In seminary, it was interesting talking to a whole group of people who went into ministry and discovering how they first felt that call. For each of us the call was different. For some, it came not just from ourselves but from those around us. I know I had a pastor when I was just a kid, not even through confirmation yet, who told me that I should consider ministry. As a sixth grader I must say I thought that was a silly idea. But that pastor was the first of many confirmations that lead me down the path that brought me to a place of professional ministry. But in seminary I was not the norm. You see the vast majority of people in seminary didn’t just come right through school. Many had done some other job first. I had a couple friends in seminary who were approaching retirement age, and had felt the call by God on their lives towards full time ministry. The vast majority, though, were in their 30’s or 40’s and saw God leading them to a new journey in their lives. Some had been Christians their whole lives, had been in leadership in their churches, but now were making the switch from lay leadership to full time ministry. Others became Christians later in life, and their new-found faith was calling them to give up what they had and move in a new direction. Some heard God speak quite clearly to them about this call on their lives, others saw the call more in the events around them. And many talked about how they fought the call for years if not decades.
In Moses, we see an 80-year-old man who is called to full time ministry, who is called by God to lead God’s people out of Egypt. It was not a job that Moses wanted. It was not something that he was prepared for. He had tried to do something for the people of Israel 40 years earlier and had failed miserably. But God called him to ministry and he followed God’s call and history was written.
I. Leaving Oppression
There is something amazing and powerful about the story of the people of Israel as they left the oppression and slavery they faced in Egypt and traveled for forty years to enter the Promised Land. It is an amazing story filled with miraculous occurrences. You have manna falling from heaven, you have water springing from rocks, you have donkeys speaking to their riders, you have people crossing the sea on dry land and you have bushes that are on fire but don’t burn up.
The exodus from Egypt has a resonance in it that is powerful. If you look particularly at many African-American spirituals that came out of the time of slavery before the civil war, they would continually reference Moses leading Israel out of slavery and leading them to someplace great. The slaves in America resonated with the slaves in Egypt as they longed for freedom from their slavery, as they looked for a God who would see their plight and respond. And though we don’t face slavery in quite the same way that the African-Americans did, nor as the people of Israel as they endured slavery in the land of Egypt; we do face our own bondages. And we know that as God looks down on us, he will remember us and deliver us from those things that we face. And we see that God will prepare a way for us through our trials and God will prepare people for us who will help us through that which we face.
These next three weeks we are going to look at this freedom from bondage that God offers. We are going to watch as God saved the people from Israel from slavery and brought them out of Egypt, and we are going to see how God can do the same for us, saving us from whatever slavery we face. And today we are going to look at the leader that God raised up to bring Israel out of Egypt, Moses.
Moses was an amazing leader. A true man of God who had a powerful relationship with God, arguing at times with God to protect the people of Israel from the consequences of their actions; receiving the Ten Commandments; and leading the people of Israel for 40 years as they wandered through the desert. If you truly want to get a sense of Moses’ leadership, I encourage you to read Deuteronomy, which is basically his last sermon to the people of Israel before he died. Powerful stuff!
But as we saw in today’s scripture, Moses wasn’t always the strong leader that Israel needed. In fact, Moses didn’t really want to do what God asked him to. He didn’t think he was up to the mission that God had given him. He was afraid. But if Moses had given into his fears, if Moses has allowed his doubts to cloud his call, Israel would never have left Egypt. And I wonder what kind of spirituals we would have if this were the case. And then I wonder whether we sometimes let our fear and our doubts get in our way so that we don’t follow where God leads, so that we don’t step up when God calls us.
II. A Burning Bush
The story of the burning bush is one of those that we learn earliest in life. We learn about how God appears to Moses and gives him his assignment and does so in a burning bush. But sometimes we allow our familiarity with a tale to distract us from it’s meaning. So let’s look at this scripture and see what it has to teach us about God, about Moses and about ourselves:
Chapter 3 of Exodus begins with Moses as a shepherd. It is amazing to me how God continues to go to shepherds and give them such important roles in his story. We have Moses, we have David and of course, we have the shepherds who were the first to see baby Jesus. So Moses is a shepherd, and not a young one. He is 80 years old. He had spent the first 40 years of his life growing up as an Egyptian prince. He was adopted by a daughter of the Pharaoh and lived the life of royalty. But then he struck out at an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite slave. And he killed this Egyptian. The Israelites feared him and the Egyptians were after him. He ran away to the Sinai Peninsula. In Sinai he married and became a shepherd and spent the next forty years of his life. And now, after having lived two full and very different lives, Moses was probably ready to sit down and retire. He was probably ready to enjoy the last years of his life in peace and quiet. But as he is caring for his sheep he sees something that amazes him. A bush that seems to be on fire, but that doesn’t burn up. And Moses is curious so he goes to check it out. This is where things begin to get weird for him. For he hears a voice call to him from within the bush, and the voice calls him by name, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses responds, “Here I am.” This is the first thing to notice about Moses’ call, it is a call given directly to him. It is a message for him alone. God calls out to him by name. When we are called to serve God it isn’t always as clear as it was for Moses. I don’t think I know one person in any sort of ministry who has seen a burning bush that called to them by name. But putting that aside, it is worth knowing that God does call us specifically. God doesn’t have a bunch of things he wants done in this world and just pick names out of a hat and assign them. It may sometimes feel like that, after all, we often find ourselves doing this sort of calling at church. We need this many Sunday School teachers and so we are just going to ask people until we get enough people to say yes. But this is not the way that God works. No, God prepares us for ministry and prepares our ministries for us. Everything that Moses had done up to that point was preparing him for leading Israel out of bondage. Moses had gone through much and it was all designed very intentionally to make him ready for what would come. The same is true for us. The joys we’ve had, the struggles we’ve faced, all these are there to prepare us for what is to come in our lives. We can think, like Moses, that we’ve already done everything that is important. Instead we need to be prepared to allow God to send us. And we need to be ready to hear God’s call when it comes, and not ignore it but allow it to speak to us, to call us by name. When you get that call from the Christian Education committee or from the Nominating committee, listen to see if God is speaking to you through them. Is God calling you by name? Is God pushing you to continue a ministry you are involved in or move into a new kind of ministry in your life? How are you going to respond to the call?
Moses responds to God’s calling him by name by saying “here I am”. It is a simple response. It is a safe response. He acknowledges that he is there, in God’s presence, but he hasn’t committed to anything yet. Smart. God tells him to take off his shoes because he is standing on holy ground. I’m very thankful that that is not something that we always have to do when we enter holy ground, take off our shoes. But there is a more important question here, what is it that makes this ground holy? Is it just holy because of where it is? Are there places in this world that by their very nature are holy? Or is there something more to it. Perhaps it is holy because of the bush that is burning on it. Or perhaps it is because it is a place where God is speaking.
Other people have crossed over that spot of earth since Moses. We can be sure of this. And no bush burned and no voice spoke to them. The place wasn’t holy when they passed over that space in the same way it was holy when God spoke to Moses there. I think what made the place holy is that it was a place where a person met with their God and where God gave that person a mission. God gave Moses a purpose. God gave Moses direction. And I believe that this is what made this into a holy place. A holy act was about to happen, and so God created a holy place for it.
We gather in this sanctuary and worship God here. We like to think of this as a holy place. We treat it different than other places we inhabit. No, we don’t take off our shoes as we enter this place, but there are certain unwritten rules that we follow in the sanctuary. They’re different for each of us. For some of us, we show its holiness by the way we dress. For others, we act different in church, more subdued. There are certain things that we would never think of doing in this place. The college I went to had originally been owned by the Catholic Church and was a school for Nuns. The chapel in the college was beautiful. When the nuns were ready to sell it there were two interested parties: our college and a police academy. The police academy wanted to take the chapel and turn it into a shooting range. Even though our college offered less money, the nuns sold it to us because we would continue to treat their chapel as a holy place. What is it that makes this place holy to us? Is it holy to us because it was holy to our parents and grandparents before us? Is it holy to us because we are told that it is holy? Or is it holy to us because it is also a place where we meet our God and where we find our mission?
III. God’s Mission and Moses’ Arguments
And now we come to the part in scripture where we see God give Moses his mission, his call. God doesn’t just tell Moses to go do this. He explains the need to Moses and gives Moses the chance to get behind it. He tells Moses about the suffering of the people of Israel and how he has heard this suffering and is going to act on their behalf. When God calls us he prepares us for this by making the need known to us. He gets us excited about making a difference. He fills us with a passion for that which he sends us to. If he is calling us to mission work, he fills us with a passion for the lost. If he is calling us to ministries of compassion and justice, he fills us with a passion for the poor and the weak. If he is calling us to work with children, he fills us with a passion for the young.
But we, like Moses, can argue with him about this. We can make excuses. We’re too old, we’re too young, we don’t know what we’re doing, nobody will take us seriously, we’ve already got too much going on in our lives with work and family, we cannot commit to something else, anyway that’s that pastor’s job, isn’t it? The list of excuses can go on and on. But if God is really calling us to a ministry, the excuses will not last. I have to say that in seminary I talked to a number of second career pastors who talked about having the call to ministry on their lives long before they accepted that call. They again and again talked about fighting that call in their lives. And they again and again talked about how God eventually wore them down and here they were in training for ministry. And their stories were always told as “don’t let this happen to you” stories. There is no pride in their struggle with God. It is not something that they are happy they did. They all wish they had given in to God’s will sooner. They wish they hadn’t spent so much time arguing with God.
Don’t let the fact that they all ended up going to seminary fool you though, for sometimes that is the place that God calls us, and other times God calls us to other ministry opportunities that are quite different. We are all called to ministry within our church; within our community; within our families. This ministry looks different for each of us. What is God calling for you to do? Don’t believe for a second that God is done with you. He still has a use for each of us. And don’t believe that he only calls some of his children to ministry. We are all called to lives of ministry in all we do. So what is God calling you to? How does he want you to serve him? How are you able to serve? Open yourself up to God’s call. Listen to see where he might send you. And when he calls, follow. Moses discovered that he had no option but to go where God led. He discovered that as God called him to ministry, God provided his resources for him in ministry. God will do the same for you. Perhaps God is calling you to full time ministry. If so, answer this call. But more likely, he is calling you to some other ministry in this church, in this community. Are you going to listen? Are you going to answer his call?
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