October 23, 2005
Houston, TX
Title: The Promised Land
In April 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King returned to Memphis,
Tennessee, a town that was experiencing an especially brutal winter and
spring, with the almost all African-American sanitation workers on strike,
and an earlier march that had been meant to be peaceful and non-
violent, having gone violently astray. Dr. King was in town to lead
another march, hopefully a more peaceful one, in support of these same
sanitation workers, but the people who worked closely with him tell us
that something had shifted within him, a sense of brooding, of
discouragement with the movement, related perhaps the failure of that
earlier Memphis march to be a peaceful one, but something else was in
the air, a sense that the forces allied against him, and thus the civil rights
movement, because for many, he represented that very movement,
there was a sense that all the pressures on him were finally going to
overwhelm him. Maybe it’s that feeling that some of us get hours before
a storm rolls in, when the sky becomes eerie with a different kind of light,
the air changes, the mood darkens, the expectation of the trouble about
to come through—you can feel it, something is different, we can feel it in
the very air around us. Earlier, when he boarded the plane to Memphis
from Atlanta, the pilot said these words to Dr. King’s fellow travelers over
the intercom system: "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin
Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were
checked and to be sure that nothing would be wrong on the plane, we
had to check out everything carefully. And we’ve had the plane protected
and guarded all night." Perhaps it was all getting to him, I can’t imagine it
wouldn’t, no matter how fierce your determination is, no matter how right
you feel about the truth and rightness of our cause.
On the night before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, outside
his room as he was exiting to go to a meeting, he gave a speech at the
Mason Temple, which was the national headquarters of the Church of
God In Christ, a historically African-American denomination, and he was
asked to say a few words to the gathered and packed crowd. Most of us
have seen the final minutes of that sermon, that speech, and one of the
things that has always struck me about the last few minutes of Dr. King’s
speech is the glaze that seemed to come over his eyes…there is
something about his eyes, as if he was looking past the crowd gathered
their in that Memphis room—it was as if he was gazing into a place, a
space that was not yet present in the room, that he was looking into
another world, as he said these words we’ve heard so often.
Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days
ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the
mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long
life - longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just
want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And
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. So I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’
m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of
the Lord.
And then there is Moses, in the story we hear today, at the end of an
epic story, and epic life, who we see literally looking into that Promised
Land, a land he will not finally lead his people into. For Moses, not being
able to go forward into that promised land full of milk and honey was a
punishment for taking credit where was credit wasn’t due him. The
people had demanded water, they had enough of this forty-year
nightmare, and, in a moment of frustration, perhaps, Moses seems to
take credit for making the rock yield water when he strikes it—and yet
God’s charge against Moses and Aaron was that they had not trusted
God—its an odd moment, and not clear why Moses was punished this
way. Nonetheless, he and Aaron are condemned to never reaching
home, both forever buried in an unknown place, in a foreign country,
beginners on the journey, but never being able to arrive at the
destination.
It’s a bittersweet moment, really. Moses gets to finally see what the
result of that Exodus from Egypt will comes to, the result of all those
difficult days and nights were for, the land he and the people were
promised. And yet, even though it seems to be a final gift to him, this
chance to see home before he dies, I can’t imagine it not being painful.
Perhaps its like watching the birth of a grandchild late in life but knowing
you will never see them fully grow up, and knowing too that the child will
probably never know you. Its been argued that the whole book of
Deuteronomy is a wrapping up of the story of Moses, with various new
laws and a repeat of earlier ones, and then are the moments of transition
between him and Joshua, the new leader of the people of Israel. And at
the end of this transition comes this eulogy to a flawed leader, and he is
given a title we often don’t associate with him—he was a great prophet,
unlike any before him or after him, the eulogist says, and he knew God
face-to-face. The narrative within the Pentateuch has created a portrait
of a man full of greatness, and yet whose faults seem as human as
ours…that is sometimes lost in our telling of these kinds of hero stories,
but these kinds of portraits in the Biblical narrative always seem to come
with a cataloguing of faults as much as they do a listing of great deeds.
But like most eulogies at most funerals, what is honored is what was
great about the person who has died, and the writer of this text in
Deuteronomy, written on the cusp of the Promised Land, follows that
very human pattern.
And yet, it is that very same Promised Land that the Jewish and Christian
scriptures speak of, and that Dr. King lays hold of in his speech, which
has always been the troublesome, and more ambiguous than most of us
would like to admit. You know, we often forget that the land that was
promised to Israel was already occupied, that there were already people
living in that land running with milk and honey, and even the Israelites
were surprised that there already tenants in the land “given to them.”
And, of course, the rest of Joshua is all about that surprise and the
subsequent realization that they were going to have to remove the
current occupants before they got a chance to sign a new lease. Now, of
course, if you’re on the other side of the mountain, if you’re the current
leaseholders, you’re probably looking at the approaching of this folks
from the desert as a disaster of the first order. In the text, there is some
bitterness on the part of Israel, because they sort of assumed that the
Promised Land would be empty when they arrived, but now to find out
that a bitter, painful, vicious, sometimes genocidal war with the current
inhabitants was on the horizon, it was grave disappointment to them.
Nonetheless, the two sides on the different sides of this moment see it
very differently, and their conceptions of what was good for each of them
was clearly going to clash, and in bloody ways. For some, the Promised
Land was before them, ready to be taken, and for others, the Promised
Land was the very ground underneath their feet, it was their current
home!
And that is the difficulty, isn’t it, the ambiguity, the debate about who
should inhabit the Promised Land, who should be its owners, and what
the land should now look like. The current debate about the nature of
Amendment #2 is a good example of that difficulty, with the Christian
church pitted against itself, with probably a majority of Christendom in
this state endorsing the placement of words into the state constitution
that affirming marriage is only between a man and a woman, and that
would attempt to disallow any government entity from recognizing even
domestic partnership arrangements between same-sex couples. Other
Christians in this state disagree with this stance, many of whom are in
this room, and I think it just reminds us of the difficulty of agreeing what
the promised Land should look like. You know, within the King family this
difficulty has come to fruition—Rev. Bernice King, Dr. King’s youngest
daughter, has become a darling of the Religious Right because of her
strident denouncement of gay and lesbian civil rights and gay marriage.
It is a useful thing to have the daughter of a civil rights giant saying that
the gay and lesbian people do not have a right to speak of any kind of
“civil rights,” and she has said that her father, Dr. King, would have
never supported the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. And yet, her
own mother, Coretta Scott King, and some of her own brothers, have
been some of the most vocal supporters of the gay and lesbian
community in the African-American community, continually speaking at
gay rights rallies. Even within the family, our own families, Dr. King’s
family, and within the Christian family, we cannot arrive at a mutual
understanding of what the Promised Land looks like and the people who
it should be allowed to populate it. Two visions of that same Promised
Land, two visions that include different sets of people, as it did
thousands of years ago, with the Israelites, the would-be occupants, and
who would settle for nothing less than complete control, and the current
occupants, who felt they were doing quite fine until someone else
showed up at the door.
In our current Healthy Congregations class that Sylvia and I are leading,
Fran Smith recently voiced a question about why it seems that the
culture has become more vicious in our disagreements with each other. I’
ve thought about that comment for awhile, and I suspect that it seems
very true…how our disagreements with each other do seem to buy more
and more from that “politics of personal destruction” shelf. And yet, it’s
not that simple, of course, I think—its more ambiguous than that, much
like the Promised Land. I mean, if you’ve been wandering in the desert
for forty years, if you’re an African-American during Dr. King’s day, or a
woman during the time of suffrage movement, or if you’re a gay person
whose relationship is not protected by the state, and is always vulnerable
to the whim of the government or even your own hostile family, I suspect
you’re always going to feel that the politics involved in these arguments
about the worthiness of your right have always been vicious to your
family, to your race, to your sex. Politics, for those looking in from the
outside, for those looking into the Promised Land, has always been a
vicious realm, because the debate was whether or not you were to be
included at all in that very Promised Land. Fran, I think it has been
always personal; it has always been vicious, though I suspect it depends
on whether or not you have been wandering in the desert your whole life,
or whether you’ve been living in that land of milk and honey.
But I tell you what I think one of the lessons we can learn from this story
where Moses looks out towards the Promise Land, full of people already
there, and that is that the quest for that Promised Land is a lot more
complicated than many of us ever expected. Who knew that we could
disagree so vehemently on the goodness we believe that God has
promised us, the land that God has given to a wandering people? It was
supposed to be so easy for Israel, and yet the complications and texture
of the problem was just beginning. And who knew that when Dr. King
articulated the vision of that Promised Land for African Americans, that
we would still be debating what that Promised Land looks like and who it
would include? I mean, if Coretta Scott King and Bernice King cannot
agree on who it includes, whom this land should house, then maybe we
ought to be humbled by the sheer ambiguity of the vision itself. Moses
and the people of Israel, led by Joshua, are about to go into that land
that is already full of people, and often times they are far from being the
heroes in the way they conducted the war, and sometimes even God
doesn’t come off all that great in story as well. It’s complicated, more
complicated than expected for Moses, for Joshua, for us.
And yet, I don’t think we should give up on the Promised Land, I don’t
think having a sense of humility before the vision is the same as giving
up the vision itself. Jesus constantly talked about the coming Kingdom of
God, the coming realm of God in this world, and even though it has not
fully come, and though we Christians disagree on what it might look like, I
don’t think we should give up on its coming. And we don’t need to give
up our right to articulate what that kingdom, that Promised Land might
look like. The reality is that Dr. King’s vision of what the Promised Land
might look like has helped form the very thing that was hoped for—his
vision of who the kingdom included changed the minds of many, though
there is still a long way to go. To give voice to our understanding of the
kingdom, with all the appropriate humility that should come with naming
our respective visions of that Promised Land, to name it is to name our
hope for this world, our hope for other people, and our hope for
ourselves, and it is somehow an articulation that God can do something
extraordinary in this world, even now. It is the belief that the world can
get better, and that our wandering in the desert is not the end of story,
that there is a destination that it is home, that there is a place that
includes you and me, and maybe will even include an “us,” all of us. I
believe that Moses and Dr. King saw it, they saw the Promised Land,
despite their long wanderings in the desert, and we are asked to see it
as well, to see that land from our own mountaintops, knowing that what
we think we see we will not always agree upon, but the kingdom, the
promised land is forever before us, the “something better” is always
calling us. Amen.
