Moses, the Servant of the Lord, Died

                                                                Proper 25A 2014

                         Deut 34:1-12; Psalm 90;1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

Father Adam Trambley

Oct 26, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

From this morning’s lesson from Deuteronomy: Then Moses, the servant of the LORD, died there in the land of Moab, at the LORD’s command.

The Book of Common Prayer actually instructs Episcopal priests to talk about the practical aspects of dying and end of life planning at least once a year, and this reading about Moses’ death is, I think, an excellent model for how we temporally prepare for our own deaths, as well as deal with the deaths of those we love.

The first point to make is, of course, that Moses died.  Moses, the man who got the Ten Commandments, whom God used to perform powerful works in Egypt and in the desert, and who saw God face-to-face, this man Moses died.  Scripture tries to explain why in different ways – that Moses did something that displeased God, that the Israelites sinned so much that their leader was indirectly punished, or, as it says here rather straightforwardly, at the LORD’s command.  We should hesitate to assign specific reasons or causes to any particular death, as if we were some metaphysical coroner.  On the grandest human scale, death comes as a result of collective human sin, but any particular death is taken most straightforwardly as just something coming at God’s command.  We do best dealing with death as something that happened, not something we can figure out or claim to understand.

When Moses died, he saw the Promised Land, but he could not enter it.  All of us die in the midst of our work, or at least we do if we have imagined the scope of our work appropriately.  No one has ever spent all the time they want to with their grandchildren, or ensured the success of their business for the next hundred years, or eliminated hunger, or saved the environment, or completed the perfect work of art, or evangelized the Shenango Valley, or even finally cut the grass so that it doesn’t get out of control again in two weeks.  If we have an imagination and vision, we can see where our godly passions are taking us, but we won’t finally get there.  And that’s OK.  Moses didn’t get there either, although he spent forty years struggling for it.  As the Talmud, a book of Jewish teachings states, “We are not required to complete our work, but we are not at liberty to quit.”

Then Deuteronomy tells us that Moses was buried, but no one knows where he is buried, and that the people mourned for him until the mourning period was ended.  Here scripture is talking to us about letting go appropriately of those who have died.  God didn’t want anyone to know where Moses was buried because they would have kept coming back and building shrines, and some folks would have stayed to form the Moses Memorial Society and make a living selling tchotchkes to tourists.  That is not what God wanted.  Nor was it what Moses would have wanted.   Moses wanted people to follow God’s commands and live their lives in the Promised Land, and they couldn’t do that if they kept looking backwards.  Certainly Moses is still remembered and honored three thousand years later.  But he is honored by remembering what God did for him and living into the blessings God provided through him.  We move forward in the direction God pointed through Moses instead of being tied to where he physically stopped.

This moving on could happen because people actually stopped and mourned.  They sat with the hole in their lives where Moses had been.  They stared into it.  They watered it with their tears as their laments and their songs and their stories and their anger bounced around in that void.  Then, when the mourning period was over, they had made friends with that emptiness.  They still didn’t like it.  The loss may still have often been painful.  But they were ready to move on and allow the hole in their lives to exist until God filled parts of it in new ways.

Too often today, we stay stuck after a death because we don’t actually mourn.  We don’t make space and time at a death to become comfortable with the new empty space in our lives.  Instead we keep running back to the proverbial grave.  Rather than allowing ourselves to move into the Promised Land our loved ones were striving for, we refuse to go forward and live our lives without them.

I wish I were making this up.

The line between appropriate remembrance and being tied to the past is always difficult to navigate, but a few things have become common that seem unhelpful.  One trend is tattooing the names of deceased loved ones on our bodies.  The Old Testament actually forbids this.  Our bodies are meant for God’s future work, not as a plaque for the deceased.  These tattoos are almost always done out of love, but they can still interfere with the spiritual work of moving forward.  Another increasing trend is for people to keep the ashes of someone who has been cremated with them in their house, or even in jewelry they wear, or, perhaps most grotesquely, in stuffed animals with special compartments for the cremains.  We are meant to bury or inter the bodies or ashes of the deceased with honor.  Holding onto remains in places not consecrated for that purpose both keeps us from the work we have to do in the future and dishonors the remains of the deceased.

Of course, Moses has done his part in helping the people move on by preparing them.  Once the mourning period is over, the people are ready to follow Joshua, son of Nun.  The people are ready to follow Joshua for two reasons.  First, Moses has made his wishes clear that Joshua is to take his place by publicly laying his hands on Joshua.  Second, Moses has prepared Joshua for the job. 

Now we may not go around laying hands on people or pouring oil on their heads as we are preparing to die, but we have ways in our culture of making our wishes clear for how our legacy is to be carried on.  We may not have leadership of a people to pass on, but we may have money or property or the care of minor children or health care decisions when we are no longer able to make them or any number of other responsibilities and blessings to bestow.  Making our wishes on all of these matters clear before we die is essential if we want to help those after us move on cleanly.  Now this can be difficult.  Who knows how many people were in the back of the crowd when Moses laid his hand on Joshua, muttering, “I should have been the next guy not this stupid Joshua dude.”  Our duty is to make sure everyone is clear about what we want, and then to write it down in the appropriate legal documents.  We should write documents like wills and health care durable powers of attorney and living wills and whatever else the lawyers recommend.  If we don’t, we may place an unconscionable burden on our heirs.  But once we have written them, we also need to share them, so that there are no surprises or fights after the fact.  Let someone make peace with the fact that they aren’t getting the house before mom dies, so they don’t have to deal with both issues at the same time.  Make sure that no one in the family is surprised at a conference table with the doctor and other family members during a health care crisis.  We need to lay our proverbial hands on the people we want to make the decisions when we won’t be able to, and we need to tell them what decisions we want made, and hopefully those decisions are what we feel the Lord is calling us to do, just like the commands Moses gave to Joshua. 

I want to take a small detour here and just remind folks that it is entirely appropriate to include the church in any estate planning or will you might be doing.   Allen Hall would not have been built, and our operating budget would not be sustainable except for the generosity of people who have left a portion of their estates, large or small, to St. John’s.  Some people leave whatever they can, some people choose to leave 10 percent of their estate as a final tithe, and some people decide to endow their pledge in perpetuity, multiplying their pledge by twenty so that every year the church can use five percent of their bequest to have support in perpetuity.  If you have any questions about how to include St. John’s in your wills, including how to make gifts of stock or real estate, please let me know and I can answer those questions.  This concludes the word from this morning’s sponsor.

The last point I want to make about Moses and Joshua is that Moses prepared Joshua to carry on his work.  Moses gave Joshua important jobs, like scouting out the land of Canaan.  He took him along on important trips, like up the mountain when he received the Ten Commandments.  Granted, Joshua could only go part of the way up, but it still was leadership training.  Moses spent time with Joshua and ensured he was ready. 

We do our own training in different ways, but if we do it right, we are ready to pass on our mission and purpose.  Maybe we let our children host holiday dinners that we used to do so that they are ready for the next generation of family gatherings.  Maybe we mentor someone professionally so our trade is passed on.  Maybe we share the gospel with someone or invite someone to church or to a ministry so that the work we think is important continues.  Maybe we just make sure that those who will make decisions once we are gone are prepared to make the right decisions.  Also worth noting here is that Moses passed on his leadership to someone who wasn’t his own child.  Some things we might anoint a family member to do, but some things, especially our work outside our families, may go to those outside the family, and that is OK.

You may remember that the last speech Martin Luther King, Jr., gave before he died talked about this passage from Deuteronomy.  Dr. King said he has seen the Promised Land, and that he wasn’t going to get there but that others would.  He laid out his vision, he prepared others to do the work once he was gone, and we all now live in a society that is much more color-blind than when Brother Martin was alive.    

Moses, the servant of the LORD, died.  Someday, unless Jesus comes back real soon, we will all die, too.  Our deaths will come before we’ve gotten to our own promised land, but if we prepare properly, our deaths can help those who come after us get where they need to go.  They can leave us and move closer to the Promised Land in this life, while we leave them for a time and enter the Promised Land of eternal life.