Prisoner of Love (Philippians 1:21 - 30)

     The first thing to know about Philippians is that Paul wrote it from prison.  He was incarcerated because of his Gospel preaching, but we don’t know where, exactly, it was.  We do know that it was in a Roman jail, because he speaks of the imperial guard (in Greek, the Praetorium), who know he’s in jail for Christ.  We do have some idea of when it was written, though: probably about 62 CE, around thirty years after the crucifixion and ten years after Paul and Timothy established the Philippian church which, being in Greece, had the distinction of being the first Christian congregation established in Europe.

It is clear that Paul had a special relationship with that congregation; he visited the church twice—in 56 and 57–after he founded it, and speaks fondly of their relationship in the verses before our passage.  “I thank my God every time I remember you,” he says “because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now . . .  You hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me.”  He longs to see them, to be with them, and prays that their “love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight,” and assures them that his imprisonment has actually helped spread the Gospel, because the local sisters and brothers had been emboldened by his example, and enabled to preach without fear.

As the letter goes on, it becomes clear that he doesn’t know his fate, that he’s probably awaiting sentencing or something, and his bravado begins to appear a bit hollow.  “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that . . . Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death.”

As our passage begins, he muses about which one it’ll be, and lets us in on a little secret: he’d kinda prefer it to be death.  “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.”  Dying is gain.  His desire is “to depart and be with Christ,” as he puts it, “for that is far better.”  Life is hard, there is sickness and hardship and suffering, and Paul knows a lot about that, too . . . in that famous passage in Second Corinthians he describes it, saying he’s been “afflicted9 in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.”  Oy.  If anybody had cause to want to die and be with Christ, it’s Paul.

And yet . . . This sort of thinking has pervaded Christianity for a long time.  Early on, in the popular conception, it became all about getting to that better place, all about pie in the sky by and by.  Fire-sale Christianity, it’s called—the idea that you do all this stuff on Earth so you’ll get to go to heaven.  Though most Christians at least profess to believe in Martin Luther’s sola gracia, there’s often an underlying conviction that you gotta be good enough.  It’s reflected in the way we speak about it, when a calamity befalls us saying “why me” and when Uncle Monty dies, he’s gone on to his great reward.

Of course, this has taken the next, inevitable step: called prosperity doctrine, it’s when that eternal reward gets pushed forward to our life here on earth.  If God rewards you for being a good little minion after death, what’s to stop God from doing it while we’re still kicking? Think Creflo Dollar—has there ever been a more apt name?—think Creflo Dollar and his 65 million dollar plane or Joel Osteen and his 17,000 square foot “family home.”

The problem is that prosperity-doctrine thinking forgets the other part of the formula: if dying is gain, living is Christ, and he didn’t live in no 10.5 million dollar house, or ask Peter and James to buy him a private jet.  No: the incarnate Christ hoofed it around Palestine, healing folks and preaching the Kingdom, and so did Paul.  And though we don’t know what Jesus did to support himself—he doubtless learned his father’s trade before he left home—we know Paul worked as a tent-maker while at the same time running around the Middle East establishing churches.

And after engaging in a little wist-ful thinking, he assures himself—and the Philippians of his confidence that God will keep him around for the sake of the gospel, to continue to do more of the earthly labor which, we know today, was crucial to the development of the church.  More specifically, he says, remaining in the flesh is “more necessary” for the church at Philippi.  “Since I am convinced of this,” he says, “I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith.”  Paul has a genuine love and regard for the fledgling Christians at Philippi, and an unshakable faith that God will do what is right by them, whatever God does with he himself.  They don’t call him a saint for nothing.

And he really wants to come visit them again, so he can share in their joy and celebration of Christ, or as he puts it, their boasting in Christ Jesus.  But just in case, he begins to exhort them, to encourage them, ‘cause exhorting and encouraging is what he does best.  And I wonder if he’s doing the same for himself, if he’s giving himself a bit of a pep talk to shake himself out of his momentary doubt. 

Whatever the case, he urges them—and himself?—to live their “life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” so that whether he gets to come and see them or not, he’ll know that they’re standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.  And notice that he’s speaking, as he almost always is in his letters, to a group, to a congregation, not to individuals, and that here, as elsewhere—notably First Corinthians—he expects unity, that they’ll work in one spirit and with one mind for the Gospel.  He doesn’t expect purity of belief, but he does expect them to get along.

He also expects them not to be intimidated by their opponents, whoever they are, and reminds them that It’s a privilege not only to believe in Christ but to suffer for him as well.  And though this sounds a little foreign to our modern ears, in a time and place that spends great amounts of time and capital to circumvent it, Paul is adamant that suffering is good for one, that it builds faith and character, that it fosters advancement along life’s journey.  And after all, Paul isn’t preaching from a gilt-edged set or some crystal cathedral.  He’s lived those words, he’s experienced suffering, and has emerged stronger from the other side.

 And yet . . . There’s still that hope, that after all is said and done.  After we’ve run the race, done our best, there’s still the hope we will go home.  He speaks of it explicitly just before our passage, and for him, this expectation that God will do what is best for his beloved Philippians is coupled with that way real hope.  And   Paul knows a lot about hope; he wrote powerfully about it over in Romans: “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”  He is waiting for his fate with patience, he doesn’t see it yet, he doesn’t know which it’ll be, he doesn’t know whether he’ll continue to witness for Christ by his life or by his death,  but through it all he is filled with hope.

This is an invitation to focus on that hope, to find hope—and yes, joy—in the uncertainties of our lives.  And when our own prison moments come, we are invited to model for others, and for ourselves, what it means to face them with hope.  Like Paul, we can choose life. We can choose to look beyond our circumstances and believe that God will show us a way that will lead us out of our prisons, out of those valleys of shadow and death in which we all sometimes find ourselves. In those times, it is our faith and conviction that God will lead us out.  Amen.

Here Comes the Judge (Romans 14:1 - 12)

     In a passage not too long before this one Paul says “You know what time it is, how now is the moment for you to wake from sleep . . . the night is far gone, the day is near” and he’s talking about the return of Christ, which he believed was right around the corner . . . he believed that it would come before his generation was finished on earth.  After all, Jesus had said as much, and this was such an ingrained belief in that first generation of Christians that Paul felt compelled in his first letter to the church at Thessalonica to reassure them that all was well, despite some of their number dying before the second coming.  What was going on in the Christian community was a gradual awakening to the fact that the second coming of Christ wouldn’t be quite as soon as some of them had thought.  It was sort of like the folks who take all their worldly possessions up onto a mountain, sure that Jesus is coming again at 5:36 am on September 4^th, 1908, and when he doesn’t, they gradually begin to look around at one another, then file slowly, a few at a time, down the mountain . . .

That was going on with at least some of the first-generation Christians when Paul wrote Romans somewhere around 60 AD . . . Christianity was in a flux, it had not settled down into an orthodoxy – that wouldn’t happen for a century or so – and there were a lot of opinions about the way Christianity should be.  Among those were Paul’s own opinions, and he was writing to kind of give them an overview of his theology, which was very dualistic: as a good apocalyptic Jew he thought in terms of good and evil, light and dark.  In the paragraphs right before our passage he says “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.  Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

And so it’s clear that to Paul, that first line of our passage—“Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions”—should be taken in this context of his admonition to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”  To put on the Lord Jesus Christ is to welcome those who are weak in the faith, but not for the purpose of feudin’ and fussin’ and fightin’.  And what does he mean by “weak in faith?”  “Some believe,” he says, “in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.”  So: here’s one characteristic of the weak: they restrict their eating.  The not-weak “believe in eating anything.  And he says, those who eat everything must not despise those who abstain . . . and those who abstain, must not judge those who eat.  Note the difference: he’s warning those who eat not to despise those who don’t, but those who don’t, he warns not to judge.  We’ll get back to that a little bit later.

Now.  Remember I said that Christianity was in flux?  That there had not been an orthodoxy established?  That’s what’s going on here.  And although we’re not certain about the specifics of what Paul is saying, we know the general outline.  There was a debate among first-generation Christians about which and how many rituals must be followed to be Christians in good standing.  Most prominent, were the Jewish dietary restrictions of the day, like eating pork or certain kinds of seafood . . . over in Galatians, Paul describes his disagreements with the pillars of the Jerusalem church—James and Peter, among others—about whether or not Christians should observe Jewish dietary rules.  And there were other traveling, Christian teachers—perhaps not unlike Paul—who taught that Jewish observances like circumcision and the following of the dietary laws were prerequisite to being Christian.  Paul was adamantly opposed to that way of thinking: “we know,” he wrote in Galatians “that a person is justified not by the works of the law” and by law, Paul means Mosaic law “a person is justified not by law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.”

And so, observing the law in general—and not just dietary laws, but all of the Mosaic law—is not necessary for what Paul calls justification, and we more commonly refer to as salvation.  But there were still a large number of brothers and sisters out there who believed that way, who were still what we might call traditional or old-school, that still believed Christians should refrain from doing certain things, like eating certain foods, and in our particular case, meat that had been offered to idols.  This stemmed from the general Hebrew rule against eating meat offered to God, and it had been extended to meat offered to any god, or as Jews would have it idols.  The problem is, you couldn’t always tell if meat had been offered to idols or not, it was common practice to sell it in the marketplace, after it had been slaughtered for sacrificial purposes, so it had become the practice in some places to avoid eating meat altogether.

But Christians—because their salvation, their being deemed children of God, comes not through observance of the law but by adoption through Christ—have great freedom which included, apparently, not worrying about whether or not meat had been offered to idols.  And for Paul, this freedom in Christ was very important:  As he wrote also in Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”  The yoke of slavery he refers to is the Torah and its rules about what you can and cannot eat.

And there were other rules causing problems: religions like Judaism and the pagan faiths of Paul’s converts had festival days.  Judaism had Passover and Purim, worshippers of the goddess Astarte had lunar observances, followers of the ba’als had harvest festivals.  And for Paul, freedom in Christ extended also to freedom from strict observance of these holy days.  As he puts it in our passage, “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike.”  But those who observe the days, just like those who follow dietary laws, observe them in honor of the Lord, and those who don’t do the same.  They are all servants of Christ, worshippers of a common Lord.  And who is anybody to pass judgment on the servants of another?  Who is one servant to pass judgment on another?  All serve the same risen Lord.

 Those who eat, and those who don’t observe the festival days, who Paul here implies are stronger, must not despise those who do, who hew to the old ways.  Those who abstain, who hew to the old ways—who Paul calls weak—are not to pass judgment on those he might call stronger because, as he says, “God has welcomed everyone.”  Once again, note the differential: those who are advanced in their faith, those who have claimed their freedom from dietary laws and observance of holy days through Christ, must not despise, must not look down on those whose faiths are weaker, who cling to the old ways.  But by the same token, those who are more traditional, more old-fashioned, clinging to the old ways, must not judge those who are more traditional must not pass judgment on those who are more “advanced” in their faiths.

And I don’t know about you, but this is beginning to sound awful familiar.  Traditionalists, keepers of the old ways, judging the newer ways to be inadequate or downright unchristian?  The less traditional, more “advanced” Christians, looking down their noses at the more traditional in scorn?  There’s nothing more smug than a person who’s convinced of the new ways, baby, and who looks upon his more traditional—often older, but often not—brothers and sisters as provincial.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard mainline Christians—whose churches are by and large failing—make fun of those video-watching, hands-to-Jesus-raising, evangelicals, whose churches have been growing.

Conversely, there’s nothing more judgmental than Christians who hold to the old ways, who refuse to see that there may be more than one way to worship God, who think that a faith that keeps up with the times is a lesser faith than theirs.  Some of those same evangelicals, that advocate that “old-time religion,” where women are in their place and there are no gays anywhere near, are so judgmental, thinking that these peripheral differences, such as about who you ordain or sleep with, are fundamental to the faith, and that more open, tolerant expressions of Christianity are literally the work of Satan.

In a denomination like ours, the motto of which is “reformed and always being reformed,” these divisions become all the more acute.  They get labeled conservative and liberal, which is understandable: conservatives tend to resist change, they want to “conserve” the past.  Liberals tend to be more comfortable with a more progressive theology and, yes, sometimes contemptuous of those who aren’t; conservatives tend not to be as comfortable with modern theology, and just a weensy bit judgmental of those who are.  And it’s splitting our denomination apart.

But it happens within churches too . . . and often—but not always—it’s along generational lines, between people brought up in times.  George Thompson, of the Interdenominational Theological Consortium, call these cultural streams, and he points out that four are present in a lot of churches: Millennials, Boomers, Gen-X’ers and so-called “Silents”, those who grew up during World War II.  Each of these generational groupings grew up when the conditions surrounding them, with the nation and the local communities, were very different.  Because of this, they tend to view the world very differently: Boomers protested the Vietnam War, marched in civil rights demonstrations, dropped in and out of middle-class society, raised kids, married, divorced, and now expect everything life has to offer.  Generation X-ers, on the other hand, are less certain, the economic situation is not as clear, they’ve been raised to be more suspicious of middle-class trappings.  Millennials are wary of talking and institutions, distrustful of authority and even more worried about the future.  The Silents, called that because they don’t believe in protest, commit to institutions such as church, helped defeat Hitler and built the post-World War economy.  And the point is that each of these groups, because they grew up and matured under very different circumstances, view the world in very different ways, and—this is very important—they view church differently too.  Many times, without even knowing it: everybody tends to think that what is apparent, real and important to them is that way to everybody else.  And it just isn’t true.

And it’s along these lines that deep divisions within churches tend to develop, that underlying splits emerge—that often never surface directly, but only through trivial carping and fighting.  These generational divides, between people with different world views, different ideas about how society and church should be run—can cause deep fissures within our churches.

But Paul is having none of it.  We are not to judge or despise one another, but we’re to welcome everyone.  And once we get them here, we shouldn’t expect them to be just like us, to like the same music we do, to commit to do the same things as us . . . As Paul says, why do we pass judgment on one another?  Or why do we despise one another?  As Paul says, we all stand before the judgment seat of God, not that of one another.  We all serve the same Lord, who is Jesus Christ.  Who are we to pass judgment on another servant of Christ?  We are—and will be—accountable to God alone.  Amen.

Remember (Exodus 12:1 - 14)

     This is a seminal episode in the history of the Jewish faith, and therefore, our own.  And through the good offices of Cecil B. DeMille, it is easily envisioned in moviegoers of a certain generation, through that eerie scene in the Ten Commandments.  Remember?  The hand of the Lord, pictured as a greenish mist, creeping through the midnight streets . . . at first all is silent, then the cries begin, the shrieks as here and there, throughout the night, the firstborn of Egypt is taken away . . . and we parents can imagine that, can’t we, the horror of it . . . some of us have felt it, surely, but we all can feel it, empathize with it as the blackness creeps down into our being . . .

     And here, God gives Moses and mouthpiece Aaron instructions about how to avoid the destruction, how to side-step the tragedy.  And one wonders: why would God need an elaborate sign?  Why would God need blood on the doorposts to indicate who were God’s children?  Doesn’t God know?  Isn’t God omniscient, and the other two “omnis” to boot? Isn’t God omnipotent and omnipresent too?  Well, maybe the author of Exodus—traditionally supposed to be Moses himself—didn’t know about that when he wrote this dark little tale.  And indeed, this is a good example of the evolving picture of God we get from scripture, if it’s thought about in chronological order . . . in the Hebrew scriptures, we get this picture of a God who’s very much human . . . in Genesis, God walks up to Moses by the Oaks of Mamre, just walks on up looking like anyone else . . . and God is certainly not pictured as unchanging in these early scripture . . . God changes his mind on several occasions.  And God is vengeful in these early passages, sending Joshua to slaughter the men, women and children on Aiken, and killing all the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, and vengeance is certainly a human trait, no?

     But as the scriptures progress—we can tell about when each book was written—the authors’ perceptions of God change, so that by the end of the first century after Christ, first John can write that “God is love.”  And where in love is there room for vengeance?  Where in love is there room for killing innocent, first-born babes, even if they are of the hated Egyptians?    If God is love, what can we say about this story?

     Quite a lot, actually.  It is absolutely essential to our Jewish friends . . . it’s the establishment of Passover, the most important festival of the year.  And because of this, it has influenced us immensely.  It is because Passover is in the Spring that Easter is there as well.  And I think it’s interesting to compare the two . . . the festival of Passover commemorates the deliverance of the people of Israel from the clutches of the Pharaoh.  You remember the story . . . Jacob—named Israel by God when he wrestled with him on the banks of the Jabbok—grew wealthy and had twelve sons, and each son begat a tribe  . . . Reuben,  Simeon and Levi.  Judah, Dan and Naphtali.  Gad and Asher, Issachar and Zebulon.  And finally, Joseph and his little brother Benjamin.  Israel and his sons, forerunners of the Israelite people.

     And Joseph, who was a little snot, really, was despised by his brothers because of it, and they plotted to kill him . . . Rueben took pity on him, and as a result he was not killed, but then he was sold as a slave to a passing caravan.  By God’s grace, Joseph rose to power in the Pharaoh’s employ—some say he was the Pharaoh’s toady—but it was only through his intervention, his bringing of his family to Egypt, that the fledgling people of Israel were saved from a terrible drought.  And so the Hebrew people thrived in the land of the Pharaoh, but later holders of that office did not treat them so well, they were overworked building the Pharaoh’s great palaces and tending his crops and livestock, and their captivity became long and cruel.

     But in spite of it all, they were multiplied by the Lord, so that by the time Moses came along, they were legion, and after having to flee the wrath of the Pharaoh, he returned to confront him and set his people free.  Of course, this was easier said than done, and now, finally, here we are at the last straw . . . plague after plague is sent to bedevil the Egyptian ruler and his people, and every time, Pharaoh’s heart becomes hard, and he does not permit them to go.

     And now it’s the last straw . . . and whatever it is that happens, Pharaoh lets God’s people go.  And it’s the original expression of liberation theology, a reminder that salvation is not just spiritual, not just pie in the sky by and by, but—often—concrete and bodily.   And it’s important to remember this, when we hear the dark whisperings against liberation theology.  Right here is it’s locus, it’s genesis . . . the Israelite people are liberated here, and they become a peoples on that day . . . it is an act of liberation that is at the heart of the Jewish faith.

     And because of this, it is in our DNA as well . . . liberation—bodily freedom from oppression and captivity is in our bones.  And it’s why Moses was such a pivotal personage in African American streams of our faith . . . Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land, Tell old, Pharaoh, let my people go . . . and when they sang that song, African American slaves were not singing about Moses, but about their own yearned-for freedom from captivity at the hands of white land owners.   Moses isn’t a revered name in African American circles for nothing, there have been a lot of black folks with that name over the years.

     If the Passover story is about liberation, it’s also about sacrifice: the lambs without blemish, chosen by each family, fattened up for four days, then slaughtered at sunset  . . . their blood is smeared on the doorposts and lintels, and when the Spirit of God sees the blood, God will pass over the house and move on to the next.  And so, it is literally the sacrifice of the blemish-less lamb, the blood of the lamb, that keeps the Israelites alive long enough to come up out of the land of the Pharaoh.

     Now . . . where have we heard that phrase “the blood of the lamb” before?  Could it be . . .  Jesus?  Christians appropriated the Passover symbolism to describe the indescribable, to describe the act of atonement that God effected through God’s son Jesus Christ.  Jesus became the lamb without blemish, without sin, who was sacrificed so that we might be forgiven for ours, forgiven once and for all time.   Christians, many of them Jews to begin with, used the imagery they knew to explain the mechanics of reconciliation.

     But we shouldn’t confuse imagery, we shouldn’t confuse an analogy, with the thing itself.  And in fact, the New Testament authors do not: they use a number of analogies for atonement.  They speak of Christ paying a price, serving a sentence, and making restitution for our mis-deeds.  Perhaps the most popular model is that Christ died instead of us, that he substituted for us by taking our place.  The way I like to think of it is using the so-called Christus Victor model, where Christ in effect defeats the forces of sin and evil, vanquishing them and thus setting us free.

     However we think about it—and if anybody tells you they know the truth, I have a bridge to sell you—however we think about it, the fact remains:  Christ died for our sins, and we have been redeemed, as sure as the Sun rises in the East . . . we have been redeemed.  We have been liberated by God as surely as our Jewish ancestors in the faith were, brought up from Pharaoh’s land.

     But our passage speaks of more than that.  More than just the act of liberation, it speaks of remembering that act as well.  “This month shall mark for you the beginning of months” and that Hebrew word for “beginning” is rash, or head, or chief.  Passover comes in the chief month, the most important month, and this story is the establishment of a tradition, of an ordinance:  This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.  You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord.  Throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.  An ordinance, an ordered thing.  Observant Jews, if they are faithful, cannot not  observe Passover.  That’s why they’re called . . . observant.

     In a similar manner, we are called to observe the Lord’s Supper.  Faithful Christians are not faithful if they do not . . . it is an ordinance.  Here’s what Paul had to say about it: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread . . .” and then he proceeds with the familiar words I will say to you in a minute.  The Lord handed it down to Paul, and he handed it down to the congregations he founded . . . it is an ordinance, an order.  Now, we Presbyterians believe, like the majority of Christians do worldwide, that it is more than that, that as a sacrament, God does something, that it is a means of grace, where grace is somehow dispensed.  But we too often overlook the fact that we are commanded to do it, in multiple places in the scriptures.

     And why are we commanded thus?  Well, Jews are commanded so that they and their families will remember the mighty works of the Lord, and God’s loving kindness toward them, and that is part of it too: do this in remembrance of me, Jesus said.   We are to do it so that we remember the gracious acts of a loving God.

But Paul gives us another reason, and it’s kind of a surprising one: for as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.  When we celebrate the Lord’s supper, we are sharing the Gospel, we are fulfilling another ordinance, that we proclaim the good news in thought, word and deed.

     So next time we take the cup and the bread and say the words of Jesus and Paul, remember that other liberating act, that first act when Moses went down to Pharaoh’s land, and remember too our own tale of redemption, the act that is peculiar to us, when God became incarnate that we might be free.   Amen.

Every Bush Is Burning (Exodus 3:1 - 15)

      When I was just a preacher-ling, before I went to seminary, I preached at my old church in Starkville, Mississippi, where the buffalo play and the bulldogs roam, and nary a cross word is said to anyone.  And in the sermon, which probably wasn’t much of one, actually—and don’t ask me if anything’s changed, please—and in the sermon I was saying something about how some weird things had been happening to me lately, how folks had come up to me I barely know, and ask when I was going to seminary, and stuff like that, and I saw my friend Roberta grinning like a mad-woman in the back-center where she always sat with her husband Ed, and I didn’t quite know why she was doing that, and when I asked her she said.  “When God is after you, every bush is burning”  Every bush is burning . . . and what she meant by that is if you’re under the gun, if God is trying to call you into the ministry, then everything in your life will point to it.

Even if it doesn’t.  Because we all know we can, well, read things into things, that’s why Paul said to test the spirits . . . what he meant was that we should carefully practice discernment to see what things come from God and what things come from us, or some other non-God source like a Chevy commercial or a politician’s sound bite.  I used to laugh at some of my acquaintances back in the day who’d say—dramatically, of course—I prayed to the Lord that he give me a sign, I said Lord?  If you want me to buy that Cadillac Seville, just give me a sign, and then . . . and then . . . the light changed! And I knew it was a sign, praise Jesus . . . well, that’s over-the-top, of course, but you can see the point:  When every bush is burning, you gotta find the one where you won’t get burnt.

Not that it was a problem for ol’ Moses . . . there was only one burning bush out there in the wilderness, where he’d fled after that little, ah, dust-up in Egypt that left a man dead.  He was a wanted man back in the land of the Pharaoh, or at least he used to be, he’d been a long time in the desert, and he’d married the daughter of a Midianite sheep-farmer, and maybe they’d forgotten about him back home . . . and here he is, herding sheep, walking up and down the mountainous wilderness without even the benefit of an SUV, or even a measly little trail bike, and he comes up on this bush that’s literally burning, but it isn’t being consumed.

And I’ll bet he looked around for the film crew, for Steven Spielberg maybe or George Lucas, or something, because it had to not be too common even in those days for bushes to burn but not be consumed . . . but there it was, burning away, and Moses says “I must turn aside and see this great sight” literally seeing “and see why the bush is not burned up!”  And in just three verses, the Hebrew verb for seeing—or one of it’s derivatives—is used seven times, and now it’s God’s turn, God sees that Moses sees, and calls out to Moses from the bush—and I thought it was an angel, but it turns out to be God—the voice says “Moses, Moses!” God says, and Moses says: “Here I am.”

And there’s a whole lot of seeing going on, around that mountain called Horeb: God sees that Moses sees, that he is looking, and he speaks to him.  Seeing is important to the enterprise of call . . .  and make no mistake, this is a call story.  Look at the wording.  Does it remind you of something?  When God called to Samuel in the night, he said “Samuel!” and it took Samuel three times before he said “Here I am.”  God came to Samuel in the night, he was asleep; but it’s broad daylight for Moses, there on the mountainside, and with a visual aid as well . . . and Moses looked and saw that it was burning . . . and he turns aside—another important verb in this verse—he turns aside and looks at the bush, and only when the Lord sees that Moses had seen, that he’d turned aside, does he call out to him.

 And look at what’s going on here . . . it’s clear that this call thing is a transaction, an interaction between God and Moses.  It’s clear that it involves God revealing God’s self to Moses—the angel of the Lord appears to Moses in a bush that is burning, but it is not consumed.  But it’s equally clear that Moses has to see it, to observe it—that verb is used seven times, after all—he has to be open to it.  And that’s not easy to do, when you’re busy herding your sheep, when you’re busy living life, it’s not easy to see God wherever you are, but that’s a key to knowing God, to discerning God’s will: first you have to see it.

The Benedictines are past-masters at this sort of thing.  They practice it in their daily lives, it’s built into the structure of their days.  And the first thing they understand is that if you’re not quiet, you can’t hear anything.  And so not only do they have the daily office—periods of corporate, chanted prayer four to seven times a day—not only do they pray to God, but they schedule time when all they do is listen.  They have several hours a day where they practice some form of contemplative prayer, usually lectio divina, divine reading, in which they open their hearts to the whisperings of God, listening to what God would have them do in and with their lives . . . it is a deeply-held Benedictine belief that God is in all things, that God speaks to us through all things, that there doesn’t have to be a burning bush, and they are quite intentional in looking for God everywhere.  This is culminated on a daily basis in their nightly office, said in private, in which they chant the Song of Simeon, in Latin the nunc dimitis: Now, Lord, dismiss your servant in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all the peoples . . . and as they chant it, as they sing about their eyes having seen salvation, they reflect back over the day just ended, consciously looking for just where they have seen it . . .

And as for us, who run like the proverbial chickens all day long, who are over-programmed and near-to-being overwhelmed, I think it’s even more important for us to be intentional about discerning our calls, about listening and looking for God . . . it’s even more important for us today—who aren’t likely to see a literal  fire that does not consume—it’s even more important that, like Moses, we turn aside from our sheep herding to be open to God’s will.

And when Moses did so, when he stopped and looked at that burning bush, that’s when he heard the voice of God issuing forth from it, and it no less than changed his life . . . that’s what encounters with God do, you know, change lives . . . and that’s a frightening thing in and of itself, isn’t it?  It sure was in Moses’ case:  God speaks to him out of that burning bush, and he says I have seen—there’s that verb again, translated as “observed” here—I have seen the misery of my people, I have heard their cry, and I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians.  God has done what God does, seen and known, and now God’s gonna do what God’s gonna do, and that is to save them.  The Lord sees and knows and delivers, that’s what the Lord does.  “I have come down to bring them up our of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites”—and I’ve always wondered how the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites felt about it, but that’s another sermon—God sees and knows and comes to deliver.

And ol’ Moses must have been groovin’ along, thinking “Well, this is pretty cool, my people have needed delivering for quite awhile now,” but then God says “So come! I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”  And you can almost hear the screeeeech of the breaks, almost see the look of panic come over Moses’ face . . . after all the seeing and turning aside and knowing and coming and delivering, Moses has gotta do something!  He’s gotta respond, and it panics him . . . This is more than he bargained for, more than “Go ye therefore to church and sing Amazing Grace and pray real hard” or “teach ye therefore Sunday school for an hour a week.”  Here he’s been a good little boy, he’s turned aside and seen, and what does it get him?  A whole new life.

And he doesn’t really like it.  He starts sputtering like Woody Allen on a first date “Who am I,” he says, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”  You can almost see him loosening his collar, it’s getting a little hot around here, and besides: he’d fled Egypt all those years ago, something about a dead Egyptian, remember?  And now God wants him to go back?  Why couldn’t God just leave him with the wife and kids, and the executive position he’d  achieved in his father-in-law’s sheep-herding organization?  Why all the change?

But that’s what happens when we listen to God, when we turn aside and see . . . God is likely to change our lives.  Discerning the will of God isn’t a safe little exercise, God doesn’t say, or doesn’t always say, at least: “That’s nice, now run along to church like a good little boys and girls.”  Instead God says:  “Come, I will send you.  I will upend your lives, change the way you do business, pull you out of your comfort zone.”

And do you see?   Presbyterians aren’t just whistling Dixie about the doctrine of cooperation with God . . . we really are God’s hands and feet on earth, and I hope you see something else as well: this discerning of God’s will for our lives, this turning-aside and seeing, is risky business, because it has a way of changing lives.

Of course, churches are called just as are individuals, just as Moses was back in the day.  And we’re tempted to consign this discernment, this seeing, to a season, to a time, and say “first we look and see, and then we go out and do,” but I don’t think it works that way . . . Look  how it was for Moses: he didn’t just up and do God’s will, liberating his people . . . I mean, he did and all,  it throughout the process he kept seeking guidance from the Lord.  And I think churches today, like their Benedictine sisters and brothers, must always be looking, always seeing what God wants them to do.  We must be in a constant state of discernment, a constant state of looking for the next burning bush.

But you know what?  God tells us the same thing as Moses: when there is a burning bush in front you, indeed when every bush is burning, I will be with you.  I will be with you.  The God of Abraham and Isaac and Paul of Tarsus . . . of Augustine and Calvin and Martin Luther King . . . of your grandfather and mother and aunts and uncles . . . your God, the great I am, will be with you.  Amen.