The Remoteness of the Promised Land
We Unitarian Universalists can be, well, cerebral people. We are thinkers, we're comfortable in our heads, in pondering the realities of the world around us. We reason our way through this life, and such reasoning almost always serves us well. But we are also hopeful people, essentially optimistic. We believe in the turn of the world, the slant it can make, toward justice. We believe in the human endeavor.
We seek truth and hope in and through what we can know and see, and as religious people, we also allow ourselves to see the enormous truth that can be found not only in reportable faces, but in stories. After all, stories are often just as true as facts. Stories tell us things about the sources of our hope that historical recitation just cannot. Stories capture something about the human imagination that evidence can't always uncover. The story that is the framework of our sermon today, that story about the Exodus of the Hebrew people and their quest for a truly Holy Land promised them by a God they loved, this land flowing with milk and honey, is just such a story.
In so many ways, this story is truer than fact. The story of Moses looking out over the Promised Land yet never living to see it is truer than history because it captures a yearning that those ancient storytellers and we and all people everywhere truly share. It's a yearning for a place, a time, a life, wherein everything will finally be as it ought to be.
The yearning of Moses looking out over the Promised Land is a yearning for all the stuff that's broken to finally get fixed. It's a yearning to finally be where you feel at home, be where you belong. That yearning, we all know, also comes paired with a struggle we all share, a struggle we share with people everywhere, from every age, and every tribe and every faith. That struggle is captured in the fact that the Promised Land, no matter if you think of that literally or metaphorically, the Promised Land is never very easy to get to.
It was certainly true of this particular Promised Land. If you look at a map of the Sinai Peninsula, which is where the ancient Israelites are said to have made their flight out of Egypt into modern day Israel and Palestine, it seems like it ought to be pretty easy to get from Pharaoh's lands in Egypt to the now-embattled shores between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean.
If anyone had so much as stopped to ask directions, it probably would have been pretty easy. They might have said something like, "follow the coastline," look at the enormous body of water and stay near it. If they could have done that, just that, maybe it wouldn't have been so hard. But the Hebrews didn't stop and ask for directions or if they did, it was from a God who left them wandering in the wilderness for an entire generation. And finally, when they got about as lost as is humanly and conceivably possible for people to get. When they had nearly starved to death and made God all mad because they were unfaithful and unruly, finally after all of this and a generation of searching, they found themselves on the edge of this land they had envisioned for so long, on a precipice abutting all that they had dreamed of, and that's where Moses left them.
At the end of the Exodus, Moses, this leader of a this hopelessly directionless but powerfully driven people, this leader looks out over the vast stretching lands from the vantage point of a high mountain peak, he sees all he has hungered for, what he risked it all for, the reason for which all these people have been following him for a generation, he sees in the distance the realization of a promise and then he dies.
The story tells us that Moses got but a glimpse of the Promised Land and then he would go no further. God's own hand dug his grave, and supposedly he is there, somewhere he is there. In the secret isolation on the edge of a promise, he is there.
But the people go on. They follow a new leader and the forge on, leaving that high lonely place of Moses' death behind them. Of course, we know now that the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey didn't turn out to be exactly what the Hebrew people were expecting. It was hardscrabble earth. It was enormously difficult farming, and in the biggest surprise of all, though perhaps they should have been prepared, some folks already lived there.
The Promised Land, it turned out, was previously inhabited, and thus begins a struggle that has never ended. For the Hebrew people, the Promised Land would be a land of hunger as much as a land of glory, a land of warfare and a land of continual starting over. Every time it seemed God's promise was almost fulfilled, that perfect state of harmony and abundance would slip back over the edge of the horizon and only a few people of every age with extraordinary vision could climb mountains high enough to still see hope, or peace, or home, there in the distance.
First they had to walk in the wilderness for a generation, then Moses, the man who'd gotten them into this mess in the first place up and died, then finally once they got there, it wasn't what they had planned. Given the circumstances I'm sure somebody might have wondered, "Couldn't God have given us better directions? Couldn't God have hooked us up with some better real estate? After all, location is everything, and the Promised Land, both literally and metaphorically, has always been far away from everything.
Or perhaps they knew, as all people eventually come to know, that it is in the very nature of a promised land to be far, far away. From Odysseus' labors to return to Ithaca to Spanish conquistadors who came to the new world seeking a fountain of youth and Mormons who caravanned across the parched Western desert to form a new Jerusalem in the wilds of the Salt Lake Valley, every single story that people have every told about a Promised Land involves a long and arduous journey and most of the time the journey ends with dubious results at best. The Promised Land is not achievable without a journey. The Promised Land is not achievable unless, somewhere along the way, you get a little lost, and once you get there, the Promised Land is never quite as perfect as you thought it would be.
I grew up in Southern Indiana, and though I don't think I took it too seriously then, I lived and thrived in the shadow of a dead utopia, a little town called New Harmony Indiana. New Harmony Indiana isn't famous for a whole lot of things. We're famous for growing good watermelons, for my grandmother's cherry pie, and most of all, we are famous in some circles for being the site of two of America's grandest and most disastrous experiments in communal utopian living.
In the 19th century, two different groups of people came to the rural little wilderness county I grew up in and tried to carve a utopia out of the wilderness. Both times it flopped miserably. In 1814, a whole pile of German puritan separatists calling themselves the Harmony Society piled into flatboats and floated down the Wabash river to that remote outpost in the Indiana territory. Their plan was to go into the wilderness, carve out something akin to a perfect society, and wait with baited breath for Jesus to come along in the very near future and end it all. That was the idea. They shared all their possessions in community. They lived in dormitories. They upheld a way of life that professed to hold all women and men as equals in the eyes of god, which is why I have always wondered why the only mansion in town was the one their founder and religious leader built for himself.
Utopia is never quite what it seems. The Harmony society lasted just over 10 years, finally retreating back east and selling out to another group of hopeful utopians, these ones led by an agnostic scientist and intellectual named Robert Owen. Robert Owen was a friend to many Unitarians. His ideas were not out of sync with those of our early forebears. See, his idea was that he would take southern Indiana and turn it into an intellectual promised land where the pursuits of the mind would overcome all the people's petty squabbles about property and wealth. Of course, petty squabbles about property and wealth were among the forces that caused that utopia to fall apart almost as soon as it began.
There is a novel inspired by New Harmony Indiana that was popular a long time ago. Elizabeth Taylor even made a movie about it. It's called Raintree County, and in the novel, the author said of the place, that "people were invited to come and join a paradise regained by innate human goodness. The noble experiment lasted two years and collapsed in the usual picturesque wreck of innate human selfishness and inefficiency."
The usual picturesque wreck. We recognize it. The same old story. The Promised Land receding further and further away over a distant horizon. It's always far away. Such is the fate of the Promised Land and such has always been the fate of utopias. There were even some utopias that were designed specifically by and for our forebears. There was even a Unitarian Utopia that was founded outside of Boston called Brook Farm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of its financial backers, and UU legend says that Nathaniel Hawthorne spent time at Brook Farm and he would go out in the morning to pitchfork hay before coming back in the afternoon to labor over his books. What UU legend doesn't always highlight is the fact that Hawthorne lasted about two weeks at Brook Farm. Along with the rest of his hopeful Unitarian Utopians, he found in short order that he would really prefer to pay servants to pitchfork the hay an so, like the experiments of New harmony Indiana, Brook Farm didn't last long either. Utopians attempts were everywhere in the 19th century. They pop up all over the place in the history of our inherently hopeful denomination. In 1840, Emerson himself wrote that, "not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." Everybody, especially our forebears, bold as we aim to be, believed it was possible.
Some people, like the Harmony Society, thought perfection would come from Jesus and some folks, like Robert Owen and our forebears thought it would come from human effort, and neither panned out. And here we are, Moses has stood atop the mountain. He has seen the place we are headed and he has professed his faith that we can make it there. All our forebears have taught us that we have the power to make of this world a more peaceful place filled with justice and yet here we are with the Promised Land getting further and further away. We've been lost in the wilderness now for more than a generation and nothing's looking like it's going to be perfect any time soon.
When faced with the brutal realities of a world not healed by all of our efforts, of a world not flowing with milk and honey, but violence and religious hatred, we could, if we chose, choose nihilism. Macbeth's oration, the most poetic nihilism ever put to paper, says of this life "out, out brief candle, life is but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
On some level, one might feel, I sometimes feel, that all of the stories of our hopeful forebears and their dreams of perfection were tales told by idiots, because when you look and you see, the Promised Land is not closer than it was then. Then candles have gone out, but the tale goes on.
It might be wonderfully dramatic, if that's your thing, sitting in the shadow of dead utopias, wars going on all around us, thinking about nihilism and the dimming of once-bright candles, bemoaning the fate of a broken world.
But we Unitarian Universalists are cerebral people, and we Unitarian Universalists are hopeful people. And the truth is that I, and most all of us, am no more a nihilist than I am a utopian. Life may not signify peace and perfection, but it certainly does not signify nothing either.
I'm often fond of trying to pass myself off as a realist, not infected with that Pollyanna gobbledygook of youthful idealism. But a few months ago, back in my own congregation in Manassas Virginia, when I was going on one of my regular tirades about the need to face reality head on without the foolishness of idealism and a dear friend, David McPherson, UU minister for some 55 years and source of copious amounts of good advice came to listen to me preach. He sat in the front row that Sunday, and he nodded, and squinted, and crossed his arms through the whole sermon, and at the end, when he shook my hand on his way out of the sanctuary, he looked me strait in the eye with a gaze that pierces pretense, and he said, "You say you're not an idealist, but you are or you wouldn't be standing up there." And I said, "right, right, busted."
I don't know what the Promised Land looks like for you. I don't know what it looks like in your own soul. Maybe it's world peace. Maybe it's finally quitting smoking. Maybe it's picking up the pieces of a broken heart, shining light into the wilderness of a hurting relationship. Maybe the Promised Land is something as complex in it's simplicity as finally being happy in your own skin. Maybe it's just finally being content in the life you life.
Maybe the promised land that is uniquely yours feels like it just keeps getting further away and you wonder in your own kind of wilderness in the shadow of your own dead utopias, waiting for the day when things will be whole again.
Maybe there's something broken inside of you that you hope beyond hope will one day be made whole. What the stories of the Promised Land teach us is that the Promised Land is not easy to get to, and it's not perfect once you get there, for no perfect society has ever existed, no perfect marriage has ever been blessed, nobody ever quit smoking without hating it, and no perfect child has ever been born.
But I am idealistic enough to believe that good societies do happen from time to time. And marriages that challenge us as well as nurture us. And children so beautiful as to make one believe in God. I am idealistic enough to remember that all of those things have existed and if every utopia every founded crumbles to dust as all utopias have so far done and if every promised land and perfect life stays just outside of our eager grasping, even if we never find the answers to our burning questions, as I suspect we won't, I believe there is meaning enough in the wilderness for us all. Life will never be all that we hope it will be, and holiness and perfection and peace may never entirely reign supreme, but our lives can bend in the direction of hope, and on most days, for most hungry hearts, that will be enough.
Do I believe that the bright light of day will always shine and people won't be hurt and our inherent worth and dignity of every person means that someday we will get it all together there will be perfect peace in the Middle East and wholeness for all who are broken and religion that connects rather than divides will overcome all the lies and hatred and make of this earth all that we dream it to be. Nope. But I'd rather turn with all my soul toward the Promised Land, climb high atop a mountain, and see hope stretched out before me, than turn my back simply because I may never get there entirely.
Even if the journey goes on and on, I'd rather turn my steps in the direction of peace and meaning and basic human decency, I'd rather turn my steps in the direction of our dreams than give up just because the golden horizon just keeps receding before me.
You know there is another man who led his people toward freedom, another man who never lived to see that freedom himself. You know he was Martin Luther King, and on the night before he was killed, his last sermon was about Moses. His words speak for themselves:
Well I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead, but it doesn't matter to me now, because I've been to the mountaintop and I don't mind. Like anybody, I'd like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about all that now. I just want to do God's will and he's allowed me to go up to that 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 that we as a people will get to that Promised Land, and I am happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything. I do not fear any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord.
And that was the last sermon he ever preached. We may not ever get there completely. The realization of all our dreams may well stay just over the horizon forever, but the journey continues, and progress is real. So let us go to the mountain top. Let us see the stretching land before us, and let us squint long enough and hard enough to make out the shape of hope, still forming on the horizon of our lives. May it be so.
Minister of the Bull Run Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Manassas, Virginia
July 29, 2007