A sermon on Deuteronomy 34:1-12; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; and Matthew 22:34-46 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
For the last three months our first reading each Sunday has followed the story of Moses, and our readings at Vespers each day have been filling in the gaps. Tonight’s extract brings us to the end. Moses climbs Mount Nebo, glimpses the promised land in the distance, and dies.
When Glennys died last week, John Sampson commented that she had died exactly as she would have wished – with absolutely no fuss. Well, Moses died with so little fuss that the text tells us that “no one knows his burial place to this day.”
The Hebrew words literally say that Moses dies “by the mouth of the Lord”, which most translators render into English as “at the Lord’s command”, but which the rabbis often read as “dying by the Lord’s kiss.” I’ve often thought that the words I’d most long to hear from God at death are “Well done, good and faithful servant”, and what more beautiful version of that could there be than to receive God’s kiss as you die.
In the synagogues, this story is the closing scene of the Torah, after which their cycle of readings goes back to the start. So the Torah itself, like Moses, ends without having arrived in the promised land.
I find the image of Moses seeing the land from a distance, but realising he is never going to get there, quite poignant. For forty years he has led the people in the wilderness, and now with the finish line almost in sight, he has to pull out and hand over the reins. The text has nothing to say about Moses’ feelings, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
One of the things it makes me wonder is what it is going to be like for me when it’s my turn to pull out and hand over the reins. I’m not thinking of retiring before I’m at least 70, but I’ll soon turn 63, so unless I go to 120 like Moses, I’m a lot closer to the end than I am to the beginning. Close enough to begin wondering what it’s going to be like.
Will the end of my ministry be like Moses’ – looking into the distance from a mountain top and realising that something I had always thought I was going to be around for is now going to happen without me? Almost certainly yes, because Christian ministry is not like a building project where one day you can stand back and admire the finished thing.
I build things from time to time, as a form of recreation, and my favourite bit is standing back and admiring the finished job. And I wonder whether that’s because that sense of completion is so rare in pastoral ministry. Everything is always a work in progress, as it should be. So whenever I arrive at my Mount Nebo, I expect that there will be plenty of unfinished ministry that I’ll be glimpsing in the distance and having to let go of.
People often say, “It’s not about the destination, but about the journey.” The Moses stories can be read either way, and it makes a huge difference to how you understand them. Should the promised land be the focus, or the journeying in the wilderness? Which of those images is most to shape our understanding of ourselves and of following Jesus?
Perhaps the way the Torah finishes still short of the promised land is suggesting an answer. There is always a journey still ahead of us. If we instead define ourselves as having arrived – we’ve made it – we can easily slide into complacency. Or worse. The blood-soaked stories of the conquest of the promised land, and the way those stories have been co-opted again and again to baptise violent colonialism, including here, highlight the risk that arrival can easily become occupation and become the moment we start drawing boundaries and naming enemies and erecting fortifications.
The main metaphor for understanding Christian living is the image of “following” Jesus. It’s not standing with Jesus and planting our flag. It is not building houses for Jesus like Peter wanted to do on the mountain of Transfiguration. It is following Jesus. Following towards a promised land, but that land is a metaphor for God’s coming kingdom, something that will arrive as a gift, not as a result of us striving hard enough. We often won’t even know where the journey is leading. We just follow and take it as it comes.
Even the answer we heard Jesus give tonight to the question of the most important commandment was an answer that one can never claim to have completed. Love God with everything you are, and love others as yourself. Those are lifelong projects. They are relationships, so you never get to say, “Yep, tick that off my list. Nailed it. Nothing more to do here.”
So, if the Christian life is always unfinished, Christian leadership is always unfinished. Even if Moses had lived another few years, there would no doubt still have been goals that felt unrealised.
It’s probably amazing that Moses lasted as long as he did. Forty years of leading the people through the challenges and crises of the wilderness will take its toll. The covid years saw a much higher than normal rate of pastors dropping out or burning out. Wilderness times – times of uncertainty, anxiety and fear – are tough on leaders. Just look at the news this past week.
Amidst rising fears of social disruption and climate catastrophe, angry people pour into the streets demanding that leaders fix things. The protests across Europe are all grounded in absolutely legitimate complaints about growing inequality, corruption, and people being left behind. But legitimate does not mean easily solved, and taking out our frustrations on politicians by threatening and attacking them will often make things worse.
The motive for the attack on Helen Haines remains murky, but it has amplified a climate of fear regardless. Numerous politicians are speaking about the number of threats they receive and the toll it takes on them and their families. If good politicians are driven to quitting, right when we most need their best, their replacements may be those who are most skilled at exploiting the anger rather than at devising solutions.
This is not new. The wilderness has always been a hostile place for leaders. Moses himself feared being stoned to death more than once. The frustrations of the people were boiling over and they were ready to point the finger and take it out on him.
To be honest though, that kind of scapegoating can go both ways. Earlier in Moses’ farewell speeches (Deut 1:34-37), it is him doing the finger pointing and blaming the people for losing him the chance to cross into the promised land. “It was on your account that the Lord was angry with me,” he says.
Whether we are the leaders or the led, when things are not going as we’d hoped, and when crisis and catastrophe threaten to prevent us from achieving what we had imagined or arriving where we had been longing to be, we can be easy prey for a raging hostility that points the finger of blame and lashes out destructively.
I was struck by another story in the news this week. It was about Nusantara, the ultra-modern city that is being built from scratch to become the new capital of Indonesia. Apparently after a change of president, construction is slowing, and funds are being cut back. In explanation, an anonymous official was quoted as saying that President “Prabowo feels that this is not his legacy.”
History is full of leaders who were obsessed with their personal legacy. Rather than being satisfied with leaving their community in better shape than they found it, they want to leave grand monuments to themselves, and to have their name plastered on everything.
The end of the Moses story is a real paradox in this regard. Moses is buried in an unmarked grave, and “no one knows his burial place to this day.” The rabbis have often said that this absence of a shrine helped protect the people against developing an idolatrous cult around the veneration of Moses.
But no sooner are we told that no one knows where Moses was buried and that after a period of mourning the Israelites looked to Joshua as his anointed successor, than the text announces, “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform.”
That’s one hell of a big legacy statement, and it must have been quite a burden to Joshua. Shrine or no shrine, how are you supposed to step into the shoes of one who has no equal? How can you be anything other than a second-rate disappointment after that? Perhaps even Moses’ no-fuss secret death was not enough to prevent some unhealthy idolising of him.
So, what would a healthy legacy look like? There might be a bit of an answer in our gospel reading. Because when Jesus was asked about what most mattered to God, about the most important commandment, his answer was given in the words of Moses. You shall love the Lord your God with everything you are, and love others as yourself. Straight from Moses.
For a religious leader, what greater legacy could you wish for? Not that everyone remembers your name and speaks it in hushed and reverent tones, but that what you taught is continuing to be passed on and is continuing to shape the people and their understanding of faithful living in positive ways. If your best words and your truest example outlive you and continue to do good long into the future, that’s the most valuable legacy of all.
There was more than a hint of that in our reading from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonian Christians too. Having been forced to leave, Paul is urging them to remember not his name, but his example of deep self-giving care. “We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” If their care for one another is shaped in the image of his example of maternal care, that’s all the legacy he needs.
Eugene Peterson and Marva Dawn wrote a book called The Unnecessary Pastor that argued that much of what churches lean on their pastors for is idolatrous – driven mostly by ego and ambition and social success. So pastors should seek to be increasingly unsuited to such needs. They even suggested that many congregations want an impressive pastor they can follow so they don’t have to bother following Jesus. The real measure of a healthy pastor’s ministry then should be that it becomes increasingly unnecessary – unnecessary because people are genuinely relating to Jesus and following him without needing the pastor as a proxy.
Dependence on an individual leader is especially risky and fragile when we are in a wilderness of uncertainty and trouble. Such times are immensely risky for pastors themselves, because anxious, fearful people can easily flip from loving the leader to blaming the leader for every ill. When I hear people say things like “the current leader is the only one who can keep us safe,” I shudder for that leader, because no one can live up to such expectations, and so the seeds of their fall are already beginning to sprout.
When asked about the most important commandment, Jesus did not say you shall honour your leaders and give them unswerving obedience. Echoing Moses, he said, “You shall love the Lord your God with everything you are, and love others as yourself.” A community that is truly learning to do that will have far more resilience as it journeys through the uncertain wilderness than a community where everything depends on the leader. In a world of hostility and anger, a community that is quietly learning to love one another can be a powerful sign of beauty among the ugliness.
Moses didn’t leave a marked grave and, assuming that I reach retirement alive, the end of my pastoral ministry will not be marked by a tomb either. I imagine that one of the things I will be remembered for is my liturgical leadership, mainly just because it is kind of weird for a Baptist pastor. Of all the liturgical texts I have written, I think the one I am probably most proud of is one we will say together shortly, in sharing the peace:
Though we are a company of strangers,
in approaching this table,
we bind ourselves to one another
to live in love and peace from this day forth.
Often after a few years even I can’t remember which bits of our liturgy I wrote and which bits I creatively curated from elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure I wrote that one. But I really hope that the legacy of our time sharing ministry here will not be that when I’m 120, those lines are still being used unchanged, or that everyone knows who wrote them.
What I really hope for is that people then will be looking at the Open Icon congregation, scratching their heads and saying, “It’s unusual and kind of beautiful how, even though they don’t seem like a natural social group, they seem really committed to each other, and to living in love and peace day by day, and to sharing the beauty of that with those around them.”
I’d gladly go to an unmarked grave in exchange for that!