RCL Easter 6C
5 May 2013
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Focus Text:
Deuteronomy 34.1-12
In 1954 my
father’s tour of duty in England was coming to an end. He was asked where he would like to be
re-assigned. Since he had been raised in
upstate New York, my father requested to be assigned at one of three Air Force
bases located in New Hampshire and Maine, close to where my grandparents lived
in the Hudson Valley. When the orders
arrived, my father must have had a moment of shock to discover that he, my
mother and I were to travel to Colorado Springs, Colorado, a fair distance away
from the northeastern United States.
So off we went
to Colorado where, in 1955, we were joined by my sister. As my sister and I were growing up, our
contact with grandparents, aunts and uncles was quite limited, but we were
fortunate to be ‘adopted’ by older people with whom my mother and father
worked, including a good number of folk from our parish church.
One couple,
Uncle Bill and Aunt Lil, as we called them, had a place in the old mining town
of Cripple Creek, some thirty miles to the west as the crow flies, but a longer
distance by mountain roads. Cripple
Creek had been the heart of the gold rush of the late 1850’s and early
1860’s. By the 1890’s Cripple Creek was
a bustling town, but by the time I was growing up, it had become a sleepy
mountain town with a rough side and a genteel side. When it rained, the dirt streets were
littered with pieces of soft turquoise, not gem-quality but of immense value to
a nine-year-old boy and his sister.
Just outside of
town stands Mt Pisgah. In the days of my
youth it had two claims to fame: a
famous graveyard containing the graves of many pioneers and prospectors and a
magnificent view of the mountains of central and southern Colorado. From its summit you can see the sharp profile
of the Sangre de Christo mountains in the south and the Continental Divide
further west. But if you turn and look
east, you see the pockmarks that are all that remain of the many gold mines dug
by the prospectors. These are the graves
of the hopes of so many who thought that they were going to make a fortune and
did not. For some of the prospectors the
holes they dug in the ground are the only legacy, the only sign that these men
ever existed.
I searched in
vain this week to find out why this mountain was called ‘Mt Pisgah’, the same
name that is sometimes used for the mountain from which Moses saw the Promised
Land he was not permitted to enter. Did
my Mt Pisgah earn its name during the heyday of the gold rush when hopes were
high and Cripple Creek seemed to be a ‘promised land’? Perhaps it was only called Mt Pisgah as the
boom went bust and people came to realize that they were not to enter the land
of promise. Of course, it could be both
at once, but the mystery continues.
Of the many
stories in the Bible, this story has always had an effect on me. Here is Moses, liberator of the people of
Israel, giver of the law, leader in the wilderness, cut off from the promise
towards which he has been working for forty years if the chronology of the
Bible is to be relieved. There is the
land, flowing with milk and honey, just within his reach, but he is denied
entry. When he dies, there will be no
grave, no monument to which people may travel to honour his memory. Or is there a legacy we do not readily
recognize?
Moses’ legacy
is found in the Torah and in the people to whom God has entrusted the
Torah. In generations to come the land
will be lost, regained, occupied, lost and restored again. In generations to come the Temple will be
built, destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed once again. But one thing remains constant, even in the
midst of the successes and failures, the victories and defeats, the moments of
greatness and the moments of persecution --- the Torah as God’s revealed word
to the people and the people as the agents of that word in time and space. Moses’ legacy is less a sacred place than it
is a way of walking with God through the chances and changes of human history.
For the early
apostolic community, the only legacy worth creating was the legacy to be found
in a people committed to following Jesus as ‘the way, the truth and the
life’. We hear in today’s reading from
Acts the story of Paul’s call to cross the waters that divided Asia from Europe
and to begin the Christian mission that led eventually to the first
missionaries crossing the English Channel.
We are Paul’s legacy, not some monument in stone, not even a tomb. We live in the spirit of the writer of the
letter to the Hebrews who penned these words to his community: “For here we have no lasting city, but we are
looking for the city that is to come.” (Hebrews 13.14). As much as each one of us seeks a legacy, a
lasting sign that we have lived, loved and mattered, the truth is that our only
legacy as Christians is a movement not a place.
This does not
mean that we treat our places of worship with contempt nor does it mean that we
do not need bases from which we strike out to take care of our neighbours and
neighbourhoods, from which we offer care for those in any need or trouble. It does mean, however, that we must always be
prepared to leave these beloved places behind if we find ourselves called to
move on, to travel towards that city that is to come, as followers of Christ,
our way, our truth and our life.
For just a
moment let us think of our dear friend, Sally Baker, who died on Friday at the
age of 92. When she was born in 1921,
women had only just been recognized as ‘persons’ in Canadian law and granted
the vote. When she was born in 1921,
Anglicans could still speak about ministry among ‘savage’ and ‘uncivilized’
peoples, a ministry to be led by young university-educated white males. But Sally knew how to travel and follow the
way, the truth and the life. She
embraced the many changes that our Christian community has undergone; I dare
say, she reveled in them. What will be
her legacy among us? We shall be her
legacy, a people who are not afraid to journey on towards the promised land of
God’s future.
Each one of us
will face our own moment on Mt Pisgah.
We shall look from its heights and may experience a moment of sadness as
we realize that we have not arrived at the destination towards which we thought
we had been striving all our lives.
Perhaps we may feel like the miners of Cripple Creek who looked down
upon the graves in which their hopes of riches lie buried. But I hope that when that time comes for me
and for each one of us, we shall be like Moses.
We shall look upon the promised land of God’s future and rejoice to see
God’s people continuing their journey towards it, sustained by all that each
one of us has contributed to that journey and guided by the Spirit who leads us
ever onwards. And we shall rest secure,
knowing that God will come and find us to bring us to that promised land in the
fullness of time. Amen.
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