I love stories that end happily ever after.
The hero rides off into the sunset.
Where everything gets resolved, the questions answered, the mystery solved, what was broke gets fixed, there is resolution.
But I also love the story of Moses, and his story is none of those things.
It does not have a conventional happy ending.
After a lifetime of facing off Pharaoh and wandering in the wilderness headed toward the land of promise, he makes it to the Mountain Top, he sees the other side, and he dies, the child of earth goes back to the dust.
The book of Torah ends there, the first five books of the Bible, the Books of Moses, end there with the promise just ahead, unobtainable and Moses dead and buried with the people weeping, wondering will they make it. It ends in dust returning to the earth.
It is unresolved, unfulfilled, open-ended.
God’s last words? “I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” God’s last speaking in the law.
We are left full of anticipation and disappointment. After all that, Moses was only given a glimpse, he didn’t make it. But it was enough.
Every generation hands off a future to the next generation that they will never see.
What is that future? What does it hold? Did we do right? Are we handing off something good? Will it be appreciated? How will we be remembered? Gifting a future that is a blessing? Or a burden? Or both?
We finish the story. What future are we setting up? Are we stretching and reaching forward to what is just ahead but just out of reach? Do we fill this moment with the vision of God’s way in the world? God’s word in the world? Speaking creation back together again and again and again even as things fall apart again and again and again.
That is the faith of Torah, of the first five books, the books of Moses. God holds the world together even as it flies apart back into the dust.
How do we read that word? That Torah? That promise that is always just up ahead?
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, the five books of Torah, how do we read them? What are they about?
Around here they are usually used to find someone to denigrate and judge. But when Jesus quotes from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, he quotes love, love of God and love of neighbor and the two cannot be separated from each other.
These two loves, of God and neighbor, show us how to read the whole of Torah, and not only that but the Prophets as well.
Torah is about love. The Prophets are about love. The word that pulls the world back together is love. The sight of the Promised Land just up ahead, over the mountaintop, is a sighting of love.
That is the future that God is speaking into creation, gathering out of the dust. That is the faith that the followers of Jesus put into practice, the resurrection of all that is love, gathered back from the earth, raising up a new humanity.
Love is unresolved, there is no conclusion, no conventional happy ending. There is only the never-ending collapse back into the earth and the never-ending recreating the world, spoken back together by the word that is love, Jesus.
In the name of love, the law and the prophets speak.
May we be those who speak that word, always bringing the collapsing world back together, even as we go down to the dust ourselves, singing our song, “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”