By the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow
This sermon is based on Deuteronomy 34:1-12
God led Moses to Mt Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, and from there God showed Moses the whole of the Land of Promise, the whole territory God had covenanted to give to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, the land toward which Moses and the people have been journeying for forty years. From the top of that mountain Moses could see Dan in the distant north, and the territory of Naphtali around the shores of Galilee, and Manasseh and Ephraim along the Jordan, and Judah reaching into the south — the whole land in panorama, a sweeping vision of the place of the promise of the mission of God.
And what strikes me as particularly interesting about Moses’ vision is that the place-names — Dan and Naphtali and Manasseh and Ephraim and Judah — are all names of Israelite tribes, they are names the people will give to those places in the future, when they settle there. When Moses looks out, of course, those lands are still inhabited by Canaanites, the Israelites haven’t moved there yet, they haven’t given those lands their names yet. For Moses to look and to see Dan and Naphtali and Manasseh and Ephraim and Judah is almost as if Moses is having a moment of double vision: as if he sees the land as it is, and yet also perceives and knows and names it as it is yet to be. It’s as if Moses can already see the potentials of God’s mission for the people taking shape, as if he can already see in the land the society of justice and peace and faithfulness and love of God and love of neighbor that is the people’s side of God’s covenant with them, the people’s part in the covenant that will be the sign of God’s blessing for all the families of the earth. In that moment of double vision, seeing the land with the people’s names, Moses knows that, whatever difficulties may lie ahead, the future of God’s mission with the people is assured.
And in that way, I think Moses’ moment of double vision serves as a model for us, an invitation to us to look at our land and our people and our mission, and to see them as they are, and at the same time to perceive and know and name them as they are yet to be in God.
We are now in the midst of October, our Stewardship Month; we’re hip-deep in pledge drive and parlor meetings; we’ve got Stewardship Moments in the services and a box for completed pledge cards in the back of the church. And at pledge drive time we always try to be realistic about the state of our church as it is. Dealing with pledges and budgets, we know we need to face the facts about revenues and expenses, about stagnant income and rising costs, about utility bills that go up and insurance premiums that increase, about maintaining a historic building and growing a graying membership. During our parlor meetings people have been asking pointed nuts-and-bolts questions about our discretionary spending, and our mission budget commitments, and the health of our endowment, and the demographics of our membership — and those are questions we should be asking, those are concerns that are part of our being realistic about who and where we are. Like Moses looking at the lay of the land and seeing it as it is, so we have to look at where we are and be honest about what we see.
But also like Moses, when we look at the lay of our land we have to see it too as it has the potential to become. As each of us considers how best to steward the time and talent and treasure God activates in us, so that we can participate in God’s mission to renew the world — as we calculate the church’s needs and our pledges — we have to be able to look ahead of us and name the places God is calling us to go.
We have a historic and expensive building; but it is also a beautiful building; and I believe the ministry of beauty is something we offer our community; and I think we should look ahead and name where God is calling us to go in supporting and expanding our ministry of beauty to a world that all too often seems ugly and tawdry and cheap.
We know that the church of the 21st century is experiencing changes in people’s patterns of membership and attendance, and those changes can be quite a challenge to some of our traditional ideas of how to do church; but we also see many congregations around the country developing new ways of focusing on faith practices, and gathering new kinds of communities both in and outside of the church building, and creating new ways for people to participate online and on their own time and in ways that make the most sense for them; and I think we at Trinity can look ahead and name where God is calling us to go in creating new ways for people to participate in our mission.
We know we are still bogged down in the Recession That Just Won’t End; but we also know that this congregation is full of people who have remarkable skills and talents and gifts and resources, and that even when money is tight we can find creative ways of coming together in the spirit of wisdom to name the new directions we will go to do the work of God; and when we do the work of God we love, the money follows — sometimes in the most surprising, unexpected ways — but always, when the love of God is the motivating factor, the money follows.
Like Moses on the mountain, we in our pledge drive look out at the lay of our land, and see it as it is, and at the same time perceive it named with the potentials of God’s mission that are yet to be. And it is to the future of that mission that we pledge our support.
May God grant us the gifts and the courage and the generosity to name God’s mission we see before us — and to go forth and do it. Amen.
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