1 Then Moses replied, “But what if they don’t believe me or pay attention to me? They might say to me, ‘The LORD didn’t appear to you!’”
2 The LORD said to him, “What’s that in your hand?”
Moses replied, “A shepherd’s rod.”
3 The LORD said, “Throw it down on the ground.” So Moses threw it on the ground, and it turned into a snake. Moses jumped back from it. 4 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Reach out and grab the snake by the tail.” So Moses reached out and grabbed it, and it turned back into a rod in his hand. 5 “Do this so that they will believe that the LORD, the God of their ancestors, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God has in fact appeared to you.”
6 Again, the LORD said to Moses, “Put your hand inside your coat.” So Moses put his hand inside his coat. When he took his hand out, his hand had a skin disease flaky like snow. 7 Then God said, “Put your hand back inside your coat.” So Moses put his hand back inside his coat. When he took it back out again, the skin of his hand had returned to normal. 8 “If they won’t believe you or pay attention to the first sign, they may believe the second sign. 9 If they won’t believe even these two signs or pay attention to you, then take some water from the Nile River and pour it out on dry ground. The water that you take from the Nile will turn into blood on the dry ground.” (CEB)
“…With All My Wonders: Moses at the Burning Bush,” Week Three
I have seen their television shows. I have been to their services. I have heard their preachers’ messages. And all I could come away with was a mix of befuddlement and envy at the crowds that they had attracted to hear what I considered to be a half-baked message. I had become one of those mainline Christians who burned with this bizarre, contradictory half-suspicion, half-envy for the megachurches around me. And while that envy for most mainliners might be only for the size of the congregation—and because size denotes stability—for me, the envy also came with the sheer conviction with which they spoke of their born-again, getting saved, whatever you want to call it experiences. It wasn’t that I wanted to worship as they did…I wanted to believe as they did, to be unshackled from doubt and skepticism and cynicism and any other –ism that threatened to shrink my faith to the size of a mustard seed. But then I remember what the Greek philosopher Heraclitus had to say about envy, that it always lasts longer than the happiness of those whom we envy. And then, sometime after that, I remember that I’m a Christian pastor and that the Bible has some things to say about envy as well! But still…it would remain—I want to believe the way that someone else, who wasn’t me, believed.
This week marks the third week of a four-week sermon series that we are 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 is, 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 God. The first week, we explored the fundamental character of God, how a God of only a small, select people could become a God of all people, and last week, we took on the job of actually trying to name such a universal, all-encompassing, all-everything deity, which was God’s response to Moses’ first weak excuse to not answer his calling to return to Egypt and free the Israelites from slavery. This week, we hear Moses’ second excuse—the “what if they don’t believe me” excuse.
The need for belief here for Moses is striking, but it is not the sort of belief that we might think about. Moses has not yet gotten to his lack of belief in himself—that will be next week—but now his lack of faith is in the Israelite people—Moses now believes in God, and has heard God’s name, so it’s not lack of faith in God—it’s a lack of faith that Moses has in his fellow people to believe him. This is certainly a better excuse than Moses’ first excuse for not accepting this calling to liberate God’s people—the excuse of “I don’t know your name, God”—but it is also probably a more depressing excuse for us. Moses’ first excuse, one of shock and confusion, has given way to a second excuse that betrays real uncertainty with the reactions of others.
And are we not exactly the same way ourselves? I have so loved getting to know each of you over the past five months, and a common theme in those conversations we have had is that we really, really don’t want God to be someone who we have to fear or distrust, but there’s also a reality that we must resign ourselves to that we cannot always trust the children of God the way we also trust God. We are asked, in Scripture, and by me, in each sermon every week, to put our faith in God. That’s fine, but we still lock our doors and guard our assets. It’s the old Middle Eastern adage: trust in God, but tie your camel. I may preach every Sunday about believing in God, but I worry that less often I preach about how to believe in a child of God not named Jesus.
And I have realized that I must stand before you and confess that this is a weakness of mine, to ask you to believe in other people. Not just to believe in one another—in the people gathered here today. That part is easy, because this, what we have here is a family. It is so much harder for me to stand up here and say to you that everyone else out there is good, and kind, and inclusive, and respectful. We look around the world, and we know that this isn’t always the case. Earlier this week, a letter to the editor appeared in The Daily News, you may have read it, saying that there was no way you could be accepting of homosexuality and still believe in God. As Christians, we are called to love and not condemn, to include and not judge. I realize that in my five months here, I have not strayed into any controversial waters from the pulpit, but I have already had long, meaningful conversations with a number of you about this very subject because of what is happening in Olympia. And I think, from the bottom of my heart, that’s wonderful, because church needs to be…it has to be…a place where we can feel safe to talk about even incredibly divisive issues and still love one another, rather than shout at someone else that they must not believe in God. So I promise you, if you feel the need to have a pastoral sounding board on this or any other issue, if you need a listening ear or a different perspective, my door is always open. And I hope in turn that everyone else will feel safe enough to talk to each of you about even the toughest of issues, and that you would, as my pastoral mentors, to a person, instructed me, to offer truth in love as a way of proclaiming your faith in a loving God.
Because that’s what Moses is up against here—he’s not worried about his friends and family in Midian believing him, he’s worried about the Israelites back in Egypt believing him. It isn’t his immediate family and faith community, it’s everyone else who also calls themselves Israelite—he does not yet know how to speak truth to them in love. It scares him to his core, and God, not being at His most sympathetic, does things that would maybe only scare Moses further—turning his staff into a snake and turning his hand leprous. God’s first signs and wonders are not performed upon Egypt, or Egypt’s gods, but instead, are performed on this fellow for whom it is going to get worse before it gets better. Before he can fulfill his calling, he must be struck by God with leprosy, he must see the waters turn to blood, so that the Israelites may believe, so that Moses might be reassured that everyone else out there outside of his family and friends might actually mean him well when he arrives to lead them.
And that’s where we are often at, aren’t we? We believe in God. We may harbor our doubts, entertain them, even reach for them, but at the end of the day, we believe in God. How much are we willing to believe in the people outside of this church? In the people who we may never meet? God does these things to Moses, the staff turning into a snake, the hand becoming leprous and clean again, so that everyone else might believe what he says. We do not have that kind of a trump card, an ace in the hole that we can pull out because we heard God’s voice speaking to us directly in a burning bush. But what we do have, and always will have, is the capacity to believe through our doubts, to have faith through our uncertainties. That is the conundrum of Moses, at its core, in this story. And though we will not see it yet, it turns out that there is just enough belief to bring about the Exodus itself, to bring about the long-awaited escape to the Promised Land, and all because of one of the most powerful prayers there is, one that I have to think that Moses cries out here today, to simply say, “I want to believe!” By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
February 5, 2012
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