Exodus 3:1-7, 10-12 “Moses, Moses!”

If you saw only the title of the sermon- what with the exclamation mark and all- you could assume this is the sound of a stadium filled with adoring fans calling out to their hero after a game-saving play, “Moses! Moses! Moses!” And you wouldn’t be far wrong, after all we know Moses as a hero. But when we read the passage that contains this quote, of course we realize it is God calling out to

Moses. And when we think how seldom God has employed this repetition of names to call the heroes of the Bible, we may want to shout their names like real fans do: “Abraham! Moses! Samuel! Paul!” Here they are, heroes, the patriarch of faith, the miracle-worker and Law-Giver, the prophet and judge of Israel, and in the New Testament, the Great Missionary: all four of them, top-10 players in the history of the league, and worthy of fan adulation.

But we should remember that it’s God calling to them, and not the cheers coming out of the stands. God calling, and making them his own- perhaps even before they became heroes: God calls out to Abraham with that same rare repetition, “Abraham, Abraham,” stopping him just as he brings down the knife to kill his own son; and God speaks softly late in the night, “Samuel, Samuel,” while he is still a young boy; and in Acts 9, the risen Jesus calls down from heaven to Paul, before his name change, “Saul, Saul,” he says, calling him out when he is on the way to persecute innocent people. Not heroes yet. And Moses, too, here in

Exodus 3: consider who he is at this moment- don’t think Charleton Heston and tablets of stone and the miracles, parting the Red Sea, and leading the liberated nation into the desert, and making water come out of the rock or manna come from nowhere; don’t think of those 40 days and nights with God working out and writing down the Torah. This is not the hero, this is Moses the shepherd, the fugitive, the murderer, the wanderer, the outcast; in his previous life a man of restless, unsettled mind, Moses the Israelite/Egyptian, feet in two worlds but his head and heart in neither. But in Exodus 3, Moses the Midianite, wife and kids, a home, a job; we can’t know how settled he is here, how settled down, if his spirit is at ease, but he has been here a long time, and he seems reluctant to leave and start on the hero path. “Who am I that I should go?” he asks in verse 11; and in the following discussion with God, continues to offer justifications and excuses trying to convince the voice in the bush that God has the wrong man. I can’t help but wonder if he’s recalling that day years ago when he tried to be a hero (the story is in chapter 2), when he stopped a bully from beating up a guy, and got only heartache for it: lost his position in the world and had to take it on the lam; had to get out of town in a hurry, and got no thanks even from the people he acted for.

That surely will do things to your confidence, to be rejected, unwanted, unappreciated, even hated, and no one to understand, no place to call your own.

Moses had lost his entire life in Egypt; and had finally built up a new one in

Midian; but now, “Moses, Moses, go down to Egypt and bring my people out.”

We can understand when Moses asks, “Who am I to do this thing?” or says to the Lord in chapter 4, “Look, they won’t believe me,” or later, “I’m not the man you need, I’m not very good at making speeches, I won’t know what to say to them.” We know, don’t we, that he doesn’t want to be uprooted again. The psychic and emotional upheaval is devastating. There is a price to pay when God calls. These four men had called, these heroes- and maybe all heroes- were forced out of normalcy, out of any kind of comfortable sense of what they wanted or expected their lives to be. For us, it’s been great to have these heroes all our lives to admire and emulate, to understand our lives in a certain way because they came before us. But for them, their “walk with God” was often a torturous path.

Sometimes pain, self-doubt perhaps, hard work and many low points. Though once in a while, exhilarating victories, and mountaintops, and burning bushes. What really grabs us in this passage is the bush that doesn’t burn up, right? I don’t know what to tell you about this miracle. Some have tried to explain it or describe what plant it was. But maybe it means just this, that God knows what difficulties he is setting before Moses, and so gives him this one-of-a-kind scene as partial payment. Oh, and you know, he gets to talk to God.

Perhaps the burning bush represents Moses and the heroes, and all the servants of God, represents the experience of any who listen for the Lord and go where God sends: that the fire of truth and compassion and hope burns so brightly and so hot that it burns up everything combustible, that it can’t be turned off, and it burns up our own comfort and sense of self- as it seems to have done with Moses, and sometimes sends us out to hard places and desperate people, as God-in-the-fire sent Moses. But even so, we are not burned up- in the end not everything is taken away: God finds us, God speaks to us out of the fire. Look at this powerful word, even as God breaks in and disrupts Moses’ life in Midian, “I will send you to bring out my people”; and then this promise, “But I will be with you.”

That’s what we get, along with the fire; and if we want to know the truth about things and about God and about ourselves, we’ll have to risk getting burned: yes, “but I will be with you.” Even if we aren’t among the heroes of faith, we still have to listen for God’s call: we must not think that God’s work is only for the great ones; we can’t leave God’s work of healing and delivering and feeding and peace-making for the heroes alone.

The command to obey and to go and to love is a commandment for us, as well.

And maybe the right way to understand our own little, non-heroic ministries, and the work of our little church, is to see what God is seeing. Let verse 7 be our example, where God says to Moses, “I have seen the affliction of my people; I know their suffering.” Let us remember the endless compassion of God.

We may never see a burning bush; we may never hear God call to us like to the heroes, but we can see God’s activity in the world if we just open our eyes and see the desperate need; we can hear God’s voice, if we will listen to the cries of children and hungry families. It may not be hero work, but it is God’s work. And it’s more than the heroes alone can do. And it comes with the promise, “I will be with you.” That profound blessing of God’s constant presence is also the demand that we share the blessing with our neighbors; not all of society, not the great big causes- let the heroes deal with those- but just one person at a time, just one smile at a time, just one act of kindness outside our comfort zone, just one gentle word. That’s about the right size for us, isn’t it? And added all together, they might even become something heroic.

“As God in Christ has loved us, so let us love one another.”