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had something happen this week that doesn’t happen all that often. Some of you know that I wear glasses and contacts. I am not supposed to have my contacts in for more than a certain amount of hours within a given day due to dry eyes. One day got a little away from me and when I went to take my contacts out, one came out rather easily. The other got stuck. Now for those of you who have worn contacts you know that frustration. You start to look around - did that contact come out and fall somewhere? No. Then all of a sudden you notice how blurry and fuzzy your vision is - being able to see out of one eye and not see out of the other. Your vision becomes distorted.
Friends, it is not just our physical vision that can become distorted from time to time, but our spiritual vision as well. In fact, I would say recognizing our vision is not the hard part in the process. Moses clearly heard his call from God. Identifying the call isn’t the hard part. The hard part is both responding to the call and dealing the frustrations that come up along the way. In other words, just because we say “yes” to the call of God and are obedient doesn’t mean that everything will always come easily. We still will have obstacles and we will still need to persevere.
The 34th chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, tells the story of what happens right before Moses died. Moses went up from the plains and God showed him the promise land, the land that he worked to get the people of Israel into, but the land that he wouldn’t be able to enter himself. I just have to imagine what Moses is seeing as he looks out on that land. He had to be thinking that this is worth it. This is what we moved towards for 40 years in the wilderness. This is what the call of God was all about. But I would also guess that he thought about all that happened along the way. Reflected back of how the people cried to go back to the land of Egypt because their clouded memories thought things were better there, even though they were in slavery. Thought back on how he had come down from having a powerful experience with God when he received the Ten Commandments only to find that the people had made an idol of a golden calf. Thought back to how many times he turned to God and asked to be rescued from these people who could be a pain in his neck.
Even as Moses looked out on the promised land, he knew all that it took to get there. All the challenges that came, but he and the people he was leading kept going on.
It would have been really easy for Moses’s vision to become distorted and fuzzy in those 40 years in the wilderness. And honestly, it became quite fuzzy for the people he was leading. When they took their collective eye off of God and working towards the Promised Land, the idol golden calf came into existence. When times got hard and people got tired of manna, their vision became clouded and they started to want to go back to Egypt, the land God had brought them out of.
How do we reach when times of challenge come? Is our focus, our vision, centered on God? Or do we become distracted and things start to get fuzzy?
Because the truth is, in Proverbs, we find the words of wisdom that say that when the people don’t have a vision, a vision from God, a vision centered on God’s Kingdom, they perish. When things start to get fuzzy friends, we go astray, and we lose our Kingdom of God focus.
Moses was eighty years old when he had the encounter with God in the burning bush. He was one hundred and twenty when he died. Brothers and sisters, it is never too late in life to respond to the call of God. No matter what our age when we are called, we have a choice to make in how we will respond and how we will persevere.
It is not just folks in scripture that have to persevere. Think about Thomas Edison, who is perhaps best known for creating the light bulb. I think we have all heard the stories about how that wasn’t always an easy process. He had to try 3,000 different theories and 6,000 different types of fiber for the carbon filament before finding the right one. But he kept coming back because this idea, this passion, wouldn’t let him go.
Are we that passionate, friends, about the church? Or do we try something once and then give up? I know that we often worry about wasting resources, especially time and energy when something doesn’t go as planned. We need to have a discerning spirit as to whether we are called to try something else or to keep at it. We need a discerning spirit about the vision of God.
In the Gospel of Matthew we find Jesus teaching that the eyes are the lamps of the body, but like most teachings of Jesus he was talking about literally and figuratively. If your eye is healthy, the whole body is full of light. But if the eye is unhealthy - well, then we are full of darkness. Do you think Jesus is talking about our literal eye? Maybe. We know that we can communicate so much through our eyes. But I think he also talking about vision and seeing God’s vision. If the eye of our spirit is focused on the vision of God, and we go after that, then our bodies are full of light. But if not, if things get cloudy and fuzzy, we can quickly enter into darkness.
When we get down to it, perseverance isn’t just about keep going on for the sake of keep going on. It’s about keeping our eyes on the one who called us. It’s being focused on the vision so we don’t let ourselves slip into the darkness. It’s about remembering who gave us the vision and the call in the first place as well as the resources for the mission.
Here is the other thing about persevering for the sake of the vision and call, brothers and sisters, at the end of the day, it’s not about us. It’s not about our own personal glory or how people will remember us. It’s not about our own legacy. It’s about the work of the Kingdom of God that goes on before and after us, but we are blessed to be part of.
What happens after Moses dies? The people of Israel wept and mourned him for thirty days. But then the work of God continued through Joshua son of Nun. The next leader. The next one to hold the vision of God.
The vision and call of God is a tricky thing in that we are blessed and gifted and equipped for such a time as this. It is our call. It’s not someone else’s call so we can’t just pass it on to anyone else. But it is also not about us - it’s about God.
So I want to end this sermon series the way that we started it six weeks ago, praying that we open ourselves anew to the dreams of God. The scary dreams. The dreams that are too big for us to even imagine on our own. Let us open ourselves to the call of the Spirit, so that we can once again be people who chase after the visions and dreams that are from God alone. Amen.
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