By Reverend Laurie DeMott

This is, obviously, a bit of wishful thinking because in spite of our improved medical knowledge, most of us are not going to celebrate our 120th birthday. For many of us, the midpoint of our lives has already come and gone and we now have fewer years before us than lie behind us. Of course, none of us wants to think about that -- when we have so much left to do, when we're just as busy as we ever were, when our brains are still perking along quite well, thank you very much, and our legs are still capable of getting us from point A to Point B, (maybe a little slower than we might like but still moving nonetheless) -- when we are simply not ready to be put out to pasture, we want to think of ourselves as a member of the "still productive" category, not as a member of the generation "in decline" and so we claim the name "middle aged". Middle aged has become a state of mind, not of body, and most people today hope to stay "middle-aged" right up to the moment they die.

The Bible says that Moses did make it to 120 before he died, but most scholars agree that because the Biblical method of accounting differed from ours, he was in fact probably about half that. The ancients may have calculated age according to seasons, which, with a rainy season and a dry season every year, would have made Moses around 60. Or more likely the numbers were symbolic -- forty years was an idiom describing the length of a generation so 120 years might have meant that Moses lived long enough to see the birth of three generations. Since biblical mothers were usually in their teens when their first child was born, Moses could have become a great grandfather in his late 50s. In other words, no matter how you figure it, by today's standards Moses was still in the prime of life, and the Bible confirms this when it says, "His eye was undimmed and his vigor unabated." And just to prove it, here in Deuteronomy 34, Moses hikes all the way to the top of a mountain to talk with God. This was no tottering old man; this was a man who still had things to do, places to go, people to see, and the energy to do it all.

In America, Moses would consider himself middle-aged: he'd be throwing away that AARP card that had arrived in the mail and checking his iPhone to see which of the five committees that he chaired was meeting that night. In spite of all of those years in the wilderness, or maybe because of all of those years in the wilderness, Moses' eye remained undimmed and his vigor unabated. That young Joshua fellow that he had been grooming to take over was a good man but he couldn't match Moses' wisdom and experience that came out of a lifetime of leading the people and even if there were some days when Moses admittedly had been ready to throw up his hands at his whining thickheaded charges and let Joshua deal with the whole lot of them, today was not one of those days. Today, finally, the Promised Land lay within his sight and as Moses stood on the summit of Mount Nebo and gazed toward Gilead as far as Dan, upon all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, toward the land of Judah as far as the western sea, at the Negeb, and the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, his eyes seeing all the way to Zoar, Moses felt younger than he had in forty years. This was what he had given his life for; this was the dream that had kept him moving, that had pushed him, pulled him, and even carried him when he didn't think he could take another step. Moses must have yearned to feel the soil of Canaan under his feet and know finally that it was all true, that God's promise was real and God's people would indeed become a great nation.

But it was not to be. This one unfinished act of his life would never be finished. God told Moses that Moses had to stay behind while others took up his work and went on without him.

When you insist on thinking of yourself as middle-aged right up to the moment you die, it is very very hard to accept that there will be some things that you will just never get to see. I knew a 90 year old man who was determined to hold his new great-granddaughter in his arms before he died, but because she was born on the other side of the country and air travel was too difficult for him, his dream was never realized. But even had he been able to see her, there would have eventually been another great-grandchild born that he would have wanted to hold as well. There would have been first days of school, graduations, weddings, reunions -- the constant stream of events that mark the passage of time for families and at some point, he would have had to admit that he would not see it all. At some point, he would have had to stand on Mount Nebo looking over the land spread below him and know that it was a land that was to be his family's but no longer his.

Being mortal means that there will come a time when life will go on without you. If you are Moses' age or older, you may already be coming to terms with the fact that you have fewer years before you than lie behind but the reality is that because we are all mortal, any one of us might already have passed the midpoint of our lives. We can't know when we will die and so we can't know when we have done most of the living we are going to get. It is a sobering thought to consider that maybe tonight will be the last night you have left to you and here you were planning on spending it watching re-runs of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians."

We don't like to think about our mortality, especially when our eyes are still undimmed and our vigor unabated, but to refuse to think about it, to pretend that we will simply go on and on forever like the Energizer Bunny, is to live in a world with a faulty center. The reason that God didn't allow Moses to enter the Promised Land, the Bible says, was because earlier in his life, Moses had claimed an authority over the people that rightfully belonged to God. When the people were thirsty, Moses had struck a rock and said, "There, I have given you water, you ungrateful wretches," and the people's thirst was quenched, but their trust in God was compromised. They were in danger of coming to believe that Moses was their Savior and so when Moses died, as he was bound to do being of mortal flesh, the Israelites would be tempted to lie down and die with him because who would there be then to save them? God needed to insure that the Israelites didn't start believing that it was Moses who had brought them out from slavery and that it was Moses alone who could bring them to the Promised Land for as important as Moses had been in God's liberation plan, he was still only one man in a whole long line of servants who would continue to serve God and bring God's vision into reality. Some of these people would become well known names -- Joshua, Gideon, Deborah, David, and Esther -- while most would vanish into obscurity, their names forgotten but their work for God crucial in bringing God's love to bear on the brokenness of the world.

And so Moses had to remain behind. He had to leave his work unfinished so that others would be forced to take it up, and so that in taking it up, that they too might discover the joy of serving God.

We can't read this passage from Deuteronomy without hearing the words of another man who became the Moses of our times. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked to liberate another oppressed people and since his assassination, no other single man or woman has arisen who has been able to lead as effectively as he led and yet King himself realized that as important as he was, he was not capable of holding together the center of the universe. He knew he was yet a mortal man who could not live forever, and so like Moses on Mount Nebo, he would have to trust that the work he had started could be continued, maybe not by one man or one woman but certainly by the countless lives of the nameless dedicated workers who would come after him. On April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, King addressed the crowd in Memphis, Tennessee and said:

"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it 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.

"We, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."
It's not Moses who will get us there.
It's not Martin Luther King, Jr. who will get us there.
It's not you who will get us there!
It's not any one man or any one woman who will get us there. It is we, as a people, who will get us to the Promised Land.1

Paul called this long line of servants, 'the saints' and it is the saints that we celebrate today -- the men and the women who came before us and dedicated their lives to serving God and others, and the men and the women who will come after us to continue that work. We give thanks for those who have gone before but we must also bless those who will come after and trust that they will be there to take our place, because no matter how hard you work and how much you do and how much you love, there will always be work unfinished, there will always be more to do, there will always be more to love.

In King's words, longevity has its place and we can all pray that we are blessed with a long and fruitful life but however long or however short our days, may we live each day with the joy of knowing that we are able to serve because of the work of those who have gone before us, and may we strive to lay down a sure and a steady path in joyful anticipation for those who will walk after us.

You are part of a great cloud of witnesses, a steady stream of saints, who have discovered the joy of following God in service together, and it is we as God's people working together who will one day get us all to the Promised Land.

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1. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 286