Passages: Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28
Have you ever planned and eagerly anticipated a vacation or a visit from friends, only to be disappointed by the results? Perhaps you’re more pragmatic than I am, and have never felt that way, but I have certainly experienced this sensation many times. I set up all sorts of expectations for what something will be like, and then the experience of it loses all joy when it differs from those expectations. In contrast, some of the times I have most enjoyed in my life were the moments I never expected anything from—a simple bike ride down the Minuteman Trail, Swedish meatballs at Ikea, talking with my grandfather at the kitchen table. The moments in which I loosen the controlling stranglehold I attempt to keep on my life, perhaps, provide just enough room for the Divine Mystery to enter in.
This phenomenon seems to also hold true even in some of the major courses my life has taken. The internship that eventually set me down this crazy divinity school path? Started as a mock job interview project for a college class. My first encounter with the person who would become my life partner? A rather unremarkable introduction at the Kentucky State Fair. I expend considerable energy attempting to chart my life course, but in retrospect, the significant moments often come when I’m not looking for them at all.
If we consider Moses’ story a prototype for God’s call, then perhaps God is usually found where we least expect it. In our lectionary passage today, Moses is really minding his own business when God encounters him. You could say that Moses has already tried to make his stand for justice and failed—in Exodus 2:11-15, we are told that Moses kills an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews. The result? Moses’ authority as a leader of the Hebrews is explicitly rejected in 2:14, and he has to skip town.
So when God encounters Moses, he has prudently chosen to lie low in the wilderness more or less indefinitely. Alienated from both his Hebrew tribe and his adopted Egyptian family, stripped, like the Joseph of a few weeks ago, of the power and privilege of his royal upbringing, Moses is truly “an alien residing in a foreign land” (2:22) at the beginning of chapter 3. The opening verse tells us that Moses “led his flock beyond the wilderness” (v. 1), suggesting that metaphorically, if not literally, Moses is lost and adrift at this stage in his life.
That’s when Moses comes upon God—or more accurately, God reveals God’s self to Moses. Upon seeing a bush that is burning but not consumed, Moses remarks that he must turn aside to see the strange sight. Now, I still don’t think Moses quite gets the significance of what he is seeing here. His tone is one of awed curiosity, like the tone you get when you go to Yellowstone National Park and see your first wildlife up close: “Would you look at that, kids?! That’s a real, live buffalo crossing the road!”
But then God speaks from the bush, and Moses finally gets it. Like Joseph before, like Samuel and Isaiah afterward, Moses responds to God’s call with the words, “Here I am.” Before he even knows what might be asked of him, Moses has already presented himself before God for the task ahead. It is paradigmatic of the life of faith, really. If you’re in a tradition that practices infant baptism, then other people signed you up for Christian faith. But even if you came to faith later in your life, of your own accord, you probably had no real notion of what the Christian life would entail. You responded to God’s call with your own “here I am,” just as clueless as Moses to what God might actually tell you to do. God surprised us, and continues to surprise us, just as that burning bush came unexpectedly upon Moses in the wilderness.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably wished for God to give you a burning bush experience that will tell you what to do. We all want to stop stumbling our way along, being confronted with ambiguous forks in the road where we’re not sure what to do next. And yes, it is true in this passage that God tells Moses exactly what the Holy One is going to do and how God expects Moses to be a primary player in it. So are we doing something wrong if our call isn’t always that clear cut?
I don’t think so. Think of it this way—how many times would Moses have led his flocks through that same wilderness, far from home? Perhaps he had wandered past Horeb before, wondering whether the God of his ancestors was merely a myth, asking why this fabled God did not do something to end the Israelite oppression. Yet as passage clearly points out later in verses 13-15, our attempts to control the wild, mysterious divine presence are futile. Just as God will not be named, will not be put into our boxes and conformed to our labels, God will not spit out answers to the challenges of life like a magic eight ball.
Rather, like Moses, we can only be open to the unexpected and receptive to the call as it comes. Because we don’t know when we will catch sight of that burning bush out of the corner of our eye.
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