Legacy

In this city of monuments and statues—with a collective memory that reaches back before the time of Christ, it is hard to escape the question of legacy.

Rome is such a strange mixture of imperial legacies intersecting with the stories of saints—and during certain historical eras it can be difficult to tell the two apart.

But here in our own time, the question of legacy is still an important one, even as our world swoons under the dual threats of war and climate change causing us to seriously contemplate the possibility of our own extinction.

What kind of legacy are we leaving as those who seek to proclaim a reign that outlasts all empires and as those who seek to be forces for hope and good in our families, our communities, and our larger world?

Today we encounter Moses perched upon Mt. Pisgah, looking across the Jordan valley to the land now called the West Bank and facing the fact that his life’s journey is ending.

The Torah cites Moses’ disobedience of God in Numbers 20 as the reason he is prevented from entering the promised land—instead of speaking to the rock to produce water for the thirsting people, as God commanded, he strikes the rock with his staff.

God interprets this choice as a lack of faith, even if we might want to see it as an unfortunate technicality, and Moses is thus prevented from entering the land of promise.

But Moses’ legacy, even though his story is filled with human failings like faithlessness and murder, is less about his own life and more about the life that he passes on to the people.

It is Joshua and the next generation that pass on the story of the Exodus, that witness God’s continued presence as the waters of the Jordan part in front of them just as they did for Moses and the Israelites at the Red Sea.

They, not Moses, are the ones that become the stewards of the law for successive generations.

Jesus, as a faithful Jew, is the recipient of this legacy, and his answer to the lawyer in Matthew’s Gospel about the greatest commandment combines sections of Deuteronomy and Leviticus to proclaim loving God and loving neighbor as the two equal sides of the coin of faith.

We are recipients of this legacy, the mixture of law and prophets and the testimony and witness about Jesus Christ and the community known as the Church which has at times well represented this legacy and at times sullied it profoundly.

The monuments and statues in this city reflect the same conflicted legacy that the Church in our day and age does.

Is our legacy of faith the sex and abuse scandals, the tacit support for dehumanizing policies that led to wars and the doctrine of discovery, and an inflexibility that privileges maintaining the institution at all costs?

Or can our legacy be something else that gets at the heart of what Moses, Jesus, and our most brilliant ancestors in the faith have sought to pass on?

Well, I’m here and part of this Church because I believe there is a way to take responsibility for the perversions of our legacy AND commit ourselves to leaving a legacy of love that more clearly reflects the contours of the eternity we know in Christ.

The path to doing that involves acknowledging the damage and hurt done in the name of the church, as well as our own complicity in systems that have benefitted from the power and influence that a legacy of accommodation has given us.

But if we stop there, we will fall short of the promise of the real legacy we are called to incarnate.

We must be the ones whose lives shine with the hope of the Gospel—we are the ones on the path to find out how loving God and loving our neighbor are the inseparable and mutually informing compass of our lives.

In actuality this means we need to be about the practice of corporate prayer and worship—because it is in this gathering that we remember that loving God alone is not enough and loving neighbor is not enough.

We come face to face with God at the same time as we come face to face with our neighbors, from around the world, whom we are learning to love in more transformative and deeper ways.

And for those of us who are on the older end of the timeline of life—we must be committed to passing on the wisdom we have gained from a lifetime of incarnating this great commandment.

Who are the Joshuas that need to carry on the legacy beyond where we can go?

Who are the Mary Magdalenes and the Pauls who will proclaim the power of resurrection in an age that desperately needs to hear it?

Who are the Howard Thurmans who will find inspiration from Gandhi’s Jesus-aligned nonviolent resistance and then pass on that legacy to Martin Luther King, Jr and a host of others?

I believe they are here among us AND out in the streets needing any encouragement and support we can give.

Each of us has been gifted by God with tools to leave the world better than we found it, including the gift of this Christ-centered community with its focus on gathering, feeding, and sending.

Spend some time this week reflecting on how you can use your gifts so that the deep and true legacy we have as members of the Body of Christ can thrive in your family, in your neighborhood, and in any wider circles of influence in which you move.

Loving God and loving our neighbor is not easy to do.

But when we care more about passing on that legacy than the legacies associated with our family names and fortunes, or the fractured legacy of our Church’s collaboration with imperial interests, then God will provide us the means and the wisdom to do so.

We can take our place in the story of faith that came before us and will continue after us, and we can rejoice together for the foretastes of the final destination that we share in this lifetime.

And when we truly love God and begin to see others as neighbors instead of enemies, as our best forebears did, then love can change the course of history and we can respond faithfully to the intractable challenges of our age.