Sermon:  Signs in the Rearview Mirror

Text:  Exodus 3:1-15

22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

August 31, 2008

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is from the Old Testament book of Exodus, the first part of chapter 3, in which Moses, attracted by the bush that burned but was not consumed, had a conversation with the Holy God.  In that meeting, God called Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery.  Moses wasn’t at all sure this was a good idea.  He asked the question that many of us might ask when we hear God’s call to service: “Who am I that I should do this?”  But God’s response had nothing to do with Moses and his qualifications for the job.  God simply answered, “I will be with you.”  That is enough to ensure the success of the mission—“I will be with you.”

Moses does not actually ask for a sign—at least not in this chapter—but God anticipates that Moses might want one.  God says, “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 worship God on this mountain.”  The thing is, because there are few punctuation marks in ancient Hebrew, we are not completely sure how to punctuate this sentence.[1]  (It might help if you actually get the text in front of you for this next part.)  If we put a period in the middle of this sentence (after “it is I who sent you”), the text would suggest that God’s presence would be the sign: “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you.”  Or, keeping the period in that same place, the text may be referring, even further back, to the fire in the bush as the sign. 

However, the New Revised Standard Version puts a colon in the middle and makes it all one long sentence.  This makes the most sense to me.  Even so, the result is still somewhat perplexing.  If the sign is that, after the people have come up out of Egypt, they will worship God on this same mountain, then that’s a peculiar sign.  The sign works only in reverse.  Only after Moses has accepted and acted in faith upon God’s calling will he see the sign that God promised.

Sermon.  The Matthew passage that Joyce read earlier (Matthew 16:21-28) is a powerful and challenging text in which Jesus promises that his disciples must give up their lives in order to find their lives and that every disciple of his must be willing to shoulder the cross.  I don’t think it’s stretching the point to say that Jesus was telling his followers what it means to answer his call.  And with this scary description, we may forgive each other if we are not exactly jumping up and volunteering for duty.

As we read the stories in the Bible, persons are almost always reluctant to embrace God’s call to service.  I think of the prophet Isaiah: “Surely you don’t mean me, God; I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.”[2]  I think of the prophet Jeremiah: “Ah, Lord God!  Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”[3]  I think of Mary, who was perplexed and afraid when the angel Gabriel announced to her that she, a virgin, would bear the Son of God.[4]  Even Jesus prayed that the cup of suffering might pass from him.[5]  So we are not surprised to see Moses, who among all others in the Old Testament was specially called to God’s service, beginning to back-pedal when he encountered God on the holy mountain.  We only get the beginning of the story in our text today, which shows Moses first asking, “But who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” and later, “What if the people want to know who sent me?”  In the following chapter, Moses continues to pile up the excuses.  “What if the people don’t believe that you sent me?”  So God gave him the rod that transformed itself into a snake and a hand that could become leprous or sound in an instant and the power to turn water from the Nile into blood.  “But my Lord, I have never been eloquent; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.”  So God reminded him that God could make him a better speaker.  Finally, Moses simply said, “O my Lord, please send someone else.”  Exasperated, God finally agreed that Moses could be accompanied by his brother, Aaron, who was an accomplished speaker.  But Moses was still in charge.

How many of you have felt God calling you to a new way of living, to new activities, to new relationships, and to new ways of understanding life?  If you have heard and felt that calling, you know that it is rarely comfortable.  It may feel right, in a moral or religious sense.  If what you are hearing is God’s call, it will have a feeling of “rightness” about it.  But it will also be uncomfortable, requiring you to give something up.  As Jesus taught his followers, you will have to lose something of yourself in order to gain the new life that God has planned for you.  It may be some of your belongings; those often slow us down when God calls.  You may have to reallocate your time.  You may have to give up some image of yourself that has been holding you back.  Like Moses, who insisted that his verbal skills were not up to the task God set before him, sometimes we are too focused on our own weaknesses.  God, I am too unrighteous.  I have a past of which I am ashamed.  I have failed too many times before.  I am not a loving person like all the other folks in church.  I don’t have enough faith.  Our imagination fails to grasp the reality that if God has called us, the relevant measure is God’s strength, God’s righteousness, God’s love, and not our own.  God will equip us for the calling as needed.[6]

When we begin to listen to God’s call, we often want a sign from God, don’t we—some kind of guaranty that things will turn out right if we answer God’s call?  True, some of those old biblical characters did get a sign.  Famously, when God asked the judge Gideon to deliver Israel, Gideon put a wool fleece out in the grass overnight and asked as a sign that when the dew fell upon the grass the fleece would be dry.  But even when God gave that sign, Gideon was not satisfied.  “OK God, now do it in reverse: tonight let the dew fall only on the fleece and not the grass.”[7]  In the Baptist church in which I was raised, asking for a sign was called “putting out the fleece.”  When God calls us, we, too, may want to “put out the fleece.”  But even in the Bible that’s not how it usually happens.  In fact Jesus seems to have tired of the crowds and the Pharisees always wanting a sign of the truth of his message, and he often told them they would get no sign or would receive only the kind of sign they neither wanted nor expected.[8]

What interests me the most about our passage this morning is not the burning bush, which certainly was a sign of some kind—at least an attention-getter.  Rather, I’m fascinated by the sign that God voluntarily gave to Moses.  After calling Moses to confront Pharaoh and to set the captives free, God said, “This will be the sign that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”  Well, gee thanks, God.  So all I have to do is go back into Egypt, where I am wanted for murder, and to gain the confidence of your people, who reviled me the last time I tried to help them, and then go to Pharaoh, the most powerful and terrible ruler in the world, and demand that he let the Israelites go?  And the sign that you will be with me in all of this is that when it is over—after I have fully committed myself and undertaken all the risks of your calling, I and the people will worship you back on this same holy mountain?  That’s not a sign.  It may be a promise, but it’s not a sign that I can rely on.  . . . .   No wonder Moses kept thinking of excuses!

Still in all, the passage is probably a good reflection of the kind of sign we do get when God calls us to service.  There are no actual guaranties on the front end—only promises.  But the promises are from one whom we trust—the Holy God, whose very name (“I am who I am”) suggests a God who does not change based on circumstances but remains steadfastly committed to God’s purposes.  Among God’s purposes are to love us and to help us.  Remember that the whole burning bush conversation began with God explaining to Moses that God had heard the cries of the Israelites in slavery and that God “knew” their sufferings.  In Hebrew, the word “know” carries with it associations of intimate experience, not just intellectual knowledge.  Thus, God knew intimately the sufferings of the people, and it was out of true empathy that God was moved to redeem them.  As God told the prophet Jeremiah, God has good intentions toward God’s people: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”[9]  God knows our sufferings, too.  Trusting in God’s goodness and good intentions toward us is the essence of faith.

If we answer God’s calling in faith, we will find—as Moses did—that the sign, the guaranty, comes into focus behind us, as we take each step.  Moses went to his brother Aaron, and he agreed to go on this dangerous mission with Moses, just as God had promised.  Moses took the next step and went to the Israelites in Egypt.  At first they were not so sure they wanted to follow Moses, but finally they did, just as God had promised.  Moses took the next step and confronted Pharaoh.  We all know what a protracted struggle that was, but eventually Pharaoh relented; and the Israelites were allowed to leave Egypt.  When Pharaoh changed his mind and sent the army to retrieve them, God protected the Israelites by swallowing up Pharaoh’s chariots in the sea.  Finally, the people arrived at the very mountain on which God had spoken to Moses out of the fire in the bush.  And the people worshipped God, just as God had promised.  At each stage there was a sign of God’s trustworthiness, but the sign was not visible before the step—only after the step was taken.  The signs were visible, if you will, only in the rear-view mirror.

I was trying to think of an example to illustrate this point, and one presented itself just this morning.  Last Sunday evening when the church picnic was over, we had a lot of left-over hamburgers.  Our member Ted Freeman asked if he could take the burgers back to someone who might need them.  So we gave him the meat and added several packages of buns, too.  When I dropped Ted off at his house after the picnic, I notice that he was immediately engaged in conversation with someone in his front yard.  I drove off as they were going together into the house.  This morning I asked Ted whether he had found any takers for the hamburger.  His face lit up as he related that the fellow he had met in the yard was very glad to receive them.  As it turns out, the man was on his way to call his sister-in-law for help: his family was completely out of food, and he was hoping that she might help.  It’s just a small example, but I think it’s a powerful one.  Ted took a small step in faith, answering God’s call to be of service to his neighbors, and God responded with a sign.  Out of all the persons in his neighborhood, Ted was led to the one who most needed the food.

And that is how it is in our lives of faith, individually, and as the church, the people of God.  God calls, and we answer in faith, with no guaranty of success other than our trust in God’s essential goodness and good purposes for us and for all the world.  When we take action based on our trust in God—when we take the risk, give up something that is of value to us, change the direction of our lives, establish new relationships—the sign that we have done the right thing and that God is with us will appear afterward, as we look back on the decision.

In this, the Great “I Am,” the God who will be who God will be, calls us with each step to be who we truly are, for ourselves and for each other.