August 25, 2005 (Jimmie Johnson)

Romans 12:1-8

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Matthew 16:13-20

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

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“I believe the Bible is true, and some of it really happened.” Since I wish to think in my believing and believe in my thinking, in other words since my faith seeks understanding, this approach to the authority of the sacred text is enjoyed by both my mind and heart. To approach the Bible as if it “is true and some of it really happened” frees me to enjoy the power of the Bible without having to worship the Scripture. I can take it fiercely seriously but not mandatory literalness.

The spiritual truthfulness of the Bible is the part that I appreciate when it comes to a story like this one of Moses, an angel, a bush that catches on fire but doesn’t burn up, while at the same time becoming a divine speaker box. This is one of those stories where I am not asking did this happen but rather what does this story mean? Is there an eternal connection between this story and our Christian story, the story of this church, and your and my personal stories? Does God communicate with us?

This text believes God really has something to say to us. Something big. And the story doesn’t consider the interruption of our lives by God speaking to be rude but rather for our good and the good of creation. I really believe it is true that God communicates with us though it is a lot easier to believe this on some days than on other days. Frankly, most of my days are lived unaware of the Holy communicating to me or as days when I conclude Heaven is silent with nothing to say. Most of my days are not religiously dramatic in any form or fashion. The Christian life of faith for me is what I suspect it is for many of you: a long slog, not an exciting mountain top after mountain top. And, honestly, I am not attracted to those religious witnesses who speak of a dramatic, sign-validated religious walk.

Moses was living in the non-dramatic world of the ordinary when this text brazenly declares God spoke to him. He was not at church. He was not even consciously on a religious quest. If he was doing anything, he was overcoming his past. Years before he had killed a man. But the years had come and gone, and Moses had found a way to blend in--living an ordinary life, doing ordinary things, herding ordinary sheep.* Nothing dramatic. Then the claim is made that God climbs out of the traditional, ordinary, religious box containing our expectations about when and where God can get God’s good in gear. God climbs out of the box of our expectations and stuns us with a disclosure concerning who God is. And don’t ever overlook this: when God discloses God’s self, something new about us is revealed as well.

Moses is never the same after this unexpected voice and sight. Theologians call it a “theophany,” a moment when God appears and discloses God’s self. Some theophanies are better than others. I have never had a good theophany myself. The closest I have ever come was the day when I was stopped at a red light, and out of nowhere a pigeon fell dead, crashing with a thump on the hood of my car. There was no voice but the sound of my own expletives. It freaked me out! The light turned green, and I drove off, concluding this message from heaven meant perhaps I had better not knock off any more pigeons in our church bell tower
with my pellet rifle.

But Moses receives a summons from out of this world that interrupts, intrudes, and pushes him against the wall. He can’t find the ordinary anymore. The ordinary is blown to smithereens, and nothing will ever be the same again. You have had an experience like this: where life is never the same. And I bet you didn’t know how to put it into words. You can feel the Exodus passage struggling to convey this communication to us as if the Bible itself doesn’t know how to make sense of God appearing and talking, and so the Bible resorts imaginatively to a burning bush and an odd voice in this passage.

The real issue for us is not that of a bush which won’t burn up or whether God’s voice is a deep baritone or a high soprano. The issue for us is the same as it was for Moses. The text announces a claim. The claim is that God shows up with a large purpose for our life, and the purpose is so large that it refuses everything conventional. The text insists that God shows up. God speaks. And we are not talking about a neutral generic God, either--the “believe whatever you want kind of God.”

No, this God has a history. This God wears an ID band. This God is the “I Am of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” My hunch is the voice also would have said, “the God of Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel, too,” if the teller of the story hadn’t lost his nerve and thought the bush was hard enough to believe much less that the mothers of the faith
could also be validated as leaders and guides. This is the God of the old ancestral stories. This is the One who came upon hopeless, old people and gave them children and new life; the One who came among the ordinary, wandering sojourners and promised them land; the One who chose to speak and act when life was locked down tight with no possibilities nor promises and instead offered a future they could not imagine or invent for themselves. After all, they were slaves.

So the first surprise and challenge of the text is to remind us that God has made some promises and God will keep those promises even if the human perspective of hopelessness declares God cannot and is a promise breaker. We all know daily life can be interpreted as absent of any meaning except that hope is a dupe. This text refuses such an interpretation of your life. This text insists that God’s promises are rude and relentless. God will come out of God’s amnesia. God will remember God’s promises and act. Our ordinary patterns of fear and hate and despair simply cannot withstand God’s promises. Tomorrow is not a meaningless rewind of today.

Not only is God’s future going to come and interrupt, but this Exodus text says God also speaks to us God’s immediate intention for the present time: “ 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” (verses 7-9).

The text says God knows what is going on. The God of the Bible takes notice of social suffering, in which some are exploited and others are comfortable because of the exploitation. And because of this awareness on God’s part a great reversal is underway. God will not put up with these kinds of oppressive social arrangements. Here in what everyone agrees is a core text, a story of monumental importance: the claim is made that God is profoundly and always preoccupied with the kind of human suffering that comes when human beings exploit their fellow human beings. Because God is who God is, there must be liberation and transformation and the reestablishment of fairness. There must be a social order where all attend to all as brothers and sisters—not driven to abuse and oppress and exploit one another but called to help one another, where all arrangements of social power exist for the purpose of loving and helping, not exploiting for power or profit.

The Sacrament of Baptism functions as our burning bush disclosing who God is and the truth we are called to announce as individuals and as a congregation, the truth that hope is not a dupe. On the contrary, the Lord’s Day Assembly reports it is fear that is a liar. God’s promises are at work in the world, to unsettle every status quo of privilege and make the world new.

Now as a sermon ending, I want you to notice with me something of extraordinary importance and frankly, something funny. If you look closely at this text, especially in verses 7-9, God says a lot of first person pronouns. God says: “I am going to do this and I am going to do that.”
God takes a lot of responsibility for what happens next. “I have seen....I know....I have come down to deliver.....I have seen the oppression....” God sounds deeply, directly, and personally up to God’s elbows in this crisis in Egypt and intends to do something. Moses must have been pumped. Moses must have felt his adrenalin flowing as he thought, “This is going to be good. God is taking on Pharaoh! This is going to shake things up.”

And then in verse 11, there is an odd, surprising turn in the rhetoric. The same God who had been uttering all these “I” statements now says to Moses, “So come, Moses, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people out of Egypt” (verse 11). God has been saying all these promises, “I will do this and I will do that,” and all of a sudden Moses hears: “Now you go....” “Say what? I am sorry, what did you just say, God?”

All theses glorious things, these reversals, these liberations, these acts of righteousness, which God says needs to be done, are now abruptly assigned to Moses as human work. What had been, “I, I, I” now is suddenly “you, you, you.” Suddenly what had been these great holy imperatives declared with such divine commitment is all transposed into very dangerous human work.

As I started out saying, “I believe the Bible is all true, and some of it really happened,” well, the “really happened” part seems always about ordinary people being enlisted and recruited as human agents to do the things God has promised. The truth is the resolve of God would not amount to much without the risky, frightened courage of Moses.

Look, I am completely baffled by our divine-human connection. It is beyond my understanding. But I do believe here and there it does happen. Our ordinariness is interrupted, and we are told to go and do the dangerous and hard work of making good on God’s promises.

Look, being a believer isn’t about all this silly preoccupation with end time speculations, nor is religious belief about your becoming fulfilled. That’s what therapy is for. Religious belief is about serving God by the hard work of helping your fellow human beings. Don’t make it any goofier than that. It’s crazy enough. Try loving others more than yourself, especially your enemies, and see if it is not all you can handle and more. God help us when God has something to say!

*This whole sermon is indebted to Walter Bruggemann, The Threat of Life, 1996, specifically chapter 3.