Scripture: Selections from Exodus 2, 3, and 4
A sermon is a unique part of our worship service; it’s a distinct form of sacred communication — not a speech, not a report, but a proclaiming of the Good News in our time.
The sermon’s purpose, as I see it, is to speak to the movement of the spirit of God as God moves in your life, and as God moves in our collective lives and times.
And when God is at work, there is Good News to be shared. Here in this church we are in the business of noticing, and paying attention, and watching for the Good News of God so that we can take part in it when we see it.
We can’t expect that God will get our attention in the method that God uses in scripture this morning — which is appearing to Moses in the form of a bush that is on fire but is not consumed by the flame.
Instead, we usually have to look for God in the everyday miracles all around us . . . the everyday gatherings and conversations that inspire us, the other driver who shows you kindness, the teacher who goes the extra mile with their students, the neighbor who makes the extra effort to get to know you, the encouragement, love, and direction that we receive from others because these moments are encoded with the love of God . . .
And when two or more people meet and collaborate, the space between them is sacred. The sacred is where you are when you encounter others with love.
The sermon is also an opportunity for a minister to make the connections of where they see life of the community connecting with the Good News. It’s helpful for us to know where we’re experiencing God, and thinking about religion, and about the sacred, so that when we meet, and when we work together to carry out the missions and values of the church in the hard times and the good times, we will know how and where God is in the midst of it.
The big event in my life in this season of life is that Grace and I are getting ready to welcome a child to the world in December. This is something new for us. The room we’ve designated as a nursery at home is filling up with the material of raising a child. We’re learning, and planning, and generally just getting ready for this unknown.
And this event on the horizon is changing the way I’m encountering the scripture about Moses this week.
I’ve been thinking about names a lot: the meaning of names, the significance of naming, what name to call a newborn . . .
One of the first things we learn about the baby Moses is that he is named Moses by someone who is not his parents. He’s named by someone he isn’t related to.
Moses was born during a time when the leader of Egypt — the Pharaoh — has decreed that the male descendants of Jacob, who we learned about last week, should be killed to avoid them becoming too plentiful and powerful.
So Moses’s mother floats her son down the river to save his life. Moses gets his name from the daughter of the powerful Pharaoh, who finds the little baby floating down a river — and she gives him a name that in her own Egyptian language means son — she makes a claim on him through this name.
But Pharaoh’s daughter also seems to know that in Hebrew, the name Moses means “the one who is drawn out,” because she found him and took him out of the water. Her naming seems to be an act of kindness — she gives him a great name. Because the name Moses can also take on an active sense and indicate “the one who draws out,” a name which foreshadows Moses’s God-given task in this story, of drawing his people out of their suffering in Egypt.
Moses is a perfect name for this child.
The story about Moses this week makes a jump of about 400 years from Jacob stealing the covenant promise from his brother Esau. We skip over the story of all of Jacob’s seventy descendants taking refuge with the help of Joseph in Egypt during a famine that otherwise would have destroyed them all. God follows them down into Egypt. And when Pharaoh turns violent, God is with them in their suffering and takes steps to get them out.
Perhaps a good name like Moses appears when the time is right.
Because everyone in the early Exodus story seems to have a perfect name that embodies their role in the story. In fact, the Hebrew name for Exodus — Shemot — means “names.”
Moses’s sister is Miriam, which means bitter — bitter like the suffering of her people in Egypt.
Moses’s wife is Zipporah, which means little bird — a name which signifies freedom, and the wonders and flight because Zipporah lives is a place of freedom.
Their child is Gershom, which means alien or refugee — because Moses is hiding in Midian, away from Pharaoh when Gershom is born.
In Midian, in his hiding, Moses is visited by God in the form of a burning bush, and God asks him to go back to Egypt to help bring his suffering people out to the Promised Land.
Which is all very well. God will work through countless prophets in similar ways.
Really, the thing that seems to raise the most questions is when Moses asks God what God’s name is. And God says, “when the people in Egypt ask what my name is, tell them ‘I am who I am.’” God said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
“I Am” is a name that seems to break a lot of conventions.
But it makes good sense, too. Because God is beyond our knowing and our comprehension. In the Bible, aspects of God are personified in order for us to make a connection and appreciate God in our own way — God is described as having a voice, or walking through Eden, or leading the way as a cloud — but God is that in creation which is more — both removed and immediately present, active in the world and active in maintaining the conditions whereby we are free to act and make mistakes and find our way with the help of each other.
God doesn’t call Moses and then leave him alone.
God will be with Moses directly for the next four decades.
As we heard in the reading, God equips Moses with speech, and confidence, and a staff that will help him navigate his challenges.
Through our own discipleship practices here in the church, we are seeking to be spiritually equipped to face the challenges of our time — to face Pharaoh anew. To navigate the roiling Red Sea keeping us from our best selves.
Because in our own time is can feel like we are experiencing a fissure, a breaking up of the familiar, a hollowing out of our capacities to care for each other.
The descendants of Jacob stuck in Egypt had a choice. They could have rejected Moses and stayed in Egypt. The Pharaoh that you know could be better than the Pharaoh that you don’t know.
But they trusted that God was something better, beyond and ahead of them.
We too can trust that something better is ahead for us, if we can be part of making it so through the social fabric that we are building … the social fabric that we are weaving . . . the social fabric that we are sharing
Our worship has practices and roots that are thousands of years old, but we are making things new every day, in all that we do.
Amen.