One last hike (All Saints, 2026)

 

Texts: Dt. 34.1-12; Ps. 90.1-17; Hebrews 11

     Over the past few years, I’ve done quite a bit of hiking, in all types of conditions, from the sweltering summer heat to the bone-chilling temperatures of late January.  I get a kick out of being outside with friends, toiling to the top of a mountain, taking in the view and then hurrying down and driving off to a good restaurant.  Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.  In today’s first reading, we see Moses undertake one last hike – to experience his ultimate “mountaintop moment”.

    And what a moment it must have been.  There’s Moses – alone at the summit of Mt. Nebo, on the eastern side of the Jordan River.  What does he see as he looks to the West, and the South, and the North?  He beholds – somehow – “the whole land”, he even glimpses the waves of the Mediterranean (the “Western sea”) lapping against the coastline of what we now call Gaza.

     What a culmination to a very unconventional life.  When we look at the trajectory of Moses’ life, we notice that his “path” was anything but “straightforward”.  Rather, his life consisted of a series of roundabout adventures which often had him returning to places he had left behind – presumably, for good, but in reality, only until “circumstances” brought him back.  As an infant, in a desperate attempt to save his life from a genocidal Pharaoh, he had been placed by his mother in a reed-basket and set adrift on the Nile only to be discovered by a princess and – thanks to the cleverness of his big sister – entrusted to the care of a Hebrew wetnurse, which of course, turned out to be his own mother.  From home to the River, and then back again to his birthplace – the Jewish ghetto of Goshen.

     Eventually, the path of the young Moses would lead him to the royal palace and the halls of Egyptian power.  Around the age of 40, he came to understand that he was actually the son of slaves and a member of a people who had been subjected to forced labour for 4 centuries.  Upon acquiring this awareness, he chose violence as a means of defending his countrymen.  Despised by his fellow Jews and hunted as a fugitive from Egyptian justice, Moses ran away into the wild and settled into life as a shepherd and family man.  40 years went by.  And then, one day, he noticed a bush that was burning…and just kept on burning.  This previously nondescript bush had become – as the Celtic tradition says – a “thin place”, a place where heaven and earth touch, a “portal” into God’s dimension.  God was “there”, in the bush.  And God had a mission to entrust to Moses.  By the way, that’s the only reason God “shows up” in the Bible – to send people on missions.  Experiencing a revelation of God, for biblical characters, was rarely a “pleasant” experience.  An “epiphany” was always an interruption in the life of the person experiencing it.  And so it was with Moses.  “Go back to Egypt, and liberate my people from slavery”.  Do you remember how God said it?  “I have seen and heard what my people are going through; so YOU go and help them”.  This is often how it is in the life of faith.  There’s not a lot of room for passivity.  Many people are going to stand before God one day and they’re going to want to confront God because of his apparent lack of awareness or concern about different things.  But before they can blurt out their question, the look in God’s eye will pull them up short: “Why didn’t you do anything?”

     So, after some prevaricating and some lame attempts to wriggle out of his vocation (!), Moses heads back…to the Egyptian palace to tell the new Pharaoh to let his people go free.  Moses has come full circle, once again.  He had left the palace as a vigilante and disgraced prince, only to return as a hesitant prophet.  You are probably quite familiar with this chapter of the story – God and Pharaoh engage in a kind of duel.  God smites Egypt with a series of 10 plagues and the hard-hearted king finally relents and releases his Hebrew slaves…only to change his mind and send his army after them and then there’s the whole Red Sea incident.  Once the sea resumes its normal ebb and flow, the Hebrews find themselves on the eastern shore…as free people.  Free people, that is, facing a long – but doable – trek across the desert to the Land that God had promised to give to their ancestors – to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.  What could have been a journey of a few months turned into a four-decades-long meandering pilgrimage in the wilderness, as God’s free people refused to act on their freedom and chose rather to remain in the desolate wastelands, going around in circles, and, perhaps not surprisingly, fighting with each other – while the “land of milk and honey” remained all the while within tantalizing reach.  May God preserve us from such a fate!

     And so, forty years after leaving Egypt for a second time, Moses climbs Mount Nebo – he’s always climbing mountains, isn’t he? – and takes in the vista before him.  So many things must have gone through his mind as he gazed upon the Land where his ancestors had lived as nomads, moving their tents from water source to water source.  This was the land they had left to take shelter in Egypt during a famine – Egypt, that place of rescue which had eventually turned into a place of torment.  And now, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph were on the verge of returning home.  As Moses looked back over his own life, he must have seen how he had been caught up in God’s plan, just as Abraham and all the others had been.  What a life!  So many adventures, so many upheavals, so much frustration, so many moments of triumph!  It had all led him here, to this mountaintop.  He had led the people of God – and remained with them – over countless miles.  Now, his chapter in the story of Yahweh and his people was about to end.  This is extremely important.  Moses’ chapter was coming to a close, but the story of God and his people would go on, and on…all the way to us, who are gathered here today.  As Moses stood atop Mount Nebo, the people of God had come to a critical juncture.  The Israelites were camped on the edge of their destiny, poised between the past and the future. 

     Our community of St. Edward’s also finds itself at a critical juncture – at a crossroads.  One chapter is drawing to a close, and new possibilities are beckoning to us.  The story will go on – but what is the next step?  Once the Israelites realized that Moses wasn’t coming down the mountain this time, they spent a month mourning him.  During those 30 days, they had time to reflect on Moses’ life and contribution, as well as on their own past adventures as well as on what awaited them on the western side of the Jordan River.  I suggest to you that we find ourselves in a similar situation to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Nebo.  We are living a crucial moment during which I recommend that we undertake three things.

1.     LOOK BACK WITH GRATITUDE.

     As Moses stood atop the mountain, he must have been overwhelmed with gratitude.  Forty years previous, the people of Yahweh had been a nation of slaves, condemned to serve the whims of pagan kings who took themselves for gods.  But the God of Abraham had been faithful to his people.  They were now free, and the future was open to them.  4,000 years after Abraham was called to journey west from Mesopotamia, the people of the creator God is still here.  193 years after its founding, our community of St. Edward’s is still here.  There may well have been times when the continuing existence of St. Edward’s seemed unlikely.  But we’re still here.  We’ve come so far.  God has been good, and certain members of our community have been especially faithful – and stubbornly resilient – as they have laboured year after year to keep the doors open, the lights on and the people happy and nurtured.  Thank God for these people.  In time, we will thank and honour them appropriately.

     Each one of us should take time to look back over our lives and thank God for always journeying with us, providing for us, protecting us, picking us up time and again, and sustaining us day by day.  Looking back, we’ll probably realize that things didn’t always unfold the way we expected or wanted, but perhaps we also realize that it was for the best and perhaps we notice signs of God’s hand at work, even when our plans fell apart.  Perhaps we have experienced some “divine interruptions” during our own journeys.  Perhaps we’re still trying to make sense of certain things, and if so, that’s OK.  Understanding will come with time, or perhaps once we enter eternity and finally get the proper perspective on everything.

2.     LOOK AHEAD WITH HOPE.

     As Moses surveyed the length and breadth of the Promised Land, he must have been filled with hope.  What would this nation of people born in the desert become?  Our community has come this far.  But we haven’t come this far to only come this far.  We still have a long way to go.  Many adventures still await us.  There is much work still to do.  God still has a plan for his people and his world – for his world through his people.  There are people among us who have yet to experience their “burning bush moment”.  But they will…God will interrupt their lives and they will be sent on a mission of their own.  God is still calling women and men to go and set other people free.  That’s the job description, my friends.  God has seen and heard the sufferings of those people all around us, and he is sending you and I – us – to go and do something about it.  There is still hope because God still exists.  God is the creator – he is the source of life and he loves his world so much that he sent his Son to save the world, and Jesus is still calling and sending women and men into the world with authority and power to heal and liberate people who are enslaved – enslaved to addiction, to poverty, to homelessness, to despair, to loneliness, to mental illness, and torments of all kinds.  “Perfect love casts out fear”.  The more we come to understand the love of God, the less we will fear people and their pain and the more we will be moved with compassion for them.  There is hope.  Why?  Because God is here and because we are here – because God has given us his Holy Spirit.  God doesn’t give his Spirit just for fun or for thrills.  The Holy Spirit has been given to us so that we can get on with the work of the kingdom of God, the work that Jesus has shown us how to do.

3.     MOVE FORWARD WITH COURAGE.

     After mourning the death of Moses, the Israelites had to make a decision.  They couldn’t stay at the foot of Mount Nebo forever, and build museums and set up commemorative plaques and hold parades to commemorate “National Moses Day”.  They had to get up and move forward.  And so must we.  God is calling us forward.  God is calling us to be a light in this community, to be a place of hope, of healing, of spiritual vitality.  We serve a big God, and we must dare to dream BIG.  We must not limit our expectations of what God can do through us based on our previous experiences and perhaps our past disappointments.  “By faith…” our ancestors in the people of God took on incredible odds.  By the way, as members of the people of God, the odds are always stacked against us.  That’s why we need faith.  The God of the Bible is always doing his work despite the odds, despite the circumstances, despite the inadequacies of his people, despite the statistics, despite the trends, despite the consensus about the decline of mainline churches, despite everything.  We must have courage and move forward in faith.

     I want to say a word to those among us who belong to the “Moses generation”, that is to say, those who are upwards of 70 years old.  It may be tempting for you to adopt a cynical, bitter or resentful attitude towards many things that you have witnessed in the church over the years.  You may not have much hope left for yourself or for your church community.  First of all, I want to say thank you for your faithfulness, dedication and stubborn refusal to give up.  Secondly, I want you to know that you are still needed.  We need your prayers, your wisdom and perhaps even your cash.  The next generation coming up needs your support as they take on the challenges of tomorrow and as they strive to carry the work of the church forward into new territory.  We are all on the same mission, and the time is fast approaching for those of the Moses generation to pass the torch to the Joshua generation, and thus entrust the work to those whose time has come to step into the front ranks.

     My friends of St. Edward’s, we are at the crossroads.  We have an opportunity to move forward together, to take risks together, to work side by side dans les deux langues officielles du Canada.  There is much potential here – will we seize this moment to move into the next chapter of what God has in store?  Will we choose faith?  Will we choose courage?  God is with us.  Jesus is calling us.  The Spirit is moving in and among us.  Will we take the next step?  The choice is ours.  Amen.