Javier Almendarez Bautista
Turning Aside: Moses, Shepherd in the Wilderness
March 3, 2013
Exodus 3:1-15
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. 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. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 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.” Then he said, “Come no closer!Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He 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.
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, 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. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt?” He 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.”
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?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “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.
Moses, Man of the Mountain: the miracle-working leader who stood up to Pharaoh when no one else would; the prophetic voice who challenged Pharaoh when no one else could. I picture him now with stone tablets in his hands. I picture him taped to a felt board in the Sunday school room of my childhood: he is maybe as tall as my arm, he looks down at our class from the top offelt board Mount Sinai, and my Sunday school teacher retells the story just one more time. (I heard Moses’ story many, many a time.) I see him with Charlton Heston’s full, well-trimmed, graying beard, arms spread wide with a mighty staff in hand, splitting the most magnificent Red Sea that special effects from the 1950’s can muster. A powerful man, Moses was, a mighty leader and prophet—or so I remember being told many, many a time.
We are drawn to that Moses. And though we’ll get to him in due time, today, we backtrack a bit. Before walking down from the mountaintop, Moses stood at the foot of Mount Horeb. Instead of the free people of Israel by his side, today’s Moses walks across the wilderness with sheep—just regular, old sheep.
It takes effort to envision regular, old sheep. Again we sift through the images: pastoral scenes full of those fluffy, innocent animals, lush and green mountainsides. But have you ever actually spent anytime around sheep? If you’ve ever been around the sounds, the smells, of real, flesh and blood, bleating sheep, you know the complete and utter un-remarkableness of an animal that will eat anything and everything in sight. Next to thissort of sheep, a nobody stands: a nobody by the name of Moses. Some say he’s a former Egyptian prince with a dark past. Most people just know him as a nomad trying to get a new start in somebody else’s land. He has gone beyond the wilderness today, to Mount Horeb: a desolate middle-of-nowhere, an unmarked and unremarkable territory.
This is a story about God’s call, and the main character, once again, isn’t Charlton Heston with a well-trimmed beard, leading the people of Israel into freedom. The one in the middle of the story is Moses: not Moses the prophet and liberator yet, not the Man of the Mountain just yet. This Moses is a shepherd tending his father-in-law’s sheep. A regular Joe who, one day, happens to turn aside to look at a great sight:a bush engulfed in flame yet not consumed.
It seems so easy to “turn aside,” to pause for just a brief moment and take in a wonderful sight. But life has other things planned, other events that don’t allow us to take the time to look at a great sight. Everyday life is a to-do list, and we’re always on the clock: whether work, or class, or deadlines; packing lunches, cooking dinner, pounding cup after cup of coffee to stay awake and on the go. In the middle of it all, we may sometimes forget to ask why, what are we doing all this stuff for? We move about expecting to secure our future through our sheep holdings, hoping the investment will pay off in the long run. All the while we miss that great sight, afraid to turn aside lest we lose it all.
That isn’t the only way to spin the story though. A busy schedule isn’t the only way to miss God. There are also unplanned events in our life; things we never asked for and which prevent us from turning aside to look for God. We wish we could have the privilege of ‘turning aside’ when we’re barely making it, when family is hanging by a thread. It’s much harder to talk about turning aside to look for God when you’re beaten down to the ground by illness, a lack of opportunity, unemployment. Looking for God may be even more difficult when you’ve got plenty of time: time filled with loneliness, by the ever-present dread of lacking friendship, by the permanent stillness that follows the death of a loved one. Emptiness, too, can be all-consuming. In those times, turning away from the emptiness, turning toward something other than emptiness, seems nothing but impossible.
Turns out that turning aside isn’t so easy after all. It’s not just a matter of taking the initiative, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and hiking up the mountain. That’s not quite how Moses’ story goes though. Though Moses turns aside, though he pays attention to the flame of fire out of the bush, the story begins and ends with a different, an important, affirmation: the point isn’t that Moses turned aside. The point is that God showed up.
Before we respond, God calls. Before Moses forgets his name and his people, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob remembers their suffering. The God of the people Israel hears their cries; their God notices their distress; their God knows their pain. This God comes down, interrupts Moses the Shepherd’s walk through no-man’s land and tells him that he stands on holy ground. God meets Moses where and when he least expects it. God says that this place right here, the very ground you stand on—the wasteland beyond the wilderness, the chaos of everyday life, the loneliest place in the busiest town—this place is holy, and it is so simply because God steps in, breaks through.
A few years back, I walked into a community center. I met a man there who had hurt his back badly in an accident. He used a walker for support, but he continued to be in constant pain. You could tell the pain had aged him. The wrinkles on his face showed it.
During lunch, he sat next to an older man who walked in with a cane in one hand and a tank of oxygen in another. The older man had Parkinson’s, as he tried taking a sip of his soup, it was obvious that holding his spoon would be a challenge. The first man reached over and helped. He may have hurt his back, but he had a steady hand. They chatted, for the first time, as they shared a meal together. Later that day, the man with the hurting back mentioned that it was good to be reminded that he could help, that he too had something to offer.
God calls us all, every one, and we answer in the most unlikely of places and circumstances. God shows us that there is something more even when we thought that all hope was gone. God doesn’t mean for Moses to stay in the wilderness; this God doesn’t relish in the emptiness, the suffering. God enters the emptiness and sets it ablaze; God renews it by God’s presence. God meets us beyond the wilderness in order to lead us where we had not imagined. This God won’t settle for anything less than all because this God intends to give us nothing short of it all: healing and wholeness, hope in the midst of despair.
The scene of the burning bush is both call and response. When Moses, the shepherd in the wilderness, is called to be Moses, Man of the Mountain, he is brought into a larger story: he moves toward God with trembling lips, but not before God moves toward him. Both the initiator and the one completing the work is none other than the great I AM: the One God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God doesn’t stand outside human existence, coordinating and ordaining human affairs from afar. God breaks into history in the wilderness, in the middle of our reality. This is the God who has bound God’s self to God’s people Israel, whose very name implies a covenant with the vulnerable and the lost.
Moses, the shepherd in the wilderness, becomes Moses, Man of the Mountain. He walks to the foot of Mount Horeb, removes his sandals and hides his face. Soon he will climb Mount Sinai and demand to see God’s glory (Ex 33:18). This is the way of God’s covenant: in God’s kingdom, a shepherd becomes a prophet and a liberator. In the unpredictability of God’s works, a man with a hurting back can be an agent of God’s redemption.
The scene at the burning bush is both call and response. It is like a psalm sung responsively, back and forth, verse by verse. It is worship; it is our participation in God’s redemption. The psalm appointed for today reads: “O God you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.” (Ps 63:1). Moses could’ve been thirsty in the middle of a barren and dry land; who knows. Yet what he found at the foot of Mount Horeb wasn’t a fountain, but a fire: a blazing flame that was not consumed. This God refreshes us with a refining fire, catches us by surprise, and let’s us see what we are capable of. This God frees us to do great things from where we stand, however we stand; God transforms us from the inside out and turns us loose on a hurting world.
Amen.
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