“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry…. Indeed, I know their sufferings….” Who is God for you? Is God for you Aristotle’s unmoved mover, a God who is totally uninvolved with this world? Perhaps you resonate with the Deist’s Watchmaker God, who, after setting the world in motion, now leaves it tick away on its own. Our opening hymn pictured God as “enthroned above,” maintaining his kingdom on “Zion’s sacred height,” surrounded by the “great archangels” but seemingly uninvolved with humanity. Is that God for you?
To be sure, God is the source of all being, the Great Mystery, the totally incomprehensible Holy One, transcendent at the theologians would say. Yet the God of the story of the calling of Moses shows us a God who is totally different from the unmoved mover or the watchmaker. Last week we heard the story of Moses’s birth to a Hebrew woman. Despite Pharaoh’s order to the Hebrew midwives to kill all male infants, Moses instead was hidden and then adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter into the royal household. Seemingly aware of his ancestry as an adult he murdered an Egyptian overseer who was abusing a Hebrew worker. He then fled to Midian, where he subsequently married the daughter of a shepherd.
Now we catch up with Moses. Out tending his father-in-law’s flocks, he has an extraordinary vision of a flaming bush. Writer Bruce Epperly relates the story of a gathering of rabbis who pondered the question, “Why was the bush burning but not consumed?”1 They considered different possibilities. Finally, one said, “It was burning and not consumed so that one day, as Moses walked by, he would notice it.” Notice it he did, and through that miraculous sign, a chain of events was set in motion that would forever define the history of the Jews.
Even so, ultimately this is not a story about Moses. In one sense, stories in Scripture are never solely about the humans in them, interesting as they may be. Stories in Scripture always reveal to us something about God, about God’s nature, and, more important, how God relates to us. Although it was composed centuries before the Word became flesh in Jesus, this story is no different, for it reveals to us a God totally different from the unmoved mover or the watchmaker God.
To begin with, this story reveals to us a God who communicates, who uses every available place, or object, or person to connect with human beings. The bush was aflame precisely because God intended to capture Moses’ attention. Second, and more important, this story reveals to us a God who notices. The God who captured Moses’s attention through the flaming bus is personal, dynamic, changing, and, most important, demanding. This God knows what is happening in the world. This God has heard God’s people’s cries. This God has heard God’s people’s prayers and felt their pain. This God is ready to respond, to deliver God’s people from injustice and oppression. This God is anything but aloof, unchanging, and impassive. Rather, this God is lively, talkative, and passionate. This God receives as well as gives. This God is moved by the injustice of the world and intimately knows the world’s joys and pains.
The story of the calling of Moses also reveals to us a God who expects humans to do God’s work in the world and empowers them to do it. “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt,” this God says to Moses. Of course, Moses, like most humans, comes right back at God with objections. Never mind that Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s household and is most likely on intimate terms with all the royal political players, to say nothing of Pharaoh himself. “Who am I,” he says to God, “that I should go to Pharoah and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” We too might wonder why a stranger to his own people and a murderer on the run is a suitable candidate for leading the Israelites. But the Holy One doesn’t explain the choice of Moses. Instead, God promises to empower Moses. “I will be with you,” God replies. When Moses and the people return to Mt. Sinai, he will see for himself that God has accomplished God’s work of liberation through this most imperfect of possible actors.
Moses hasn’t finished with his objections. He pushes God a little farther. “When I want to prove to people that I’m an authentic leader,” he says, “whom shall I say has sent me?” God’s answer has tantalized people ever since. “I AM Who I AM,” God says. And further, “Say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” The Hebrew words can also be translated, “I will be who I will be.” In other words, God is ultimately holy mystery, who exists but cannot be known. In effect, God says to Moses the most that humans can bear: “You will know me by what I do.”
Is this your God? The bush is still burning. When do you know yourself to be on holy ground? Where are your “thin places?” Does God provide signs for you, so that you too might turn aside and “look at this great sight?” Can you ever stop, take off your shoes, and know that God is revealing Godself to you? How would you know that God is revealing Godself if you never turn off the TV or look up from your smartphone? Ultimately, if we are to hear the God we say we trust and believe in, we too have to look for the flaming bushes in our world and then “turn aside” to actually look at them. Then we have to let God do some of the talking. The pursuit of silence, in meditation, or even in the five minutes before you get out of bed, is one of the “deepest disciplines of the Spirit,” as we let go of our own concerns and let God’s concerns seep into our consciousness.
The bush is still burning. God continues to reveal Godself to wherever we are. Writer Kent Nerburn reminds us that “Spirituality is far more than religious practice. It is a cast of mind, a leaning of the heart, a willingness to see the divine mystery in all people and all things.” It is a way of seeing that allows us to see the sacred traces wherever we look. Our task, “as surely as performing acts of worship, is to find these sacred moments, hallow them with our attention, and raise them up as a celebration of the mystery of life.”2
Do you trust that God is the one “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid?” Are you confident that God knows us intimately, and that God loves us passionately? Does God love all of humanity? Do you believe that God sees the oppression of God’s people? Is God there when people are unjustly murdered and executed? Was God standing with James Foley or Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin? Does God see the suffering of the refugees who have fled Syria and Iraq? Does God weep when God looks down on Gaza? Do the victims of AIDS and the Ebola virus stir God’s heart? Does God abhor human trafficking?
More to the point, do you believe that God calls and empowers you to partner with God in delivering God’s people from oppression? The bush is still burning. Do you hear God’s call? Can you hear God say to you, “So come, I will send you?” What are your objections when you hear God’s call? How easy it is to answer God as Moses did, “Who me? Who am I that I should do as you ask?” How seductive it is to think that we must know more about theology or Scripture or worship or politics or budgets or anything else before we can answer God’s call. The truth is that God needs us all, whoever and wherever we are. God had no need to explain God’s use of an imperfect human being like Moses to carry out God’s plan. God promised to accompany and empower Moses in the work of liberating God’s people. So God knows all our strengths and weaknesses, our failures and accomplishments. So God promises to accompany and empower us in the work to which God calls us.
Who is God for you? Is God for you divorced from the world, uncaring, uninvolved, the watchmaker or unmoved mover of old? If you are a follower of Jesus the Christ then your God is the living God of Scripture, the God who reaches out to us and calls us, the God who hears the cries of suffering humanity, the God who empowers us to respond to those cries, the God to whom, we can say with all our hearts, “Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”
1. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingaholyadventure/
2. Ordinary Sacred: The Simple Beauty of Everyday Life (Novato, CA, New World Library 2012), quoted in Synthesis, August 31, 2014, 3
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