Sunday: 7th Sunday after Pentecost C
Reading: Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

The Rev. Peter C. Lane

Deuteronomy 30:9-14

Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy is a speech about covenant relationship to a people on the borderland.The Israelites are on the Jordan River, on the border of the Promised Land after their forty years in the wilderness.Moses is giving his farewell speech. He is on the border of death.And, if you look at how the book of Deuteronomy was put together, you see that the speech was written centuries later when Israel was at another border, returning from long exile in Babylon.All of these were borders between promise and fulfillment for people who had not always been faithful.Remember that the Israelites had fashioned a golden calf when they lost faith, that most of their spies had despaired when first sent into Canaan, and that the people regularly complained.Moses is talking to a real people—a wayward people—a people on the border.At the cusp of something new, God was calling them back into relationship.

Borderland areas are difficult. It is often at these precarious junctures that we make decisions.And so Moses’ last speech reminds Israel about the covenant they had with God.The basics of that covenant were that God had initiated a relationship with God’s people.Israel’s obedience was to be a response to God’s redemptive grace.[1]God’s grace first, humanities obedience second.

That seems to be the thrust of Moses’ speech.But the 1^st thought in our snippet unsettles me.“The Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings…when you obey the Lord your God…”Moses says that if you obey you will prosper.He offers the three great signs of wealth in the ancient world: children, cattle and crops—kids, cows, and corn or in our world cars, condos and cash.All available to the obedient!And Moses says the reverse is also true.A few verses after our passage Moses makes clear that disobedience leads to turmoil.[2]The church has often embraced this interpretation.John Calvin said, “Scripture teaches us that pestilence, war and other calamities of this kind are chastisements of God, which he inflicts on our sins.”[3]That doesn’t sit well with me: obedience=prosperity and disobedience=turmoil.It doesn’t jive with my experience of the world.

Life is lived too much on the borderland for something to be so neat.Now, I know the logic makes some immediate sense.Those who do what they are supposed to often prosper.I did a triathlon yesterday in Dewitt, Iowa and got walloped by my grey haired father-in-law.A little more obedience to my training schedule might have saved me from the embarrassment.But, most of life is not like training for a triathlon.Most of life is much more precarious.

But, life is rich on that border.Some of the most faithful people I’ve known resided in that vague and undetermined place.[4]When I was a chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital I had the privilege of getting to know men who cared deeply for God. They listened intently, they sang songs with vigor, and they received the sacrament knowing it would nourish them.But, these were men who were to live out their lives on the border of sanity, behind locked doors due to serious and crippling mental illness coupled with lack of family resources.Schizophrenia and its like had caught these men off guard.The laugh of people at a neighboring table became peels of scorn.Voices in their head became as real as the voice of a sister or mother. I would have made a fool of myself if I would have gone in with Moses’ words and told them that if only they obeyed God would prosper them.They were obeying.

Unfortunately, many of these men’s scripts were written.Decades had passed since they had been outside the facility and likely the chaplain would do their funeral.Trenton Psychiatric Hospital exposed the fallacy of the obedience = prosperity, disobedience = turmoil theory.The suffering of the men I served was not God’s punishment for disobedience.To these men on the border, Moses’ words made no sense.And so the words confuse me.

Can these words once spoken, now speak again?Do Moses’ words make sense in our own borderlands?The borderlands between sickness and health, between youth and infirmity?Do they make sense in the borderlands of Hyde Park?Between black and white, between million dollar homes across the street from the almost 90% low income Shoesmith school?[5]Does Moses make sense in that vague place between faith and doubt that sometimes longs for the Nicene Creed and sometimes loves the Affirmation of Faith?Possibly.

God doesn’t dole out prizes for first place.Our obedience does not affect God’s grace. My Old Testament Professor Pat Miller explained that the logic of covenants is that everything about the relationship is based on the priority of God’s loving-kindness.Curse is not the final word.Moses words can only possibly make sense if we see them in the context of the covenant and as delivered to a people at a precarious life juncture.It makes the words much less neat.A call to obedience in the light of God’s grace often comes at places where things are complicated. God’s grace is at the borderlands. This text arises out of the harsh realities of disobedience, judgment or exile.It must find that place in our lives.I once was talking to a wonderful woman who was dying.She told me that maybe God’s way of making her prosperous was allowing her to die.

Moses was wrong to make prosperity and pain so simply derived.He was right to call people back to God at the borderlands of their life.God doesn’t use the carrot and stick of material success and failure.God does initiate relationship with us through redemptive grace and calls us towards obedience out of that grace.And God often calls us most loudly when we are in life’s vague and uncertain places, when we have not yet received the blessing of the Promised Land, but are stuck in the borderlands.Just ask Moses.

AMEN.