Wednesday, August 16, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Blessed be God who filled my soul with fire!
The book of Deuteronomy is about life, not death. CHOOSE LIFE, Moses pleads to his people. Remember the stories of God’s power and write them on your foreheads, your mantles, your doorposts. Never let your children forget them. The burning bush burns forever.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength and all your mind.
But for Moses, this closing chapter in the desert is bittersweet. Because God has not and will not change his mind about Moses’ final day. Joshua is in the wings, blessed and ready. At the last God shows Moses the Promised Land from a high mountain and speaks once more to him:
This is the land which I swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that I would give to their descendants. I have let you feast your eyes upon it, but you shall not cross over.
Being in our 73rd year, Margaret and I think of how we want to be buried, and where we want to be buried. We aren’t sure about anything yet. But Moses didn’t have that option. He died on Mount Nebo, and the Lord himself buried Moses’ body.
To this day no one knows the place of Moses’ burial. He was one hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated.
120 wasn’t so old in those days. Moses might have lived many more years. But he ended his days with the Lord, and surely that is how he would have wanted it, singing a psalm not yet written:
Hear now, all you who fear God, while I declare what he has done for me. Whenever I appealed to him in words, praise was on the tip of my tongue. Blessed be God who filled my soul with fire!
Deuteronomy ends with a bang, not a whimper.
Since then no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He had no equal in all the signs and wonders the Lord sent him to perform in Egypt, and for the might and the terrifying power that Moses exhibited in the sight of all Israel.
Jesus knew the words of Deuteronomy by heart, I imagine. Hear, O Israel! When he spoke to his disciples he spoke like Moses might have talked with his own elect. He wanted them to understand not only the power they wielded as individuals, but even more as a group and a community.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
Perhaps the disciples, like me, were amazed and afraid at the power those words imply. I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told. I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles. Jesus doesn’t see his poor fishermen and farmers like that at all. He doesn’t see you that way either. Or me. We are his community and his church.
If two of you agree on earth about anything for which you are to pray, it shall be granted to you by my Heavenly Father.
Forget the mumble jumble. There is power here, God’s power which flies with eagle’s wings through our humility and our surrender.
Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
Listen to the trumpet of Jesus!
(Deuteronomy 34, Psalm 66, 2 Corinthians 5, Matthew 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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