Exodus 3:1-15 "Holy Ground"

          You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly! 

And the story of Moses continues.  Yes, we began to learn last week about this man who was the greatest leader Israel would ever know.  We were introduced to him as an infant, set afloat in a wicker basket on the Nile River, a Hebrew baby rescued and adopted by the princess daughter of the Egyptian king himself. We learned that this story of Moses is much more than an ancient tale meant only for Jews.  It is a significant part of our story as well.

         Today we pick up the tale again.  Many years have passed – more than you might realize.  Moses is a grown man now – middle aged – and has been wondering for some time about his real origins.  He has begun to leave the Ivory Tower of Pharaoh’s court to see what life in this country he has come to call home is really like. 

         He has seen the glorious cities and massive pyramids his adoptive grandfather – the Pharaoh - has built.  However, Moses has also witnessed the hard labor and cruelty deemed to be necessary to achieve those architectural wonders.  As a result, he has developed an abiding, and, given his circumstances as Pharaoh’s grandson, a peculiar connection to the Hebrew slaves who have made those wonders a reality, brick by mud and straw brick.

         One day, we are told in an earlier chapter of the Biblical Book of Exodus, Moses witnessed a particularly grim Egyptian taskmaster hard at his job of making the Hebrew slaves as miserable as possible.  At the sight of the impending violence, the bile rose in Moses’ throat, and a deep anger and resentment boiled over in his heart, and, when he thought that no one was watching, Moses slit the foreman’s throat and hastily buried the corpse in a shallow and sandy grave. 

         Perhaps Moses should have known better.  Perhaps he should have known that no misdeed remains secret forever: Because someone did see, and word did spread among the enslaved people.  And they were terrified of Moses and his odd association with them.  And word got to the Pharaoh too.  And now there was a price on his head to boot.  Rejected by the Hebrews, outlawed by the Egyptians, now a man without a country, Moses had no choice but to flee far into the wilderness.

         Many tiring and thirsty days later, he ended up in Midian, in the northwestern reaches of the Arabian Desert.  And there he sat by a local well one morning, even as his ancestor Jacob once did long before.  And it was there that Moses watched as the daughters of Jethro, the local priest, tried to wedge their way past a bunch of boisterous shepherds to get water for their goats and sheep.  Moses, being a good man at heart, came to their aid – and later went home with them for dinner.

         As luck would have it, Moses’ reputation had not preceded him.  So he settled comfortably in Midian, married Zipporah, one of the daughters, raised a family, and worked for his father-in-law tending the sheep and goats.  Tradition has it that he was in this voluntary exile for some 40 years. 

         From Pharaoh’s court with all its privileges to the degrading job of being someone else’s shepherd:  Moses’ career path was hardly one to be particularly proud of.  Not being the most successful man on the planet then, he began to draw his social security and became eligible for Medicare and thereby slid in a rather undistinguished way into retirement. 

         However, never let it be said that age alone exempts anyone from feeling that holy nudge and persistent sacred tapping on the shoulder. You see, Moses must have been pushing eighty when that awkward lamb danced away from the flock one day, out of sight around the bend, and up, up the cobbled trail toward the heights of Mt. Horeb – or Mt. Sinai as we sometimes call it. 

         Our shepherd chased after the lamb, tripped and fell, twisted his ankle, ripped the hem of his robe, got up, scrambled forward, and nearly fell into the brambly bush, the shrub that had caught fire.  His first thought was to make a firebreak, so the flames would not scorch the mountain itself.  His second thought was that this fire was quite unusual, for the bush burned but was not consumed by the flames. 

         Moses hesitated (after all, this was something new and therefore not to be trusted), but curiosity got the best of him, and so he ventured closer for a better look.  That was when he heard the voice – perhaps James Earl Jones like, or Morgan Freeman, or Charlton Heston, or Val Kilmer. Whoever it sounded like does not really matter: it was a god-like voice, no doubt about it.  What mattered were the words it spoke, which were “Moses, Moses.”

         Taken aback, Moses stood there doltishly and said what came first to his mind: “Hey.  Here I am – over here.”

         And the voice, perhaps not being sure that Moses had fully grasped the situation and for sure knew with whom he was conversing, commanded him:  “Moses, take off your shoes, for you are standing on holy ground.”

         “Yikes,” thought Moses as he presumably kicked his sandals off and then, according to the text, covered his face and waited for the Holy One to continue.  And sure enough, God (because that was who the voice belonged to) made a pronouncement.

         "I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; and I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…”

         Surely Moses, facedown in the dirt by this time, whispered into his sleeve, “Awesome!  Great idea!  Those slaves will appreciate that.  You have been distant for quite some time now.  I am behind you all the way.  You go Sacred Voice in the burning bush!”

         But that was not all the voice said.  It continued: "So, come, I will send you to pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt."

         “Whoa!  Hold on there, buddy bush.  Now that is a horse – or a camel – of a different color.  These are my gold years.  I am past my prime.”  Having great difficulty in getting his words out right, Moses eventually spat out a couple of questions to the bush that continued to calmly burn.

         Question #1:  "Who am I that I should go to pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?"  The fact that I have a price on my head in my adoptive country not withstanding, I have got a wife at home – and kids – and a steady job.  Not a great job, but a steady one, and in this economy, that’s not something to sneeze at.  Get real!  I am a nobody. “  Or, as Disciples of Christ pastor Kory Wilcoxson imagines, “Me? God, you couldn’t be suggesting that I go, could you? I mean, I’m a worker not a leader. I’m one of the behind-the-scenes people, not the frontline person.”

         God’s answer was simply this:  “I will be with you, and the ground we walk upon together will be holy ground.  What more do you need?”

         Question #2:  “OK, that is all well and good, but 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?  Who are you anyway?"

         God’s answer was again simple, but it described the essence of the Holy One.  It was an answer that is so fraught with mystery that it has swirled down through the ages so that even today – even here – we are still trying to figure out exactly what it means. 

         “Tell them that I am Yahweh:  ‘I am who I am,’ or ‘I will be what I will be’ or ‘I am what I will be.’   Or, as Christian writer and poet Thom Shuman writes, ““Well,” says the Mystery, “most days, I-am-who-I-am; but on alternate Tuesdays, I like “I-will-be-that-which-I-now-am; in months that have only 30 days, you might call me “I-am-who-causes-to-exist.’ But always, always, I-Am-who-gives-life.”  “Tell them ‘I am who I am.’”  Surely that will convince them.

         “Not bloody likely” Moses probably snorted into his sleeve as he spit the sand out of his mouth.  And our rather reluctant Israelite goes on in the next verses to ask for for a few visual aids and an assistant if he is going to even think about taking on this job.  Finally, however, Moses agrees to God’s demand. He answers God’s call affirmatively, though undoubtedly tentatively and surely without a whole lot of confidence.

         And as Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman so beautifully write, “Next to Moses, a lamb tumbled and bahhhhed, licked Moses' naked feet. The fire shook and vanished. The bush was gone. Ashes trembled in the wind, settled to mark a pathway down the mountain. The lamb danced downward upon the path of ashes. Moses, exhausted and exhilarated, limping after the lamb, began to imitate its skipping.

         ‘God only knows where this dance is going to take us,’ he muttered. He turned to look back at the summit of the mountain. ‘It's up to You,’ he shouted. ‘I have no idea where we're heading’…and turned to follow, stumbling on the pathway.”  And there it is:  Moses has gone from being the keeper of sheep to the deliverer of a nation.

         Well, I suppose that the good news is: “God isn’t calling most of us to rescue whole nations. But the sobering news is: God is calling us” (Magdalene’s Musing).  That being said, let’s glean a couple of pointers about that call from this story of Moses and the desert shrub that burned and burned.

         The first pointer is this.  You are never too old.  You are never too young.  God will never deem you too busy or too important or too unimportant.  God gives out no free passes or byes. And this pointer’s corollary is that certainly we are called as individuals – some to serve God through Maine Seacoast Mission, others to create a ministry in a Sunday School classroom, others to sing in the choir or be trained as liturgists. 

         But we are called as a church community as well.  And I would submit that, whatever else we may be collectively called to, we are called to find a vision for ourselves as the Raymond Village Community Church, United Church of Christ. We are called to imagine who we want to be ten, twenty, fifty years down the road.  Who we will is not who we are now.  The church will not look like it does now.  That much is certain. 

         What we will look like, who we will be in this town is something, guided by the spirit, we are called to define.  Fleshing out that vision and making it real in a vibrant and lasting way is what I believe God expects us as a church family to do. And I would suggest that no one is too old – or young – or busy – or important – or unimportant to answer this critical community call and to be part of the conversation. 

         In the Exodus story, God called out, “Moses, Moses.”  But God might just as well have said, “Bob, Bob, Polly, Polly, Andy, Andy, Cora, Cora.”  You get the picture. We are all in this call together.

        Here is the second pointer.  If we are tempted to respond like Moses did – Whoa!  Hold on!  I am not equipped to do this.  I am not the visioning sort.  If this involves change, count me out.  I want the organ.  I only want the old hymns.  I think it should be someone else’s job to step up and take on something new.  How do you expect me to do this?  I have never thought about this stuff before.

         If we are tempted to respond like that – and all of us do to a greater or lesser extent - then we would do well to remember God’s response to Moses’ hemming and hawing:  “I will be with you,” God replied.  “You will not be alone as you hammer out a vision and put it into action.  After all, you are on holy ground.”

         And finally, the third pointer is about that name business:  I am who I am.  Perhaps within those seemingly meaningless words lies what we need to trust as we move forward into the future together as a church community. 

         As Lutheran pastor Edward Markquart has eloquently written:  “What is the message of Yahweh’s name? God’s name is a verb. It is not a noun….God’s name is not I but AM, not a noun but a verb. God is action, movement…God is forever on the move…God is a BE verb… I will be father. I will be mother. I will be son. I will be daughter. I will be anything I want to be.

         I will be anything you need. If you are thirsty, I am water. If you are starving, I am food. If you are all alone, I am friend….If you are weak, I am strong….No matter what you need, I am all things for you. I am with you. I am in you. I am for you. I am everything you need… You cannot lock God into “I am father.” You cannot lock God into “I am mother.” You cannot lock God into anything because God is essentially mysterious, the ground of all that is.”  The ground on which you stand.  The Holy Ground – no burning bush for us perhaps, but holy nonetheless.

         Some of you may remember at my installation service here nearly nine years ago that U.C.C. pastor Paul Shupe stood where I am standing now and said to me sitting there in the second row, “Take off your shoes, Nancy, for you are standing on holy ground.”  And, you know, he was right!

         But you too are standing on that same holy ground. Yes, you! And so I offer you the same invitation:  Take off you shoes if you wish, but, at the very least, listen to the voice of God whispering, “I am with you.  What more do you need.” 

         Like Moses, we may not know where the path is leading us.  But also like Moses, we can trust that if we listen to the Holy One and walk with the Great I Am, we will make our way toward a new vision, so that this church can both survive and thrive.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C.