Exodus 3:1-15

Moses was doing an ordinary thing, living an ordinary life, herding ordinary sheep. Then there exploded in the midst of his life the extraordinary, the miraculous. It moved in against him, addressed him, summoned him, and his life was changed irreversibly. The Bible does not know how to talk about that intervention (as we do not know how to speak about it), because the experience falls outside our usual way of talking. So the Bible speaks about a "burning bush", and an odd voice.

The real issue for Moses, however, is not the bush. What happened is that God came to confront Moses and to give him a large purpose for his life that refused everything conventional. The reason we hold on to this old story and continue to ponder it is that either we are people who have had this extraordinary reversal of our life by God, so that nothing is ever the same again, or we wait for and yearn for such a moment that will break our life open. We hold this story because we know there is more to our life than the ordinariness of life without the holiness of God.

The first thing that happens in this moment of extraordinary miracle is that God speaks. God announces for God's own self a very specific identity. This is no generic God. It is rather the specific God of the book of Genesis: I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.

The statement might have added, "I am the God of Sarah, the God of Rebekah, the God of Rachel." I am the God of the old ancestral stories, the one who came upon hopeless old people and gave them children and new life, the one who came among the wandering sojourners and promised them land, the one who came where life was all closed down and promised them a future they could not imagine or invent for themselves.

The first part of this story of Moses and the bush is a life-changing assertion: There are promises from God writ large in the faith of the church and in the life of the world. This story affirms (and we believe) that God has indeed made promises, and God will keep promises that run beyond all destructive hopelessness.

The alternative to promise is despair, which is what we get without the intrusion of this God. There are two kinds of people who despair. There are those who have nothing and conclude they will never get anything. There are those, by contrast, who have everything, and who want to keep it just the way it is. Both those who have nothing and those who have everything find promises impossible. Nonetheless, God's promises are rude and relentless. These promises do not honor our despair or our complacency. We believe that God's future will cause a newness in the world, in which our old tired patterns of displacement and fear and hate cannot persist. In this "bush-narrative," God has come to enlist people into these promises for the future of Israel, and the future of the world.

Second, God speaks to Moses not only about the old promises and future expectations. God comes to speak also about God's immediate intention for the present tense: I have seen the misery of my people...I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them to a good land...I have seen how the Egyptians oppress them. The God of the Bible takes notice of social suffering, in which some are oppressed and others are oppressors, in which some are exploited and others are comfortable because of the exploitation. God notices and God cares, and God acts decisively, because God will not put up with these kinds of dysfunctional social arrangements.

There is presently a great quarrel in the North American church about the nature of biblical faith and the God of the Bible. Is this faith only about matters religious and pious and private, or is it also about the great public questions of justice and equity in relation to economic and political reality? The argument is made differently here and there in the Bible. In this text, in any case, we are at the core claim of biblical faith. The God of the Bible is profoundly and perennially preoccupied with the kind of human suffering that comes when one brother or sister is able to establish economic and political leverage over another brother or sister. Because God is who God is, there must be liberation and transformation and the reestablishment of equity, a community in which all attend to all.

In Romans Paul, good Jew that he is, knows about God's resolve for liberation. In an astonishing way, Paul extends that resolve for liberation so that it concerns not just slaves and peasants and nomads, but the whole of creation. Imagine the whole of creation destined for an Exodus liberation! The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God...[so] that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. What a mouthful Paul wrote long before our environmental concerns! As Israel is enslaved to Pharaoh, so the creation is enslaved to fear and anger and alienation, cursed under the distortion of the human community. And so creation cannot be fully liberated until true "children of God" appear, who can care for the earth differently. So says Paul, God wills the liberation of the world in order that the creation can be its fruitful, productive, and harmonious true self.

In these two speeches on the promises of Genesis and on the resolve of liberation, Moses is inducted by God into some of the largest and most definitional themes of biblical faith. Christians attest the promises of God, believing that the promises of God are at work in the world, unsettling every status quo and making the world new. We are people who celebrate God's resolve for liberation, in society and in creation, knowing that God wants us all to be liberated selves in a liberated creation. We affirm that the large forces of God's promise and God's resolve are at work, even though the world does not notice, and even though we ourselves do not always resonate with that work.

After the promises of Moses and the announcement of liberation to Moses, however, something very strange happens in the text of Exodus 3. In vv. 7-9, God has uttered a lot of first-person pronouns in which God takes initiative for what must come next; "I have seen, I know, I have come down to deliver, I have seen the oppression." God is deeply, directly, and personally involved in this crisis in Egypt and intends to do something about it. Upon hearing this speech of God, Moses must have thought, "This is indeed some impressive God - God is going to do something about this, even though I do not know how it will all happen."

And then in vs. 11, there is an odd, surprising turn in the rhetoric. The same God who has been uttering all these "I" statements now says to Moses: So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people Israel out of Egypt.

"I will, I will, I will...so come, you go." What a turn around. The trick is that all of these glorious things God has resolved to do are now abruptly assigned to Moses as human work. It is, moreover, dangerous human work. You be the liberator! You go to Pharaoh! You go to the big house and confront the entrenched, oppressive powers. You care enough to make the case for this bondaged people. What had been "I, I, I" now is suddenly "You, you, you."

What happens in one quick rhetorical flourish is that God's wondrous resolves are transposed into dangerous human work. That is how it often is in the Bible. 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. The book of Exodus is the tale of Moses' courageous life lived in defiance of Pharaoh for the sake of God's liberating resolve. Indeed, the resolve of God would not amount to much without the risky courage of Moses.

Now I assume that you are like Moses and like me - ordinary life, ordinary work, ordinary sheep to tend. Nonetheless, it does happen that the power of God explodes in our midst, and we get pushed out beyond our conventional horizon. It is, of course, possible to go on as though God's intrusion has not happened. Most of us, moreover, are timid and not inclined to crawl out very far on a limb. But it does happen, here and there, to people like us. And where it happens, the story moves to its next scene, for the story of this people is the story of people who have agreed to do God's own work of promise and liberation.

I imagine, moreover, that the reason we need to think about this story of the bush and its unsettling invitation is that our society is in deep crisis. It is clear that most of our old patterns of life together are not working. This is indeed a time when the church may gather its faith together in order to think and pray and act differently. We are people who believe that God's old promises for well being and justice still persist in the world. We are people who believe that God's resolve for liberation in the world and of the world is a resolve of urgency that still pertains to the abused. And we are the ones who know that the promissory, liberating work of God depends upon folk who do God's work in the world.

So Moses had his ordinariness broken. He had to rethink the faith and the life of his people. Moses discovered that his life was saturated with the reality of God. And some God this! The psalmist speaks of the God of the bush in this lyrical way:

Who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your disease,
who redeems your life from the Pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
who satisfies you with good as long as you life,
so your youth is renewed like the eagle's,
who works vindication and justice for all who are
oppressed.
(Psalm 103:3-6)

And Moses wondered: What could be different about the purpose of my life because of the reality of this God?

The Rev. Esther Hargis
September 1, 2002

© 2002, Esther Hargis

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