Exodus 3:1-12
1 Moses was taking care of the flock for his father-in-law Jethro,[a] Midian’s priest. He led his flock out to the edge of the desert, and he came to God’s mountain called Horeb. 2 The LORD’s messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in the middle of a bush. Moses saw that the bush was in flames, but it didn’t burn up. 3 Then Moses said to himself, Let me check out this amazing sight and find out why the bush isn’t burning up.
4 When the LORD saw that he was coming to look, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
Moses said, “I’m here.”
5 Then the LORD said, “Don’t come any closer! Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground.” 6 He continued, “I am the God of your father, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God.” Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the LORD said, “I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain. 8 I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. 9 Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them. 10 So get going. I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh and to bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
12 God said, “I’ll be with you. And this will show you that I’m the one who sent you. After you bring the people out of Egypt, you will come back here and worship God on this mountain.” (CEB)
“…With All My Wonders: Moses at the Burning Bush,” Week One
The desert sun would beat down upon the pilgrims’ shoulders as they approached the multistory stone wall, the single largest intact remains of the great temples of Herod and Solomon. They say that prayers written down and placed in the cracks of the wall are heard by God Himself, and that the closest God ever came to inhabiting the world is in the space that lies beyond that wall.
The Western Wall in ancient Jerusalem, the epicenter of the Jewish temple tradition, venerable though it is, has long since been architecturally eclipsed by the Dome of the Rock to the northeast and the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the south. Walk across a stone pavilion, though, and go through airport-style security, and any Gentile may, side-by-side with the Jewish pilgrims, pray at the place where it is said that God’s spirit still dwells.
Yet it was not always this way. In the Genesis stories, God appears through angels masquerading as men—to Lot, to Sarah to tell her she shall have a child, and to Jacob to tell him that he shall be renamed Israel. The first time we hear of God inhabiting a space of land, then, is not the Temple of Solomon. It is here, at a burning bush in Midian, before a man named Moses.
This week marks the start of a new four-week sermon series that we will be walking through together. This series, “With All My Wonders,” will travel verse-by-verse through the story of Moses at the burning bush in the third and fourth chapters of Exodus. It will be, I pray, a spiritually fulfilling segue from the Christmas season into Lent, for Lent always begins with the story of Jesus being called and then sent into the wilderness, just as Moses was—called by God here at the wilderness of the burning bush, and then sent to the wilderness of Egypt—a land he had not lived in for forty years. Remember where this story is in the chronology of Exodus—it is not that Moses is a native Midianite, called by his own God. No, Moses is a Hebrew child raised as an Egyptian (in the royal family, no less), but then he is cast into exile for murder, and he finds the beginnings of his redemption not in the glory of his former royalty, but in the fire of the presence of a god NOT his own as an Egyptian, a God for a particular people, a particular time, and especially in this story, a particular place—the burning bush.
So, fundamentally, the setting of this story flies in the face of everything that we have come to believe about a universal god, a god so omnipresent that He is everywhere at all times, including here, in our sanctuary, thousands of miles from wherever He may have appeared to our religious ancestors. In this story, the angel of God—and then God Himself—is saying that the place upon which Moses stands—not any other place, not the Holy of Holies, not the Jerusalem temple, not the Ark of the Covenant, for none of those things even existed—here, in this tiniest of tiny patches of land, God dwells. So far removed are we from the magnificent images of places like the Western Wall, or the Dome of the Rock, or even a Gothic sanctuary as beautiful as our own that it is absolutely jaw-dropping that God would appear in a bush. If you’re going for awe and majesty—which, let’s be honest, God is in this story when we get around to the plagues—then at least give us a tree, or a mountaintop, or a cliff, something that isn’t so humble as a shrub. But that is the first lesson we must learn in God-worship—that we may search for God at earth’s top, but we are most likely to find Him in the deepest of valleys. That is hardly comforting for us, though—the Exodus God is fundamentally a god of liberation from pain, a god of freedom from humiliation, of emancipation from injustice, and that is a god we would want to be everywhere, mountain and valley alike!
But those wishes, however heartfelt, do not answer for us the question of how we go from a very local, tribal god to the God of all power and splendor who rules over all the heavens, all the earth, and all things that are in them. That question has often been answered by pastors and theologians in terms of the static nature of God—God IS all-present, God IS universal—and that is fine, but it neglects what God DOES, and, at least as importantly how God does what He does. It is not simply that God has always been universal, even if He created all the heavens, all the earth, and all the things that are in them. It is that God has traveled with us across that creation He has made—just as we are carried by God, so too do we carry God with us wherever we go.
The rabbinic tradition of Judaism created, long ago, a book called the Talmud, which is used to this day by Jewish rabbis across to world to interpret that very nature of God. And in the Talmud, there is a story of how, like how God sent angels to speak to us, God sends angels to accompany us as well. We have a belief like that in Christianity in the form of guardian angels, but in this Talmudic tradition, the angels are not guardians as much as heralds—messengers, as their original purpose was in the Scriptures. But rather than heralding God’s divine presence, these angels herald OUR presence—as the Talmud writes, each of us has a flock of angels that goes before us, calling out to other angels, saying “Make way! Make way! Make way for the image of God!”
It’s a great story…and one that I realize does NOT answer my question of how God becomes a universal god. But it’s a good story to tell in a sermon, no? It does get us part of the way there, because the theology told in that story from the Talmud is one of us carrying God. But the inverse is equally true, that God can, and does, carry us—there’s the old story of a fellow who went through his entire life believing so, so firmly that God was walking alongside him in each step of the journey. And at the end of his life, on his deathbed, the man turns around and looks at his entire life, and at all of the places he had been, he sees his footprints, scattered across the entire world. Sometimes, though, he sees two sets of footprints, other times only one set. And so he says to God, “God, I believed in you. I thought you loved me. How come there are only one set of footprints at so many different places in my life? I needed you. Why weren’t you walking alongside of me?” To which God simply replies, “Oh, there? That would be where I picked you up, and carried you in my arms.”
That is the Exodus story, in its purest form. Here, at the burning bush, God has heard the cries of His children and is preparing to take an entire people into His arms and deliver them out of the injustice of bondage and into a better time, in a better land. There will be times along that journey where the Israelite people will say, “Why are there only one set of footprints?” The entire Hebrew Bible is filled with those moments. There will be times, perhaps there already have been, in your own life journey where you have asked God why there are only one set of footprints. But even this answer, that God has carried you, is incomplete. It is not enough to say that God has picked you up and carried you in His arms. It is proclaim that he has done so by speaking through His angels, those angels are traveling before you, even while you’re in His arms, calling out, “Make way! Make way! Make way for the image of God!” In this way, God has become known in the world. In this way, God has gone from beyond the Promised Land, that land of milk and honey that only a few were promised so very, very, long ago to the rest of the world He rules over. And in this way, the God of the burning bush has become the God of the world entire. Make way for the image of God! Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
January 22, 2012
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