doing so doesn’t mean that we give up our talents; it means that we can use our talents to better ends. What’s next?

---