“The God of Unlikely Places”

a sermon by

Dr. William P. Wood

First Presbyterian Church Charlotte, North Carolina

October 5, 2008

Text: “Then, he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’” (Exodus 3:5)

Over the past several years, I have developed a keen interest in the writings of Reynolds Price, particularly in three of his more explicitly theological works: Three Gospels, Letter to a Man in the Fire, and A Serious Way of Wondering.

I had the chance to meet Reynolds Price some time ago, when he was speaking at a forum sponsored by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Novello program. At that time, I was a member of the library board and my job was to introduce Dr. Price to that audience. I spent a few minutes with him before the program began. He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was a Presbyterian Minister. When he asked me how long I would speak, I told him that I had only been given three minutes. He replied that he had never known a Presbyterian minister who could speak for three minutes.

In recent years, Reynolds Price has devoted himself to a number of religious issues, including an intricate and detailed study of the New Testament Gospels. He has also dealt with the troubling question of human suffering. A turning point for Price in his own life was a terrible battle with a cancerous tumor in his spinal cord which almost took his life, and after treatment, left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Fundamentally, the Christianity that Price exposes is not so much a narrative or an ethic. To be sure, no one would call him a conventional Christian. He does not attend church and much of his thought is somewhat beyond the pale of Christian orthodoxy. But one thing is very clear in Price’s writings. It is the person of Christ that guides his thought. He believes that he encountered Christ during a critical phase of his life-threatening illness, and that Christ saved him from death.

I.

The scripture from which I read is one of the pivotal passages in the Old Testament. It narrates the call of God to Moses at Mt. Sinai, where Moses hears God say to him, “the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Moses was in the wilderness and he was in a lot of trouble. In anger, he had killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating an Israelite. Compelled to leave, Moses fled to the desert.

Moses had experienced quite a fall. Raised by Pharaoh’s daughter in the king’s court, he had enjoyed a life of privilege and pleasure. But now all of this was gone. Suddenly, he found himself in a desert, tending the sheep of his father in law, Jethro. One day he saw a bush in the desert that was burning, but not consumed. When he turned aside he heard a voice calling him and all of a sudden, he was in the presence of God.

It is one thing to find God in the lovely places of life, but sooner or later all of us come to a place where, if we are to find God at all, we must find him in a wilderness.

Over the past week the city of Charlotte, as well as our nation, has been in a state of shock as financial markets in this country have been shattered and the United States government has intervened in a desperate attempt to keep this nation from sliding into a deep recession. In Charlotte the news that Wachovia had been sold brought a great sense of fear and uncertainty, not only to the employees of the bank, but to the whole city as well.

Over the past several weeks I have found myself talking to a number of people who were, like Moses, in a wilderness. They were afraid for their jobs, their families, their futures, and for themselves.

So how does a person find God in the wilderness?

II.

For one thing, Moses found something to be angry at. Moses had led a charmed life. He had been brought up as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, living a soft life at the royal court. But one day Moses saw something that changed his life. He saw an Egyptian task master beat a Hebrew slave and all of a sudden all of the frustration of his people flowed through his veins. Finally, he could take it no longer. He was so incensed he killed the Egyptian.

Now, of course, that was a foolish and dangerous thing to do. But it changed Moses’ life. He was no longer a playboy and darling of the court. He was a hunted man whose life was in grave danger.

Ordinarily, we don’t speak of anger in the church in a positive way, but there is a place for anger, not only in the church but in our lives as well. According to the Gospels, Jesus demonstrated anger on a number of occasions. He was angry when he saw a deed of mercy being held up by a ceremonial triviality. And when he saw small children being roughly brushed aside, he was “moved with indignation.” Paul wrote the Thirteenth Chapter of I Corinthians on the power of Christian love, but he also said, “Be angry and sin not.” That is to say, we should

First Presbyterian Church Page 2 October 5, 2008, #1335 control our anger, harness it for good, but still in the face of evil, you are not a Christian if you are not angry. Great character is not soft; at its very core is indignation and some things are terribly wrong.

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to our anger. We get up in the morning and go to work. Most of us don’t seem particularly concerned that many of the children of our community go to bed hungry, that guns are being carried in our schools, that the economic recession which causes some inconvenience for us is a death threat for the poorest in our community. Where is the anger? Where is the indignation?

III.

Something else happened to Moses in the wilderness. He came face-to-face with himself. That is the very nature of any wilderness. It forces us to look more closely at ourselves and to find strength we did not know was there. “Meek as Moses” is a cliché we sometimes hear. But that is not Moses. To be sure, he tried to shrink away from God’s call. He used every excuse in the book. Who was he to stand up to Pharaoh? He was a poor public speaker. He had no power. But finally, he confronted himself until he dedicated himself. He found his vocation in the wilderness.

Some years ago, a physician by the name of Wilfred Grenfell found himself in a wilderness. He visited the country of Labrador. He was really there to get away from it all. He needed a rest; a change of scenery. He found something else—a whole mass of people who had never seen a doctor. He wrote in his diary, “I attended nine hundred persons who would have never seen a doctor had I not been there.” That got to him. He had to come. He had heard a voice that said to him, “The place where you are standing is holy ground.”

I believe God is saying that to someone who is within the sound of my voice this morning. Some of us are in a wilderness today. Maybe there is a loved one in our lives who is severely ill. Maybe it is someone who has lost a job, a family, a future. To these people God is saying, “The ground you are standing on is holy ground.”

IV.

Then, too, there is this. Moses found God in the wilderness. In this encounter with right against wrong, in his self-dedication to his people, he found God.

Many of us are like that. We talk of God in terms of love, beauty, and goodness. But when we find ourselves in some wilderness of depression, anxiety, and fear we ask ourselves, “Where is God?”

In truth, some of the greatest persons of faith found God in a wilderness. Moses in the desert; the great Isaiah with his people in exile in Babylon; Job, out of his tragic calamity, saying, “ I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” The Old Testament is filled with that kind of experience. As for the New Testament, who would have ever thought you could find God on a cross?

First Presbyterian Church Page 3 October 5, 2008, #1335 I don’t know where this finds you in your life, but for myself, I bear you this witness. My deepest faith in God did not spring from those times in my life when everything seemed to be going my way, but from the times in which the rain descended and the winds blew and beat, and God was there, so that the house did not fall.

V.

One final word. If a person finds God in some of the unlikely places of life, one may be fairly sure that this person first found God in some likely places. Some beauty touched our lives, some person reached out to us in a special way.

It’s not easy finding God in the desert. Start now by looking for God in the most likely places: in worship, in prayer, in friendship, in beauty, and in love.

If we find God in these likely places, we are much more likely to find God in the unlikely places as well.

Amen.

First Presbyterian Church Page 4 October 5, 2008, #1335