Jill’s grandmother, whom we all called Mammaw, had a habit of beginning conversations in the middle. Have you ever known anyone like that? Mammaw lived to be ninety-six years old. She saw a lot in her long life, the vast and incredible sweep of the twentieth century. Mammaw was carried along by that huge story, and so whenever something would occur to her—momentous or mundane—she’d begin to speak out loud about whatever part of the story was running through her mind at that moment. She began conversations in the middle. If you were on the hearing end, you had to catch up to whatever Mammaw was talking about. It could be discombobulating.
Today’s Deuteronomy reading chronicles the end of Moses’ life, which was, itself, a life that began in the middle of a story. By the time of Moses’ birth, the long story of the Israelites had already involved uprooting, movement, establishment, joy, trial, and forgetting. By the time of Moses’ birth, the Israelites had forgotten even about God. They lived as enslaved people in Egypt, oppressed and despondent. Moses was born at a time when the Egyptian Pharaoh was attempting to wipe out the Israelites, and Moses himself was plucked from death and given a dual name, Mosheh in Egyptian, which means “son,” and Mashah in Hebrew, which means “drawn forth.”[i] Moses’ very name unwittingly declares that Moses is a son of Israel drawn forth to play a special role in the story whose beginning happened long before his birth. Discombobulating, to say the least.
Moses grows up and lives a wild story of his own before he is forced to flee and live in hiding in the wilderness, where one day as a shepherd he meets God in a burning bush, and God explains to him who both God and Moses are, and the role Moses is to play. It feels like a starring role, a central role, a role that will bring Israel’s whole story to its ultimate culmination.
Moses plays his part faithfully and well. He leads; he prays; he problem-solves; he deals with threats and challenges from within and without. Finally, after forty years of wandering with the Israelites in the wilderness, what appears to be the culminating moment of the whole story arrives. We read, “Moses went up to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole [promised] land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain…The Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants.”’”
What a cinematic moment! After such an arduous lifetime faithfully playing his starring role, Moses climbs Mount Nebo and looks out over the sweeping land God has promised to God’s people. Moses’ satisfaction must be immense, as is our empathy for him. He is about to exhale and travel down the mountain. Though Moses had to enter this story in the middle and figure out what it was all about and what his role was within it, now he will finish it. He will get see, as it were, the final credits roll across the screen.
But wait. God isn’t yet finished speaking. God adds, “Moses, I have let you see the Promised Land with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” And the very next sentence in Deuteronomy is, “Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab.”
Huh? That makes no sense.[ii] It is an affront to the way stories should be told, of denouement. It’s an affront to Moses. It was difficult enough for Moses to enter in the middle of the story; now Moses doesn’t get to see the end? Moses learns that he wasn’t the central character. The story wasn’t about him after all.
I think our indignation is at least as much for ourselves as for Moses, because Moses’ experience on Mount Nebo is, in truth, the experience of us all. When I attend the bedside of the dying, the sometime anxiety and confusion is less about what will happen to the person after he dies, but rather how the world can conceivably go on without him. We each imagine ourselves as the main character in the story. (I am the star—the hero—and y’all are the supporting cast; you know that right?) Of course, we all enter the story in the middle, and it takes most of our lives to catch up to exactly what’s going on (like one of Mammaw’s conversations), but once we at least dimly figure out the plot, we take center stage. How in the world can it be that the world might spin without us?
But deep down, we know it will. And this subconscious knowledge is what leads to much of our unease in life. It leads to our frustration, when, try as we might to affect the world around us, the needle never moves. The same old challenges recur; the same old problems are intractable, be those in our immediate relationships, our local communities, or our larger world. As a result, we risk becoming cynical, apathetic, or both. Like Shakespeare’s MacBeth, we begin to suspect that “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[iii]
Or, instead, the knowledge results in some people claiming, in each generation including our own, that since our own heroics can’t effect change, God must be about to break in and do it Godself, so that we will be here to see the story’s end. I have an intelligent and well-meaning friend who, on social media, predicts every few months that God’s End Time is about to arrive. And then when it doesn’t, he merely shifts the proposed date a bit forward on the calendar. Such desperate prediction is just another way of dealing with the uncomfortable fact that we aren’t the stars of the show, and that we, like Moses, very likely won’t be around to see how it all works out. We live in the middle. We didn’t see the beginning, and we won’t see the end.
There is a solution to our distress. It is the only solution: to recognize, as Moses did, that the story is not ours, was never ours, but God’s. We are not, as MacBeth feared, walking shadows, but neither are we the headliners. We are characters in God’s grand salvation story, which began in the mythical garden[iv] and will end in the city through which runs the river of life.[v] We may see neither the beginning nor the end, but we can recognize our time on God’s good earth as the sheer gift of a supporting role, and no less essential or important for that fact. We, like Moses, are created and called to enter the scene already in progress, and to play a part that focuses not on ourselves but on moving God’s great story forward toward the kingdom. What does that look like?
There is an old parable about the building of a gothic cathedral in medieval England. Construction began years before anyone onsite was born, and every worker will be dead long before the church is completed. No one present will see the end. A traveler comes upon the half-finished edifice. He asks a stonecutter what he is doing. With great pride, the man replies, “I’m carving the gargoyle that will perch above the west entrance. It will be my crowning glory.”
The traveler then sees a mason stirring plaster in a bucket. “And what are you doing?” he asks. The mason replies, “I’m plastering the apse behind the altar. It will be so finely detailed that it will be the wonder of the Cathedral. It will rebound to my fame.”
Finally, as the traveler is about to leave the half-finished site, he sees an old, bent woman slowly and deliberately sweeping away dust that will merely return tomorrow. “And you, mother, what are you doing?” the traveler asks. The woman looks up at him and beams through her wrinkled face with joy that comes from beyond her. “Sir,” she says, “I’m building a cathedral.”[vi]
It may seem at first to be the hardest thing in the world, to imagine ourselves not as the star or the hero, but as a supporting character in the middle of God’s great story. But if we will reframe, if we will decenter ourselves, we will come to realize an abiding peace that replaces ego-centered striving and truly passes understanding. We will discover that there is no unimportant role, no meaningless Gospel task. And most importantly, we will beam with a joy that comes from beyond us, because we know that, though we cannot know how or when, the love we embody and the grace we share move God’s story toward the Promised Land of the kingdom.
[i] Kass, Leon R. Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus, pp. 43-44.
[ii] The Book of Numbers attempts to offer a rationale behind God’s decision not to allow Moses to enter the Promised Land, but in this priest’s opinion, the explanation offered there is weak tea. See Number 20:1-13.
[iii] Shakespeare, William. MacBeth, Act 5, scene 5.
[iv] Genesis 2
[v] Revelation 21
[vi] I cannot recall where I first read or heard this parable.
God in the Midst of the City 