I Hope this Email Finds You on an Earth as it is in Heaven

Deuteronomy 30:9-14

and the Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors, when you obey the Lord your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

There’s a tweet I read the other day by a comedian I follow on Twitter—it was a play on the formal email greeting, “I hope this email finds you well…”. The tweet read: “Hi! I hope this email finds you in another dimension where none of this is happening and everything is fine.” If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, right? But oof, that tweet really spoke to me. Now, before I continue, when I was reading my sermon to Chris earlier this week, his response to what I’m about to preach was, “I feel like this all sounds very familiar, like you’ve said this all before?” Because I’ve started so many sermons this way. Because things just don’t seem to be getting better! My God, I’m tired of preaching about crisis after crisis, but you know—it’s a sign of the times more than anything else, so here we go again— everything is feeling pretty dire, isn’t it? Everything is feeling out of control, this country’s almost feeling irredeemable these days. In the past two weeks, we've lost Roe V. Wade, the EPA has been gutted at the expense of the already burning planet, the separation of church and state is on its last legs, seemingly in favor of just one religion, and it was just announced that next on the docket will be a case to potentially give unchecked control to state legislatures when it comes to national election results. And none of this is even touching on yet another mass shooting on the 4th of July, that was actually in my good friend Jorie’s hometown; in fact her cousin was grazed during the shooting.

Everything we need to live a comfortable, peaceful life just all seems so out of reach, doesn’t it? As things continue to spiral, it all just feels so far away, like it couldn’t even exist in the world in which we’re currently living. So yes, I kind of wish I was in another dimension where none of this was happening and everything was fine.

But that’s why this beautiful passage that Glenda just read for us comes at such a perfect time. Because this passage is all about the fact that no matter what happens, no matter how far we stray, no matter how much we mess up, how much we overthink things, an earth as it is in Heaven in, indeed, possible.

You may or may not remember from a sermon back in Advent, when I preached on an apocryphal passage from the lesser known Biblical figure Baruch. Well, verses 12-13 in today’s passage are likely inspired by Baruch, in which he says, “Who has gone up into heaven and taken her and brought her down from the clouds? Who has gone over the sea and found her and will buy her for pure gold? No one knows the way to her or is concerned about the path to her.” We can read this in a cynical way and interpret it is as—we’ll never know true wisdom and it's futile to even try to figure it out. But what I believe it’s actually saying—is that we don’t have to look far for wisdom. We don’t have to overthink things. “No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart…”, says Moses.

It’s hard to feel like a better world is possible right now. But this passage makes it clear that it is—we’re just overthinking things. We think that we have to get to heaven to finally have peace. We think maybe peace exists in some far away land that we don’t have the means to get to that perfect place. We think we can buy truth with gold. It seems the richest people in the world believe this too—as I’ve also talked about in previous sermons, we have men who have the money to feed every person in the world, and instead they’re building rocketships and going to space. They’re trying to find some kind of truth out there, when we have everything we need right here. We have it on this earth, and we have it in our hearts. We just get too bogged down with the millions of options that surround us, with the materialistic and supposedly other-worldly things that will allegedly bring us happiness.

There’s a novel I read a few months back called The Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno. It’s a mind-bending cosmic horror book, but even more than that, it’s a book about deep grief and loss. The narrator has lost the love of his life, and at one point, towards the end of the book, he’s ruminating on the afterlife, on his belief of what comes next, but then he says, “I don’t want it to be that what I believe is what matters most. I want the truth, without a brain to skew it, without eyes to filter it.” What a profound sentiment, and one that works so perfectly with this passage. In our passage today, Moses is making it clear— we all, each and every one of us, has access to ultimate truth, and therefore, ultimate peace. We all have a path to an earth as it is in heaven, we all have the guidance, the map right in front of us, the world we live in muddles everything. The richest among us get overwhelmed by wealth and ego, and lose sight of what would actually create the most good in the world. The most powerful, the politicians and leaders among us become drunk on power and money and ignore the most obvious policy solutions that would help the most people. And we—us regular people—we become overwhelmed with despair. We become overwhelmed with a feeling of futility and powerlessness when it feels like the solutions to the world’s problems are so far out of reach that they’re downright impossible.

“Surely this commandment… is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away.” Surely. It doesn’t seem so sure today. Nothing seems very sure these days, does it? The freedoms and norms we’ve taken for granted these past few decades are dropping like flies. People in power are jumping through hoops and bending over backwards to find new and complicated ways to keep broken systems in place. There’s a crisis around every corner, and it feels like no one is doing anything to fix it. I don’t understand why we’re bending over backwards to bow down to what the greedy few believe to be true or right instead of just finding and living the truth. Like the narrator in The Thing Between Us, I want us all to find the truth without brains to skew it, or eyes to see it—because our brains and eyes that have been so utterly corrupted by this sinful world.

We can fall into such a hole of despair, that it can feel like the only option must be a completely different world, another dimension, another planet. But it’s not. Nothing should be out of reach for us. Nothing should be that hard, nothing should be impossible. Take one of the biggest factors in the current, nationwide housing crisis, for instance—something our own state is feeling hard. Private equity firms are buying up single-family homes with cash offers well over asking prices, making it so, so much harder, in many places impossible, for normal people who need mortgages to ever own property. These firms end up acting as slumlords, charging exorbitant rent while neglecting the properties they’re renting out to desperate families. This is happening because of greed; because of an opportunity for the already-rich to make more money. They’re doing this because the rich believe that what they want, and what they believe matters most—more than regular folks’ comfort, safety, stability, and peace of mind. And it makes something that in past decades has been taken for granted—the fact that we get a job, we buy a house on some land, we start a family, and we have comfort and stability—it’s made that impossible for so many people. It's completely out of reach now. So it’s natural that many might fall into despair in the face of instability and housing insecurity. It’s natural that many will believe that a good life just isn’t possible here on this earth when there’s so much going against us; when there’s so much that just feels impossible or out of reach.

But we have to have faith that stability, comfort, truth, wisdom isn’t out of reach for any of us. Sure, the powers that be try their absolute best to make us believe it is, to make us despair and give up. The powers that be can put us in a state of apathy, showing how little they care with their gross inaction. But we can’t give up. Because it is all “very near to us.” The powerful have been corrupted by their own power and egos, and we’ve therefore been corrupted to think that a better world isn’t possible.

Not only is a better world possible—that better world is already here and available to us. Surely those Moses was speaking to in this passage had dealt with so many trials and exiles. They had been wandering, they had been banished, they had been traumatized by war. But Moses makes it clear here that there is nothing they can do that will separate them from God. There’s nothing they can do that’s beyond redemption. What it takes though, is losing our egos. It takes losing our egos and having faith in God, and one another, as one body.

Those in power think that what they believe matters most, at the expense of the well-being of all people, at the expense of the greater good—no matter what the majority in this country wants, no matter what keeps people safe and healthy, no matter what is the best for this country as a whole. I’d like to think that in our idyllic community here, we don’t have that problem, and for the most part, I don’t think we do. I genuinely believe that we all do our best to think of one another and think of the community as a whole. Honestly, just reading people’s nuanced but strong and opinions on the listserv, regardless of which side those opinions land on, show how deeply people care about the integrity of this community and what is best for it as a whole.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t still be corrupted. We’re corrupted in that everything is filtered through the seemingly perpetually cracked lens of this world—everything is filtered through our eyes that have seen so much tragedy and chaos, and so much despair; everything is filtered through our brains, which have experienced so much anxiety and uncertainty, seemingly always having to be working on overdrive, and so it’s easy to just feel so helpless, and to think that a better world isn’t possible here, on this earth.

So we have to work hard to make sure our eyes and brains see and process things as clearly as possible, without getting bogged down by despair. And we have to do our best to convince those in power, those who selfishly maintain that what they believe and what they want is most important at the expense of the regular folks in the majority, that their wants and their egos are doing irreversible damage to this world.

But you know—I think we can. I think we can reach those people by ridding ourselves of despair and cynicism and ego, by doing the work God’s calls us to, and practicing the Love Jesus teaches in this world, and create and earth as it is in Heaven. The powers that be want us to think this is all impossible, that it’s all out of reach—but it’s not. The wisdom we need to do this—it’s not in heaven, it’s not beyond the sea, we don’t have to buy it with precious gold—no, it is very near to us. It is in our mouths and in our hearts. Amen.