Unifying Theme:
God has the power to mold and direct His creatures;
God appeals to His creation to act on the basis of love.
Rewards for the Righteous
The Deuteronomy passage that we read this morning is Moses last message, his last lesson to his people. He will not and cannot by command of God, go with them into the promised land. He will be buried in the land that God's people are standing on, looking into their promised land, their land of promise. And Moses is not going with them.
The Exodus story gives us an explanation why Moses is not going, that is not very satisfying. And perhaps the real reason is that God's call to Moses, that Moses's job, was to get them to this point of a new future. It will fall to others of God's servants to do the work of establishing the Israelites in Canaan. Moses job was to shepherd the people to this point just as an architect produces plans for a house, but does not build it. Other skills, other knowledge are required for building a nation than would be required to shepherd it through the desert. Sometimes the reward for a job well done is the end of the job. There is a passing of the baton, a changing of the guard. What looks like an end, or even a failure, is really just a change.
We often think from our ideas of progress that the past that is overcome was bad, somehow inferior. We might thing that sitting around a fire and waiting for our pig to roast is inferior to being home alone putting our packaged sausage in the microwave.
But that idea of progress ignores the value of a community working together to find, prepare and eat a meal. It ignores the satisfaction of sharing, the appreciation of the work required to create a meal or an event; it covers up the years of science and hard work by many people to make packing and processing, microwaves, trucks and the many things that go into being able to put a package of sausage into a device and eat it hot within seconds.
The same is true in politics and history. We forget what it has taken to get here. We forget what the trajectory of history is from our narrow perspective of our lives or even where and what we are today.
So the Moses and Dr Kings of our age are shown a glimpse of a future that they may not enter. That one arrives at the gate to a new future, is the reward. God offers a view into the future; God takes them to the mountaintop. God shows them that the future is different from the past or present but does not negate that past or present. The future stands on the shoulders of those in the past. The future is the fulfillment of this present and that past. Just as Jesus says that he comes to fulfill the law – to end it and start a new era.
My grandmother was at an earlier time of change, a time of awakening. Iris Israel was her name. She knew early that she had a calling. She was a teacher at fifteen. The hired teacher in their one room schoolhouse had a family emergency and returned East. Iris was the one student chosen out of her twenty two classmates to teach the remainder of that year. She swallowed her fear of teaching and managing the behavior of older students. Iris was able to command their respect and to teach the well what each of her students needed to thrive. She stayed and taught for the next five years.
She also got her preaching license at sixteen from the Methodists, the only denomination that would offer her one. Iris had been guest speaker in the revival tents across northern Missouri and Iowa for two years already. She played the piano for these revivals as well, having memorized the entire Rodeheaver Gospel Songs for Sunday School and Church. The revival tents brought an ecstatic, joyful gospel message of God’s love and abundance. People attended because it was a relief from the fire and brimstone messages they got from their home churches with their staid Dimsdale style preachers.
Iris perfected the art of the back of the envelope sermon at this time. A peppering of gospel verses, hymn verses and popular poetry was the skeleton for a simple and usually triumphant message about faith and love overcoming fear and hate. Her inspiration and a frequent trope in her sermons was Edwin Markham’s poem:
“He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
Iris continued her call in the face of criticism. She did what many women did. She married a preacher. She was clever in that she chose a biblical archeologist. My grandfather, Owen, preferred to be on digs in the Holy Land than preach sermons. Owen struggled to craft each sermon and they were apparently rather dull, academic pieces. Often Iris was called upon to be the substitute preacher.
When she was in the cranberry bog country of Massachusetts in 1938, she served Owen’s Methodist church while he was away on an extended dig in Palestine. It was 1940 and the beginning of WWII. The Nazi’s were coming and as risky as it was, Owen remained. The male pastor of the Congregational Church in the next town, chose to be a chaplain and go with the troops to Europe in mid-December 1941. Iris, the only preacher willing to substitute, took on this Congregational Church. She led the Christmas services at both churches in 1941 and served as senior and only pastor for both churches until the end of the war. Both churches grew under her leadership.
Iris was a strong willed woman. Like the parable of the widow and the judge [in Luke 18] she continued to ask her association for ordination at each and every meeting. She and her congregation wanted recognition for the job she was doing. Since no men were available or could be convinced to come to rural Massachusetts, they relented and agreed to ordain her in 1943. Another woman was ordained at nearly the same time in rural western Massachusetts. These were the second and third women ordained in the Congregational Church.
My grandmother in her day brought a new spirit to her churches. She had a vibrancy taken from the revival times and was a model of a successful woman. Her churches prospered in this new spirit. Today, the modern church seems irrelevant to the young who thirst for the Spirit. Hypocritical, lost in its processes and liturgies without a sense of the power of its words and its rituals. In response, Iris lived her truth of an engaging church, a church that recognizes the contributions of all of its members, male and female.
IBM was founded by TJ Watson in 1911. It was not so commentable, except that TJ Watson had been fired as a salesman from NCR. He was fired not so much because he did anything wrong or was not a good salesman, but because NCR was having trouble meeting its financial goals. Watson though that this was what unions were saying about big business, and he would not allow this to happen to good employees in his company. He did not believe that his company needed a union to keep it honest and appropriate to employees, so he structured the company to meet employee needs without being forced to by unions. Watson developed some novel ideas in his day. One was “peace through commerce” and lifetime employment. These were sorely tested in the Great Depression.
IBM was making “black iron” based on the ideas of Herman Hollerith, IBM (and others) had developed machines that used punch cards. These cards could encode information like names, addresses and numeric or alphabetic codes in punches or holes in the cards. There were machines to punch the cards and machines that could process the punched cards. The processing machines had electric feelers that made a circuit when a hole was present and no circuit when there was not a hole. This allowed the cards to be “read” and the cards could be sorted by almost any combination of punches in the card. This sorting could be quite fast. Certainly faster than a human and far more accurate.
When the depression hit, there had been interest in these “black iron” punch card machines for doing both business and government work. For businesses it allowed the analysis of sales data. For example, the sorter could sort orders by region and quickly tally and issue manufacturing orders to regional factories. For government it allowed tallying of census data much more rapidly than the banks of adding machines that had been used. The Constitution says that a census must be done every ten years and Congressional districts re-aligned to make sure that people are appropriately represented. In 1930 census had not been able to tally results fast enough to redistrict for the early 1930 elections. Projections were that it would take the entire decade of the 1940s or longer to do the census and redistrict the USA. The census bureau would never catch up. These card sorting machines were the answer.
But the Great Depression came. Companies laid of almost all of their employees. Companies other than IBM, that is. Working in a backwater town of Endicott, NY, Watson mortgaged everything, sold bonds at deep discount, used his considerable fortune as collateral, and kept IBM employees working. Very little of their production was sold, but Watson stockpiled it in warehouses. Watson knew that there was an opportunity in 1940, if he could keep IBM going. The Depression was longer than anyone imagined, but Watson managed to keep IBM afloat and the employees working. In 1940, NCR, IBM, and the Hollerith company presented bids to the US Census Bureau. The other companies submitted bids with substantial delays in delivery. Only IBM had the equipment all ready on trucks to send to Washington to get started immediately. IBM won its biggest government contract and the largest single contract the USA had made prior to WWII. All of IBMs employees enjoyed a share of the profits in one of the few profit sharing programs in the USA.
Over time, IBM forgot its promises to employees. It reneged on its great principles of Respect for the Individual, the Pursuit of Excellence and the Service to the Customer. The church reneged on its promise for love for all. My Grandmother's last church had her as interim for 25 years as they waited for a “real” pastor – a man.
I left the church in the 70s and I left IBM in the 90s. Both had given me a good grounding in their respective areas. I know Christianity well and the love that it can create, the communities of support and change that they can be, and I know the goodness that is possible through commerce, capitalism and business. And I know how corrupted both can become.
Two weeks ago I had a chance for some hope. I spent some time with a scholar who studies historical trends in denominations and churches, specifically the trajectory of Christianity. Diana Butler Bass writes about the 'emerging church' most notably, but has begun to branch out into the trajectory or arc of history related to Christianity as embedded in our world.
She sees a change afoot. She writes that our society is in the midst of a great awakening. A time that appears to be the promised land for Christianity and progressive values. She presents scholars that suggest that the 1960s was indeed a time of change and that the reaction to that time, may mask the thrust for more openness in society, for less reliance on propaganda for evaluating the role of women in our world or the evils of socialism and communism, or the proper place for GLBTQ people and couples in our society. She suggests that the rise of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity was a maidservant of this suppression. She also said that this brand of church is dying quickly and a different church is growing to take its place.
Church is no longer an obligation Bass suggests, but rather a resource and a place to find inspiration, traditions that give comfort and workable community, experiences of the divine that offer a sense of purpose and direction in a world of chaos, violence and fear. Churches that offer answers or strict reliance on belief no longer offer the comfort and inspiration that people, particularly young people, need.
Like Paul's offer in Philemon, the church need not order us to believe a certain way or to be reborn a particular way. We need not evangelize or proselytize to prove that we are good Christians. We may do these things out of love of the church or our fellow man. Being a slave to church is not helpful, being a servant out of love of the church might be the purpose and fulfillment of ourselves.
When I first read this morning's story about Moses at the edge of the promised land, I saw this as a failure of Moses. Yet, he is revered and held up with Elijah and Elisha as heroes of Judaism and with Jesus as an equal in Christian teachings. Moses is like the departing preacher who cannot go on with his flock into the land that he prepared them for. It is rather a tribute to the work that Moses did, that God's people are ready now for the Deborahs, Joshuas and Davids.
Neither the church nor business is evil or a failure in leading us to this time. But like Moses, they cannot carry us any further. It is time for them to pass on the torch to those who can lead us while in the promised land. In that vein, I invite you to consider that the fourth great awakening has come. To consider that God is doing a new thing; that a renewed vigor will infect church and communities of God; that they will expand and bring God's love to all; that supportive and alternative forms of faith, politics and economics will bring something more workable, more just and more loving to our world.
When I think of the story of Moses, I also think of Dr King. In his last speech before being assassinated, he said he had been to the mountaintop, he had seen into the promised land. But like Moses, he was not able to join us. His “eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” He wasn't afraid, he wasn't worried about anything. He was happy that night in Memphis. He wanted all of us to have the joy of being in that Promised Land
Some of us will get there and some not. But either way, we should not be worried about anything; we should be happy. We should celebrate the passing of the old, and ring in the new. We should revel at being at the mountaintop, knowing that we have been a part of getting the world to this place of promise, this new future. We should know that we reap the reward of being righteous. Amen.
