Sharing the Inheritance - Deuteronomy 34:1-12

When I served at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, I lived with my dog, Abel, in an apartment just south of town. On Thursday afternoons when I got off work, I would often pick up Abel on my way to the county line package store for a bottle of wine and we’d take the long way home, winding through country lanes filled with yard art that thrilled me and wild smells that thrilled him.

Sometimes, we would end up at Mt. Pisgah Cemetery, off of County Road 403. As a novice but passionate observer of burial grounds, it is my opinion that Mt. Pisgah is a world class cemetery. It has weeping willows and Spanish moss. It has quotes, stories, even recipes on gravestones. It has makeshift altars full of fake flowers. It has hanging lanterns, tiny picket fences, and enough quirky history to fill a lifetime of visits. It became one of my sacred spaces in Northeast Arkansas. 

Most of the time, I was the only person for miles around when we visited Mt. Pisgah, and I would let Abel roam off leash while I wandered through the granite monuments. I know that I’m lucky that he always comes when I call. But one afternoon, we pulled into the gravel lot next to the entrance and discovered another car already parked there. 

I had a leash with me, of course. And I had no intention of causing a disruption for the mourner. There was no reason that my dog and I couldn’t share that space with another person. But strangely, I felt intruded upon. This was our special place and it didn’t feel quite as special when anyone could see or see us in it. Abel and I would end up meandering through Mt. Pisgah alongside strangers many times, but that first time, I turned the car around and headed home, grumpy and uncomfortable and not really sure why.

There are plenty of churches and mountains called Mt. Pisgah in America, presumably named after the summit from which Moses and the Israelites, after 40 years in the wilderness, finally catch their first glimpse of the promised land. In the Hebrew, Pisgah simply means “summit,” so this particular peak likely wasn’t a special place before this passage, and we never hear about it again in scripture afterwards. But in today’s Old Testament lesson, Moses stands on a spot the storytellers called Mt. Pisgah to take in an incredible vision for which he has spent most of his life in longing, and then he dies. 

Since June, we have read along, week after week, with the unfolding events of the Torah. We traveled with Abraham when he first left his homeland and made a covenant with God. We trembled when Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, Isaac. We rolled our eyes at Isaac’s rascal of a son, Jacob. We followed Jacob’s son Joseph to Egypt where we fell into slavery, and we followed Moses and the Israelites back out of Egypt and into freedom. We’ve spent the last several weeks wandering with them in the wilderness. 

We’ve learned about how frustrating families can be, about how complicated it is to create a new kind of society from scratch, and about just how much God loves us, in spite of, or perhaps because of, our flawed and foolish humanity. It’s been a journey of epic proportions, which makes today’s passage from Deuteronomy bittersweet. Moses dies before he can cross into the promised land. Although, perhaps there is some mercy in his death. After all, the land that Moses and the people saw from Mt. Pisgah was already occupied by other people, surely indicating more drama to come.

This seems to be an unavoidable part of the human condition. Whether it’s me and my dog at Mt. Pisgah Cemetery, Moses and the Israelites at their Mt. Pisgah, or our brothers and sisters in the Holy Land today, we cannot avoid having to share holy space, and yet, we seem doomed to continually resist this inevitability.

As people of faith, and further, as people of the covenant, we have no choice but to wrestle theologically with what’s happening in Israel, just like we have no choice but to wrestle theologically with what it means that God made a promise to Abraham and to us as Abraham’s descendants, that we would have a holy place to inhabit, and yet, generation after generation, we are surrounded by people who live outside of this promise. 

What should we make of this? In light of the news cycle over the past few weeks, there is a sense of urgency to understand what it means that God seemingly bestows on God’s children the gift of someone else’s land. As ever, we can trust God to be challenging, but the promise of the covenant is not sneaky or cryptic. The scriptures we have immersed ourselves in over the past few months can help guide us.

If we give the foundational stories of our faith a mere passing glance, we see that in the book of Genesis alone, Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah’s son Ham, Hagar and Ishmael, and Esau are all forced out of their homeland, either as punishment for bad behavior or because they were destined by their birth. But when we look closer at their stories, none of them seem to stay out. 

Esau and his brother Jacob bury their father together in the land of their ancestors. God makes an entire nation from Ishmael. Cain is offered protection from violence. And of course, although God played the long game here, we understand the resurrection of Christ to be the undoing of the separation between God and humanity in Eden. It seems that God does not permanently expel anyone from their holy place.

But there is still the question about possession of the land. To whom does a promised land belong - those to whom it was promised, or those who already inhabit it? It’s interesting to look at the Hebrew here. The word used for “possess,” as in, “possess the land,” is also the word used for “inherit,” as in, “inherit the promise.” But, this word is never used to describe the possession of an object or trait.

Possessing or inheriting the land is about legacy, heritage, and promise fulfillment, not ownership. We inherit a way of life, a practice of worship, and a responsibility to an environment, not a plot of earth to hoard and conceal. Our relationship with God is not transactional, but covenantal, and right relationship with holy spaces reflects that.

If I’m honest, this is hard for me to hear. I struggle to share my personal space, much less my holy space. Owning a home that no one ever comes to is just about my favorite thing about me. Unfortunately for me, God’s promise of a place to belong and to practice the faith cannot be bought, traded, or earned - or in my case, mortgaged. It is a gift that must be shared.

It’s uncomfortable. Although we hope for it, it’s hard to imagine a world in which everyone in the Middle East can share their homeland and their holy places. I was uncomfortable sharing a random cemetery I found with people who actually have relatives buried there. But if we learned anything from the first five books of Holy Scripture over the summer, it’s that while we are promised an inheritance of family, holy space, and blessings of purpose, we are not guaranteed comfort. In fact, it’s only on the other side of our discomfort, on the other side of our acceptance that the inheritance must be shared, that we will find our promised land, the Kingdom of God. 

As people of faith, we are at the top of our own Mt. Pisgah, with a vision of what the world could be if we could all love one another the way God loves us. And, from our vantage point, we also see a world fully inhabited by people who do not live within the covenant. Even so, we must share our inheritance. We must share the love and holiness we’ve been given wherever we find ourselves and with whomever we’re surrounded by. This is our heritage, and our path to the fulfillment of God’s promise. Amen.