Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Glory to you, Lord Christ.
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?
And he said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Now, while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this.
What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?
And they said to him, the son of David. And he said to them, and how is it then that David, by the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.
If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?
No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day, did anyone dare to ask him any more questions. The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: The Lord said to him, this is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, I. I will give it to your descendants.
I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.
Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord's command.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen. You may be seated.
490 years ago this month, in October of 1536, William Tyndale was executed as a heretic outside Brussels.
The charges against him were about his theology, but the work to which he gave his life was translating the Bible into English from the original Hebrew and Greek.
Translating it without the Church's permission was forbidden, so the work he did was in hiding on the continent.
Along the way, he made an enemy of King Henry VIII by writing against Henry's plan to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Tyndale published his New Testament in 1526, and in 1530, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, including the passage we've just heard. From the very end, he was still working on the rest when he was betrayed and arrested.
His last words, the story goes, were a prayer, Lord, open the King of England's eyes.
Within three years, Henry had ordered an English Bible placed in every parish church, built largely on Tyndale's translation and completed by his friends.
Tyndale knew something about dying within sight of the Finish line.
Since August, we have been reading through the story of Moses.
We have followed him from his birth to meeting God in the burning bush, through the plagues and the exodus from Egypt, to 40 years of wandering in the desert, 40 years of guiding a people who we are told were not an easy people to guide.
They got discouraged.
They strayed from God. They were impatient and untrusty.
But now they finally made it.
And God shows Moses a panoramic view of the Promised Land.
The land promised to their ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, is finally before them their home.
And Moses doesn't get to enter the promised Land.
He dies right there.
As interesting as I find the story of Moses, and I really, really do, whenever I hear it, there's this little voice at the back of my head saying, okay, but did it really happen?
When I was a teenager, I was at a youth retreat, and an adult from a different church got wind of my skepticism about the literal truth of the entire Bible, and she decided to sit me down and set me straight.
She was appalled when I told her that I don't believe that Manna actually literally appeared on the ground every morning for 40 years in the wilderness.
She told me I was on a slippery slope away from God, and here I am about to become a priest in the Episcopal Church.
I wonder if she would be surprised that I still read the Bible.
I imagine her asking me, if it's not all literally true, what good even is it?
My first time deeply exploring that question was in a religious studies class at Northeastern University.
Dr. Seta, my Bible professor, told us that it's difficult to know for sure if the Exodus happened.
If it happened at the scale that the Bible says it did, there should be archaeological evidence for it, and there doesn't seem to be.
And if it happened at a smaller scale, that's possible. The Egyptians probably wouldn't have written about this embarrassing period in their history. So it makes sense. We don't have evidence there.
So maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.
And if it didn't happen, there's one big question about it, right? Why did the Hebrews tell this story about themselves?
Why would you tell your children and your children's children that you're descended from enslaved people who spent 40 years wandering the desert?
Most cultures tell stories about themselves in which they're heroes and victors.
Why tell this story about your people?
And then we get to the detail I find most challenging.
God keeps Moses out of the Promised Land.
We don't get a clear answer on why exactly that is in the Book of Numbers, Moses strikes a rock to produce water instead of speaking to it as God has commanded him.
And in Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people that God won't let him into the promised land because God was angry with him on their account.
These explanations, taken on their own, honestly don't really satisfy me.
But the community of people who wrote and compiled Deuteronomy didn't have me in mind as their audience.
The Judeans who wrote this book are thought by some scholars to have written this chapter during the late exilic period when they were about to return home.
When I think about these ancient people telling this story of their patriarch waiting to go home just as they were, and not getting to make it there, it makes sense to me.
I'm sure those Judeans had experienced the deaths of leaders they loved before they were able to go back home by writing of a great prophet, the greatest prophet, being denied entry to the promised land.
Perhaps they're thinking of their own loved ones.
And perhaps they're saying that God was with Moses even there in the wilderness, just as God was with the Judeans in their exile in Babylon.
Another thing Dr. Seta taught me was that many of the nations the Babylonians conquered did not hold on to their identities. So certainly not to the present day, the way the Jews have managed to God stayed with the Judeans, even in exile.
Another contrast with other cultures of the time is that the Judeans were not afraid of remembering Moses, their greatest prophet, as a flawed man.
Most cultures would write of their heroes of their ancestors as mythologically spectacular.
The Judeans, though, don't need Moses to be flawless.
And it's not just Moses. The Hebrew Bible is full of flawed patriarchs, matriarchs, prophets, judges and kings.
These stories teach us that God is great enough to work with flawed people, even if the stories aren't literally historically true. I know as well as I know anything that that is true.
I've never met a perfect person, I don't think, but I have met my fair share of flawed saints.
There's one other thing I want us to hear from Moses this morning.
He has spent 40 years getting his people to this point and within sight of the land. He lays hands on Joshua and he hands the work over.
Moses doesn't get to see how the story ends. He has to trust that Joshua and the leaders who come after Joshua will carry on what he began.
More than that, he has to trust that God will keep guiding God's people after him.
There's a saying, a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
Moses planted trees.
So did William Tyndale.
He died with his Old Testament unfinished, and his friends took up his manuscripts and completed it.
Tyndale saw the promised land of an English Bible from a distance. And others brought the people in.
I think many of you probably know something about this.
Many of you have spent your lives on work that will outlive you.
And if you'll let me get a little more specific, many of you have been faithful to this church in ways that will keep bearing fruit long after you're gone.
Thank you.
I'll leave you with a.
What are you planting?
Who will you trust to tend it after you're gone?
I don't know if Moses was a real historical figure, and it doesn't matter much to me because this story is one of those trees.
Generation after generation planted it, tended it, and passed it on in exile and on the way home so that people they would never meet could sit under its shade. We can see their fingerprints on it. And we can see the way God has spoken through it over the centuries and continues to speak through it to us today.
Amen.
