Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
September 4, 2005
Exodus 3: 1-15
(The Bill Cosby sketch entitled “The Call of Noah” is played where Noah hears the voice of God calling for him to build an ark)
Noah, Jeremiah, Mary, the mother of Jesus, Moses, and so many others throughout the ages…doing ordinary things, living ordinary lives, when without warning or preparation, there exploded into their midst the extraordinary, the miraculous, the holy. It moved against them and within them, it addressed them, it summoned them and they found their lives irresistibly and irreversibly changed. Just them? Or can such a divine intrusion also happen in our lives, perhaps even today? I suspect Bill Cosby’s Noah speaks for many of us when he responds to the divine call, saying, “Right! Who is this really?” We don’t really believe such a thing can happen to us.
But beware…you never know, you just never know, when or where and to whom God’s call may come. And there is something else about the call of God. We heard it in Cosby’s “Noah” and we hear it in the story of Moses – it is not always enthusiastically received.
God calls, but that call is not always received as good news. Moses says ‘no’ at least three times: “the people won’t listen to me, the people won’t believe me, and besides that, I am a terrible public speaker! Send someone else!” Yet still God persists. When God gets a hold of you, God doesn’t let go. Let’s think about Moses just a moment, where was he in life when God called him?
Moses had already experienced quite a bit of drama and excitement in his life. The story is familiar: placed by his mother in a basket in the Nile in order to escape the slaughter of all the Hebrew male children; rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised as prince of Egypt; years later he kills an Egyptian guard who is beating a Hebrew slave; recognized later by two Hebrew men who identify him as the killer, he flees Egypt.
But when we meet Moses in today’s text, we meet a man who has left all that behind. We meet a man who has married and settled down, a man for whom the days in Egypt are a distant memory. In the words of Dawn Weeks, a Disciples of Christ pastor, “Out among the sheep he was tending, Moses blended into the landscape and seemed an innocuous character. The justice-fire that had consumed him earlier was just a smoldering coal, not bright enough to attract any attention. In fact, Moses was doing his best to put out that fire. No one in Egypt knew where he was. He was safe there among the hills. He was settled.” But God still found him. And God had something for him to do. And God didn’t stop there. God knows how to find us, as well, no matter how safe and settled we are.
Her name is Joy. When her husband left her she was well into middle age. She had never worked outside the home, having raised three children who were now grown. She had left college early in order to get married. She had no degree and no marketable skills as far as she was concerned. What was to become of her now?
One of her friends, who had been through a similar experience, told her, “Joy, I believe that God can use even this lousy situation in order to bring some good out of it.” To Joy, such words sounded like nothing more than pious nonsense. She was quite sure that no matter how many calls she received, God would never be on the other end of the line. Not even God could use her – too old, too useless, too tired.
A few days later the phone rang. A person Joy hardly knew had a question. Would Joy be interested in helping to organize a volunteer center in town that would coordinate volunteer work among the various community agencies. Joy did her best imitation of Moses, citing all the reasons she was wrong for the job, why she couldn’t possibly do it. But the person on the other end of the line was persistent, reminding Joy of all her volunteer work she had done in the community over the years. Her persistence paid off and finally, Joy said yes. The rest is history. From nothing, learning as she went, Joy built up an outstanding center which today places, trains and supervises a wide range of volunteer programs in her town.
But, of course, we already know that story. We’ve heard it before. God had heard the cries of people in need and was about to move in their community. Someone was required to help God do God’s work so a call was issued and persistently pursued. God made an offer that couldn’t be refused. From Moses to Joy to the members and friends The Community Church of Sebastopol, God’s message remains the same, “I am going to do a great thing for my people and guess who is going to help me?”
Now I’m not Moses, I could never organize a volunteer center, but know this, God intends to use us and God will use us. Dare to believe it.
Do you recall the Stuart Smalley character from Saturday Night Live? He was a spoof of self-esteem gurus; you might say he was a real west county kind of guy! Stuart taught his followers to look into the mirror and repeat this self-affirming mantra: “I am smart enough. I am handsome or beautiful enough. I am good enough. And, doggone it, people like me!”
I hate to say this, but God isn’t our therapist. God doesn’t really tell Moses how capable or handsome he is or how much people like him. All God says is, “There is a need, I can use you, and, oh yes, no matter what, I will be with you.” What matters here is not who Moses is or not who we are. What matters most is who God is. What matters most, in the words of Old Testament professor, Walter Brueggemann, is that, “God has indeed made promises and God will keep promises that run beyond all destructive hopelessness…(and) God has come to enlist people into these promises for the future of the world.” People just like us, called by the mysterious I AM – the one who is present in faithful ways to make possible that which is otherwise not possible.
Getting back to Bruggemann for just a moment, he continues, “God does God’s work to be sure; but the story of the Bible is the story of enlisting and recruiting human agents to do the things that God has promised…In the Book of Exodus, God’s liberating resolve would not have amounted to much without the risky resolve of Moses.”
He concludes, “Now I assume that you are like Moses and like me – ordinary people, ordinary life, ordinary work, ordinary sheep to tend. Nevertheless, it does happen that the power of God explodes in our midst, and we get pushed out beyond our conventional horizon….It does happen, here and there, to people just like us. And where it happens, the story moves to its next scene, for the story of this people is the story of folk who have agreed to do God’s own work of promise and liberation…who discover that their lives are saturated with the reality of God.”
Martin Luther told of a priest who asked a tradesman, “What do you do, as a Christian?” The man answered, “I bake bread.” “No,” persisted, the priest, “What do you do as a…Christian?” And he answered, “I bake bread.”
Then there is this story shared by a colleague: “My wife has a friend who once lived in the remote town of Victory, Vermont – no school, no church, no store, and famous for being the last town in Vermont to receive electricity. During the course of earning her master’s degree, this friend found it necessary to commute several times a week from Victory to the state university in Burlington, a good hundred miles away. Coming home late at night, she would see an old man sitting by the side of the road. He was always there, in subzero temperatures, in stormy weather, no matter how late she returned. He just sat there - made no acknowledgement of her when she drove by.
“She often wondered what brought him to that same spot every evening – what stubborn habit, private grief or mental disorder. Finally she asked a neighbor, ‘Have you ever seen an old man who sits by the road late at night?’
“’Oh, yes,’ said her neighbor, ‘many times.’
“’Is he…a little touched in the head?’
“’He’s no more touched than you or me,’ her neighbor laughed, ‘and he goes home right after you do. You see, he doesn’t like the idea of you driving by yourself out late all alone on these back roads, so every night he walks out to wait for you. When he sees your taillights disappear around the bend and he knows you are OK, then he goes home to bed.’”
Tending sheep, baking bread, keeping watch over a neighbor; working in the church nursery, helping in the church school, baking apple pies, singing in the choir, fixing sewer pipes, writing a check for hurricane relief – I don’t care what it is or who you are – don’t you dare believe that God can’t or won’t use you. Finally, it is my hope and prayer that we will grow weary of religion that simply makes us comfortable and asks nothing of us. I pray we will hunger for nothing less that partnering with the God of deliverance and liberation who wants to set all people free. I pray that each one of us will meet the God of the Burning Bush who burns within our souls until we have no choice but to say yes…I will go where you send me.