I greet you in the name of the one who is Lord of the living and the dead, the Ancient of Days, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the firstborn of the grave; the one who said, I am the resurrection and the life, those who believe in me, though they are dead, yet shall they live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die (Jn. 11:25).

If I were conducting the service, you might expect words like those at the opening. What we get instead are these words from the end of Deuteronomy. Israel is saying goodbye to their dearly departed leader, Moses. Throughout the first five books of the Old Testament, Moses’ voice is heard and his perspective comes through. Here at the last Israel puts the finishing touches on Moses’ life amid great weeping. The words are eloquent and lofty—just as they should be for a man so great he represents Israel the way Jesus does the church.

We have followed the life of Moses over the past few months of sermons. We were in the bulrushes watching as he floated the Nile and was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. We took our shoes off with him at the burning bush and heard his call to lead the people to freedom. We walked with him through the Red Sea, across the wilderness, up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, and down Mount Sinai to break the commandments over the heads of the Golden Calf-making, commandment- breaking, stiff-necked children of Israel. And it hurt us as much as it hurt them, because we too are Israel, after all. And now we come to the end with him: the narrative from Israel’s funeral tribute bids us hike alongside him to the top of Mount Nebo, at the brink of the Promised Land, and take one good long last look at what’s out there that he will see with his eyes but not lay foot upon himself. It’s a moment of clarity for him right before his death, but it’s not Moses’ clarity so much as Israel’s: they are telling us less about him and his death than about themselves and their own lives. They tell what we ought to see before we get to our end. They offer us perspective.

Whenever we attend a funeral or scan the obituary page for a face or a name we might know, perspective is what we ought to gain. No man is an island entire of itself, wrote the divine, John Donne; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…. Any man’s death diminishes me, he says, because I am involved in mankind. And then in a reference to that old custom, in which the church bells would ring out at the death of one of their own, Donne says rightly, … never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Meditation XVII, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, Charles M. Coffin, ed., [Modern Library, 1994], p. 441.)

Maybe you’ve been feeling that already lately with deaths in your own family. Maybe the death last week of the young Navy pilot, Matt Shubzda, shook you up. Maybe the sniper victims made you realize how it could have been you. Maybe the plane crash that took Senator Paul Wellstone, along with his wife, daughter and staffers gave you some perspective on things. It should have.

But what does Israel want us to learn from this brief homage to Moses at the end of the Books of Moses? We see first how he died in the presence of God alone, the way we each of us must. Moses and God—the two of them together—made quite a team, didn’t they? Israel lovingly reports that God was the undertaker for Moses’ burial. Nice.

It’s an interesting thing about funerals: there are two things that we always hope turn out to be one thing: the eulogy and the message. The eulogy focuses upon the person who has died; it pays tribute to the life and character of the deceased. A relative or good friend often speaks it. The message speaks of God more than the person who has died. It takes up the matters of life and death and life after death. It’s always a joy, though, when a eulogy is a message and a message a eulogy; when you can hardly speak of the dead person without speaking of the living God; when you can hardly speak better of God than to speak about the way God was seen in the one seemed to have lived face to face with God.

For the first twelve years of my pastorate here, our late pastor emeritus, Bruce McIver, and I often shared funeral duties. As he typically knew the deceased better than I, he would offer the eulogy and I the message. It was a neat division of labor, but it broke down on certain occasions. It broke down entirely at Bruce’s own memorial service. His wife Lawanna spoke a tribute—how did she do that? Howard Butt, Jr., offered an eloquent eulogy. I delivered a message. But truth be told, they were all three eulogies and all three messages, because we could none of us speak of Bruce without speaking of God or speak of God without speaking of Bruce.

Wouldn’t that be something, to come to the end of your life and know that to be the delightful dilemma you left behind? This is the case with Moses. Israel cannot speak of Moses without speaking of God, and it cannot speak of God without speaking of Moses.

One curious hint of this is the way they speak of Moses’ vitality right to the end. He is old, but he hasn’t lost his youthfulness. One hundred twenty years, but good circulation has kept him in circulation. The Hebrew is interesting for his vigor: he is still moist, it says. He’s got life in his loins is what they mean. He’s still got it, don’t you know?! The women in the nursing home have to lock their doors. He’s not all dried up. The Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, translates it: his freshness had not fled. Nice. No sour odor. Irish Spring smell. Apparently, Moses lived so close to God that God’s own power of life kept him going right to the end.

It’s his eyes that caught Israel’s attention, though; his eyes more than his musk, his vision more than his vigor. Seeing is the thing Moses did better than anyone in Israel. His eyes were undimmed, the text says, even at his death. He saw clearly. He had great vision. Moses was a prophet like none other in the history of Israel. A prophet is given a view of things from God’s point of view. A prophet has perspective: he or she gets to stand at a high point of history and look at how things are, how things have been, and what things may come to be. A prophet has three kinds of sight: hindsight, insight, and foresight.

On the mountaintop of Nebo, Moses had a panoramic view. He could see where he had come from, where he had been, all that had happened to bring him there. And Israel wanted to say thank you for all of that. They hoped he was satisfied, that he had a sense that he had done what God wanted, and that for all the ups and down, the wrong turns and false starts, it was nonetheless good. Israel knew it was. The children of Moses were children of God, no thanks to themselves. Moses had done his part in raising them thus far.

When you look at your past, what do you see? Do you see only the failures and losses, the ways you blew it and all the hurts that held you back? Or do you see the hand of God protecting and leading you? It’s one thing to pray, For all that will be, yes. Can you also pray, For all that has been, thanks? This is the hindsight perspective that death should lead us to if it’s not to be lost upon us. Sins forgiven, wounds healed, gratitude for all that’s left.

The insight was something more. Even God’s best friend, Moses, had to die. We don’t know why he couldn’t enter the Promised Land himself. Doesn’t seem fair. Maybe he was being punished for killing the Egyptian. But God killed Egyptians, too. He wasn’t perfect, Moses; he was only a man, for God’s sake. But that may be it: he was only a man, even if he lived his whole life for God’s sake. If Moses doesn’t get to rob the grave, neither do any of us. None of us gets out of here alive. If Moses didn’t get to, neither will we. We may hope for resurrection, but we get that only after we die.

Another insight. Since Moses doesn’t get to live forever, he also doesn’t get to tie up every loose end in his life. None of us does. Even if we want to, there are things that will remain unreconciled or unfinished. We can’t fix everything, we can’t complete everything; we have to leave it to God to take care of. Even if we lay hands on our successor the way Moses did to Joshua, even if we seek to bless everyone we have loved before we go, we will wonder what else we could have done. Israel is telling us, Let it go; you are not in control. Do everything you can as long as you can, but then let it all go to God for the fixing and finishing. That’s what God does best, anyway.

One more insight: you are not indispensable. Moses and Israel are not one and the same. I wonder if Israel is seeing in Moses’ death the truth that they do not owe their existence to Moses but God. The church may depend for a time upon the pastor, but the church exists by the life-giving power of God and God alone. The family may have depended upon the parents for many years, but they will go on, too, and the family will continue because life is in the hands of God. Same with a business or anything else. The church and the family and every enterprise you have put your life into will go on after you are gone if, and only if, God so wills. God will raise up Joshua to take it the next mile. You can trust God with what you leave behind, because it was never really yours in the first place.

Finally, foresight. God gives Moses a view of the Promised Land. There is always more to come with an eternal God. Time running out doesn’t mean hope running out. A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for, penned the poet Robert Browning. God holds out hope before you at the moment of your death and mine, as if to say: Face forward, my friend; you ain’t seen nothing yet. This vision is not a consolation prize to Moses after learning he will not cross over in this lifetime; it is a promise to him as well as any of us that we will one day cross over in another way to a Land that is more real than any we have seen. What we see, if we see what Israel thinks we ought to see, is the glory of the coming of the Lord.

The struggle for civil rights had carried Martin Luther King, Jr., across America in a whirlwind of the Spirit. He was riding the wind of God, we know now in hindsight, if we didn’t know by insight at the time. In Memphis, Tennessee, on the stormy night of April 3, 1968, he made his final address to striking sanitation workers in the Mason Temple. The next day an assassin’s bullet robbed him of any future but resurrection. He closed his speech that night with these words reminiscent of our text: 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. And 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.

Amen?