Raging Storms & Burning Bushes (8.30.20)

Raging Storms & Burning Bushes
Exodus 3:1-15
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. 3 So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

4 When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.”

5 “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” 6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

7 The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9 And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

12 And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.”

13 Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.[c] This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

15 God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord,[d] the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’

“This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.”

I know I’ve said this almost every week for half a year, but what a week! We watched TS Marco become a Cat 1 Hurricane but turn and float along the coast instead. Then we watched TS Laura become a 1 a 2 a 3 a 4 and wondered if she would make it to 5. The cone shifted west then east again then west. The storm surge was predicted to be “unsurvivable.” And many of you, like me, stayed alert throughout the night for signs and warnings of tornadoes.

While the storm surge did not become as wildly dangerous as feared, the hurricane crushed towns in Southwest Louisiana where residents of Lake Charles face as much as 8 weeks without power and a potential 4 weeks without water. All of this anxiety and watching and preparing came in the countdown to 15 years since Katrina and the subsequent levee failure. So many of you are marking and remembering where you were 15 years ago today. What you were wondering, asking, doing. The months of distance. The irreversible change of your city.

And then there’s the shooting of Jacob Blake. The response of deadly violence at the hands of a teenager in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The protests in Portland that escalated just this weekend. The rallies and move toward final months leading to the presidential election.

Friends, I know I am an open-hearted empath who feels it all. I have to work mindfully to shut out the emotional influx of news and life events and the stress and trauma my neighbors are feeling. Even if you are not highly attuned to the emotional energy of everyone around you, I suspect the constant inundation of news mixed with personal life timelines is just so much. So so much.

If you haven’t already, I invite you to take your shoes off now. I barely wear shoes anymore at all, and it’s wonderful! Feel the four corners of your feet on the ground. Let us root ourselves in this moment as we explore a biblical story that may just speak to our current reality—both within and around us.

When we left off last week, the defiant midwives had assisted in the birth of babies that were mean to be slaughtered, and the boy child Moses was born and kept alive by his clever mother and shrewd sister. One giant step further than mere survival, they arranged his secure safety by having him adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter.

As we reach today’s text, quite a lot of time has passed. We know that at some point Moses lives with Pharaoh’s daughter as her son, but he is aware he is Hebrew and not Egyptian. So when he sees first-hand the enslavement of his people, the cruel treatment at the hands of the Egyptians, he becomes enraged. So enraged that he kills an Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew and then rapidly buries the body in sand.

Though he thinks he has done this in private, word of the murder spreads. Pharaoh finds out and wants Moses killed, so Moses runs away to another country. He aids a family in need there, marries, has a son, and settles into his new life as a foreigner in a foreign land. He thinks this will be his life now and forevermore. Then…

During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. 24 God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. 25 So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

“Concern” doesn’t quite get us where this text is trying to take us. It is the compassion of God that leads to the bush on fire but does not burn. The cries of the Israelites become prayers that move the heart of God to action, and then, from a far off place, Moses is invited to lead the redemptive movement of God’s love.

Amidst chaos, abuse, distress, murder, lies, secrets, and despair—God sees. God hears. God responds. And God invites Moses to partner in this divine mission, but first he must become ready.

Before he can go to a new Pharaoh, and speak radical love to power, and free his people, and lead them through the wilderness, and guide them to the Promised Land, he must take his shoes off. He must stand in the four corners of his feet, feeling the bare earth beneath his toes and heels, the texture of sand and grit rubbing against his bare feet. He must stand before the heat of that fire that burns but does not destroy. He must root himself in earth, getting fully centered in his mind, body, and spirit, before he can hear and receive a word from The Divine.

I Am Who I Am.

These words must rush over him like the wind that radiates from fire. It is a swirling sensory experience this holy encounter and calling.

Well before Moses can face the new king and speak to his own people, he must be clear about both who he is and Who goes with him.

I’m listening to this word at the end of an emotionally exhausting week. In addition to everything I’ve already named, I am noticing how this school/work-from-home life might not be as much physical presence as those early years with babies/toddlers but it is matching/even surpassing the emotional and mental presence. Just a few days ago, I tweeted something like, “I want to get out and fight for what’s right and change the world and stop a descent into total autocracy. But I can barely get through a work-from-home-while-you-school-from-home day. How are we gonna get anything else done???”

I know you feel this, too. News and life. It’s all coming in so fast, and we know there is more to come on a personal, global, local, and national level.

How can we seek justice when we’re seeking what will we eat for dinner today?

Let go of the how for now. It will be enough that I AM goes before us, with us, and beside us with a promise not just of presence but of words to speak. But we’re not there yet. Today, in this moment—just for now, we are taking our shoes off and dropping down into the physical experience of spiritual connection.

Centering ourselves in the Holy Presence, rooting ourselves in these bodies and this earth, MUST come first. Don’t forget, it was from a far off, adopted home place of tending that Moses is called out and sent. Moses is met there in the place where he works, in the midst of his daily labor. In a place where Moses thinks he is hidden and safe, far from the old worries of another life, that God finds him right in the new place where he is. And because Moses is in a state of noticing and listening, he can receive this invitation from I Am to be there in the presence of God.

And because Moses knew the voice of I Am and trusted what that voice said, then later, those who wanted life and abundance and freedom knew they could trust and follow Moses because he moved and spoke as one who was walking with God.

Not everyone is called to Pharaoh’s throne, to be sure. But we are invited, each of us and all of us, into a connected place of centered open-heartedness. And that connected place precedes the action. Today is not a day for staring down the king, though that day will come. For just right now in this present moment, the only one we ever really have, today is a day for taking our shoes off. And feeling the heat of the fire on our skin. Of filling our lungs with long, slow, deep breaths. Of becoming so connected that we hear the voice of God whispering our name.

Blessing at the Burning Bush by Jan Richardson

You will have to decide
if you want this—
want the blessing
that comes to you
on an ordinary day
when you are minding
your own path,
bent on the task before you
that you have done
a hundred times,
a thousand.

You will have to choose
for yourself
whether you will attend
to the signs,
whether you will open your eyes
to the searing light, the heat,
whether you will open
your ears, your heart
to the voice
that knows your name,
that tells you this place
where you stand—
this ground so familiar
and therefore unregarded—
is, in fact,
holy.

You will have to discern
whether you have
defenses enough
to rebuff the call,
excuses sufficient
to withstand the pull
of what blazes before you;
whether you will
hide your face,
will turn away
back toward—
what, exactly?

No path from here
could ever be
ordinary again,
could ever become
unstrange to you
whose seeing
has been scorched
beyond all salving.

You will know your path
not by how it shines
before you
but by how it burns
within you,
leaving you whole
as you go from here
blazing with
your inarticulate,
your inescapable
yes.