“Promised Land”
This Eternity Sunday feels more personal to me this year than it ever has. Today I will be lighting a candle for my Dad Gary Harder, who died on March 18 this year. It is the closest person to me that I have lit a candle for before, and I am sure there will be some tears as I do so. As a pastor, I am present with so many families as they say their last goodbyes to a loved one, as they prepare for and walk through a funeral or memorial service or gravesite committal, and as they come forward on a day like today to light a candle. I see the tears, the love, the family dynamics, the things left undone or unsaid or unresolved; I see the grief and rawness. I also see the gratitudes and joys and moments of humour and delight, and I see God present and alive and providing comfort and hope and promise. These have always been such sacred and holy moments and I deeply treasure the privilege it has been to walk along side so many of you in these times. It is may be the most fulfilling part about being a pastor.
It does feel different when it is your own father that has died, and your own grief and disorientation and journey. I am so grateful for the way you as a congregation walked alongside me and my Mother and our family as we grieved Dad’s death in March, and held his visitation and funeral and fellowship meal right here in our building. It was a reversal of roles, and it felt good and so supportive. It was such a good and rich funeral – the tributes and stories, the pastoral care and leadership by Janet and Don and Michelle Rizoli, the singing that was out of this world. And the death too was really a good death, as hard as it was, and as surreal as it still feels that he is gone so soon, given how healthy and active he had been. There was all the support of hospice and the many visits and cards and letters in those 5 weeks from his initial stoke and cancer diagnosis, with every grandchild and great grandchild visiting, with his consciousness and awareness and appetite present until the last day. My first inner comments, moments after Dad died, with the piano music of Bach still lingering in the air, was that this was a good and peaceful death, and it’s going to be okay. I have no regrets. Lots of sadness and loss, but no regrets. I knew that God was present and alive and walking with us. I recognize that this is not always how death happens, and that many carry very different stories, but this was my experience with my Dad.
In the months since, there has been lots of processing by our family, by myself, and by the larger community that knew and loved Gary. And yes, this sermon will be more personal than most, because that is what us preachers sometimes do – we have a platform to process our stuff out loud with others as we sit with the Scriptures and the stories of life. So bare with me. And may some of what I share connect to the people you hold dear.
One of the biblical images we use around death is that image of Crossing the River into the Promised Land. It comes from that major event in the life of the people of Israel, when after years of slavery in Egypt, and then 40 years of wandering in the dessert, they finally cross the river into the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and all the promises of a new life. I found myself intrigued by the verses we heard from the very last chapter of Deuteronomy when Moses is standing on the verge of the Promised Land as a very old man, but is not allowed to cross over before he dies. Maybe that passage was still rattling through my head from our summer series on Climbing the Mountain of God, when Janet preached on this very passage using the image of eye glasses and magnifying glasses and lens and asking what perspectives do we use to see this story and our stories. The story of Moses also fits well with our whole fall worship series we’ve had on Leaders in the Land as we have followed various Old Testament leaders and asked what they can teach us about leadership in our time. It is a fitting passage to use to end this series.
For over a year now, I have been a part of an MCEC Pastor’s Learning Circle group with a few other pastors. We meet once a month over Zoom for mutual support and sharing and prayer. We have been reading a chapter each month from a book called ‘Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership,’ by Ruth Haley Barton (IVP Books, 2018). (https://www.amazon.ca/Strengthening-Soul-Your-Leadership-Crucible/dp/083084645X/ref=sr_1_4?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.c0m-n2nmsP9RbPPWfMtdSN5GJ2Gst4OxgmQpQb3y5lMHRgSFunRL28f6w3D8SR0-pv8TtgxwTwiVBNFSy5iUFg.CLV94w0bJdyumetSv8w8hE0LGDBeQZy6YkkZWlBPdds&dib_tag=se&hvadid=666823236666&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9001028&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=16685315600921707192&hvtargid=kwd-311818796556&hydadcr=2877_13589103&keywords=strengthening+the+soul&qid=1730494279&sr=8-4) Haley Barton asks important and tough questions to pastor types, leader types, and really all of us, about how it is with your soul. What lies beneath your ministry and grounds you and keeps you spiritually connected to God amidst all the demands and potential loneliness and isolation of ministry. As Ruth Haley Barton writes, ‘the choice to lead from our soul is a vulnerable approach to leadership, because the soul is more tender than the mind or the ego. It is a place where we don’t have all the answers – or at least not necessarily when everybody wants them! It is a place where we are not in control; God is. It is a place where the quickest way is not always the best way, because the transformation that is happening in us is more important than getting where we think we need to go.’ (Ibid, p. 210) As we have explored the themes of this book, this pastor’s group has been a safe and vulnerable place to explore these questions. All the way through the book she draws on the person and character of Moses to guide us into each topic of conversation. So it feels like Moses has been accompanying me for a long time now.
We finally got to the last chapter, about the death of Moses, on our Halloween Day Zoom call, chapter 13 no less! The author gave such a refreshing take on this story and what it might say to all of us about leadership, but also about our lives and how we understand death and the death of those around us on a day like today. Rather than focus on Moses being able to see but not cross into the Promised Land as some sort of cruel punishment, Haley Barton sees the gifts in this story to Moses. She gives us three helpful, more life-giving images for the story – ways of understanding what might be going on.
The first image is ‘Letting Go’. Whether it is our leadership in a job or career, within our family structures, within a community project, within the church context, or whether it is our very physical lives themselves, we have strong visions of what can and should be, and how things should turn out. We work hard and put our whole selves into things. But at a certain point we recognize that change is coming, and our role may be ending or shifting, or we may be looking at our own death or the death of a loved one, and how life will still go on. As Haley Barton says ‘We can feel things starting to shift and we realize that maybe we are not going to see all our dreams come true. Some of the things we had hoped for have come about, but many have not.’ (Ibid, p. 212) Moses has led his people for over 40 years, and had strong visions of who they could become and where they were going. But now he is coming to terms with the reality that someone else will take it the rest of the way. Notice that Moses is not arguing with God here, or protesting. He seems okay with this. Moses has been given the gift of letting go. His identity is no longer dependant on him being that strong leader of the people. His identity is now found in God. Haley Barton writes that he can ‘sit on the side of the mountain content to be a soul in God’s presence. He no longer needed any role or responsibility or task to define him.’ (Ibid, p.213) He has let these things go, and now is ready for the ultimate letting go in death. One of the real gifts I have seen both in people who are dying, but also in their families, is when they can start to let go as they prepare for death – let go of their dreams, let go of control, let go of their resentments or anger or things that are unresolved, let go of the person who is dying into the hands of God. It cannot be forced, but comes as a gift, and we reach a new place of trust in God. Like Moses, we are able to let go.
The second image Haley Barton uses is ‘Crossing to Safety.’ She describes the journey of encounter with God that brings Moses to a place where he has crossed over to a new place of transformation and safety that is not dependant on actually crossing this physical river in front of him. He has been so changed by his journey with God over all these years, that he is completely at peace with himself and God – a place of intimacy and utter assurance of the presence of God. Maybe this is what it means when it says that Moses knew the Lord face to face. She writes ‘By this time Moses and God were like an old married couple who had loved and fought for so long that they had reached a deep level of understanding. They had been through so much together that now it was enough to sit and rock on the front porch of life, each one content just to know that the other is there. That was all it took to make life good.’ (Ibid, p. 215). She wonders if the Promised Land is not so much a physical destination, but a ‘way of life and being that enables us to worship and love God fully….to encounter God so richly that no matter what we are working toward here on this earth, we know we already have what we most deeply want – the presence of God.’ (Ibid, p.215) Our physical death then is just one more step towards this intimacy and union with the God we seek. Again, this is about not clinging and grasping onto our biggest ambitions or projects, or the things we can’t control, but about being grounded in our trust of God.
The last image Haley Barton uses she calls ‘The Long View.’ It is a way of putting our lives within the much longer view of God. Yes, we have all the things we need to do right now – our struggles for peace and justice, our compassionate acts within our communities, the ministry of our lives, of our church, but these only make sense within the long view of God’s vision for our world. We will sometimes do good, but we will also sometimes fail. We will not be perfect, but we will be met by our God. In a longer quote to end this chapter she writes ‘I am filled with a longing to BE a certain kind of person. A person who knows God. A person who is faithful against all odds and does not shrink back. A person through whom God can perform whatever deeds need to be done – mighty or otherwise – but also a person who can be just as content settling down beside a well or sitting on the side of a mountain in God’s presence. Someone whose face shines because she has been talking to God. Someone whose every move is a result of an attempt to listen to God and then do what he says. Someone who, when God says ”it’s time to let go; it’s time for you to come home,” easily lets go and rests in the arms of this One whom she has grown to love and trust with her very being.’ End of Quote. (Ibid, p.219). This is the gift of the long view that Moses knew, and that we are invited into. This is the soul work that we are invited into already in life and all the ways we hold our lives, but which then is present around death – to let go, to cross into safety and to see the long view.
I like this language of journey, of being, of trust, of letting go, of crossing, of seeing the long view. It helps me as I think about grief and loss this year. A month ago, my brother Kendall and I flew out to BC with my Mom. This came out some comments Mom made soon after Dad’s death that at some point, she would want to connect particularly with some of our Harder relatives. There were 4 Harder brothers, of which 3 have died in the last 2 years. Over a few days, we met with my two aunts, who have also lost their husbands, with the living youngest brother, my Uncle Allen and his wife, and with a bunch of Harder cousins and partners – some of who I had not seen since my Grandma Harder’s funeral 14 years ago. It was such a rich trip. It is so easy after a death and all the intensity of those weeks before he died and the funeral week, to simply re-enter the normal pace of regular life and work and ministry, and kind of shelf all the emotions and processing into the background. We don’t quite have the same formalized 30 days of mourning and weeping we heard about in our passage. And some of that is simply normal, and what we need to do to move on. That is how we cope with life. But this felt intentional – a set aside time. Here we were, coming back to that emotional space of dealing with Dad’s death – and being met with warm hugs and good food – nothing quite like a Harder supper, and then sharing over and over again the story of Dad’s health journey and death, and all the details and stories around his visitation and funeral, which they had all watched on-line. We did this while recounting the older two brother’s death and funerals too as they shared about those experiences. The sister in laws shared with each other and us, and we talked deeply with our cousins about what it has meant to lose a Dad. There were tears and stories and lots of laughter at their many quirks. We didn’t waste time with lots of small talk, but got down to the essentials of life and purpose and meaning. These were intense days of visiting and sharing, but somehow very cathartic. It felt like some letting go and crossing into a new place in relation to this death. It also gave space to see the longer view, and to know that life does go on, where we all carry the gifts left to us into a new form of the future.
The second half of our week was making our way from BC, from our time on Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast, Abbotsford and Kamloops, and from all these Harders, back to Alberta, where our family lived for most of my growing up. This part of the trip was good for the three of us too – where we had more time to simply be, together, and then to see some Neufeld relatives in Calgary and Edmonton, and lots of old friends in Edmonton – the people who had watched me grow up, and still loved and held me. It was like a crossing into safety – taking both a physical and spiritual journey through the mountains. I said in the sharing time already when I got back, that on our long driving day through the mountains, in honour of my Dad who would never stop for any points of interest, we stopped multiple times – at beautiful views and vistas that I had never seen before – Three Valley Gap, Rogers Pass, Natural Bridge, Emerald Lake, Canmore, Lake Louise, Banff – the last 2 I’ve stopped at before. Maybe it was a way of coming to terms that we are different now without Dad, and just as we remember some of his quirks of personality, and even some of the things that irritated us, or his failures and flaws, we also kept bringing to mind the tremendous gifts he left us, with the trust that those too continue on within us, even without him. One of those gifts is music, and on the three hour drive from Calgary to Edmonton, we finally blasted the music of J.S. Bach the whole way – all 6 of his chorale motets, Cantata #4 and the Goldberg Variations on piano – talk about letting go. And then we had this short little time in Edmonton, where Dad had his first longer pastorate – 15 and ½ years at First Mennonite Church – which we left 37 years ago. We are still all welcomed by our friends there so warmly – a yummy supper and evening watching the Oilers actually win a game this year with more of the peers of Kendall and I, meeting 2 high school friends for a lively breakfast, and then a supper my Mom and I had the next night with friends a generation or so older than me – the adults I had grown up watching and that shaped much of whom I am. For a time, the room got deeply into ‘church talk’ and all that is going on in that congregation, which is such a different place by now, but also seems to be thriving. Seeing my Mom there around the table, a respected Elder, and the memories for them of my Dad, I was re-assured that gifts and dreams had been shared and received and made a difference those many years ago, but also that God’s work continues long after any of us are gone. Just like Moses and the Promised Land, it was like I got a glimpse of that long view, and was filled with gratitude and assurance. That has been a part of my journey this year with my Dad, and will continue to be the journey I am on. I know each of you have your own stories and journeys and the ways you process the death of loves ones in your lives.
So this morning, we will invite a time of lighting candles. As we light candles, we will name the people from SJMC who have died this year, name some of the losses and challenges within our lives and our world, and come forward to light candles in memory of specific people in our lives that we have let go. As we do so, maybe we can think about Moses gazing into the Promised Land – a Land which he will never enter, but which he has helped dream. May we be given the gift of letting go, a process that can take many years and happens in stages, the assurance that we are crossing into safety and that our loved ones crossed into safety, and the eyes and ears and heart to see the long view, and know that ultimately our lives are in the hands of God. May it be so. Thanks be to God. Amen.