SERMON PREACHED at St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI
READINGS
Exodus 3: 1-15
Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c
Romans 12 : 21-28
Matthew 16: 21-28
Given the phenomenal amount of ink (including toner!) that has been applied to the commissioning of Moses, the beginning of the great Exodus event, you could well prepare yourself for an extraordinarily long sermon! I’ll do my best to thwart that expectation, but there are few more influential moments in at least the Hebrew scriptures; perhaps only the resurrection narratives of the Christian scriptures surpass this momentous passage in God’s relationship to humankind. In these moments of encounter, God dares to implant a new dream in the mind of the shepherd Moses. We’ll find another shepherd somewhat central to the stories of Jewish and Christian people alike, in David – and the virgin’s son Jesus will go on to name himself as “the great shepherd.” There is much going on here.
But let’s start
with the dangerous threshold on which Moses stands. He is beyond the wilderness.
Whatever is meant by this, it is no easy place to be, and not the sort of place
you want to suddenly experience appearances of God. There, on the slopes of
Horeb – or Sinai – Moses encounters more than he had expected. It is worth
pausing momentarily, just as in his inevitable puzzlement and shock Moses pauses.
His life has been up to now more reprobate than a life of spiritual leadership,
yet he quickly adjusts: he recognizes his own unworthiness to experience the
encounter. We can fairly assume that he does what he is told, removing his
sandals on the holy ground. We are told he goes further: recognizing his human
shortfall of the expectations of God he hides his face. The God he has encountered is no mate.
But nor is
Moses totally acquiescent. If we know our Moses story, we will know he is an
impetuous soul, which is how he came to be tending Jethro’s flock in the first
place. God is not choosing a pussy cat to lead the People of God to freedom. Moses
will argue with God – perhaps we will be reminded of Jacob and his wrestling
match with God. But Moses will also surrender to God. We can learn much from
both these actions. It does not harm to wrestle with God, in prayer; it does
greater good to surrender to God as God nudges our lives in the way God chooses
for us. Moses is not deaf or blind to the signs around him: “Here I am, Lord,”
he responds. Our moments of encounter with God tend to be a little less
dramatic, we hope, but the same response if asked of us. “Here I am, Lord.”
There are ways
in which Moses is only a bit-player in this scene. God’s heart is moved not by
anything Moses has said or done, but by the desperate cries of the People
Israel. Moses will spend much time in coming chapters explaining why God has
got things wrong. God will not be swayed by the man’s pleas: “I am with you” is
God’s unambiguous response. Moses again and again will look to his or his people’s
past. God will time and time again point to a new future.
We in the
Christian community would do well to learn from this relationship. The past,
the whakapapa of our faith is critical, a gift from God, just as the call and
naming of Abraham’s descendants has been a gift from God. But God would not leave them either in their
past or in the precariousness of the present: it is time to dream a new dream.
God will indicate this over and again.
Moses never altogether quite gets it, but God does. The people, though not
Moses, will eventually reach their Promised Land, albeit with many
trials along the way.
The difficulty
for twenty first century followers of Jesus is that we are in a context not
altogether unlike that of Moses. As we look back on the history of Christianity,
certainly since it became a force of power across the footprints of the old
Roman Empire, there is much for us to be ashamed of. One of the few things we know
of the younger Moses is that he had killed. Not without some justice or righteous
anger, but killed, nevertheless. “‘Vengeance is Mine’ says the Lord” is a
lesson Moses will take the rest of his life to internalise. Or, as Paul goes on to say, “bless those who
persecute you.”
Moses takes a
lifetime to learn it, but he will make “vengeance is God’s” a centrepiece of
his final speech. Christians have too often decided that vengeance and
retaliation, oppression and victimization is ours to impose. The current
parlous state of Christianity in the Europeanized world is precisely God’s
brutal reminder that vengeance is God’s alone: our task as so many certainties
crumble around us may well be, like Moses, to surrender the old certainties, the
false gods that have left us comfortable and complacent.
Our task is to
hear instead the voices of those who cry for compassion and justice across the
screens of our television news and other media feeds each day. We may well lose
all the Linus blankets – of, for a stronger metaphor, the false gods of power,
privilege and prestige that the western church has clung to for too long. Our buildings,
our tax breaks, our stipended clergy: all are being stripped from us and we are
called to find the God who speaks from a burning bush, called to turn aside to
new realities and listen to their message.
Which is not to
say that every voice that whispers is the voice of truth. Do the messages that
we see in media and read in our own hopes and dreams, do they point to the God
of the Cross, the God who will always prioritise the plight of the vulnerable
and disenfranchised? Who are the
beneficiaries of our priorities? Of our survival, or the survival of the most
wretched of the earth (species and peoples)? As Mr Trump in a far-off land
slams the activists who are calling for justice for the disadvantaged, we must
ask whether the God of Moses called for the protection of the powerful Egyptian
Empire or the liberation of a suffering people. Black Lives Matter, because
black lives are made in the image of God. #MeToo because God, too, has been victimised
and raped.
The story of Moses will point to the need to ask questions that take us out of our comfort zones. The tendency of the church for hundreds of years has been to draw boundary lines that clearly define the ins and the outs of belonging, lines which define the alleged wrongs and rights of practising our faith. The encounter of Moses with the sight of burning bush and speechless angel, and the sound of the voice of God, redefines expectations, rejigs calibrations of faith. Moses is not a particularly deserving servant of God – he has blood on his hands, after all – but he is a chosen servant of God. Because God has chosen him – as God will choose the great prophets throughout Jewish and Christian and perhaps other histories. We are not particularly deserving servants of God – and because we are not, we need to get rid of any sense of entitlement.
We begin not with God needing us, but God choosing us. We
continue not with expectations of comfort or reward, or even the expectation,
Moses reminds us, that we will see the fruits of any labours we fulfil. Jesus,
in our gospel passage, makes it clearer still: where we wish to protect our
interests, to save our lives, we will not succeed. Those who want to save their
life, will lose it. We continue by reminding ourselves that our experience of
God in worship, in fellowship, in all aspects of divine touch, is a privilege
not a right. We continue by reminding ourselves that we are called to serve not
our own interests but the needs and interests of others.
For us as
Christians in the world today this may mean much more to come that is
unsettling. We are far removed now from the world in which Johnny Jones generously
if ambivalently boosted the presence and resources of Christian faith in our
region. The very things that for 160 years enhanced our gospel-mission may well
be the things that, at least to some degree, now hold us back. The Spirit who startled
Moses in lands beyond the wilderness is the same Spirit who is stretching us,
challenging us to speak with integrity of love, of justice, of peace and
reconciliation, and above all of the mysteries of resurrection faith in a world
beyond the wilderness that was Christendom, state-sanctioned Christianity.
For our
purposes here we should give the final say to Paul, that prickly saint whose
known world collapsed around him and experienced new birth when it did. As he
wrote to attempt to establish his credentials to the Roman Christians, perhaps
already lapsing into a Christian arrogance and complacency, he pulled no
punches:
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
It’s not a
bad manifesto.
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