T here are a lot of stories in the Hebrew Scriptures that impact us, whether they describe something that actually happened or not. There are the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, David and Goliath (or David and Bethsheba, better yet), Abraham and Isaac, Sarah, Rachael, Solomon, Daniel and the Lion’s Den, Ezekiel saw the wheel, dem bones, dem bones… on and on they go. But the story that’s most central to the Hebrew tradition – and, maybe, to our own American tradition – is the story of Moses. It’s the story of how, having been plucked by an Egyptian princess out of a basket floating in the Nile, Moses is chosen by Yahweh to lead the Hebrew people to freedom in the Promised Land. It’s a long journey, punctuated by being fed by Manna, Yahweh speaking to Moses out of a burning bush, and Moses receiving, etched on tablets of stone, laws meant to help his people make sense out of how to live in what can be a confusing world.
Most Americans see Moses as a towering leader: a bearded Charlton Heston with a booming voice, able to lead people where they want to go and become what they’re meant to be, even though, in the story, when the Hebrew people finally get to the River Jordan, Moses ups and dies, leaving it up to them to cross over on their own into Land on their own and create there, themselves, the life for which they’d hoped.
The story of Moses is the prototypical one for many journeys since, including the journey to North America, not just by the Europeans who followed those who had crossed the land bridge from Asia, but for those who now come to this country, whether it’s on an airplane, a leaky raft or by foot across the desert. These newcomers may not have a Moses to lead them, but they are seeking a Promised Land just as much as did those who came before them – and they are just as aware as were they that they are going to have to fulfill their dreams on their own. Those who oppose immigration never seem to understand this, forgetting the hardships that most people who come to a place like this originally have to endure.
Though these newcomers don’t see themselves as being led by a Moses, a lot of those who are already here wish there was a Moses they could follow. This has been true ever since the time of George Washington, perhaps the first American Moses. Recently there was a reenactment of the inauguration of George Washington as our first President. The ceremony that took place in a building close to site of the World Trade Center, which had been destroyed as a symbolic slap at the promise of America. The featured speaker at the reenactment said that if ever there was an American leader who was indispensable, like Moses, it was Washington. He went on:
When the thirteen colonies needed leadership in the War of Independence, the Continental Congress chose Washington. When liberty seemed lost in the fall of 1777, Washington kept the soldiers in the field. When independence lapsed into sectional conflict after the war, the framers asked Washington to chair the Constitutional Convention. And when the new republic elected its first president, again the natural choice was Washington.
At the time of our nation’s founding, Americans needed a Moses. They needed someone around whom they could rally, just as they had when they needed someone to lead their armies as they sought freedom from British oppression. They needed someone who, holding the tablets on which the words of our new were etched, could inspire them to create a land in which they could thrive, as they were able to do when Washington turned his presidency over to John Adams who followed in his place.
Being seen as a religious-like figure would have seemed peculiar to Washington, since he wasn’t a particularly religious person. He was nowhere near as religious as the person who followed him, though John Adams, himself, was enough out of the mainstream to be a Unitarian. Though Washington was a nominal Anglican and occasionally went to church, he refused to take communion, rarely knelt to pray, disliked religious language and hardly ever mentioned Jesus, let alone the Moses to whom he was compared. About as close as Washington ever got to being religious was to become a Mason. But even though the Masonic order has some religious trappings, to be a Mason was to be a freethinker. So, freethinker that he was, it was on a Masonic Bible Washington placed his hand when he was sworn in as President.
It’s said that the passage on which Washington’s hand rested as he took his pledge of office was the one from Genesis in which Joseph, who had preceded Moses as the leader of the Hebrew people in Egypt, told those who were looking to him for leadership that he wasn’t a God or a king. He said: “I am your brother.” He went on: “We may have fought amongst ourselves in the past, but now we stand removed from the father and cut off from the fatherland, so we must work together.” It was in this Josephish kind of spirit that Washington wanted to lead.
But this isn’t the way people looked at Washington, nor it the way most people look at our contemporary Presidents. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a George Bush or a Barack Obama, Americans like to believe that whomever they choose as their leaders will be able to lead them to the Promised Land – and they don’t want it to take the 40 years it took Moses, nor do they want responsibility turned over to them once they get to where they’re going. They want the Promised Land to appear right now and they want it handed over to them without any cost and without requiring any assembling on their part.
But Washington knew he couldn’t do that, no matter how much he was revered him, nor could Abraham Lincoln, the next of our Presidents to be compared to Moses. In Lincoln’s case, for all of his efforts to reestablish what he saw as the founder’s dream of a nation of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – his life was cut short, just as was the life of Moses, before being able to cross over into such a Promised Land. Lincoln was killed at the threshold of being able to realize his dream for a reborn America, becoming a victim of the same oppressive ideology he took our nation to war to defeat.
One of the people from whom Abraham Lincoln derived his inspiration was Henry Beecher, the father of Harriett Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet’s father was one of the Civil War era’s most powerful preachers – an extoller of Moses who advocated freedom for those whose “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” had been negated because of the compromises needed to enact the Constitution. Lincoln invited Beecher to speak at Fort Sumter during the ceremony that took place at the end of the war when the American flag was raised again finally raised. Lincoln asked Beecher to speak on his behalf because he believed: “Had it not been for Beecher, there would have been no flag.” For Beecher and his daughter – who, by the way, went on to become a Unitarian –freedom for enslaved Americans was necessary to fulfill the journey in which first Uncle Tom, then Lincoln, was the Moses.
According to Bruce Feiler, author of America’s Prophet – Moses and the American Story, in the Gettysburg Address, one of the seminal documents of American history, Lincoln was connecting the Civil War to the rationale for the founding of our country. Says Feiler, Lincoln was “presenting a vision for God’s American Israel that reconnected it to God’s original Israel.” In the Creation story the world begins as a watery chaos and God divides “the waters from the waters,” and the dry land on which we can live appears. In the Exodus story the Israelites also face a watery chaos in the Red Sea and God again “divides the waters” so the Israelites can have dry ground on which to walk as they make their way to the freedom they seek. Comparing the biblical stories to what Lincoln was saying at Gettysburg, Feiler says that just as the Creation story marks the birth of a people, so the Declaration of Independence marks the birth of our nation. And just as the story of the Exodus is the story of the rebirth of a people in the fullness of their freedom, so the Civil War provides the story of the rebirth of the people of our nation in the fullness of their freedom. The Gettysburg Address, says Felier, “seared this biblical pattern” of the “birth, death and rebirth of a nation” into “America’s consciousness.” Maybe that’s why a reporter who heard the address at Gettysburg compared Lincoln to Moses, saying the ruler of a nation “never stood higher, or grander, or more prophetic.”
Later, a Boston minister said in the sermon he preached after Lincoln’s death: “In Abraham Lincoln God gave us just the man to take us safely through the last stages of the rebellion.” But now there were are “sterner duties” that would have to be accomplished without him. Unfortunately, many of these duties were ignored after the death of our second Moses. In the South, oppression as brutal as slavery took its place.
We’ve had some Moses-like Presidents since the time of Lincoln, like the Roosevelts and John Kennedy. And Martin Luther King, Jr. rose up to lead the Civil Rights Movement feeling just as strong a call as did the biblical prophet. But, as was true of Kennedy and Lincoln, King was killed before the promise of American could be achieved. That this would happen was no surprise. King had assumed he might be killed, which added to his desire to try to inspire others to achieve his dream. The night before he was shot, King preached a sermon in which he said: “I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I have seen the Promised Land.” Then King looked out at his audience, with, as an observer put it, “brimming eyes and a trace of a smile, ” and said: “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!” That’s why, said King: “I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glo-ry of the coming of the Lord!” – meaning the coming of his people into the freedom and opportunity they sought. With these words the audience broke out “Amen, amen.”
King wasn’t naïve. He knew he was a target of hateful people. But he believed that the sort of life of which he dreamed could be achieved. Like Lincoln, he believed the sort of nation envisioned by our founders could be created. I don’t know whether our current President has the imagination, force and courage to get us to help us do, but I believe it’s the kind of nation toward which he’s trying to lead us, fully understanding the morale of the story of Moses, which is that even if he can lead us to the Promised Land it’s up to us to build it.
It seems to me there’s a lesson in this when it comes to thinking about our church. Just shy of a year ago we lost a minister some, I suspect, thought of as our Moses. We sent Peter Morales off, with our blessing – and a lot of our help –on his quest to lead our religious movement to the Promised Land it seeks. And now we’re looking for someone to take his place – someone with enough enthusiasm, vision and imagination to help us understand, in our fullness, what a liberal religious community can be.
Luckily we’re not just starting on this quest. We’ve already created what is a remarkable church, although it’s not a church without problems. At our Congregational Meeting this afternoon we are faced with the task of adopting a budget far shy of being able to support the staffing, operations and programming of which we’ve dreamed and we have financial problems looming in the future. It’s our hope – and it’s a well-founded one – that the right sort of new Senior Minister will be able to help us deal with such problems. But like Moses – and Lincoln and Washington and Kennedy and King – he or she – or he and she – will not be able to create whatever it is we seek. Doing that is up to us.
I happen to think we’ve got a good shot at doing this, because we’re a congregation that not only likes to make use of its imagination but is willing, as Henry David Thoreau put it, to build foundations under the castles of our dreams. We’ll be given a chance to begin doing this in the coming year as we think about growing our capacity to attract people to Unitarian Universalism, deepen the spiritual dimensions of our congregational life, and work more effectively with our young adults and youth.
As for our country, we face a similar challenge, both in dealing with financial issues and making the promise of America more real for those who are here. Maybe President Obama can get us nearer to the river we need to cross over, if his opponents will let him, but we’ve got to remember it’s up to us to get beyond the image of those who think that America can fulfill its promise by just tossing out the tea of interference by the government, as though government were some kind of enemy rather than something we’ve created to help us. Here on the shores of Jordan we’ve got to understand that we can’t have “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for ourselves if we deny it to others – if we allow our nation to be plagued by the poverty, ignorance, the multi-layer oppressions that continue to haunt our nation. To help us do this, I’d like to think Americans are still able to resonate with the story of the journey on which Moses led his people in pursuit of something better than the lives they’d been forced to live.
If a new Moses does come along, whether for our country or for our church, may it be a Moses who can inspires us, as Bruce Feiler puts it, to: “perform our own liberation, plunge into the waters, persevere through the dryness” and push on, even if it’s going to take a long time to realize our dreams. Says Feiler, “the ultimate lesson of Moses’ life” – or the life of Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy or King – “is that the dream doesn’t die with the dreamer; the journey doesn’t stop on the mountaintop; and the true destination in a narrative of hope is not this year…. It’s the next.” The Promised Land has still to be built – and it’s up to us, not a Moses, to build it.
Reading taken from Bruce Feiler’s America’s Prophet
According to Bruce Feiler, author of such popular books as Walking the Bible, over the years Americans have been smitten by the image of Moses. Says Feiler:
One reason Moses has inspired so many Americans is that he evangelizes action; he justifies risk. He gives ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty. As I found in my own travels in the Sinai desert over the years, no matter how full of hope the Israelites were when they departed Egypt, they were still leaving the most civilized place on earth for the most barren, based only on the word of a God they’d never actually seen and a leader they barely knew. Moses is the enemy of caution, which is one reason he has inspired so many visionaries [from George Washington, to Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King. And these people were not born to greatness. They became great by tapping into the anger and hope within themselves. The moral of their lives, like that of Moses, is that each of us must become our own agitator, our own entrepreneur, our own freedom fighter. Our own Moses.
We must take these steps because Moses cannot do it for us. If we are to achieve the Promised Land, we must do it without him….
I tell my daughters that this is the meaning of the Moses story and why it has reverberated through the American story. America, it has been said, is a synonym for human possibility. I dream for you, girls, the privilege of that possibility. Imagine your own Promised Land, perform your own liberation, plunge into the waters, persevere through the dryness, and don’t be surprised – or saddened – if you’re stopped just short of your dream. Because the ultimate lesson of Moses’ life is that the dream doesn’t die with the dreamer, the journey doesn’t end on the mountaintop, and the true destination in a narrative of hope is not [what’s happening right now].