How fitting for this Labor Day weekend that we would find Moses at his job-site.
At lot had happened in Moses’ younger days. He had seen his share of excitement, starting when he narrowly escaped death at birth, and his mother had hidden him in the reeds near the riverbank as we heard last week. After he had grown up, he had seen an Egyptian slavedriver beating one of the Hebrew slaves, and in a fit of anger, Moses killed the Egyptian. As a result he had to flee from the land, and from Pharaoh.
But those were his days of youthful indiscretion. Moses had settled down into a quieter life now. He was married, had a son, and was working for his father-in-law.
His job wasn’t much — an entry-level position, watching the sheep. There wasn’t much competition for the job with its long hours and very little opportunity for advancement. On the other hand the job required little more than watching sheep and fending off the occasional hungry wolf. Still, it was a nice, safe little job, and it kept food on the table.
It started out as just another day out in the field counting sheep when suddenly
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.”
Now I’m not sure what I like better about this part of the story, the fact that Moses stopped and said to himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up;” or the fact that he apparently stopped and said anything, since there was no one there to hear him except the sheep. (I guess even Moses talked to himself when he was bored and alone.)
Just like that, a normal day in Moses’ life was transformed into an encounter with God. Moses wasn’t looking for it, he wasn’t expecting it, and he wasn’t doing anything particularly spiritual at the time. He was just going about through his daily routine, doing his job, living his life, when suddenly God stepped in.
I was reminded of this story awhile back when I was looking through a book store and saw a book entitled My Monastery Is a Minivan: 35 Stories from a Real Life. The author is a woman named Denise Roy who had originally thought about becoming a nun, but instead became a mother — not a mother in a convent, but a mother of four children. Her story then reminded me of Martin Luther, who left monastic life on the mountain top when he realized that the call to serve God did not mean separating yourself from the rest of the world.
From the stories of Martin Luther, Denise Roy, and Moses, as well as from our own experiences we know that it is in the every day that we meet God.
The only question is: Are we willing to take that risk?
Now before we get started, let me assure you that I am not going to ask any of you to volunteer to be burned at the stake or crucified upside down or stoned to death, which is what happened to most of the early disciples.
But before we raise our hands to volunteer ourselves in service to God, we need to remember that life is seldom easy for those who accept God’s call. In fact terrible things can happen to people who take this Christianity thing seriously. After all, look at what happened to Jesus.
It was just another ordinary day for Jesus’ disciples. They were walking along with Jesus, but that was something they did every day for several years. Most of them probably considered it just another day with Jesus (as hard as it may be for us to imagine).
All of a sudden, the tone of Jesus’ message changes. He started talking to them about being turned over to the authorities and killed. Peter said what we would have said — “Heaven forbid that anything like that should happen to you!!!!”
Peter and the other disciples were uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus dying. Who could blame them? In fact, 2,000 years later people are still uncomfortable with the idea. You can hear it in the words that we use, or, more importantly, the words we don’t use. We just don’t talk about suffering, about atonement, about the cost of being a disciple of Jesus. More often we talk about Jesus in terms of love and compassion — and those are good terms to use when talking about Jesus, but they do not give us the whole picture. They only give us the safe picture of Jesus.
We must want more than the safe, watered down Jesus. We must want more than what one writer called “Decaffeinated Christianity” — the faith that won’t keep you up at night. We have to want more than that. We have to want an unsafe faith.
The apostles wanted Jesus to change the world, they just didn’t want Him to change them. They wanted a safe Jesus.
But Jesus never offered to be safe. Jesus only offered to be the way, the truth, and the life. And if he is the life, then we are not. If He is the way, then every other way is not His. If He is the truth, then everything within us that is not truth is opposed to what Jesus is all about.
What Jesus wants from us is very simple. He only wants our life, and He only hopes that we will understand why we must give it to Him, because that is the way of the cross:
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
We want to be in control. Jesus says that He is the Way. We want to argue about words. Jesus says that He is the Truth. We want to protect our lives. Jesus says that He is life.
The disciples didn’t understand because Jesus could see beyond what they could see. And God can still see beyond what we can see.
CS Lewis wrote that while Jesus was not safe, he was good. That is the important thing that we must remember. Jesus calls us to Himself and to His way, and He does not promise us a life which is safe. He calls us out of ordinary days and sets decisions before us. Will we turn and face what God has before us, or will we go back to safely tending the sheep?
If we believe that God is good, then we will be willing to risk going beyond what is safe. Jesus never promised us a rose garden and quiet Sunday afternoons to do the crossword puzzle. Instead He promised his followers a final reward and a heavenly destination. He promised that He would be with them even when they stumble and fall. He promised never to leave them even when others would hate and despise and misunderstand and tell lies about them.
He promised them an unsafe passage to an eternal world where we would enter into the safety of eternal life with God.
Jesus does not call us to martyrdom or a miserable life. He certainly does not call us to do harm to those who have not yet found their hearts and minds captured by the love and grace of God. He calls us to start with ourselves, with our hearts and our souls and our strength and our minds. He wants our lives. Actually He wants to give us life, and an abundant life, a life that is filled with much more than the things of this world.
What Jesus knew, and what He was trying to tell his followers, was that if you focus on yourself, on your own life, on “looking out for number one” then you will lose your life. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus warned his followers:
“Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” — Luke 12:15-21
Was the man cursed because he had riches? Not at all! The man’s fault was not in what he had, but on the condition of his heart. He was thinking only about his own survival, about his own needs. Jesus calls him lost because he failed to look beyond the walls of his own house.
But Jesus’ message is not one of condemnation. It is not a heavy set of law books set upon our shoulders. There are expectations, and there is a calling for us to follow — of that there can be no doubt. However before we consider what is our cross and what is expected of us, we have to remember what is already done.
First we remember the cross of Jesus. We accept and believe that it was on that cross that our sins were carried. It was on that cross that our salvation was achieved. It was on that cross that we were forgiven. When Jesus calls to us to follow Him, He is not asking us to do what He has already done. We do not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. We do not try to do the right things in order to earn our wings so that we can fly ourselves to heaven. That cross has already been carried, and it is pure sin for us to think of our lives in terms of mere obligation. Jesus did not want slaves or even indentured servants.
Remember Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last...” (John 15:12-16a)
Note the clear distinction Jesus makes between slaves — who have a list of obligations and requirements or else fear retribution — and friends. “I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last...” That is what Jesus has called us to — a life lived for things that will last long beyond ourselves.
We start out concerned with the collection of things, but we grow to seek the fruit that God has to offer, the fruit that will last.
God also gives us more than just commands, more than just a list of instructions to be followed.
God’s commandments throughout the Old Testament were always combined with a promise of God’s presence and strength. We hear this throughout the Psalms where David calls to God. Why did David know that God would hear him? Why did David know that God would respond? Because God had promised to do so. Even if that had been all God had done for us, it would have been a wonderful blessing.
Still God was not finished yet. In time God sent us Jesus as well, ready to help us to understand, and to take the burden of our sin from us. Even if that had been all that God had done for us, it would have been a magnificent blessing.
Still God was not finished yet. God sent His church the Holy Spirit. Through the Holy Spirit God continues to work in our heart, soul, strength, and mind, to renew us and strengthen us — but it is not for us. When the Holy Spirit comes and changes us, it drives us out of ourselves, our of lives into the world around us.
Let our prayer be to ask God to give us the faith to seek a life that is not safe, that we will be willing to take the risks that God will put before us and follow the path that God will show us.
Amen.