Exodus 3:1-15
I Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

One of the things that makes it difficult, sometimes, to connect the great, familiar, archetypal stories of Scripture — like the calling of Moses — to our own lives and experience is the way that God’s communication (in Scripture) is always so clear, so unambiguous, and so obvious. The angel of the Lord, we are told, appeared to Moses “in a flame of fire out of a bush.” And Moses, looking at this sight, sees — and notices! — that the bush “was blazing, yet it was not consumed.” Moses then decides that he has to turn aside and investigate this “great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” I can’t help feeling that, were I tending someone else’s livestock in a dry-climate wilderness, I might have a very different reaction to the sight of open flames; it probably wouldn’t occur to me to try to figure out whether or not the bush was actually being consumed. I think I’d be more focused on getting the goats (or sheep, or whatever) — and myself! — out of range of a possible brush fire. The story-teller in me (or perhaps the editor in me), wishes that some less alarming metaphor had been chosen: a cool blue light emanating from the shrubbery, or a drift of vividly colored and enticingly scented mist. But flames and fire have their elemental appeal, and are associated with the appearance of God, and the Holy Spirit, in many places in Scripture.

As the story unfolds, the quality of the communication between God and Moses is remarkably direct. God instructs Moses to remove his sandals, since he has come to stand on holy ground; and God goes on to identify God’s-self, to outline a specific problem — the mistreatment of the Israelites at the hands of their Egyptian taskmasters — and to propose a response. “So come,” God says to Moses. “I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” Moses raises obvious (and to me quite reasonable) objections: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” But God overrides this by insisting that God will be with Moses. Still doubtful, Moses asks (essentially) why the Israelites should believe him, when he tells them God sent him, and asks God’s name. “I AM WHO I AM,” God responds; and with that, Moses has to be content.

The Hebrew phrase that, in the NRSV, is translated, “I AM WHO I AM” could also be expressed in other ways. Literally, it might be closer to say: “I-shall-be that I-shall-be;” or even, “I am that I am.” Later attempts to render this concept in Greek, resulted in amplifications like: “I am the BEING, the WAS, and the IS TO COME,” which describes God as beyond the influence of normal Time. What, in the story conversation, sounds almost like a refusal to give a name, becomes metaphorically (and theologically) significant, if we accept the mysterious name of God as a reflection of the essential mystery of the Divine nature. Perhaps, by expressing the Divine name as I AM, God is revealing the Divine self as the one who is always there, always present to us, whenever we make the effort to seek God.

For Moses, in today’s story, the interaction with God is essentially unambiguous; although it is also mysterious and powerful, daunting and overwhelming, the encounter can be summed up in very simple, direct terms. God provides a sign (the bush that burns without being consumed). Moses discerns significance in the sign and stops to see whether he can uncover its deeper implications. When Moses approaches, God provides an explanation — in words — of a problem, and charges Moses with addressing it in a specific way. Moses resists, but is reassured, and ultimately accepts the mission. Because the story is told in such unambiguous terms, we may find it hard to recognize similar patterns in our own lives and experience; but I think they are there. The trick, for us, may be to relinquish the expectation that the sign (or the Divine directions) will be outlined, in our own lives, in such broad, vivid strokes. In our lives, the significant events God provides may not take the form of (obvious) burning bushes, so much as (subtle — maybe even obscure) moments of intuition and vague glimpses of insight. Instead of the clear (verbal) explication of situation and response God gives to Moses, we may find ourselves struggling to perceive patterns and formulate contingencies without access to some external summation of facts and strategies.

It’s understandable — though possibly a deep, human failing — that we crave certainty and reasons. “Do you think,” Jesus asks, “that the Galileans Pilate had murdered were any worse sinners than any other Galileans? I tell you, No.” Jesus asks this question because he is challenging an assumption of his culture: that one could judge the quality of person’s relationship to God by the external circumstances of his or her life. The Temple taught and people believed that sinners were punished and righteous persons thrived. On some level, we resonate to that old, erroneous understanding; we want to believe that (in some way) we affect and shape our own reality. On some level, we find the idea that if we’re good, God will reward us — and its converse — compelling. Perhaps it is because that understanding leaves us with (at least the illusion of) control; we dislike the idea that suffering is random, that God’s love can neither be earned nor deserved, that our external circumstances are more random than controlled. We cherish the illusion that certainty can be attained; and perhaps, we insulate ourselves from the challenges God directs toward us by clinging to the assumption that if God really wanted us to do something, God would tell us about it — with flagrantly unambiguous signs, and clear and explicit directions in words.

“Who am I,” Moses says to God, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And we, knowing how the story ends, can’t quite avoid a conviction that Moses is being silly: he’s the one destined to help the Israelites shake off the yoke of their Egyptian oppressors. But, when we are faced with our own subtle and complicated efforts at discernment, we are quite likely to ask ourselves a similar question — and to feel it is entirely justified. After all, Moses was special — one of the archetypal characters out of Scripture — and we’re just ordinary. But I think that part of the point this story about Moses’ calling is making for us is that, throughout Scripture — and history for that matter — God uses ordinary, straightforward people to take on quite extraordinary tasks and challenges. It’s not Moses’ objection that we should notice and hold onto, but God’s reassurance: “I will be with you.”

God — the BEING, the WAS, and the IS TO COME — is always with us; God (I-shall-be that I-shall-be) empowers us with the Divine presence, no matter how ordinary, how inadequate we may feel. Every single one of us is made in God’s image: God made us to contain the same creative power, the same potential for compassion, the same capacity of imagination, that God has. This means that none of us is ordinary; every single one of us has the potential to take amazing, powerful, transformative action in our lives. What we need to do is to open our hearts, shed our crippling assumptions and damaging expectations. We need to stop waiting for miraculous interventions in our lives and history; we need to stop hoping for someone else — someone as “special” and archetypal as a Moses — to emerge from the camouflage of the human population to lead us into a new promised land. Miracles and archetypes aren’t easily recognized in real time — they need the gloss of hindsight, the accretions of popular history, in order to become recognizable. What we need to do — each and every one of us — is to cease exempting ourselves (because we think we are ordinary) from the work of discernment and start to look — really look! — for the subtle, insubstantial, tentative, ambiguous indications of God’s intentions for us. The signs are there, but we need to learn how to recognize them.

There are a couple of important insights expressed in Jesus’ parable of the unprofitable fig tree. First, no one is expecting flashy, impossible miracles: the landowner merely wants all the trees to bear fruit; they don’t have to bear multiple kinds of fruit, nor are they expected to produce gold, jewels, or wheat. But they are called to be fruitful. It’s not enough just to take up growing space; green leaves are a start, but not the fulfillment of the mission. We are called to live out our faith in such a way that others (and we) recognize the tangible results — the fruit, as it were — of our spiritual convictions.

Second, we are not expected to achieve fruitfulness without help. In the parable, when the gardener intercedes for the unproductive tree, he also promises to provide help. It’s like God’s assurances to Moses: “I will be with you.” You won’t have to bring the Israelites out of Egypt without help. Each of us may be called — urged, lured, prodded, or hinted — toward some unexpected and transformative mission; but we don’t embark upon it alone or unaided.

“I AM WHO I AM,” God tells Moses; and Jesus shows us another face of God in the gardener who intercedes, who buys us time and gives us help, so that we may grow into His image and bear rich and unique fruit. I AM calls each of us to be who we are, to express in our lives the unique facet of God’s nature which is within each of us. And Jesus — the Christ; God With Us — provides us with an example, and the help and nurturing we need in order to grow into the full potential with which God has so richly blessed us.

It is my prayer that we will open our minds and eyes, as we seek to discern God at work in our lives and our world; and that as we become more adept at recognizing the subtle signs and ambiguous visions with which God challenges us, we will also find the courage to step out in faith and to follow, however hesitantly, upon the path the Spirit lays before our feet.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.