This ancient story of divine calling centers on sacred
vision. This Sunday, the scripture invites us to stop, to
look, to listen. This holy word offers blessed assurance
that God sees us and hears our cries.
You probably remember: the story began under the threat
of a terrified tyrant. Moses barely escapes Pharaoh’s
blueprint of brutality for baby boys thanks to the quick
and courageous action of his mother and sister. We meet
him this morning a fugitive far from home in Midian.
Moses is living below the radar and beyond the demands
of justice. It may be a dull life for one raised in Pharaoh’s
court, but at least he is secure. Moses is not on some
soul-seeking expedition, no quest to find himself or
encounter God. He comes to Horeb, God’s own mountain,
entirely by accident, following the flocks of his father-inlaw. As far as Moses is concerned, when we meet him
today, the ground on which he stands is no more holy
than any other field meant for grazing.
But something makes the man stop. A brush fire. A
bush burning but not burned up. At that moment,
Moses makes a decision that changes his life. He stops.
It was not inevitable that it would be so. He could have
kept walking. He could have ignored the sign. But
Moses turns aside, and only then does God speak.
Remember the text:
When the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside to see,
God called to him.
And what does God say? “I have seen my people’s
misery…I have heard their cries for help…I have come
down to deliver them.” The initiative is entirely God’s.
The plan is clear. God has seen and heard. God shows
up. And Moses is sent to speak God’s message to the
King of Egypt. Let my people go.
Now, you biblical scholars in the sanctuary may recall
that the encounter does not end there with Moses
gladly accepting his charge and marching off to fulfill
his God-given calling. No, Moses is skeptical. He has
questions. Objections. Excuses. Five of them to be exact.
My favorite is the final one when Moses simply says to
God, “Oh, Lord, please send somebody else.” It’s not
hard to understand why. The call placed on the life of
Moses is not an easy call. The words he must speak are
not easy words. The journey he is about to begin will not
be an easy journey.
You likely know that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was
deeply influenced by the Christian faith of its author. At
the beginning of the first book, J.R.R. Tolkien describes
a dialogue between Frodo, the young Hobbit, and
Gandalf, the wise wizard. To my reading, the encounter
echoes the stories of divine call and response scattered
throughout the pages of scripture. I’ve been thinking
about it this week. Frodo has just received his calling in
the form of a ring of power, a sign of his vocation and
his immense responsibility. And he does not respond
with enthusiasm. Rather, he responds with lament. “I
wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this
had happened.” Gandalf responds, “So do I, and so do
all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to
decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time
that is given us.”
In the time of Moses, the people of God were suffering.
God saw their misery. God heard their cries. God showed
up. And Moses did too, eventually. God’s persistence pays
off. Divine initiative compels human response.
Divine initiative. Human response. It is a good day, I
think, to consider the call of people and communities of
faith. This people. This community of faith. To ask again
the ancient question of the prophets: what does the
Lord require of us? There are many good and faithful
answers to that question. But for me, the answer, like
this morning’s scripture, centers on sacred vision. It
must begin by looking for the presence of God in the
ordinary, noticing the needs of our neighbors with our
own eyes, seeing the divine image reflected in every
human face, attending to the places of pain in our own
hearts and the struggles of those around us, setting our
sight on the promise of God as yet unfulfilled and always
still ahead of us. Never in jeopardy. If there is anything
of which I am certain this Sunday morning, it is that
God has work for us to do. Yes, work that is uniquely
and unavoidably assigned to people of faith. That’s you.
For the sake of the gospel and the people we are called
to love, we must not ignore, abandon, or abdicate this
responsibility. We must not rush past this moment of
divine encounter. The bush is on fire! Stop. Look. Listen.
God is still speaking.
It is commitment season at Second Presbyterian
Church. By that we typically mean that we’re beginning
to build a budget based on financial pledges received
from members and friends of the church. And that’s true.
And so, I should probably remind you that everything
we do in this place depends on your generous response
to God’s grace and our invitation. And, perhaps more
importantly, to remind you that here at Second, literally
everything we do has grown and expanded in the last
four years. I wish I had time to recount the stories and
share the statistics that prove that statement true, the
outreach to the city, our membership, our ministries
of music and fine arts, our care for each other, our
commitment to children and youth, our presence in the
public square, our faithful voices in places of influence.
Growth, growth, growth. And that growth is God’s gift,
but it is your responsibility. This year’s commitment
theme, Imagine Second, invites us, with the prophets
and the disciples at Pentecost, to keep dreaming about
the time that God has given us and our call to use it well.
Through this lens of imagination, we see a bright and
promising future, and we pursue it with our gifts, our
time, our talent, our commitment. We listen for God’s
voice calling each of us to be a part of the movement of
the spirit in this place. Yes, we rely on your pledges and
your giving. I trust you know that, and I know you will
respond faithfully.
But your commitment to God is about more than your
money. It is about answering the call, accepting the
responsibility, and living in ways that honor Jesus
Christ. Our focus this program year is on the work of
repairing the breach. Friends, that breach is now laid
bare. There is no denying the chasm between us. You
can feel it in daily encounters, even in this space, the
tensions of our divisions that threaten to choke off our
call to repair. And so, this season, we must commit and
recommit to that responsibility.
Friends, it is time to double down on our God-given
mission, so that we might demonstrate to a watching
world that faith can make one more loving. That faith
can make one more compassionate, more gracious.
This week, a dear friend sent me an essay written by
the author and editor Sara Sherbill. The title of the
piece is, “You Might Consider Praying,” and the first line
sets the stage. She writes, “This year keeps breaking
my heart.” After sharing a partial list—anger, anxiety,
resentment, personal loss, the violence of war, the
suffering caused by natural disaster—the author asks,
“What can we do when our hearts are breaking?”
Her suggestion? “We can pray.” Now, Sherbill is the
daughter of a rabbi, raised in an Orthodox Jewish family.
And while she confesses that she has departed from
much of that tradition, she writes, “Prayer was the
one thing I grabbed on my way out.” She shares this
witness, “For me, sometimes prayer looks like this: I am
driving and it is raining and the windshield wipers are
going back and forth and I am crying and I am asking
God for help. Help me…I whisper over and over. Just
please help me.”
If you have ever been with her, if you have ever been
driving and it is raining and the windshield wipers are
going back and forth and you are crying and you are
asking God for help, then you know the power of her
witness. I read her words with tears in my own eyes, and
then I thought of the verse that precedes this morning’s
passage. “After a long time, the king of Egypt died.
The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried
out. Their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their
groaning. God remembered his covenant…”
The story that is our faith would remind us again and again
that God hears. That God remembers. That God speaks.
Burning bushes. Holy ground.
The man turns aside. He looks. He listens.
As those called by God, gifted with the burden of
responsibility, let each of us answer with courage and
with faith, “Here I am. Send me.” Amen.