Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 31, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As I read this morning’s passage from Moses I was struck by how different Moses’ world was from ours. It could hardly have been more different from ours. In Moses’ time, around 1250 BCE or so, most of what we know as history hadn’t happened yet. No one would even begin to think of the world the way we think of the world for centuries or even millennia to come. Anything approaching a modern scientific understanding of the universe was three thousand years in the future. Jesus, whom we think of as having lived so very, very long ago, was over a thousand years in the future. The Hebrew people, who would eventually give the world monotheism, the belief in one God, still believed that there were a great many gods and wouldn’t develop true monotheism for something like 750 years. Democracy as we know it, or even as the Greeks would come to know it centuries later, hadn’t occurred to anyone and would have struck everyone as sheer madness. Slavery was universally accepted as the natural order of things, as was the total domination of men over women. Those ideas wouldn’t change significantly for over 3,000 years. Moses’ world was so different from ours that we can hardly conceive of it, and we sure wouldn’t much like to live in it.

So you’d think that we wouldn’t have very much in common with Moses. You’d think that his story wouldn’t have all that much to teach us, living as we do in such a different world. Yet for all the differences in our worlds there are some ways in which Moses is an awful lot like us. We see one of those ways in our reading this morning about Moses’ encounter with Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew people, at the burning bush in the desert. In that story Moses is tending his father-in-law’s sheep when he sees the most amazing thing, a bush that is on fire but isn’t being burned up the way bushes that are on fire are supposed to be. So he went to check it out. And as he examined the bush trying to figure out how it was that it could burn without being burned up all of a sudden Yahweh, here called both God and “the LORD,” called to him out of the burning bush. Now that sure doesn’t happen every day!

God called: “Moses! Moses!” And Moses answered with alacrity: “Here I am.” Then something happened that Moses certainly wasn’t expecting. Yahweh told him that He was sending Moses to Pharaoh, the ruler of the mighty Egyptian empire, to bring the Hebrew people who were enslaved there out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan. Now, I’m sure Moses was very happy to respond “Here I am” when all God was doing was calling his name, calling him simply to stand in the presence of God. That was easy, but Moses had a very different reaction when God asked him to do something really hard and really dangerous. He said, in effect, “You’ve got to be kidding! I can’t do that! That’s way too hard a job for the likes of me!” And Yahweh would have none of it. He persisted in the command that Moses go and bring Yahweh’s people out of bondage in Egypt. God, it seems, didn’t take Moses’ excuses seriously and just wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Moses lived a very long time ago in world very different from ours, but don’t you think that he reacts to God the same way we do? I know he reacts to the call of God the same way I to. We’re really happy to come into the presence of God. God calls, and we say “here we are.” We come to God with gladness. We come seeking comfort, peace, reassurance, and forgiveness. We come seeking that powerful experience of the comforting, supportive, profoundly peaceful presence of God that some of us have been blessed to experience, if only on rare occasions in its fullness. We come with joy seeking what God has to give us, the gifts of the Spirit, bread for the journey, hope in a world that can seem so hopeless. For all of that we are more than happy to say to God with Moses “Here I am.”

Which of course is all very well and good, but then we run into the same problem Moses had with Yahweh in the burning bush. God does indeed offer us all of those things that we come so readily go God to receive; but just as God did with Moses so many years ago, God never stops with giving us the gifts of the Spirit. As we so hungrily receive God’s good gifts, all of a sudden we begin to hear another voice from God, the same other voice that Moses heard. We hear God making demands. Moses heard God say go to Pharaoh and bring my people out of Egypt. We don’t hear that command, not in so many words; but we hear other, similar commands. The Hebrew people aren’t in bondage in Pharaoh’s Egypt today, but other people live lives of oppression and suffering in other places. People all over the world live in bondage to poverty, hunger, and disease. People all over the world have their basic human dignity and their fundamental human rights violated and denied by oppressive and corrupt political regimes. Everywhere people are despoiling God’s good earth through greedy and heedless exploitation of limited resources with no regard for the environmental consequences of their actions, especially in the places where poor, powerless people live. The list of the ways in which God’s people live in bondage today could go on and on.

And just as Yahweh said to Moses over 3,000 years ago “Go to Pharaoh and bring my people out of Egypt,” so God says to us to us go to today’s pharaohs, the people and powers in our own country and around the world who keep God’s people in bondage, who benefit from profoundly unjust social, political, and economic systems, and say “Let my people go!” God also says to us “Insofar as you are pharaohs, benefiting from injustice and the exploitation of others, repent! You be the pharaoh who lets the people go by transforming your lives and the structures in which you live so that they are more just, so that they benefit the poorest and most vulnerable of God’s people at least as much as they benefit you. Go to your pharaohs, and bring my people out of bondage. And you do your part to bring them out of the bondage that you keep them in too.”

And just like Moses, we don’t want to hear it. Just like Moses we say “Who are we that we should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” We are more than happy to flee to God for comfort, but when God says to us go yourselves to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable we balk. We close our ears. We say we don’t hear. Or we say surely God doesn’t mean us! We say we can’t do it. It’s too hard. It’s too dangerous. It means changing our comfortable lives. It means transforming the way we are in the world. It means transforming the way our rich and powerful nation, today’s Pharaoh of pharaohs, is in the world. We don’t want to do it. We say we can’t do it.

But here’s the thing. Just as God would have none of Moses’ excuses by the burning bush in the desert, so God will have none of our excuses today. When Moses said to God “who am I to do this impossible thing that you ask,” God answered with what may seem like a non sequitur, something that doesn’t really follow from Moses’ question. God said “I will be with you.” That is God’s response to all of our excuses, all of our doubts, all of our fears. “I will be with you. None of your excuses to avoid what I ask of you mean a thing because I will be with you.” That’s all the response God gives: “Yes, I hear what you say; but I will be with you.” We say we can’t. God says “I will be with you.” We say we’re afraid. God says “I will be with you.” That’s all the answer Moses got. It’s all the answer we get too.

And the thing is, it’s all the answer we need. God’s presence with us as we do the work to which God calls us really is sufficient for us. God’s presence gives us courage and peace. God’s presence gives us the strength to get through whatever comes our way and to bear whatever burdens the world places upon us. God says “I will be with you” and expects us to realize what a powerful, amazing promise that is.

So the question before us is this: Are we willing to accept what the United Church of Christ’s Statement of Faith calls the cost of discipleship as well as its joy? Will we accept the challenge as well as the comfort? Will we accept the risk as well as the assurance? Can we see that God’s “I will be with you” is sufficient for us? Or will we cling to our fears and our narrow self-interest? It is one of the central questions of the Christian life. Moses eventually said yes to God. He went to Pharaoh, and at great personal risk led the Hebrew people out of Egypt. Moses eventually said yes. Will we? Amen.