Rev. Joseph Boyd According to the Torah, Moses is brought to a mountaintop where he is shown the Promised Land. Then God tells Moses so there is no confusion: This is the land I have promised your ancestors, and this the land your children will enter, but you yourself will not enter it. Moses receives this vision right before his death. I think it’s important to note how the vision comes about. It comes after 40 years of traveling in the wilderness, after many years of travel in inhospitable conditions which challenged Moses’ view of human nature. The people who are promised liberation often complain, wish they could return to their former years of relative security even as slaves, and who challenge Moses with nearly every decision. Most of Moses’ life is not spent on the mountaintop; it’s spent in places where almost nothing grows: no food, no shelter, no hope.
The only hope is the faith handed to Moses from his ancestors, the hope that one day he and his children, and the children in his entire community will be free, liberated, free to live in a land flowing with milk and honey: a place where food will be plenty and accessible, a place with rich soil where one can grow flowers and plants, a place of hope. That is the promise, and Moses holds that promise as he leads all his people into a life that is unfamiliar, dangerous, and scary. Moses spends most of his life wrestling with his insecurities, wrestling with faith, uncertain sometimes how he and his people will make it through a single day. Moses and his people endure plagues, political and social oppression, on top of the garden variety fear, greed, and self-centeredness which accompany every human life. The Holy Land as it has been called is often described as featureless: dry and without much clear distinction. It is arid, and its beauty lies in its emptiness. There are few mountains or high peaks. It is mostly flat and featureless, and when a person travels through this land without a car, it can feel like perpetual deja vu: one can easily lose track of time, uncertain how far they’ve traveled, uncertain how long they have yet to go to reach their destination.
There is another mountaintop experience in the New Testament when Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain, and Elijah and Moses appear in the sky above them. A voice booms from heaven: “This is my Son, whom I love, and I am very pleased with him. Listen to him!” As you and I would probably do if we heard a booming voice from the sky: the disciples fall to the ground and cower in fear uncertain what they are witnessing. They are uncertain of the vision they are receiving, and they are very afraid. I imagine the disciples covering their faces on the ground, covering all their senses, trying to ground themselves in what they have known reality to be. One of the disciples peaks up and sees that Jesus is alone, and Elijah and Moses have left. Jesus, out of kindness and wisdom, says through his actions, we shouldn’t spend too much time on the mountaintop, and leads them back down the mountain, back to the valley that they know.
Martin Luther King Jr. not only knew these stories, but they were part of him, informing his understanding of the world. King knew intimately that most of life would not be the mountaintop, it would not be when one hears and understands all things, it would be down in the valley with the people. Most of it would be with the people, people trying to get through their day, people yearning to be free, but also people who were unprepared for sacrifice, sacrifice for the sake of a vision.
In this last speech given the day before he was assassinated, King imagines that he could fly instantly to any moment in human history. But in each period of history he experiences, he feels compelled to fly on. He says that if he could be alive at any time in human history, he would choose to be alive in his own time: a time still ruled by policies and attitudes of racism, perpetual poverty, and militarism.
He remarks that he understands why anyone would be baffled by this desire to live on this day we are in, but then he goes on to say why he feels this way. His logic is unusual but sound. The reason he would prefer to be alive at this time in human history is not because we don’t have trouble or problems, it’s because the trouble and problems are so great today, that we can’t put off grappling with them any longer. This time is the greatest time in human history because we collectively are becoming aware that if we don’t grapple with these centuries long problems, we will no longer survive. We are becoming increasingly clear that without collective liberation, without some dramatic correction to centuries-long attitudes and practices, we will cease to be. You don’t need to be a preacher to have this view today. No one will call you a prophet for stating this. Every day normal people are saying this. It is now becoming common sense. And this common understanding is leading many to despair, understandably. We have endured these injustices for centuries, and we don’t seem to be any less greedy or fearful than we were 60 years ago, so what hope do we have?
King showed us a response to that very serious and important question. In reading King’s biography, I learned that his ambition as a young person was to one day become a minister of a congregation like his father, and be a professor at a university or seminary. This was the ambition that led to his journey of ordination and then his doctoral studies. It is a reasonable ambition. That was all he had hoped for himself. He became a pastor for the first time of a church in Montgomery, Alabama, and was well on his way to achieving his ambitions as a pastor/professor. Groups of his membership in Montgomery were active in planning a bus boycott, mostly women, and at this time no religious leaders. They sought a minister who would give their cause some validity to the surrounding community, and the other ministers who were senior to King said that they had too much to lose by speaking out. They told King he was young, and had less to lose in comparison: he had no local reputation to uphold, so they made him the defacto spokesperson for the boycott.
I like watching some of those early sermons, because I get the sense King has no idea what all of this will one day lead to both for him and for America. I can imagine King constructing these speeches and sermons the way he would construct any sermon, and having no idea that in the process his life will become something very different from what he imagined. It also is poignant to me that he says if he had to choose one time period to be alive, it would be that time period he was in, who according to friends and colleagues said it was the most difficult period of his life. During that last year, he had used his moral authority to speak out against the Vietnam War and to start a campaign which would end poverty. In that process, he lost some of his most stalwart supporters, and often felt alone. According to close friends he had bouts of depression, and he was increasingly losing public support.
It is an understatement to say that King was a great orator, an effective organizer, and an inspiration for millions of people. But that is not what impresses me most about King. What impresses me most is King’s willingness to change and be changed by what he came in contact with, and his struggle to persistently do what he thought was good and right. When he was young he had a certain ambition, and all of that changed based on the needs of his community. At the height of his popularity as a Civil Rights leader he meets an unassuming Vietnamese monk and hears about the atrocities in Vietnam. He is moved to change and speak out against militarism, war, profit at the expense of people. He receives a telegram from sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee who are trying to unionize so they can be given fair wages and health insurance, asking for his assistance. He immediately books a plane to Memphis to deliver the speech we heard this morning, and give support to these workers. He was attentive to the valleys of everyday human experience and injustice, and he responded using all his gifts to offer a different vision of what is possible: a world where all those seeking freedom will be given it: freedom to be who they are in their own skin, in their own land. Freedom to provide for themselves and their families, their community. Freedom from violence, and the necessity to kill another person in war.
For me, his last speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” is about hope. It’s hope for us all down here in the valley. It’s a direction for all of us who think: Wow, this time is really awful – look at what we and people we see have to deal with on a daily basis. And the direction is very simple. Don’t stand apart from it. Let these times change you, not into a person of cynical bitterness, but a person who desires to respond. If like we do sometimes become depressed or cynical, still don’t forget to respond. Say yes to the pleas from all around the world, pleas from the earth itself yearning for a promised land. What if each of us here, you and I is the fulfillment of that promise? What if we lived as if that were true? What if our actions inspired others to act, and collectively we lived into that promise? That is the vision King talked about.
And I’ve discovered that a vision/a view or perspective does emerge when we commit to even modest engagement with the time we are in, wishing to help another and our whole society. I’ve discovered that commitment to what is in front of me, commitment to what is before me in the valley of my life, that desire for engagement, gives birth to intention. And intention gives rise to hope, because from intention we notice possibilities. We will notice some of those possibilities, and many of them we never will. But that’s ok, because other people will notice what we’ve missed, and our intention can help fuel them, even after we’re gone. The intention to be free, the intention to love, and the intention to live fully in the time we are in with the time we have left. Living fully is giving fully, giving fully of ourselves to ourselves and to our world. There is no amount of giving that is too small. The smallest gesture brings us to the mountaintop, and thankfully back down to the valley, where we truly are needed.
