Pasadena Presbyterian Church Sermon Text
November 23, 2003

"The Long View"
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Mark Smutny

Scripture:  Deuteronomy 34:1-4; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-16, 39-40; 12:1-2

I have let you see with your eyes, but you shall not go over there.

- Deuteronomy 34:1-4

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.  If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.

- Hebrews 11:13-16b

Today is Celebration Sunday when we give thanks to God for wonderful response of the congregation to the stewardship campaign, In the Light of Grace.   This effort has been founded on the principle that we are not raising money for an operating budget, but that our giving is a faithful response to a gracious God, as are all our ministries.  I want to thank each one of you who have pledged so generously, and especially the Stewardship Committee; the volunteers; Nancy Davidson and Bob Lodwick, the people who gave such powerful testimonials; the persons who agreed to be profiled and who spoke with such candor and commitment; Evelyn Thomas, who conducted the interviews; Bob Thomas for producing the mailers and design work; and the church staff.  Thank you. 

As Betsy Bartscherer, Chairperson of the Stewardship Committee, said earlier, the response to the campaign has been very good.  Our financial future is looking better.  The past year has been financially stressful for the church with the loss of a major tenant last December. However, we've recently signed two major leases, the stewardship campaign is looking good, the economy may be on the upswing. 

We have an important witness and vital ministry in this congregation.  There is so much good that happens because of this church and its witness.  We are getting stronger.  One indicator of our growing vitality - certainly not the only one - is that PPC's church membership, once the third largest in the denomination, bottomed out a couple of years ago at 621.  Now we're back up to 770, a 12.5% increase in official members. 

There is much to celebrate here at PPC.  Blessings abound and we are grateful.  This Thursday at our table, we will look back on the year and give thanks for the abundance we enjoy: family, friends and this church.  I hope you will join us in prayers of gratitude.

As it turns out, today is not only Celebration Sunday and the Sunday before Thanksgiving, an obvious serendipitous connection, it is also the last Sunday of the church liturgical year, not that many pay much that much attention.  The fiscal year and the calendar year are more firmly rooted in our consciousness, even to church people.  On the other hand, preachers and music and worship planners do pay attention to such things.  Next Sunday begins Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year with all the hope that gathers around Advent and Christmas. 

Such endings and beginnings afford preachers the opportunity to prognosticate about the future, an enticing, if dubious venture.  The former senior editor of the New Yorker magazine, William Shawn, used to tell his non-fiction writers that the world's second worst topic was the future: "Hard to tie down, the future could too easily come loose and take off in unexpected vectors."   "The worst topic," he said, "is the Loch Ness monster." 

Nonetheless, as one of the chief cheerleaders of this congregation (pastors do many things that are buried in the fine print of our job descriptions, including cheerleading) there is an obligation to extol the virtues of our future, even when we can't remember whether its three or four meetings we have the next day.  So I will attempt to outline the future.

As it turns out, the Capital Campaign Committee has entitled its case statement for next year's capital campaign, Building Sacred Space for a Bright Future.  I believe the future will be bright, though I think my optimism has more do to about who God is than who we are.  It will be a bright future, God's future.

As it turns out, this Wednesday morning the Strategic Planning Task Force is meeting with the pastoral staff to plan strategically all morning.  We will take the results from the class Designing the Church We Want and fashion plans to present to the Session and to you, soon, February 15th, I think is the date.  Strategic planners are future-oriented types of folks.  We expect the future will be bright, God's future.

So as we give thanks for your commitments in the light of God's grace, as we give thanks on Thanksgiving Day for God's provision in our lives, and the vitality and witness of this church, there's lots of talk and plans at PPC about the future.

One of the challenges about talking about the future is that we have such wildly different opinions about the past.  One of the keynoters at the annual Covenant Network of Presbyterian conference I attended in D.C. a few weeks ago, Patrick Henry, had this to say about history's trajectory:  "I am more agnostic than many theologians about history's direction.  For me, the jury is out on whether history is a decline from a golden age, a story of progress, a circle, a spiral, or just one damn thing after another." (1)

When it comes to history in general, and church history in particular, it really depends on your point of view.  Some are certain that the year of my birth, 1955, must have been the apex of the golden age, particularly in the Presbyterian Church, and it's been all downhill ever since.  Sunday schools were overflowing.  Mainline Protestant churches enjoyed a cultural hegemony not seen since. Our complexions  looked pretty much alike, within each congregation.  There were no controversies about anything.  Then in 1956 (the year of Dr. Barbara's birth), women were first permitted to be ordained as ministers.  Some of us believe, that it has gotten better and better because of that propitious year.  It depends upon your point of view.

On the other hand, in the year of my birth others who hadn't participated in one group's "Golden Age," began to wonder if some day the "Golden Age" in church and society might be brown and black and yellow, as well as blond and golden. 

In the year before my birth, Brown vs. the Board of Education had just been handed down, eventually leading to the desegregation of public schools. 

A decade later in 1965, the most liberal immigration policies in the history of the Republic were enacted, helping to make Southern California what it is today: 180 languages, a multicultural stew pot, an experiment into whether one of the most pluralistic, culturally and religiously diverse city in the world will either learn to get along or tear each other apart.  The jury is still out. 

Nearly five decades later, the church - this church and other churches - are beginning to experiment with the notion that to bear the name of Christ and to be the most segregated institution in America is not only hypocritical and racist, but spiritually bankrupt.  I believe we have come into this experiment not because of progressive politics or demographic studies, but because of who God is. 

Some of us have come to believe that the Golden Age is not back then, right now or in the  future.  The Golden Age isn't about us, what we have done or left undone.  The future, like the past, is not about us, it's about God.  Whether history's direction is an ascent, descent, spiral or one damn thing after another, doesn't really matter.  This is about God and God's time and what we do with our time within it.  It's about what we do with our precious time.

Which brings us to this bittersweet text of Moses' last moments of his time on earth and the only future that really matters.  God brings Moses to Mount Pisgah where God has him survey the land of promise, Palestine, like he was on Mount Wilson looking over the San Gabriel Valley.  From the mountaintop God tells him, "I have let you see with your eyes, but you shall not go over there." (Deuteronomy 34:4)   The first five books of the Bible and Moses' life all come down to this sad ending and hope-filled beginning. 

The future will be bright, but Moses will not being going there.  From the mountaintop, God gives Moses a telescopic tour of the promised land, the land which Moses and his people have sought for 40 years.  It is the culmination of his career, the apex of his deepest desire.  He is able to see the land that God had promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and their ancestors, a land overflowing with milk and honey. 

The leader would see the future, but he would not go there. "I will let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there."  Moses does not make it.  He dies in the land of Moab.  No stone marked his grave.  No monument commemorated his courage.  He was mourned for the requisite 30 days and the people of Israel move on.  They don't look back.  They enter the land under a new leader, Aaron, and get on with the business of being the people of God.

It doesn't seem right or fair.  After all that hard work, you'd think Moses would get a break.  Maybe he should have been carried down to a Palestinian oasis, placed in a hammock and be allowed to watch people put into place the vision of a land marked by mercy, compassion and justice, where the poor are rich, the stranger welcomed and peace shines like the morning sun. 

Of course, we know it doesn't turn out that way.  With 20/20 hindsight, it is possible to return to Mount Pisgah look across history and see a land of lost opportunities, a desecration of promises made, a violation of covenants vowed, a dimming of a bright future that will never be enjoyed by those who most deserve it. 

We struggle to the mountaintop only to discover that "The future," to use the gem from Yogi Berra, "ain't what it used to be."   The land of promise isn't all milk and honey.  The wine turns to vinegar, the milk sours and to get to the honey, you first have to get through the stinging bees.  Obstacles get in the way, problems abound and everyone seems, well, terribly human.  The poor still get trounced, the widows forgotten and peace edges in only occasionally, between our current war and the next.  It would be tempting to stay back on Mount Pisgah and die a little death.

How many times have we wondered, "Can't life be easier?  I only want to enjoy a decent income, raise a family, watch my grandchildren succeed, enjoy retirement, lower my taxes and stay healthy.  Can't the world ever resemble something like peace and justice, mercy and compassion?  There's the perpetual trouble in Israel/Palestine, the war in Iraq sure looks like a quagmire, and the state of California, when will it get better?   After our great grandchildren pay off the debt?"

The landscape from Mount Pisgah looks a little like most of the rest of history, a mixed bag at best, but there is no turning back, only going forward.  Of course, some will choose to remain behind, erect a shrine to what used to never be, and shrivel up and die, if not in the body, definitely in the soul. 

If the future is to be bright, we must look to reasons other than human ones to give us hope or as the Apostle Paul says, "In Christ we no longer look at anyone (or anything) from a human point of view" (II Corinthians 5:16).

Mount Pisgah was not only the end of Moses, it was the beginning of a new day for his people which includes us, for in faith we are his offspring.  For whether the future in human terms is a spiral, a bell curve, a golden age that never was, a cascading descent into Hades or an unstoppable march into progress, we know "the future ain't what it used to be" but it is God's future.  Despite its ambiguity, the future is God's future.  Our time is in God's hands and we can either choose to embrace that time with faithfulness or we can shrink and go back, even though there is no going back, except to die.

We look out over the landscape of God's promise and know that our sight is incomplete, our plans partial, our understanding imperfect.  We look with less than 20/20 vision, but our faith is no less pure. We look to the one whose vision is always clear.  We look with the eyes of the heart, the conviction of the spirit.  We see through a lens dimly of a land where "tears are wiped away, where death and pain, dying and mourning are no more, for the former ways have passed away." (Revelation 21:4)

"Behold, I make all things new!" (Isaiah 40:1) we'll read, hear and proclaim next Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent.   We'll begin another round of preparation for the Prince of Peace, not because injustice will have disappeared, or that none of our loved ones will ever die, or peace will break out everywhere.  Children will still be lost, marriages will fracture, peace will still be only a dream in far too many places. 

But for those with the eyes of the heart, the eyes of faith, it will be a real dream and we will walk into that dream.  Because we see the vision of what God intends, we will walk into the promised land where clay clings to our all too human feet. We will feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, pray for peace, mess it up far too much, seek forgiveness, and keep at it again and again, step by step, until we breathe our last, confident that those that come after us will continue the journey. 

The goal is the journey, not the destination.  We can only see glimpses of the vision that God sets before us.  Any dimwit can look at the world and the morass we've made of it, and see the vast chasm between what God intends and what is, be terrified, turn back and give up.  It takes a special kind of dimwit, a fool for Christ, to look at that same world, and say, "Let's go down into the promised land.  Let's do our part in the precious time God has given us to bring love as a weapon against the terror of fear, to kindle hope for the despairing, healing for the injured, hospitality to the unwelcomed, and forgiveness to the contrite of heart."  This foolishness, of course, is a gift from God.  It is a knowledge that the world can neither give nor take away. 

The Epistle to the Hebrews puts it this way, as its author reflected on all of those who ventured out in into new lands equipped only with God's vision and faith, none of whom arrived at history's final consummation that we might enjoy the goodness of God.  He writes, "All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.  If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one" (Hebrews 11:13-16b)

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice." (2) Some believe progress is being made. Others believe we're going to hell in a handbasket.  The future, like history, may very well be one damn thing after another.  The future surely ain't what it used to be.

The long view is that it is God's future, the One who faith proclaims is the "alpha and omega, the beginning and end of all that is and was, and shall ever be." (Revelation 22:13)  So run down from the mountaintop.  Plunge into the rivers of life, cross over into the land of both clay and promise.  Love again, hope again, forgive and be forgiven, step out in faith and live the vision we see only dimly.  "Run with perseverance the race that is set before you, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith," until you find your rest.  With God's help.  Amen.  

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Patrick Henry, Theological Reflections on Yogi Berra's 'The Future Ain't What It Used to Be," New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., November 2, 2003.  See www.covenantnetwork.org.

(2) Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

(c) Copyright 2003 by Mark K. Smutny.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.