Moses, the Mountain & the Land

What was it like up on that mountain? Old Moses at 120 climbing up to the top of Mount Nebo, 4,000 feet above the Dead Sea that lay at the foot of the mountain. But Moses was used to climbing mountains. He was on a mountain when God came and spoke to him from the burning bush. He was on a mountain when God came in clouds and delivered the Ten Commandments and the Law to him. And the scripture says that even now, at 120, his eyes were not dim and his vigor was not gone. Like the 100-year-old marathoner who finished that race in Canada a few weeks ago, Moses was fit right to the end. But this was the end. He was climbing his last mountain. He knew it was the end. The whole book of Deuteronomy is the record of his farewell addresses to the people of Israel because he knew he was going. After resisting the call to go back to Egypt to liberate these people from slavery, after confronting Pharaoh with signs and wonders on behalf of these people, after enduring the grumblings and hostility of these people through forty years in the desert, after interceding on behalf of these people before God -- after all this the people were going on into the Promised Land and Moses was staying behind. He climbed up Mount Nebo, across the Jordan River from the land of Canaan. It's a high spot. A great spot from which to see the whole of the Jordan River valley and the hill country of Canaan. You can't see all the way to the Mediterranean from there, but God gives Moses a special vision and allows him to see that far and from the northern extent of the future Israel to the southern deserts. It's a little like another scene in the Bible when God gives Abraham a vision from a high place after her has split from his nephew Lot. In Genesis chapter 13 it tells us that God told Abraham to raise his eyes and look to the north and the south, the east and the west. "All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever," God says. When Moses comes along, it is still an unfulfilled promise but God repeats it: "This is the land I sore to Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over to it." Moses knew the moment was coming. Knew, somehow, that he would not be going over the Jordan into the land. But it is still a hard thing for us to hear. Even Moses, who surely did more than anyone to work on behalf of his people, to bring this about, couldn't cross over to the other side. You know the first five books of the Bible are looked at as a special section of the Bible by Jews and Christians. It's called the Pentateuch - the Five Books and they are the foundational story for everything else that comes in the Hebrew Scriptures. But the Pentateuch doesn't end with Israel in the Promised Land. It ends with a vision that is incomplete. For Israel it will always be a little incomplete. O, there will be high moments. David and Solomon will build a great city out of Jerusalem and the united kingdom will briefly shine as the great fulfillment of Israel's dream of being a nation like other nations. But that kingdom will split into two. Other powers will threaten. The people will forget the law and the words of Moses. They will turn to other gods. They will forget where they came from. The kingdoms will fall. The land will be occupied by other powers. And to this day, even though there is once again an independent Israel in the land, the promise seems incomplete. So maybe it's not so strange that Deuteronomy ends here. It's where we still live - with a vision of promise and yet, 'not yet.' Moses, the servant of God, dies there in Moab. Moses is buried there in an unmarked grave. The Bible is even unclear about who buried him. The Hebrew text says that is was God. God, who covered Moses with a hand in the cleft of a rock to prevent him from being killed by God's glory passing by, now covers him with earth in a place no one knows. And he will not appear again until Jesus is with him on another mountain at his transfiguration. It's not the end of the story, though, because there is Joshua. God did not leave the people without a leader. Moses laid his hands on Joshua and he carried on and led the people into the land, into their future. So here we are. And I wonder if Moses could see as far as Franktown - to see what God would do. Here we are 3000+ years later and who could have imagined that the name of Moses would still be on our lips? But I don't want you just to remember Moses - I want you to be Moses. There are a lot of discouraging things in this world. This week I read about the closing of the last Christian church in Afghanistan. The last one. They're closing because to be a Christian in that country is to be marked for intimidation, bombings, and death. In Iran, a Christian pastor, Yosef Nadarkhani, was sentenced to death last month for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. In Bethlehem, the place of Jesus' birth, 86% of the population was Christian in 1915. Today, in the West Bank, Christians make up only 1.7% of the whole population. Again it is intimidation and violence from gangs and government policy and economic strangulation from the ongoing conflicts. These things are to be expected. Jesus told us that suffering would come to the church. Jesus said that persecutions would happen because of him. These things are to be expected but they should not be accepted. I long for a renewed Christian witness in the Middle East. The Middle East needs Christians and the people of the land need Jesus. I long for the same things here. Our disappointments may be different. People may not be dying because of their faith here. Thanks be to God. But churches are dying because we have lost the vision from the mountaintop. We have given in to our despair. We have forgotten the promises of God. We have forgotten who we are. And so we are formed by the morality of reality TV. We get our identity from brand name consumer items. We have such limited expectations of who we can be that we let advertisements and the illusion of the lottery fill the void. Moses' eyes had not gone dim but ours have. Moses' vigor had not diminished but ours has. We tell ourselves the story of how the church has lost its way rather than the story of how the church reveals the Way. We lament the fact that there are no more Moseses and forget that all the wisdom given to Moses was passed on to Joshua and through others to us. What we need we have been given. And what the world needs is for us to give away what we have been given. Let me tell you about another mountaintop. On the West Bank, the area loosely run by the Palestinian Authority, across the Jordan River from Moses' Mount Nebo, there is a mountain where I went on my recent trip. From the top of this mountain you get a feel for what a small place Israel is. When we looked north we could see all the way to the edge of the Galilee. When we looked south we could see the outskirts of Jerusalem. When we looked west we could see ships coming into the Mediterranean port of Ashdod and the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv. What could you do with such a mountaintop? If you were committed to violence against Israel you could certainly put missiles on top of it and hit just about anywhere in the country. But I was there with a man named Bashar Masri and he wants to build a city on that mountain. Not just any city. He wants to build the biggest city on the West Bank - a place where 40,000 people can come to live and work. It is the biggest development project in Palestinian history. It will create 8,000 to 10,000 jobs during construction. It will cost about $1 billion. All for a place that is modeled after Reston, Virginia. He wants to draw people looking for affordable housing and who are looking for a normal life when everything around them is not normal. When he told his staff that, for his last project, he wanted to build a city, they immediately started to list out reasons why it couldn't be done. The Israeli government wouldn't cooperate. The Palestinian government wouldn't cooperate. How were they going to get water up on the mountain? How were they going to get access through the security zones? How would they keep militants out? How could they find investors? They listed 102 obstacles. After three hours of this, Masri said, "O.K., let's call these challenges and get to work." And they did and now that list of 102 has come down to three. They have begun construction. They have advertised the first 2,000 units and they have already oversold them. If somebody can stand on top of a mountain in the West Bank and see a city, why can't we see what God is doing in our land? Why can't we declare that a new day is coming? And why can't we believe that all the obstacles we can list are really challenges waiting to be overcome through the power of the Holy Spirit? What is 'not yet' here that God has given you to see? How do you keep yourself close to that vision? God has not stopped helping the people dream dreams. So don't stop listening for that new day coming. Thanks be to God.