I saw the documentary
Ripples of Hope at the Heartland Film Festival. It’s about the
remarkable speech by Robert Kennedy at 17^th and Broadway
in Indianapolis to calm a crowd after the death of Martin Luther
King. It’s all the more poignant, as RFK would be gunned down
within two months. The night before King died, he was thinking about
our main passage this morning. Hear his words again: “I’ve
been to the mountaintop I’ve looked over and I’ve seen
the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to
know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
No matter how great we are, no matter how healthy we try to stay, we
are all mortal; we are all flawed, even Moses.

When I was in high
school, we were assigned to write our own obituary. It forced you to
write a script for an imagined future. I knew right away that I did
not want to stay in Western Pennsylvania. I didn’t imagine that
God would call me to be a pastor. From another end, many enjoyed the
Bucket List with Nicholson and Freeman as cancer patients who wanted
to do some things before they kicked the bucket. Some folks have a
bucket list that they check off as they achieve a heart’s
desire.

Few of us will go to
our eternal reward having checked off all of our imagined futures.
Even Moses did not get to enter the Promised Land after forty years
of wandering. I find it moving to see this great man being given a
panorama of the land he worked to claim, but would not live to cross.
Some of the rabbis imagined that Moses was even given a vision of the
future in the Promised Land for his people. Scripture gives us a
glimpse of the Promised Land of heaven as a lodestar day after day.

Part of a finding a
spiritual path in life is to live so as to imagine a eulogy. An
outstanding check on our words and actions is the reminder of what if
this is the last thing I say or do? We do well to want to aspire to
level of a life well-lived so that it can be the subject of a eulogy.
A long time ago, one of the pastors here opened the floor to memories
of family and friends for the first time, in part, because it was
hard for him to write a eulogy for the departed. We want to be
remembered, as an element of living on, also as an element of our
lives being more than mere footprints in the sand. When Abraham
Lincoln was in the midst of one his terrible depressive episodes, he
told a friend that the only thing that kept him from taking his life
was the thought that his name would be forgotten.

I hold to a theology
that assumes that God holds our lives in the divine hand, but also in
the divine heart. Nothing worth saving is ever lost in the life of
God. I would even go further. and say that nothing worth saving goes
without regard in this life. I imagine our lives as ripple in the
pond that interact constantly with other ripples moving out toward
the edge of the eternal. In large measure, Moses was defined by the
journey toward freedom he led, not the destination itself. That
purpose kept him going even against so many obstacles, including
forty years of wandering. No matter how uncertain our steps, no
matter how our course may zigzag back and forth, God will help us
arrive at our final destination, the Promised land of our dreams, the
Promised Land of our faith. In the mean time, we have a promised Land
that beckons for us now, in ways that gives us energy and hope, a
goal toward which we can work and reach out here in the wilderness.