The View from Mt. Nebo

26 December 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

May we be granted a saving vision, a vision of wholeness, of justice and compassion, a vision of peace. May we be granted that saving vision.

We struggle each day in this land of partial visions, where whole armies and unholy laws serve those whose half-truths have achieved fearful power.

When it is too much, too unrealistic, to hope for the victory of more adequate visions, let us keep the faith that we may have those visions of a healthier kind of wholeness. And let us be sustained and carried forward by those greater visions.

In our lives, in our families, in our relationships, in our nation and in our world, we usually stumble not because we are bad, but because we can’t see clearly enough to discern the higher path. We slip back into our frustrating ruts because we cannot see a better path.

It is said that the longest trip still begins with the first step. But even before the first step, it begins with the vision of where we need to step, where our road needs to lead us.

May we be granted a saving vision, a vision of wholeness, of justice and compassion, a vision of peace. May we be granted that saving vision for our lives, our families, our relationships, our nation and our world.

Amen.

READING:

The reading for this morning is from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Scriptures.

And Yahweh said to Moses, “Ascend this mountain, Mt. Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, opposite Jericho; and view the land of Canaan, which I give to the people of Israel for a possession; and die on the mountain which you ascend, and be gathered to your people. For you shall see the land before you; but you shall not go there, into the land which I give to the people of Israel.” (32:48-52)

And Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mt. Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And Yahweh showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan, all Naph’tali, the land of E’phriam and Manas’seh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain, that is, the valley of Jericho the city of palm trees, as far as Zo’ar. And Yahweh said to Moses, “This is the land which I promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there.” (34: 1-4)

So Moses died there in the land of Moab, never entering the Promised Land.

SERMON: “The View from Mt. Nebo”

Now there are these people in this wilderness, this land that doesn’t feel much like a home, and their leader is taken up to the top of a mountain and given a wonderful vision of a land where all the different peoples have become one in a land of milk and honey.

This is not your run-of-the-mill view, this view from Mt. Nebo. It is not one seen from down below. The people of Gilead don’t see it, nor the people of Judah, nor Moses’s own people.

Their visions are so much more limited. They are just trying to survive down there, and all those other people are in their way. They each have their own small territories, their own cities of darkness, and they cluster together there in their tight little knots, to protect their flanks.

But this one man is given a view almost beyond belief. Some day, he is told, this land will be a place where enemies have learned to be friends, war has given way to peace, and the people are at last one.

Then he is told: oh, by the way – you’ll never live to see this. Long before the fractious nature of the world ends, you will end. Now go back and tell your people about this vision of the Promised Land you’ll never live to see. Make them believe it, help them to seek it. Maybe they will live to see what is beyond the reach of your own lifetime.

Then, the story says, Moses died and his people finally entered the Promised Land. And after defeating all the other inhabitants of the place through a series of wars, they claimed the land as their own, which they are doing again now in our own time. Now there, we have left religion, and come back into tribalism. There they missed the wonderful point the story had just made, and retreated into the very territorialism that the view from Mt. Nebo had pointed beyond.

Now I wonder: is that right, or is it that there the story ended and reality returned? That after this mythic image, we people come back in, and we don’t do well with all these grand visions, and so proceed to mess it all up again?

I am not sure how a story could be more timeless or true to the human condition than the story we used for this morning’s reading. We are as lost in the wilderness today as that little tribe was 3,000 years ago.

More than any other single thing today, we lack a shared vision with enough depth to bring us together. We are disjointed. We are people, but not a people; we are like a landscape filled with potted plants, but no garden.

Lacking a shared vision, we define ourselves by partial visions. And this sets person against person and group against group. The very differences in race, sex, belief or political bias which separate and make us different from others-those are the traits we use to define ourselves and partition our little area off from the rest. No one has a view of the whole. There is a proverb that says, “Without a vision, the people perish.” And we are without a vision.

We are born straight or gay; male or female; white or black. We decide to define ourselves as liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats, and all the rest. We define ourselves by our differences, and then fight for our individual rights. But every victory for a partial vision is really a victory for the wilderness, for a world in which the most fundamental problem is still that we do not share a deep and binding vision.

What would today’s version of the view from Mt. Nebo be? for it would not show us the tribal areas of Gilead, Judah, and the rest. Today’s version of the view from Mt. Nebo, I think, is captured in that remarkable photograph of the earth taken from the surface of the moon that you have all seen. An earth without national, racial, or religious divisions. A living planet where everything on it swirls together into a small but glorious green island in space. So today’s version of Mt. Nebo is that view from the moon. As we grow more and are able to look back upon ourselves from farther out, new and more inclusive visions will take the place of this view from the moon. But the important message in all these progressive views of the whole is that partial visions and little victories for partial visions are the problem, not the solution. The drives and allegiances which once served us now serve to defeat us.

Nationalism served us once. It bonded the people of a country together and made them one. But now the territory we must care for is not a nation but the whole planet, and so the same spirit of nationalism which once brought local people together is driving global peoples apart.

Nor can the great world religions bond the peoples of the planet together. Once they brought people together within the religious framework of their particular faith. But from here on the situation is one of peoples with very different faiths, few of whom will ever convert. And so like nationalism, religions have become associated with the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-importance. General propaganda for one or another of the local solutions has become a menace.

Let me be clear about this Promised Land business, for we can get into trouble if we confuse poetry and reality. I do not for one minute really believe that the world will ever be united into one happy group of warless people with a single shared common vision, a world where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them,” as Isaiah put it (Isaiah 11:6, RSV). That is mythic language, not historical language, and the fact that this hope has been given poetic form for most of recorded history must help us realize that this is not a problem to be solved by enlightened social programs, but a timeless picture of the human condition itself.

Nevertheless, the view from Mt. Nebo is a vision we are called to live by, if we are to live this life deeply and caringly, if we are to aspire to become most fully human or most nearly divine, whichever way you prefer to put it. And it is fundamentally different from the visions which really do rule the world as humans know it and seem always to have known it. It is a vision calling us to see each other not in terms of our differences, but in terms of those human or divine things which we hold in common, those yearnings that lie deep within us all.

It is a vision of the earth like that photograph taken from the moon, and we are called to live as if it were true. The Promised Land would be what the world would be like if everyone lived as if it were true. That is what I believe we are called to do: you and I and everyone who wants to try and become part of the solution rather than part of the continuing problem. That is the fundamental religious task before the world today: the task of finding, articulating, and living a vision of wholeness that can begin to bring us together.

I’ll give you two examples of more recent people who preached and tried to live by this vision. One you will know, the other you may not. I was told recently, though I have not read this myself, that the native Americans, or American Indians, had a wonderful policy that could teach us this greater vision. When they had to make a major decision for the tribe, and the grand council was called together, they were commanded to make the decision based upon the effects of that decision on the next seven generations of people. That’s about 150 to 200 years. Can you imagine what our world today would be like if all major decisions concerning the environment, social programs, and war were made taking into account the needs and benefits of the next seven generations? Or how grateful we would be if that had been the law of the land for the past five or six generations? There is a modern view from Mt. Nebo.

The second example is one that most of you will know. It comes from thirty six years ago: April 3rd, 1968, to be exact. It was in a speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., just a few days before he was murdered. You have probably heard these words, but unless you knew your Bible very well, you probably didn’t know just what they were referring to before. Here is what King wrote:

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top. I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.

And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.

So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

This story about Mt. Nebo is not as ancient or forgotten as we may have thought. And one of its messages is that we will be judged, you and I-both by ourselves and by others-according to the bigness of the vision we served with our lives. Long after Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson have been forgotten, Martin Luther King Jr. will still be remembered and quoted and missed, because he had a view from that mountain. And he proclaimed that promise, and lived that promise, even though he suspected that he, like Moses, would not live to see it fulfilled.

Neither will you or I. But we will be remembered according to the vision we served. And it is far nobler to struggle with a great vision than to champion a mediocre one. Think of the people you most cherish from your own lives and see if this isn’t true. They aren’t the clever or arrogant people, but those who reached out to the world around them as if they belonged to it, who acted as if we really were all together in this. You know those people from your own life, and you know-whether you would use these words or not-that in those special people the most sacred dimension of life was touched, and was brought to life.

We gather at this church and at many other churches today to ponder things like this, to think about them, but I want to say there is more to it than that. It is not just a mind-game, this religion business. There are things at the depth of life which call us, which make demands on us, which say to us “look, if you are to be serious about this life, you must care about it. You must care about the people who need you, and about the planet, which is your home. Whether you like it or not, whether it is intellectually interesting or not, there are things you are simply called to do, and you must answer that call!”

The view from Mt. Nebo is not the view looking back toward our own small group, trying to see the whole world in terms of only our own beliefs. It is looking ahead, to a place we have never been, to a vision of foreigners become friends, strangers become brothers and sisters, a place where the deep awareness of our commonalities is so strong that it can absorb our differences, the way it is done within healthy families and loving friendships.

We will not live to reach the Promised Land. That is not our goal. Our goal is to live to reach the vision, and to begin to live that vision out in our lives. We need each other. This community of Austin and its environs needs us. This country needs us. This desperate world needs us, every single one of us. We don’t need any more ways to be apart, we need ways to be together, and our world calls us to that task.

Partial visions in our community and our world must be replaced by more complete ones. Who will do it, if not us?

New moral perspectives are needed on so many issues of the day: the questions and problems raised by the AIDS epidemic, all of the issues surrounding abortion, programs for human services and the prioritizing of our local and national commitments, which must be guided by a more humane and moral vision. Who will do this, if not us?

There are hungry and desperate people in our town, in our country, and in our world. Who will care for them, if not us? And who will try to change the structures of the community, the country, and the world to help make them productive people with their own earned dignity-if not us?

Who will wipe their tears, who will reach out and touch them, if not you and I and the rest of us?

The view from Mt. Nebo is a view of the Promised Land. It is a metaphor. It uses geographical symbols and describes this Land as if it were out there. But you don’t get there in a car. For this is the language of religion, not geography, and like all religious metaphors, it points within and among us, not across some fields or oceans.

The view from Mt. Nebo is the vision of a coordinated soul, reunited with its own depths, and reaching out for completion, reaching out to clasp to its breast all of its long-lost brothers and sisters, reaching out in recognition and compassion to bring the human family together again, and to make of this place a home.

The journey begins here. It begins in our own hearts and souls. It can begin simply with a recognition, a feeling, a tear, and a touch. It seems a simple, even an ineffectual, beginning.

And what a grand vision: a world made whole, where a vulnerable and simple truth is honored more than powerful lies, where naked humanity trumps an ensconced hierarchy. It is a vision of what has been call a world of truth, justice and love, the kingdom of God, the Promised Land.

We won’t live to see the whole thing, ever. Neither did Moses, or Martin Luther King, Jr. But to be inspired by the vision, by the view from today’s version of Mt. Nebo, and actually to begin taking steps toward it – that view, and those steps, can transform all the lives they can touch. Even ours, even here, even now.