Promises, Promises: Exodus 3:1-14
Sermon for a service of consecrating new licensed local pastors
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law
Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came
to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a
bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then
Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the
bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw
that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses,
Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said,
“Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you
are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I
am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said,
“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their
cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and
I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of
that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey,
to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites,
the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the
Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress
them. 10 Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to
bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But
Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the
Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “I will be
with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when
you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this
mountain.”
13 But Moses said to
God, “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?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”
He said further, “Thus you shall
say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” (NRSVue)
When I was
a freshman in college, I had to take a class called “Human Nature” to fulfill
one of the core requirements—it was a liberal arts school, in case you couldn’t
tell, and what subset of “Human Nature” was yours to choose. Some had more of a science bend, and some were
linguistic, and mine was “The Human Comedy” because of course it was. We focused on what it meant to make something
funny and how comedy has changed through history, making some things that were
funny in their time horrifying in ours and some things that are hilarious to us
unfathomable to our ancestors. One of
the things we studied was the use of dramatic irony in comedic writing and
staging; dramatic irony is where the audience or reader of a text knows more
than the characters in the story. It’s
the yelling at the woman in the scary movie not to go into the basement; it’s being
infuriated when Romeo kills himself because he thinks, incorrectly, that Juliet
is truly dead; it’s knowing the squirrel in the Ice Age films will never
actually get the acorn. Dramatic irony
can be used for all sorts of emotions and humor is one of them, but it creates
distance between the audience and the characters even while it drags us into
the story, shouting and laughing and pleading with the actors to notice what we
know. It is a kind of foreknowledge, which
humans want so, so much.
Moses and
the burning bush is one of the most well-known Scripture pieces, especially
when it comes to talking about call stories, because it’s dramatic as
heck. We have a fugitive trying to blend
into a Midianite family after running from his secret-identity upbringing and a
crime of at least aggravated manslaughter.
While he’s tending sheep he sees a bush that is burning but not burning
up and goes to investigate and meets God, of all people, Who tells him He’s
going to free the people of Israel from Egypt’s clutches. There’s a reason Charlton Heston made a huge
film out of this; it’s cinematic, it’s marvelous, it’s God’s announcement of
Godself in a beautifully big and yet personable way.
And it’s layered
in dramatic irony. Even the first hearers
would know that an announcement to take off one’s shoes means the Divine has
come into play, that a bush that burns without being devoured is some kind of
magic, that Moses must be destined for something big to have gone through such
a story of salvation. We who come to the
text thousands of years later know that Moses will become one of the most
famous Israelites in all of history, leading God’s people through miracle after
miracle and grumble after grumble, bringing them but not himself to the promised
land of milk and honey. Perhaps, when we
read this, we have become so used to it that we no longer shout at the page when
Moses talks back to God, insists he isn’t enough.
Or,
perhaps, we sigh with absolute recognition.
Licensed
local pastors, you have answered the call to ministry at an exceedingly tumultuous
time in history. All times are, but when
I was thinking about writing this sermon this week and pondering Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
death at the hands of Nazis, Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment in apartheid South
Africa, or the assassination of Harvey Milk, I remembered why I love Moses so
much: he absolutely, categorically does not want this job.
“But Moses
said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out
of Egypt?’” Professor John Holbert reimagines
Moses’ inner narrative as, “After all, God, I am a fugitive from Egyptian
justice, and besides I have a wife and child and a steady job. YHWH calmly
responds, ‘I will be with you; and this will be the sign for you that it is I
who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship
God on this mountain’ (Ex. 3:12).
“YHWH may
have thought the promise of the divine presence would be enough to convince
Moses to buckle up and head southwest, but it clearly is not. ‘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?’ First, who am I,
and now who are you. The bush draws itself up to his full leafy height and
intones in its best James Earl Jones voice, ‘I am who I am,’ or ‘I will be what
I will be,’ or ‘I am what I will be,’ or something or other! The phrase is
notoriously ambiguous, and surely that is part of the point. YHWH is not about
to impart the whole of the divine name and identity to anyone, let alone this
reluctant shepherd who is doing his best to weasel out of the call of his God.”[1]
“Weasel” it
may be, but Moses knows whereof he speaks.
He grew up in the culture of the pharaoh, in the center of the empire;
he knows exactly how much power it would take to overthrow a king who considers
himself divinely appointed to the job, and a herd of sheep and a curiously
un-singed bush aren’t going to do it.
Moses may be incredibly brash to challenge the Divine on holy ground,
but he’s not just being lazy; he’s afraid, because he knows how bad this can
get, and we the readers in irony nod and say yep, it’s gonna be rough.
And God
answers him, and us, one fear at a time.
Professor
Roger Nam writes that, “God knows that the heart of the question in ‘What is
his name’ is more of a plea for assurance or an expression of human fear…Whatever
the precise understanding, the answer ‘I am who I am’ is not just a declaration
of a name, but assurance of God’s presence in the call. One possible
explanation is that the phrase is technically a causative verbal form of ‘to
be.’ Thus, one awkward translation of verses 13b and 14a:
“‘What
shall I say to them?’
“God said
to Moses, ‘I am the one who causes things to pass.’
“This
answers the heart of Moses’ question. Moses does not want the name. More than
that, he wants assurance that God will do this. So the answer is right—that he
is the one who will cause things to pass. Despite the objections, God will
deliver on his promises. He is the God of the patriarchs. God will deliver on
his promise of redemption.”[2]
New
pastors, make no mistake: you stand without sandals in front of a burning bush
and you are being sent to tangle with an empire. It will not be pretty, or easy, and in the
conversations we’ve had in the classes you’ve already taken I know that you’re
aware your own people will fight you as much as the systems against which you’ll
preach. Holbert writes, “From Gideon to
Isaiah to Jeremiah to Ezekiel, God's call to service is regularly met with
reluctance, recalcitrance, and lack of enthusiasm. Little wonder! God is
forever calling persons to speak truth to power, to say things that most people
have no desire to hear. And prophets have a way of dying at the hands of those
they have been called to speak to.”[3] Moses’ fear and hesitation will etch itself
into your very bones because it will not matter that he was in a desert and you
are ten feet from a lake at any given time; this ministry thing is exhausting,
dangerous, and absolutely will break you if you’re not careful.
But. Neither Moses nor you are facing this with
only some sheep and a weird plant; both Moses and you are promised, promised
that the God Who is, the God Who will be, has heard God’s people and has
not forgotten them. You are not being
send into something hopeless, no matter how many times it may seem that
way. In the classes ahead of you, in the
churches ahead of you, in the Annual Conferences and district committee
meetings and protest marches and pastoral care sessions and the emails, the
emails, the emails ahead of you, the One Who sent you says, “I will be with
you.”
Will
be, am already, always has been; the God of yesterday and tomorrow will not abandon
you in this calling, pastors. God will
not leave you to the empire, although it will still be one heck of an uphill
battle. We are never promised
smoothness, but we are always promised presence. Our promise in return is that we come to this
ministry thing with curiosity.
“‘When
the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, the Lord called to him out of the
bush.” “This is, perhaps, a small point,”
writes Rev. Rick Morley, “but when God set a bush ablaze, he didn’t choose a
bush right in front of Moses. God didn’t choose the bush that Moses was about
to stumble upon. It was within sight,
but at enough distance that Moses would have had to go out of his way to
explore it.”[4] Father Robert Warren agrees, “The
commissioning of Moses and the whole story of the Exodus doesn’t begin with
God’s words from the burning bush. It begins a few lines earlier when
Moses, still comfortably at the tail end of Jethro’s flocks and with everything
to gain by staying the course, says to himself: ‘I must turn aside and look at
this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’”[5]
We
don’t have the benefit of dramatic irony to see what’s coming, sadly, and
perhaps there are angels yelling at the TV show that is us as we prepare to go
into the basement where the scary guy is.
But we do have the benefit of God’s promise that if we step out in faith—even
and especially if that step is off the regulated path, away from what is
familiar and safe and commonplace—then God will step with us. Speak truth to power, prophets; care for your
flock, pastors; teach the history we bear and the future we pray for, teachers;
preach like God gave you Aaron to help out, preachers. Know that the promise holds: you have stepped
off the path to see this strange phenomenon, you have taken off your shoes on
holy ground, and God holds covenant that you will not be left alone to handle
the consequences. It is, really, the
only way we can ever say yes to the God Whose name is as confusing as the
mission: we walk by faith, one barefoot step at a time, hearing the cry of the people
and God’s voice saying, “Oh, how much I am about to do through you.” May we trust in that, in all the days to
come. Amen.
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