Sermon - The Rev. Leah D. Schade

Moses on Mt. Nebo

Deuteronomy 3:23-28; 32:44-52

August 3, 2008

We've come to our last mountain in our tour of Old Testament peaks.  Today we are on Mt. Nebo, also called Pisgah, where Moses stands wistfully looking out over the Promised Land, knowing that this is as close as he'll ever get to it before he dies.  This mountain is a holy place for Jews, Christians and Muslim alike.  In fact, Pope John Paul II visited this site on his tour of the Middle East as part of his efforts to help these three feuding faiths begin to reconcile.  It is located just to the northeast of the Dead Sea, and from its height of 2680 feet you can see across to Jericho, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem. 

So there it is, all laid out for Moses – the Promised Land.  But it is a bittersweet moment.  You can't help but be filled with pathos, imagining this great prophet, this great leader of Israel standing alone on the mountain, the presence of the Lord surrounding him, the wind gently blowing his long, white beard, listening to the silence as he gazes across the vista. 

If you've ever been to the top of a mountain, you know the feeling.  You are aware that you're as high as you'll ever be, being granted a view of the surrounding landscape that fills you with feelings of majesty and awe.  And yet there is a certain sadness, knowing that you can't stay on the mountaintop forever.  Eventually, you have to come down.  The clean air, the pure view, the feeling of being so close to heaven - it will all be just a memory once you're back on level ground.  And for Moses, when he leaves this mountaintop, he knows he's going to his death.  He must have lingered there many long hours before the voice finally said, "Come on, Moses - it's time to go."  And heaving a heavy sigh, he tears his eyes away from this last, best view and begins his descent down the mountain.       

What makes this even more heartbreaking for Moses is the realization that he has failed.  Moses failed.  Now I'm not saying that Moses' mission failed.  His successor, Joshua, does bring the next generation of Israelites into the Promised Land.  And I'm not saying that Moses himself was a failure.  Because he did accomplish great things through the help of God.  He and his brother Aaron stood up to Pharaoh.  He led the Israelites out of Egypt.  He parted the water and witnessed his people crossing the Sea of Reeds on dry ground to escape the Egyptian army.  He ascended Mt. Sinai and received the Ten Commandments.  Through God's power he made water spring from a rock.  And he endured 40 years of wandering in the desert wilderness. 

But when it came to this last great hope, this last mission, Moses failed. He himself did not make it to the Promised Land.  Thousands of people he brought out from Egypt with him didn't make it either.  All that he had worked for those many years, and the goal he had wanted so desperately to accomplish - to arrive at Canaan and dwell there in the land flowing with milk and honey - he was not able to make it happen for himself.  He failed.

Does it cause you discomfort to hear that word?  Fail.  Failure.  Why is that word so difficult to hear, so difficult to say? 

No one wants to fail.  Getting a failing grade in school is the worst nightmare for most students.  We say someone who is divorced had a "failed marriage."  Failing at something you've tried really hard to do can cause feelings of embarrassment, disappointment, inadequacy, depression, and loss of self-esteem. Failure does not feel good.  It feels awful.  And yet it is a natural part of life.  Of course we must fail sometimes.  That's often how we learn our best lessons in life.

But our culture has what I would call an unhealthy fear of failure.  We're so driven to be the best, make the most money, win the game, to be perfect.  The basketball player LeBron James, when interviewed about his hopes for winning at the Olympics said, "It's the gold or it's failure," (Time Magazine, August 4, 2008, p. 5).  We will do anything NOT to fail.  Which can then lead us to compromise our values and our morals to the point where we are breaking commandments all over the place - lying, cheating, stealing, even murdering to avoid failure.

It was, in fact, Moses' fear of failure that led him to this agonizing ending in the first place.  It all started just as soon as they left Egypt. Despite all God had done, all the miracles God had worked to bring them out of Egypt, once they were across the Sea of Reeds they continually doubted God's care of them, whined and complained about their hardships, and blamed Moses for their predicament.  And as hard as Moses tried to withstand their constant bitterness and threats of mutiny, he finally reached his breaking point at Meribah where the people were so desperate for water in the desert, they threatened to revolt. 

But instead of allowing God to absorb all their negative energy, Moses took it into himself.  He was desperate to win their approval, to prove to them once and for all that he was a capable leader.  All of his self doubt, misgivings about his leadership skills, and questions about his own abilities overshadowed his trust in God.  In Numbers, Chapter 20, God tells Moses to use his rod to strike the rock to bring forth water.  But when he goes out in front of the people, he says, "Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?"  And with two strikes from his rod, water bursts from solid rock.  All seems well again.  The people are duly impressed with this miracle as they happily slurp away.

But here's the problem - it's what Moses says: "Shall we bring water for you out of this rock?", meaning he and Aaron.  He does not give the credit to God.  He uses the situation to salvage his own reputation; uses God's power to pretend he is the powerful one; manipulates the miracle to prove to his people that he is not a failure.  And because of this lack of faith in the real source of power, because of his fear of failure, Moses is doomed to die with the rest of his faithless generation in the land of wanderings, the wilderness of Moab, just at the edge of the Promised Land.

When we claim all the power for ourselves, when we make it look like we are the ones who accomplished this, that we are the clever ones, the talented ones, the ones deserving all the credit and recognition -- what we are doing is ultimately setting ourselves up for devastating failure at some point.  Because if the success is all on you, then when things go wrong, it's all on you as well.  Just ask any parent who has celebrated their children's accomplishments, living vicariously through their successes, and then are driven to rage and destructive disappointment when their child does not succeed or, worse, makes mistakes.  Ask any pastor who took all the credit when the church was filled to the brim and running like a well-oiled machine, and then beat themselves up (and allowed others to beat them up) when things started to go south. 

The flip side of this ego-driven hunger for success is the ego-devastating train wreck of failure.  Expectations that are too high coupled with faith misplaced in the wrong god, leads to a fall from a great height down into a sharp, hard place.  And we find ourselves shattered, wondering how we will ever pick up the pieces.    

The question then is:  What does it mean to fail and then to find a new way forward into life?  How can we learn to fall in a way that does not shatter us? Is there a way to fail and to suffer through the accompanying feelings of grief, sadness, anger, rejection, and hopelessness, and then to move through them into another phase of life?  

I had to ask myself those questions just four months ago when I failed to make it into the graduate schools that were my top picks.  When I was invited to Vanderbilt University back in January for interviews with the faculty, and I walked around that campus breathing in all that rarified academic air, it felt like I was on the mountaintop looking out on the future of my destiny.  And when I received the rejection letter two months later stating that there were only two slots, and I was third on the list . . . well, you can imagine my feelings of disappointment.  My ego took a big hit.  I felt like I was letting my family down, and worse, I had let myself down.  For about a week I experienced sharp pains from the gashes in my pride.

But I had to keep reminding myself that my prayer all along was, "God, your will be done.  Now, please understand I really, really, reeeaallly want this.  And you want this for me, too, doncha God?  You've seen how hard I've worked.  You know what I have to offer.  You know I'm trying to follow your call.  You know you wanna give this to me, right?  But. . . okay, I know, not my will, but thy will be done."    

So I had to trust that somehow God's will was being done, even in the midst of my failure.  And now, four months later, I have to say God has opened to me an even deeper sense of call regarding my hopes for graduate work.  God has led me in a way that has allowed me to shift the direction of my dissertation topic, sharpen my focus, and discover where my true calling might be.  That's not to say when I apply again this time around that I'll be successful.  But I'm starting to realize now that that's not the point.  The goal to which I am working is fueling my ministry now, not just for some future dream of success.  The end purpose for which I am striving is enlivening my faith at each step along the way, moment by moment. Will I be disappointed if I fail again?  Oh yeah.  And if I am successful will I celebrate?  Oh yeah.  But what's important is where I ultimately place my trust - is it in myself, or is it in God?

This does not mean we should prop up a false sense of humility.  If you did a good job and are complimented, be gracious and say thank you.  Fake modesty is a thin disguise for hidden pride.  If you have succeeded in something, celebrate it, feel good about it.  But remember the source of your talent and efforts, remember to give thanks to One who blessed you in the first place. 

And if you do mess up, if you do make a mistake, if you do, indeed, fail -- be honest about that as well.  Voice your disappointment, feel the sadness.  But give it over to God to absorb those emotions before they consume you with destructive tendencies. 

Here is where the model of Moses can be helpful.  What can we learn from Moses' failure?  When he stood on that mountaintop knowing he had failed, he did not whine about it.  He did not blame anyone.  He did not try to argue with God, negotiate, or fight against the decision that had been made.  He checked his ego and simply accepted what was.  He willingly passed the mantle of leadership onto Joshua, not desperately grabbing at the reins to secure his own thirst for power, as we see so many leaders do.  He entrusted his life and his death to God.

Kind of reminds you of another leader whose life ended on a mountain looking down at the followers who loved him, knowing that, at this moment, he had failed. His mission from God to bring light and love, forgiveness and justice into the world was ending ignominiously on the peak of Golgotha.  But three days later, his disciples learned that sometimes failure is not always a bad thing in the end.  Yes, it's painful and devastating when you're going through it.  But when you're going through it with God, when you're giving it all over to God, when you're trusting God to transform even the failure of death . . . you may just wake up to a whole new life come Sunday morning.

Amen.