It’s interesting that our lectionary text should be Exodus 3:1-15 – the story of the Burning Bush, considering that’s where we got our name. A couple of years ago, I wrote a sermon on this very passage. I’m blogging it for this week:
“Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Moses is standing in front of a burning bush, burning but not devoured by the flames, a scientific phenomenon, AND the center of the flame is talking to Moses, asking him to go to the most powerful ruler in the world and demand the freedom of his slaves. Moses doesn’t run. Moses doesn’t scream. Moses doesn’t call the media. But Moses also doesn’t say “yes” either.
Burning Bush. We all know the meaning of those two words together. We know the story, thanks to years of Christian Education and a lot of help from Cecil B. DeMille. It’s why our program chose the name Project Burning Bush, in hopes that folks would connect a well-known call story with what we do to help young people with their call to vocation. Although I have to say it also can confuse some folks. Once our Associate Director of Admissions, Pat Morgan, was wearing one of our t-shirts in a grocery store line. A woman who was standing behind Pat saw the t-shirt and gave Pat a scathing look. Pat looked at her in confusion when the woman said angrily, “I think your t-shirt is awful! We should all be supportive of our president!” At which point, Pat smiled graciously and said, pointing to the two words, “MOSES and the burning bush…..” Of course the woman was horribly embarrassed. I guess she was so focused on petty politics that the larger meaning of what our name represents didn’t even dawn on her.
Aside from the name of our program, the story of the burning bush is a bit confusing when we try to apply it to our lives today. We don’t see burning bushes. God doesn’t talk to us from the middle of a flame. We don’t remove our shoes because the ground is ordinary and we’ve lost our sense for the holy.
I hear this all the time. Because I work with a program that deals with call and vocation and because I work at a seminary, I hear a lot of personal call stories. Union-PSCE includes our student and faculty call stories in their calendar and on their website. And I can guarantee that on any given day when I’m listening to a personal call to ministry, one or more folks will always explain: “I didn’t see a burning bush or anything….” It’s as if they are apologizing or embarrassed that their call wasn’t as entertaining as Charlton Heston made it out to be. Their call becomes an ordinary, no-frills, generic explanation of God at work in their lives – like they got a bulk mailed postcard or something. I find this phenomenally unfair to God and to their vocation.
I’ve used the term “vocation” a few times already. We have a lot of meanings for the word – ranging from our secular careers to joining a convent. But when I talk about “vocation” in the truest sense of the word, I mean something much more and very specific. I use the Frederick Buechner definition of vocation: “The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” So please be clear, I am not talking about vocation as your job or your hobby or your church position. I am talking about the deepest passion of your life, the thing that only you can do, the talent or skill that gives you the greatest satisfaction to perform or to create or to act upon – I’m talking about that thing being offered as service, as nourishment, as liberation for a destitute world.
God doesn’t send those invitations out on bulk-mailed postcards. Yet we shrink back from the idea that God is offering burning bushes, too. I think we have the same lack of self-esteem that Moses has in our passage. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Who is Moses? Let’s take an inventory: He’s the only Hebrew baby boy in our story saved from a Pharaoh bent on genocide. He’s the adopted child of the same Pharaoh thanks to a creative conspiracy between his mother, his sister, and the Pharaoh’s own daughter. He has the best education, best food, best housing, best everything. He is trained for leadership in the court of the king.
And there is one more thing – Moses has a passion for the oppressed. He is aware that he is Hebrew, he knows that his people suffer as slaves even if he is not. He sees that they are broken by the very people who raised him. And in witnessing an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave, Moses is outraged. The scripture says that he looked this way and that way, and thinking that no one is watching him, Moses murders the Egyptian taskmaster in a misguided act of vengeance. But as we all know from our own political structure, someone is ALWAYS looking. He has made a huge mistake, the Hebrews reject him as their leader, and Pharaoh wants him dead. All in all, not the best start for a vocation.
We’ve all seen people make mistakes of gargantuan magnitude. They find a passion, a path, a way to make their lives meaningful – whether it is through a job or a partner or a church. And they then, in their passion, they make a terrible choice – irrevocable and devastating. It’s all over our communities: The politician who commits fraud, the mother who lies to the social worker, the pastor who has an affair. Or maybe it’s something smaller but no less damaging – we see them antagonize, bully, mislead – all in a misguided attempt to serve other people. And we’ve all seen how each and every time, they are discovered and they fail. It’s a bitter thing to find that the thing that brings you the greatest gladness can be the thing that breaks you.
Moses is broken. His call to vocation is lost. His identity is shattered. He works for his father-in-law, a priest, not helping out with the priestly duties – but schlepping his sheep all over the desert. He has retreated into himself, a stranger in a strange land, aware that his people not too far away are desperately struggling under the iron fist of Egypt. He heard their cries. He knows their suffering. And he chooses to watch someone else’s sheep.
God has also heard the cries. God also knows their suffering. And God knows Moses – knows his heart, knows his passion, knows his failure and his loss. God knows Moses is still capable of so much more and has the confidence that Moses is the one person in the entire world that can make God’s plan to get the Israelites out of Egypt work. God remembers who Moses is. God remembers who the Israelites are. And now it’s time to redeem both of their identities – Moses as a leader and the Israelites as a light unto the nations.
God remembers who you are. Do you? Do you remember your passion? Do you know somewhere in the depths of you is a fervor so profound, so blistering, that it dares to meet the needs of the world? Did you try it once and fail? Did you find that it didn’t meet the expectations of your family, of your friends, of your community – that it didn’t meet your expectations? Did you give it your all only to be rejected? Did you try and fail? Do you believe there are other people who are better than you? Did you hide it so far within yourself that you don’t know where to look? Is it some distant memory from a life long gone? Have you kept it carefully covered up so that no one would have to criticize it, no one would have to challenge it, no one would have to judge it?
You are hopelessly, intricately entangled with your passion. There is no way around it. It is who you are. You are not your job. You are not your children or your partner. You are not your position in church. You are what you long for. You are what you desire most. Anything less than giving your deepest passion to a world desperate for meaning and purpose is living a half-life. Choosing to schlep sheep when you can free the slaves not only eradicates your potential, it undermines God’s plans.
As Presbyterians, I’m sure that gets under your skin a bit. The eternal tension between God’s sovereignty and our freedom has placed Calvinists on the side of God’s sovereignty. Yes, God could have just wiped away Pharaoh, sent angels to release the slaves, and set up a water slide to the land of milk and honey. But in this story, God does not do that. For reasons I cannot fathom, God needs Moses to carry out the plan. Moses protests four times, the last time with a flat out rejection, “Please send someone else.” God doesn’t do that. God doesn’t go to the next person on the list. There isn’t one. Moses is the list. All God’s bets are on Moses and he’s bailing.
All God’s bets are on you. You have a unique ability to change the world in ways that only God can imagine. You have a passion that the world needs to come alive again. Your deepest delight in children, in story telling, in wood working, in medicine, in listening, in drawing, in music, in nature, in computers, in justice, in sports – I could go on – your deepest desires can meet the world’s greatest needs. You can liberate the captive, you can bring hope to the disenfranchised, you can point to peace in the midst of hatred. The thing you long to do most, broken as it may be or small as you may think it is, is the very thing the world needs to find purpose, to find peace, to find belonging.
You cannot do it alone, though. You need friends and family who love you and support you. Moses had his brother Aaron, his sister Miriam, his wife and children, his father-in-law – all who spoke for him, sang for him, protected him, and gave him advice. You need your community. Moses needed the people of Israel behind him to pull this off. He needed their cooperation and their fervent belief that he was the man for the job. He also needed their critiques when things weren’t going so well. It may have angered Moses to hear their complaints, but he always listened and responded to their needs. You need constant communication with God. Those daily practices of prayer, scripture reading, meditation are vital if you are to stay in touch with your passion, your call, and God’s plan.
You need a burning bush. We all do. God’s visit to Moses seems fantastical to us today, but blackberry bushes were a dime a dozen in the wilderness. They still are an ordinary sight along our highways. God comes through the ordinary in an extraordinary way. But you have to be watchful. You have to be on the lookout. You have to be curious when something looks a little unusual. Moses could have missed it, or dismissed it as another bushfire and moved his herd away – but he doesn’t. He sees that it has potential to be remarkable – an ordinary bush, burning in an extraordinary way. That is the definition of sacrament: the presence of God coming through the everyday, mundane, the commonplace.
God comes to our everyday in burning bushes all our own. They are not to be diminished or belittled because they aren’t the spectacular event we think other folks expect. They are glimpses into the face of God, only meant for you. God speaks to us through the smile of a child who finally grasps a difficult concept. God speaks to us through the images of nations destroyed by war and natural disasters. God speaks to us through the hush of the deep forest and the roar of a waterfall. God speaks to us in the astonishing speed of Michael Phelps. God speaks to us through Picasso, Bach, Thoreau, and Spielberg. There is no limit to the ways God speaks to us. It is the moment that grabs us away from the ordinary and allows us to see a vision of what is possible. It is significant and life changing, not just a bulk-mailed postcard. But you have to be looking for it, waiting, even if right now you are just schlepping sheep, you have to be always attentive to the face of God speaking from the everyday in your life. You can dismiss it or you can recognize it for what it is: your burning bush.
You have the potential to be remarkable. You have the potential to be the everyday person through whom God works to make a difference in the world. You have the potential to be brightly burning with your passion and yet not consumed with it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve failed before. Learn from it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get it right again. Be patient with yourself. All that matters is that you are willing to follow the plan. Are you willing to unleash you passion onto the world, unashamed, trusting God, your friends, your family, your community to support you? Are you willing to be vulnerable enough to put your dream out there for a world that only has nightmares? Only you can do this amazing thing for God’s people. God can’t send someone else. There isn’t anyone else on the list. You are the list.
In her book, Return to Love, Marianne Williamson wrote a passage that was quoted by Nelson Mandela in his inaugural speech. You’ve probably heard it before, but I think it bears repeating because it seems fitting in light of the burning bushes that find their ways into our lives.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
AMEN and AMEN.
