My Shattered Dreams

Moses had a pretty remarkable life. From the very beginning, his life was an adventure. But with all that he experienced, he simply longed for one thing. Moses, at the end of his life, was on a journey to see the promise land. He had faithfully followed all but one instruction from God and the result of the relatively minor incident of losing his temper, at least according to scripture, was that he was denied entrance to the promise land that was just within grasp. Deuteronomy 34 details the events of his death, but there is one verse in particular that is sums up the ethics of God in this passage, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.”

The question I have to ask myself as I read this is, “Why?” Here is this guy that dedicated his life and sacrificed his well-being repeatedly to serve God for what appears to be motivated by not much more than a deep desire to connect with a heritage he never really felt a part of. So how can God strike him down so mercilessly? Perhaps the story of the death of Moses is just a way for the story teller to interpret the event. Maybe Moses climbed that mountain and had a heart attack. Maybe he died some time earlier, but the narrative necessitated the image. Maybe we could put some evangelical slant on this to show us that the Promise Land is not some place here on earth, but that the real promise land is heaven. I guess. Any of these could be true. However, these would still mean that God at least allowed Moses to die before his entrance into the promise land for no real point.

I have chosen this passage for a couple of reasons. The first is because is demonstrates how modern Christianity has shaped an inconsistent personal ethic. As Christianity has tried to understand the ethics of God based on passages such as this, it has shaped an ethic of God that can explain his actions and therefore shape our understanding of those actions. However, what typically is happening is that we use a form of convenient relativism. The church, despite its awareness, will often hold to a moral absolutism when considering God’s sovereignty in that there is right and wrong and that is that. However, it will also hold to a teleological ethic with grace. This means that the determining factor is not so much about right and wrong, but about the consequences of the sin. The inconsistency lies here in the motivation, not to sin: because it is wrong or because it has negative effects. However, again, when the church will discuss the behavior of Christ it will often discuss it from a deontology paradigm in that he was acting according to a duty to God. Similarly, the church will hold to a virtue ethic when discussing discipleship. This means that the pursuit to be obedient is because it builds a strong character. But the church is unable to recognize that virtue ethics is inconsistent with absolutism and teleology. Ironically, virtue ethics may be what holds us to deontology even though virtue, in one sense, is something that deontologists would reject.

Here is my first point- modern Christianity with an attempt to guide its ethics and understand the actions of God has based what it has attempted to discern is the ethics of God in scripture. But since God transcends ethics and defines pure ethics, he is not subject to the same rigidity that we are. This is not to argue that God is unethical, but that we simply can’t understand why he acts the way he acts. But that is the trapping of the modern church: it NEEDS to understand God in order to have intimacy with Him (or her or it or the event of). When we attempt to understand the universe by defining the character of God then we end up placing whichever preconceived ethical description of God works. At one point we will propose that God was testing us while at another point we will believe the enemy is pressing down on us. Ultimately this leads us to read scripture about all things working toward good or knocking and receiving as an assumption that this is a description of God’s ethics. But it isn’t. It is a description of intimacy and purpose experienced.

This leads to the second reason I have chosen this passage. Moses assumed that his reward for a life of dedication would be to lead his people home. But for whatever reason, this didn’t happen. There was a time when I hoped that my future laid in highly successful ministry. When I left the church I found something that actually brought me much closer to my strengths and interests. I began to explore what success would look like if I stayed on that path. After receiving my doctorate in August I began to look for new opportunities. I felt that I had a good handle on my gifts, talents, strengths, and the opposites of each of those pretty well. I also knew that I wanted to get back to doing something in ministry, but in a different way. I had a plan of success that awarded the opportunity to make great contributions to ministry as well. It hasn’t panned out. In fact, earlier today I received another rejection letter. I currently have a job that I like and am in no hurry to leave, but I had a plan and that plan isn’t working out. I am realizing though that my plan has had very little to do with intimacy or purpose, but with success. My point is not about “the best laid plans of mice and men”, but how I attempt to understand why those plans don’t come to pass. This is something that I can’t quite work out: is it better to humbly serve in contentment or to pursue excellence and vision? I don’t know, but what I do know is that my goals have been neither. They have been rooted in validating myself. And maybe that is the real point. We all know that things rarely work out the way we want them to, but where does that need for them to work out in a certain way or have some reason for them not working out that way come from.

Moses experienced a dream shattered. While my reality ain’t too bad, I too am dealing with a shattered dream. In his sermon titled “Shattered Dreams” Martin Luther King Jr. gives two pointers on dealing with shattered dreams:

1. “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”
2. “Courage to be.”

In my attempts to grow spiritually I have too often attempted to understand why things don’t work out the way that I want them to. And I have allowed my identity to be shaped by my conclusions. There have always been answers to that question even though they just as often contradicted each other. Seeking the answer, however, in some formulaic attempt to understand God will likely always lead to despair (recognized or not). What I am just now coming to see is that my plans have had very little to do with anything other than needing to have greater certainty. So here is the convoluted mess I have gotten myself in: I make plans that result in a success that will validate my insecurities, but when the plan doesn’t come to fruition or I find that I don’t feel any more validated I try to understand why God has allowed my noble plans to fail. And rather than seeing it as an opportunity (regardless of why) I layer it with some form of other certainty that will provide immediate relief, but all that I am really doing is working against my real goal of intimacy and purpose. So rather than understanding my shattered dreams I am trying to learn from them in the hope that I will someday develop the courage to simply be (whatever that means).