Welcome
Good morning, church. I’m Pastor Ashley Dargai
I remind you of our coffee hour before service to catch up with your church friends, from 10:15-10:45 AM on Zoom on Sundays. As our coffee hour ends, we’ll hop on over to Facebook Live to worship together.
Tonight is the last meeting of our book study for I’m Still Here at 7 pm on Zoom. I hope you can join us.
Make sure to check the links in the comments for various resources including ways to give financially to the church. Like and comment this video to let us know you’re here.
We continue our worship series on Exodus, what we’re calling, Things Are Different Now. In this series, we’re taking lessons from Israelites on being surprised by God, on learning to be a new community, and on trusting in God’s provision. Today, we journey with Moses to the burning bush, so I hope you have slipped your shoes off for today’s service.
Let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Pastoral Prayer
God,
Our refuge, our strength,
This year continues to surprise us with illness, poverty, war, and storming winds as they continue to wreak havoc through our lives. We feel vulnerable, exposed, open. We come to you, seeking comfort when we need wholeness, feeling broken, when the world around us seems unfamiliar.
Lord, we recognize that water can be both healing and destructive. The same water that can remove us from our homes and communities can welcome us into a life through you in baptism.
In times like these, you are as near to us as our breath.
In times when we feel you are out of reach and in times when we feel completely enfolded in your love: touch our eyes that we may see you; open our ears that we may hear you; enter our hearts that we might know your love; shine your light so that we may reflect it to those around us.
Grace us with your presence during these difficult times, so that we might feel your strength and your healing touch. In the name of Jesus Christ, we ask these things. Amen.
Children’s Moment
Our friend Leah Saurenmann reminded us recently, that shoes sometimes keep us from feeling the heat of the road on a hot summer day, but there are times when we need to remove our shoes to feel the earth and be connected to it, like feeling the grass tickle your toes, or the cool sand where the waves keep rolling in. In our story, Moses sees a burning bush, and takes his shoes off out of reverence, out of respect, because he knows something special is about to happen. And that’s when God speaks to Moses.
God speaks – Sometimes in a voice: to Moses, to Abraham and Sarah, to Paul. It doesn’t happen all the time, but the Bible has several examples. Sometimes in many voices: When we call someone to ministry, it is the community speaking God’s words to an individual. And sometimes it’s inside your spirit. When you are quiet, when you are praying or meditating, sometimes we feel God’s spirit moving us to do something different in our lives.
The big question is, can we be alert? Can we pay attention to what’s happening so that we would recognize God’s presence everywhere?
Let’s pray: Holy one, you speak to us in many forms. Help us pay attention to your words, and follow you more every day. Amen.
Scripture and Sermon
Exodus 3:1-15 (NRSV)
3 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then God said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 God said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 God said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” God said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
I’ll admit, the burning bush seems like a misplaced text as wildfires rage this morning in California. It seems a little too on the nose to be talking about wilderness as the gulf coastline is being forever changed by Hurricane Laura, as parts of Azle were affected by the tornado last night. When we were planning our Genesis and Exodus worship series, we had no idea how these texts would be in dialogue with our state of the world. I read a tweet that 2020 is giving off series finale vibes, and having watched a lot more television in the past few months, I concur. And I can only imagine how it will feel to read the apocalyptic texts of Advent—what will our world look like then? How will our cities be changed by the pandemic, by protests, and politics and natural disasters? What existential threats will compound our already heightened existential dread? Who will have left this earth for their eternal peace? Whose lives will be completely altered by financial instability? And will the murder hornets finally descend upon us?
Our text today tells us that Moses was herding sheep in his new, strange life, years after growing up as the Pharaoh’s family scandal. A Hebrew boy, brought in by Pharaoh’s daughter in defiance of his orders, was one of the sole survivors of his slaughtered generation. He was probably fairer skinned than his Hebrew siblings having been spared the hard slave labor in the sun and he probably had a soft belly from a palace upbringing. He was never at home in the palace though, being the open secret of Egypt. Yet he was not at home in the sparse Hebrew dwellings either. He did not know hard labor like them. He did not sing their songs or know their names. Indeed, in a fit of passion, he had killed an abusive Egyptian taskmaster on behalf of his people and they still rejected him, fearing his power and doubting his loyalty.
And as we meander through this text today, as if we, too, were herding sheep in the wilderness, as if the most important thing on our schedule was to take a nap in the shade, perhaps we can understand the aimlessness of Moses. Having not belonged in the role of the oppressive party for some time, and not finding home in the suffering segment, he was out in the desert, living out a Midianite marriage, his days blurring together as one continuous blob. Until he saw the bush on fire.
There’s a famous poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning that suggests that every bush can be a burning bush if we have eyes to see. She writes:
“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
I love this sentiment, that holy ground is everywhere. That in the most ordinary of times and places, God can call out to us, illuminating the room, giving us a mission.
However, with no offense to Browning, it was only when Moses was “beyond the wilderness” that he saw this bush. Some translations say “at the far side” or the “edge” of the wilderness. He was not in his backyard or by the local well. He had journeyed far out into the land, to the limits of where he could take his sheep. And I wonder if by “beyond the wilderness” the teller of this story is also trying to say Moses was at the end of his rope, at his wits’ end. His life had not always been the boring life of a sheep herder, after all. But now he was in exile from his family and on the run from the Egyptians. There’s a bit of breathlessness to this moment, a weariness to his face. It’s not just your casual Tuesday.
We know the story of the burning bush—God told Moses to take his sandals off because it was holy ground, but perhaps it was also a signal to Moses that he had finally found his home because where else do you take off your shoes? His home, it turned out, was not the cool rooms of the palace or the lean-to village of the Hebrew people; it was the wilderness. It was the very presence of God.
And then of course God told Moses that God was not like the deities of empire, whose egos needed to be stroked and whose bloodlust was as normal as the rising sun. No, God had heard the cries of the suffering, and God was going to do something drastic, something world-upheaving to liberate God’s people. And God was going to partner with Moses—risking this whole liberation enterprise on a fragile, fickle sheep herder.
And we also know how Moses responded with the big faith questions: Who am I? And by the way, God, who are you? Remember Moses didn’t grow up hearing the stories his brother and sister did.
But as his calloused toes gripped the sand beneath his feet, there was another grounding taking place. This was the same ground from which God breathed humanity into life. Moses may not have contained the memory, but the earth beneath his feet did.
And God reminded him that there is an ancient memory, an ancestral belonging in which he was being planted like a tree, or perhaps, a bush. This voice was of the God of Moses’ father, of Abraham, of Isaac, and Jacob. You may not know these stories, God seemed to be saying, but they are yours. This is who you are.
And as for me? God says, and I imagine the flames flicked in the way the tail of a mischievous cat does, “I am who I am. I will be who I will be.” Which of course tells Moses nothing.
But this memory that existed outside of Moses was important because God’s call was not just to free a little band of enslaved people as an escape from empire, though that was important enough especially if you were part of that little band. Rather, God was assaulting the consciousness of empire itself, the world that shaped Moses’ imagination—the mythic pretensions that oppression is necessary for human flourishing, that one must eat or be eaten, that simply because something seems ordained to perpetuity means it is God-ordained.
But from this bush beyond the wilderness, God was asking Moses to imagine a different world. I’m not sure God channels John Lennon during this moment, calling for a nebulous society of equality.
But perhaps God was asking, “What if things could be different? What if things didn’t have to be this way?” This is a God who chose something as trivial as a bush on which to burn, yet even this bush was preserved with care, the flames not consuming and reducing it to ashes. This is a God whose plan was not to strong-arm and subjugate but rather to lead out and liberate. A God whose plan rested on an outcast to both sides of the power dynamic rather than an actual child of Pharaoh or a local leader of the Hebrew people. A God whose call comes on the edge of a wilderness rather than the center of commerce or on the marketplace of ideas.
By saying to Moses, “I am the God of your ancestors, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, and I will be who I will be,” what if God were calling out a genetic encoding, if you will? Like God was sending a spark of electricity in those toes gripping the sand that being led out into the desert was something this people had done before. Not these exact persons, but in the collective memory of the Hebrew people, they had done this before.
We will read the story of the Hebrew people’s meandering through the desert in the coming weeks, and they will one day return to this very mountain, and Moses will be able to say, “I have been in this wilderness before. I have stood at the foot of this mountain before. I have seen the fire and it has not consumed me.” And because of Moses’ experience, there will exist a kind of muscle memory in the collective group.
So maybe, in this muscle memory, genetic encoding, sociological and theological evolutionary adaptation, whatever we want to call it, we see that this new way of being that God was proposing to Moses was not new, not really. It was actually very old, stretching back to the beginning of time.
Imagine a different world, God proposed, where my people are free. Where the Hebrew people do not exist as capital and collateral but live in what will be a covenant community. And imagine a different world, God proposed to a man who grew up because of the kindness of an Egyptian ruler, where my people no longer have blood on their hands in the quest for power, but rather respect for the dignity of all human lives and allow for the health of all communities. God’s liberation was not limited to the Hebrew people because God, the Creator of the Hebrews and the Egyptians, knows that no one in the role of taskmaster leaves that role with their soul unscathed.
The home that Moses has found in the presence of God beyond the wilderness after years of ancestral homelessness is not comfortable. His shoes may be off, but he isn’t sipping tea and reading a book by the fire. The story of his people was coursing through his body in the call of God to partner in the work of deliverance, a dangerous call, one that could alienate and even kill him. But in the recitation of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God seemed to be saying, “Your people have done this work before. You are not alone, you are not the first, and you won’t be the last. I AM goes with you.”
There’s a part of me that feels like we’re still in Lent. But things have a taken a turn, so it’s not so much Lent-ish as it is the apocalypse. And I realize the gravity of that word from the mouth of a preacher, and I’m not saying there’s 4 Horseman on the horizon or anything. But I am saying that there is an undercurrent of despair in our world, specifically in our country right now. With the natural disasters brought on in part by climate change, and the racial reckoning, the political polarization that cuts through even our most beloved relationships, the fear of a virus that we do not fully understand, the consistent targeting and harming of people’s children in a myriad of ways, not to mention the wilderness of quarantine life because of COVID-19, our collective mental health and peace of the soul is at a much lower baseline. We are at the far side of the wilderness, if you will.
I don’t know what our world will look like at Advent. I think most of us thought a few months ago we’d already be back to normal, whatever that means. And I don’t know the way out of the wilderness from a spiritual standpoint.
But I do know this. We have been here before. Maybe not us, the particular people alive today, maybe not you and me, but the people of God have wandered to the far edge of the wilderness many times before to be surprised by God’s generous provision and by God’s challenging call for a different world.
The God who calls out to us from beyond the wilderness is the God of Abraham and Jacob and Isaac. Of Moses and Aaron and Miriam. And as Christians, we believe it is the God of Mary and Joseph, Anna and Simeon, and our brother and redeemer Jesus, of the early church people Paul and Peter, Barnabas and Timothy, Lydia, and Priscilla, and Joanna, the body that stretches across time and history and the globe, the long, long table of God from which we eat today.
So maybe we can overhear this call to Moses as part of our call, a call to reject the mythic pretensions of empire, to restore the humanity to both the oppressed and the oppressors, to attend to the old work, built into the muscle memory of our collective being.
We may have had to wander to the far side of the wilderness, in a place of breathless despair, we may have felt displaced from the people we loved and the institutions in which we were shaped, but just ahead there is a bush burning, flicking its flames in holy mischief. Ready to ignite our imaginations.
Amen.
Communion
In many ways we think of this sanctuary as holy ground. Some of you were baptized here, some of you were married here. Some of us have witnessed the funerals of our loved ones here. We have called this place holy, because we have encountered God here, in some amazing ways. When Jesus sat with his disciples at a table in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, I’m not sure they thought of that particular place as holy. Yes, it was a Passover meal, but they had celebrated Passover so many times before, why would this be different? However, the presence of Jesus made that table, that room, that moment holy. I think that it true for this table, handcrafted by one of our members. And it’s true for the tables where you gather. The presence of Jesus, in our lives, makes our homes holy, makes our tables holy, makes our lives holy. May you know that truth as we celebrate today.
Sharing Our Resources
These days, it seems like we can’t keep up with the growing needs around us. But what we know as Azle Christian Christian Church, that in the face of great need, it’s even more crucial for us to share our resources with our neighbors and our community. When you give to Azle Christian Church, you help take care of the community around us through helping our various outreach ministries—the benevolence fund, the little food pantry we’ve set up, Food Hub, Southwest Good Samaritan Ministry, and others. Additionally, we have provided a link for Week of Compassion, the vehicle through which our denomination provides aid relief for people affected by the wildfires, Hurricane Laura, and other disasters.
There are several ways for you to help sustain the ministries of the church through your financial gifts—online, Venmo, text-to-give, or agood ol-fashioned check. See the comments on this video for links to ways to give.
Finally, if you or someone you know is in need of help during this time, please contact our church office or get in touch with us through Facebook or email.
Benediction
For our benediction today, I invite you to give me your best jazz hands or spirit fingers and stretch them up to make a big bush.
May the God of imagination burn within our hearts.
May the God of liberation respond to the suffering of God’s beloveds.
May the God of our faith ancestors go with us as we complete the good work we have been called to.
Amen.
Go in peace.