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Title: Seeing in the Dark
Date: Oct 26, 2008ct 26, 2008
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
Izbrano poglavje ne obstaja!

Texts: Deut 34:1-12Deut 34:1-12
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
The Death of Moses ^{34 1} Sometime later, Moses left the lowlands of Moab. He went up Mount Pisgah to the peak of Mount Nebo, x Mount Pisgah ... Mount Nebo: Mount Nebo was probably one peak of the ridge known as Mount Pisgah. which is across the Jordan River from Jericho. The Lord showed him all the land as far north as Gilead and the town of Dan. ² He let Moses see the territories that would soon belong to the tribes of Naphtali, Ephraim, Manasseh, and Judah, as far west as the Mediterranean Sea. ³ The Lord also showed him the land in the south, from the valley near the town of Jericho, known as The City of Palm Trees, down to the town of Zoar. ⁴ a ; b ; c . The Lord said, “Moses, this is the land I was talking about when I solemnly promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that I would give land to their descendants. I have let you see it, but you will not cross the Jordan and go in.” ⁵ And so, Moses the Lord's servant died there in Moab, just as the Lord had said. ⁶ The Lord buried him in a valley near the town of Beth-Peor, but even today no one knows exactly where. ⁷ Moses was a hundred twenty years old when he died, yet his eyesight was still good, and his body was strong. ⁸ The people of Israel stayed in the lowlands of Moab, where they mourned and grieved thirty days for Moses, as was their custom. Joshua Becomes the Leader of Israel ⁹ Before Moses died, he had placed his hands on Joshua, and the Lord had given Joshua wisdom. The Israelites paid attention to what Joshua said and obeyed the commands that the Lord had given Moses. Moses Was a Great Prophet ¹⁰ There has never again been a prophet in Israel like Moses. The Lord spoke face to face with him ¹¹ and sent him to perform powerful miracles in the presence of the king of Egypt and his entire nation. ¹² No one else has ever had the power to do such great things as Moses did for everyone to see.

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, Ps 90, I Thess 2:1-8ss 2:1-8
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
Love Makes Everything Beautiful She Speaks: ^{2 1} I am merely a rose e rose: The traditional translation. The exact variety of the flower is not known, though it may have been a crocus. from the land of Sharon, a lily from the valley. He Speaks: ² My darling, when compared with other young women, you are a lily among thorns. She Speaks: ³ And you, my love, are an apple tree among trees of the forest. Your shade brought me pleasure; your fruit was sweet. ⁴ You led me to your banquet room and showered me with love. ⁵ Refresh and strengthen me with raisins and apples. I am hungry for love! ⁶ Put your left hand under my head and embrace me with your right arm. ⁷ Young women of Jerusalem, promise me by the power of deer and gazelles f deer and gazelles: Deer and gazelles were sacred animals in some religions of Old Testament times, and they were thought to have special powers. never to awaken love before it is ready. Winter Is Past She Speaks: ⁸ I hear the voice of the one I love, as he comes leaping over mountains and hills

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, Matt 22:34-46Matt 22:34-46
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
The Most Important Commandment ³⁴ After Jesus had made the Sadducees look foolish, the Pharisees heard about it and got together. ³⁵ . One of them was an expert in the Jewish Law. So he tried to test Jesus by asking, ³⁶ “Teacher, what is the most important commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ . Jesus answered: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. ³⁸ This is the first and most important commandment. ³⁹ . The second most important commandment is like this one. And it is, “Love others as much as you love yourself.” ⁴⁰ All the Law of Moses and the Books of the Prophets h the Law of Moses and the Books of the Prophets: The Jewish Scriptures, that is, the Old Testament. are based on these two commandments. About David's Son ⁴¹ While the Pharisees were still there, Jesus asked them, ⁴² “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose family will he come from?” They answered, “He will be a son of King David.” i son of King David: See the note at . ⁴³ Jesus replied, “How then could the Spirit lead David to call the Messiah his Lord? David said, ⁴⁴ . ‘The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right side j right side: The place of power and honor. until I make your enemies into a footstool for you.’ ⁴⁵ If David called the Messiah his Lord, how can the Messiah be a son of King David?” ⁴⁶ No one was able to give Jesus an answer, and from that day on, no one dared ask him any more questions.

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It’s the end for Moses. He led Israel out of Egypt and spent the rest of his life wandering in the wilderness. The Lord takes him up the mountain top of Nebo and shows Moses the promised land. Moses gets to see it before he dies, but he doesn’t get to live in it. His life has been one of waiting, on the verge of entering the Promised Land. A life of profound patience.

That’s what I want us to think about today: patient hope. That’s the story of Moses. He wanders and never receives the promise. But he hopes and leads Israel in hope.

Fast-forward to April 3rd, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee. The small crowd that gathered at Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ) that evening heard the best sermon ever preached on our passage from Deuteronomy 34:1-12Deuteronomy 34:1-12
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
The Death of Moses ^{34 1} Sometime later, Moses left the lowlands of Moab. He went up Mount Pisgah to the peak of Mount Nebo, x Mount Pisgah ... Mount Nebo: Mount Nebo was probably one peak of the ridge known as Mount Pisgah. which is across the Jordan River from Jericho. The Lord showed him all the land as far north as Gilead and the town of Dan. ² He let Moses see the territories that would soon belong to the tribes of Naphtali, Ephraim, Manasseh, and Judah, as far west as the Mediterranean Sea. ³ The Lord also showed him the land in the south, from the valley near the town of Jericho, known as The City of Palm Trees, down to the town of Zoar. ⁴ a ; b ; c . The Lord said, “Moses, this is the land I was talking about when I solemnly promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that I would give land to their descendants. I have let you see it, but you will not cross the Jordan and go in.” ⁵ And so, Moses the Lord's servant died there in Moab, just as the Lord had said. ⁶ The Lord buried him in a valley near the town of Beth-Peor, but even today no one knows exactly where. ⁷ Moses was a hundred twenty years old when he died, yet his eyesight was still good, and his body was strong. ⁸ The people of Israel stayed in the lowlands of Moab, where they mourned and grieved thirty days for Moses, as was their custom. Joshua Becomes the Leader of Israel ⁹ Before Moses died, he had placed his hands on Joshua, and the Lord had given Joshua wisdom. The Israelites paid attention to what Joshua said and obeyed the commands that the Lord had given Moses. Moses Was a Great Prophet ¹⁰ There has never again been a prophet in Israel like Moses. The Lord spoke face to face with him ¹¹ and sent him to perform powerful miracles in the presence of the king of Egypt and his entire nation. ¹² No one else has ever had the power to do such great things as Moses did for everyone to see.

. It would be Martin Luther King Jr.’s last sermon before he was killed.

I read the commentaries this week on our bible passages. They’re usually not helpful. I don’t know why I even try. It was even worse this week because what they say is so absolutely uninteresting once you have King’s voice echoing in your head. I listened to his sermon 6 or 7 times this past week. I couldn’t stop. And I think the best thing I can do for a sermon is to have you listen to it. But it’s long. Around 45 minutes. We’ll listen to the last 2 minutes. The sermon title is “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

If you have a chance, you should watch the last few minutes of his sermon on YouTube. It’s amazing. King comes to the end of his sermon. The crowd is ecstatic. The people sitting behind him are on their feet—cheering, clapping, stomping. He preaches his last line, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Then he turns away from the crowd, away from the pulpit. A couple friends who are clapping and jumping around try to grab him. But King shrugs them off, walks past them, and collapses into a chair. He looks exhausted or disoriented—maybe some of both.

King once said that “the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony.” That’s what he said when he finally spoke out against the Vietnam War. A vocation of agony. That must have been the case for King when he collapsed into his chair while everyone cheered. He couldn’t enjoy it. He was in agony. Like Moses, he goes to the mountaintop, sees the wonders of the Promised Land, the glory of the Lord. And falls into the background while the people rejoice.

Like I said before, King delivered that sermon on the evening of April 3rd, 1968. He was killed the next day. He spoke the truth—maybe more true than he knew—when he said in his sermon, “I’ve been to the mountaintop… And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. But I may not get there with you.”

I may not get there with you. Like Moses, Martin Luther King wandered through the wilderness, the wilderness of the United States—definitely not the Promised Land. King knew that. I don’t think he had any illusions about this country turning itself around. That wasn’t his hope. King had a dark hope.
The hope he offered didn’t ignore the darkness of the world. He didn’t run or hide from the troubling reality in the United States. We don’t live in a very good place. King did not have any illusions about the world getting better in due time. Here’s what he says earlier in his sermon: “The world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around.” He’s not very optimistic. King is honest about the darkness. But listen to his very next line: “But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”

Only when it’s dark outside can you see the stars. What kind of hope is that? I thought I should learn a little bit about stars. So I looked up starts on wikipedia. Very interesting stuff. Does anyone remember what you learned in astronomy? How long does it take for a star to form? Here’s what I found out. The formation of a star begins with a gravitational instability inside a molecular cloud, often triggered by shockwaves from supernovae or the collision of two galaxies. Then around 10 million years of gravitation contraction—a very long time. That produces what’s called a Protostar. Some more stuff happens for another 100,000r 100,000
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
Izbrano poglavje ne obstaja! Štetje svetopisemskih vrstic se začne z ¹! Vrstica ⁰ ne obstaja!

years, and then you have a star.

So, all that to say, stars take a long time to form. They don’t happen overnight. In the same way, hope doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not like you wake up one morning and decide to be hopeful. Hope takes years to form. For Israel, hope is learned in the wilderness as they spend 40 years trusting God. Hope takes time. It’s something we learn. Hope is something we learn by waiting, sometimes forever, like Moses.

This is also true of Martin Luther King’s hope. He and the hope he preached didn’t come from nowhere. He didn’t wake up one morning and have a dream. He learned how to dream from a movement of black Baptist women. Ella Baker was one of those women. She’s somewhat of a local—grew up in Littleton, North Carolina and graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh. Ella Baker had this to say about King: “the movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement.” King didn’t create the Civil Rights movement. He was product of it. The civil rights movement gave King something to talk about.

The Civil Rights movement arose out of the ordinary work of African-American churchwomen. They cared for one another, raised each other’s children, provided meals for the needy. They created communities of mutual aid; they ate together and cooked in each other’s kitchen. As Ella Baker once said, “If you share your food with people, you share your lives with people” (quoted in Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, p. 57). Those communities of mutual aid and care were the birthplaces of the Civil Rights movement. It took lots of work, lots of patience, lots of messy relationships. But it exploded into a movement of hope. That’s the movement that gave Martin Luther King something to say. Hope happens in the patience of shared meals and shared lives.

It takes time to learn how to see hope, just like it takes a long time for a star to form. There is no hope without patience; there is no hope without waiting. That’s what Moses shows us. He wandered in the wilderness. But he and Israel wandered with hope. They had hope because they learned to trust God, and know that God’s promises would come, even if it took forever.

(pause)

With Moses we go up to the mountaintop. We are at the edge of the wilderness looking out upon Promised Land. Hope is a path on the edge of the wilderness, patiently awaiting the promises of God. Hope is a path of unswerving trust that God has not abandoned us in the wilderness. Hope is not a feeling. Our hope doesn’t depend on whether or not the world is getting any better. Ultimately, hope is a way of seeing; hope is a way of seeing in the dark.

Our gathering for worship is not a distraction from this plague of darkness. We aren’t here to ignore what’s going on in the world. Instead, worship is our training, it’s how we train our eyes, it’s how we tune our senses; it’s a way of disciplining our attention. Worship is how we learn to see the stars in the darkness. Worship is where we begin to see how God is at work in our dark world. God is in the long-term business of forming stars, places of hope, places that burst into new life.  All in God’s mysterious timing. We patiently wait with hope. (The last two paragraphs paraphrase Nicholas Lash, Seeing in the Dark, pp. 30-31)

How do we know that this is true? How do we know that God is at work even when things go from bad to worse? We know it’s true because the hope of the world came from the least expected place: Mary’s womb. And when that hope was killed on a cross 30 years later, hope emerged another unexpected place: the darkness of a tomb

King is right. “Only when it’s dark outside can you see the stars.” Our hope comes from Mary’s travail; hope comes from the empty tomb. Hope comes to us in Jesus, the one who told us that he would never leave us nor forsake us. To live in this hope means that we do what the Lord commands—to love God and neighbor, as we hear in our passage from Matthew—even when the world is falling apart. That’s what King said in his last sermon: “It doesn’t matter with me now… I’m not concerned about that now… I’m not worried about anything now. I’m not fearing any man. For mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”