Exodus 3
Moses was looking after the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro. He led his flock to the far side of the wilderness to Mt. Horeb. Then the Lord appeared to him in the shape of a flame of fire coming from a burning bush. Moses looked and saw that though the bush was blazing, it was not being burnt up.
When the Lord saw him go forward to look, he called to Moses from the middle of the bush. “Come no nearer, Moses. Take off your shoes for the place on which you stand is holy ground. I am the God of your father Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. I have seen the miserable state of my people in Egypt..So come, I send you to Pharoah to bring the people of Israel out of Egypt.”
Moses said, “Who am I to go to Pharoah and bring Israel out of Egypt?”
The bush burning like that without being consumed and the fact of the voice coming out of that bush were not the only miracles in that incident. It is downright miraculous that after the first four or five words spoken by the flaming bush, Moses did not abandon the sheep, beat a fast retreat down off the mountain back to town, throw a few things in a bag, cancel all appointments and leave on a vacation of indefinite length for an extended rest!
Had I just been spoken to by a bush or a tree or even a brighter-than-usual, articulate tomato plant, I don’t think you would have seen me at my best. The appointment I set up would have more likely been with a [physician than with Pharoah. “Doctor, I have this friend who thinks the flora and fauna are talking to him…”
It’s not that I don’t believe in God or God’s power. And I’m better acquainted than most are with all the stories like this one, about God speaking to Moses, or confronting Jacob, or summoning Samuel, or call Gideon, or whispering to Elijah. Those are intriguing and revealing and thrilling stories. But still, when it come to me and my being moved or inspired, most of the time it is not all that easy to believe the God of all history and creation having something that specific to do with me or with this miniscule corner of the universe that surrounds me.
I don’t have any doubt about what God could do. But I have all kinds of uncertainties about whether He is doing something at my particular time or in a specific situation…especially having to do with me.
You may have heard before the story about the little boy who came home from church school on Sunday and was asked by his father what the lesson had been that day. “Well,” he said, “there’re were these people who were prisoners of a bad king in Egypt and a General names Moses helped them to escape. But the army of the bad king chased them and trapped them on a beachhead beside a big sea. So they built this pontoon bridge across the water and got away. And when the army of the bad king started chasing them across the bridge with their heavy armor and staff, General Moses called for an aerial bombardment and that blasted the bridge and all of the troops and armaments of the bad king were drowned and …
Wait a minute,” the father interrupted, I don’t believe that that is what your teacher said happened.” The boy scrunched up his face and replied, “Okay, you’re right. But you sure wouldn’t believe what she did say happened!”
I’ll have to admit, I know a little bit about what the boy was struggling with-God being that present, that specific. Even the people Israel weren’t so sure of God’s part in the story all the time, once they were safe on the other side and some months had passed. Moses you may remember had his moments during long strings of frustrating, uninspired, ordinary days in the wilderness, when his doubts pretty well screened out the momentum, the mountaintop of inspiration or certainty.
From this distance, could he really be sure that that whole ecstatic burning bush experience on Mt. Horeb wasn’t merely a combination of high altitude, low blood sugar, insufficient sleep, or a momentary cerebral vascular accident?
A lot of the time it really is difficult, isn’t it, to believe that God has anything much to do with our little efforts and our little selves? “How could God?”…”Why would God?”…”How would I know for sure if God did?”…To make matters worse, sometimes our doubt isn’t helped much by some the spiritually glib who are always claiming that God just told them such-and such, or just showed them s-and-so; the spiritual superstars who claim not to ever have a doubt in the world and know perfectly at any moment God’s every whim.
I suspect, in fact, that an awfully lot of sincere people come to feel that they are religiously defective or spiritually retarded because a bad car battery, they can’t seem to hold a charge. Either that or, in the long stretches of common days, they just come to doubt that they really did experience God’s touch or calling or presence burning within them in the way that at the time they thought that they had.
One wonders, “Was I really touched then, or just a little” tetched.” It’s one of faith’s morale problems. If your life is anything at all like my own, while there are the moments of sharp awareness of God’s presence or grace-moments of special confidence and clarity, times of feeling choked-up with life’s meaning or joy or love. There keeps turning out to be the wildernesses, too. They are the airy, barren, sometimes long stretches of the unexceptional, the customary, mundane, common stuff…when there’s no lump in my throat, no awe, no wonder.
And those are the times when (in spite of myself) I find myself doubting whether there ever really was that other dimension, that spiritual mountaintop; whether there was anything with real or relevant about those somewhat elusive times when I felt completely “whole,” at-one with myself; when I knew what I needed to be and do and when I felt empowered and purposeful.
Well, if it’s any comfort to you, the Bible is full of people with the same problem. Were you to go count the anecdotes and narratives of the Bible, paragraph for paragraph, you’ll find that there is an awfully lot more in there about just that, about days of doubt and of withering commonness than you will about the glorious flashes of faith and certainty and vision.
In the scripture itself, very much like the Moses/Exodus story, the moments of shining, intoxicating faith and unmistakable graces are “oases in deserts of uncertainty. “Those divine touches are often more like lightning in the darkness, giving just enough vision while things are lit up, to keep going a bit longer if you will remember and trust what you saw.
And maybe a lot of us need to be reminded regularly that to some extent it has always been like that-that the ordinary days do not mean that we have lost what was and is extraordinary about our live and spirits. In fact, maybe the real persons of faith turn out to be the ones with enough faith to keep on keeping –on, when lately they can’t quite get that warm feeling that God is ”holding their hand” or “hovering over them” or “walking and talking with them in some garden.”
Maybe it is well to look again at how often faith, instead of being a warm heavenly glow, had to be an almost blind discipline of remembering the light, rather than being able to bask in it. Maybe some of us have to be repeatedly helped to understand that truth and inspiration may come only in flashes from strange places and in small packages and still be the real thing and be that with which we have to make do for a while.
Because I suspect that in one way or another, every one of us- even the most skeptical-have been moved, stirred, impassioned, touched by God in all manner of mountaintops. And maybe a big difference between people is those who trust it, versus those who try to forget it…believing, again, that they were a little tetched, not touched.
Now there’s no denying it is sometimes next to impossible to remember having felt called or sent or led, when you are now out being worn out, pulled in all directions and battered with frustrating details It is very difficult, as the poster says, when you are up to your knees in alligators, to remember that you original had a vision of clearing out the swamp. (The language of the poster is a little more earthy than that. This is the “pulpit translation.”)
It takes a determined, disciplined memory to keep before you how much you have been moved to loved when now you are in the midst of not even liking him or her or them one little bit, and there is no thrill or “good feeling,” or any certainty that it is ultimately capable of being good.
It is hard to remember that “burning bush,” that is, hard to keep from feeling like some kind of fuzzy-minded romantic who has been making a fool of himself, when what have been your ideals and principles and dreams are being made to look obsolete or naïve. That’s where it gets tough, isn’t it?
Can you still remember what at some point you knew in the very core of your soul to be right true about mercy or justice or forgiveness or reconciliation…when it has just been crammed down your throat that however true it may have seemed up there on your nice mountaintop, it doesn’t seem to make sense down here in the valley?
You hear echoes of that in a little couplet someone quoted to me recently: ”The Lord is my Shepherd, we know” says the Psalm; ”But now we’re not sure, so we’re building a bomb.”…Not sure anymore, so I’d best act as if there was no vision of anything better.
You see, it is not necessarily a case of not believing in God in the grand, universal sense of order and creation. It’s just that in the push and grind of trying to get by, by thinking safely and conservatively, it is easy to wonder whether we didn’t get a little carried away ever believing that God actually touches our lives; moves directly, one-to-one, in you, in me.
God does! Even though sometimes doubting it or forgetting it in the wilderness, I want to keep coming back to it. And that is part of the importance of Christians gathering in worship and searching. It is to recall and look, at least once a week, at the fact that we have understood more, felt more, believed more, hoped more than we are inclined to open ourselves to most of the time.
It’s a time to remember the time you were moved by what was said or sung or done, beyond what you thought a sophisticated person like you could be moved; and that somewhat awkward moment of cleansing through tears or having “spilled your guts” or asked forgiveness, or repented, or whatever it was that seemed strangely, uncomfortably right at the time; and that impulse to sacrifice beyond what was typical of you for someone or something that later didn’t make as much sense; and that Christian concern that burned within you for awhile in a way that you no longer thought possible in hard-boiled you. Remember that time when you really did believe that you were/are completely forgiven and briefly there was no guilt lurking in the corners of your consciousness; that strange “mountaintop; or maybe it was a dark valley, where as never before you felt you had nothing to fear, either about life or death.
Well, we come together to remember and know that all of that a real: is every bit as authentic as the more common, practical, ordinary days where we sometimes discount it, and infinitely more real than that cynical voice that keeps chanting, “C’mon, be realistic!”
We are creatures who are touched…over and over again. Thank God for that. So learn to recognize those time, own them, hold onto them for dear life-because “dear life” is what they are all about.
Cliff Schutjer served as a minister to The First Congregational Church of Mansfield for over 45 years and was named Minister Emeritus in 2007. He is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York City and of Anderson College in Anderson, Indiana. During his years in Mansfield he worked on a broad range of civic and health care boards and activities. He and his wife Pat are now retired and living in Phoenix, Arizona. They are the parents of three children.
