Moses Begins His Last Sermon

Moses Begins His Last Sermon
Deuteronomy 1:1-45

This coming Saturday, I am taking part in a service in which the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles expresses its regret and contrition for the way we have treated African Americans. The church to which I belong was founded to provide a place where the white members of the big church in town could send their black servants. It is not the only church in the diocese that made clear in the early twentieth century that black people were encouraged to go somewhere else, to form their own congregation. Hardly anyone alive today was personally involved in those events, yet they are part of our history. I was not even in Los Angeles until a decade or so ago, but by becoming part of the diocese I become part of its history, and I have to come to terms with it, not least because it continues to have its effect on the present. So I shall join in expressing “my” contrition for what “we” did a century ago. In Requiem for a Nun, part novel, part play, William Faulkner has one of his characters say, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner dealt with overlapping themes in an earlier novel, Go Down, Moses; significantly, this novel concerned race relations in the United States. In a speech during his presidential campaign, Barack Obama took up these themes and in effect urged the people of the United States to decide that the time had come to let the past be the past. In what the Torah presents as the last, greatest, and certainly longest speech of his life, Moses begins by urging Israel not to forget its past...