“Can You Hear Me Now?” Reflections on 3:1-15 (Burning Bush) Laura Crow August 30, 2020

Let us pray... Lord, now may the words of my [pen] and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight – you, who are our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Today is the second of our four weeks in the story of Moses. We have left Moses behind in the bulrushes and leapt forward past his growing up years as a young man in Egypt. It is worth a quick look at what we skipped...

 Recall that in this part of the story the Hebrew people are enslaved; Moses is saved by the Pharaoh’s daughter and grows up in the palace.  As a young man, Moses confronts an Egyptian overseer that was abusing one of the Hebrew slaves; he murders the man and conceals the body in the sand.  Moses then flees Egypt as a wanted felon, taking refuge among extended family in Midian;  Here he marries and settles into his role as a sheep herder for his father-in-law, Jethro.

Moses may have been settled into his new life, but God’s people that Moses left behind in Egypt are still suffering. The story links the death of Pharaoh to God’s noticing of the Israelites’. groans and cries for help.

I wonder – had God been indifferent all these years? Had Moses? How attentive am I to the suffering of the poor on a regular basis? What does it take for me to notice and to feel empathy?

How much more does it take for me to hear God’s call on my life to participate in the healing? Isn’t that why we are here? Isn’t seeking justice and building up beloved community what we are all called to do?

Why does it feel as if the cries of the poor and the oppressed, the suffering and the are so faint, so muffled, so easy to overlook?

What is striking to me in this call story of Moses is the number action verbs ascribed to God. God OBSERVES. God HEARS. God KNOWS. God NOTICES. God CALLS. God COMES DOWN. God SPEAKS. God’s presence BURNS.

This scene is bursting with God’s presence and activity. Yet somehow I don’t think this scene is an anomaly. God’s presence is in and through all things all the time. So perhaps the thing that is different is Moses. Moses, who is going about his day like any other day, looking after the sheep and finding ways to pass the time.

Maybe Moses is different today because he has heard about Pharaoh’s death. Maybe that little news clip has caused him to reminisce about his days in Egypt. I wonder what he has told his wife and family about those years and the real reasons he left all those years ago.

I wonder if he is thinking about the family he left behind – his birth mother and father, Miriam and Aaron. I wonder if he is thinking too about Pharaoh’s daughter – his adoptive mother, and her son who is now the new king. I wonder if these musings distract him enough from the sheep to cause him to look aside and see God in the bush.

Now I have never been a shepherd wandering the hillside day after day, but I can imagine that Moses is not the first to have a conversation with a bush. Or the first to have an encounter with God in the wilderness.

So Moses is talking with God in the bush about all the things he remembers about Egypt – the good and the bad, especially the bad. He may offer a prayer of thanksgiving that he was able to escape.

Listening to the voice from the bush say how God has heard their cries and that God will come down and BRING THEM OUT, Moses is probably totally excited for the possibility of an end to his people’s oppression and suffering. Moses wants all of this to happen. Maybe he is even wondering if he might be reunited with his birth family.

And then God says to Moses, 10 So come, I will send YOU to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

And Moses says, “WHAAAAATTT?”

Because you know that Moses is just like us – he wants God to fix stuff, and he wants to cheer on the folks back in Egypt that God will be helping.

We want – I want – to live in MLK’s dream, the one that is aligned with God’s dream – a world where people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, where no person is disposable, and where all can grow into their divine purpose. I want to live in a world where a 17 yo child will not be indoctrinated into a toxic cultural milieu of white supremacy, patriarchy, and nationalism, where might does not equal right, violence is not the means by which we settle scores, and where homeland security is built upon healthy and mutual relationships with one another. I want to live in a world where the water is clean, the air is fit to breathe, and there is food for all. I want and expect God to be at the center of all these things – but sometimes – often – I turn away from God’s call to do this work in my own life.

Moses understandably felt woefully unprepared for the task God had put before him. He laid out his excuses - “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” and “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

God answered, “I will be with you” and “I AM who I AM”. What God causes to BE is what is to BE.

This work of justice, restoration and reconciliation is not about what we can do; it’s not about what Moses is capable of or what we can do. God’s work is always first about who God is.

Like Moses, if we don’t feel woefully unprepared for the task, I would wonder whether it is actually from God. We each can likely to point to a calling or decision point that caused us to go deeper in our faith and trust in the “I AM” God.

I have spoken before about our decision to adopt a child with a significant physical disability. A few years before that, when I was president of the Middleton Outreach Ministry board, I was called on to handle a serious sexual misconduct boundary violation by our Executive Director, simultaneously paying attention to employment issues, client & volunteer needs, and congregational/community support.

Both of these experiences taught me the need to lean into God. And they have taught me to trust that God will be with me.

There is a great deal of work to be done in our world today. As individuals and as a church we are being called into spaces that feel unfamiliar and overwhelming. We feel woefully inadequate to the task. I don’t think God’s presence or call is any different than it has always been. Perhaps what is different is our readiness to look aside and listen.

A reluctant or hesitant yes – like Moses’ – is still a yes. May we have the faith and grace to follow where God is leading.

Amen.