What gets your attention? The sound of a car alarm with a horn just like your own? The coronavirus graphic flashing on screen during a newscast? A ringtone? A loved one’s voice? A baby bunny hopping in your backyard? A TikTok video? A silly meme? A T-shirt that says: “2020; 1 star; wouldn’t recommend it.”
There is so much that vies for our attention each day—social media newsfeeds and hungry kids; the thunder of recent rainstorms; our own sense of worry. Life as it plays out throws marketing pitches at us all day long, trying to command our attention and consequently our energy.
In the familiar story we have heard this morning, God gets Moses’ attention through a burning bush in a wilderness. This brushfire is odd, as the fire but does not consume it. Curious Moses, steps away from the flock of his father-in-law’s sheep he’s herded to the far side of the mountain to learn more. Before he knows it, he has drawn near to the presence of God.
God tells Moses that the mistreatment of the Israelite people has gotten God’s attention. God has seen the suffering of God’s people at the hands of the Egyptians. God has heard their cries. But even for God, simply noticing the injustices experienced by the oppressed is unacceptable. Action is necessary. Wrongs must be righted. The oppressed must be set free. And God needs Moses’ help.
So God appeals to Moses through this conversation. God needs a shepherd who can lead people through the rough wilderness terrain. God needs someone who knows Pharaoh and the Egyptian people but who identifies with and has a heart for the Hebrew people. God needs someone who themself has been saved—who knows what deliverance feels like, and even how complicated it can be. God needs someone who understands the tensions in this world and who has gotten caught up in the conflict—even when that engagement has been fraught with sin and imperfection. God needs Moses to show up before Pharaoh on God’s behalf and set God’s people free.
Moses raises questions and even objections in the 3 chapters that follow these verses. And rightly so, perhaps. God is asking Moses to do the impossible. God is calling him to face an oppressive sovereign and singlehandedly liberate an entire enslaved people. But God assures Moses that God will go with him. God will equip him. God will enable him to get Pharaoh’s attention and the attention of the Israelite people. God will work with and through Moses to bring justice.
But see, this story is not just a story about call. It is a story that reflects God’s priorities. God sees Moses, just as God sees those who are enslaved. And God invites Moses to shift his vantage point as well as his social location to identify not with the Pharaoh in whose house he was reared, but with the slave woman who gave him birth. God sees Moses and claims his complicated self as God’s own. But God reminds Moses that God’s own include those who are being mistreated and maligned, and a faithful response is action.
I like to identify with this story. I like to think that the God who can work through a murderer and a stutterer with a fractured past. That God must be able to work through me too! I like to think that the God who equipped Moses in all his limitation can fill the gap of my own limitations and stand by me too.
Now, I do believe this is true—and I have preached it before. But another look at this text also shows that this text is holds more than a call to an imperfect person to join the work of a perfect God. This passage also makes it clear that God calls those in a position of privilege to pay attention the broken systems in the world. God calls attention to needs of those on the margins and calls all who are within earshot to be instruments of liberation. Siblings, if we want to identify with Moses in our ability to be called by God, we also need to identify with the substance of Moses’ CALL.
Candidly, it is a call painted all throughout the texts of the entirety of scripture. God continually disrupts the power structures of society to lift up those to whom society has attributed no worth: the younger sibling with no authority; the woman with no voice, the nation with no power, the carpenter Messiah with no throne. God calls us over and over again to reevaluate the things of this world to which we have grown accustomed and redirect our energy away from upholding the status quo and spend our time administering grace and working for justice—especially on behalf of those made most vulnerable by the powers that be.
Howard Thurman reminds of this in his book “Jesus and the Disinherited.” He says:
The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.1
For centuries Christians have proclaimed a God made in our own image. We have confused Christianity and Nationalism. We have used the rhetoric of faith to harm others with Divine backing. We have used lines of scripture to support rhetoric of hate—from the indoctrination of slavery to the subordination of women to the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people. Susan B. Anthony is quoted to have said, “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
However, the God of the WHOLE of scripture does not suggest that our sacred text be treated as a mad lib in which humankind can freely substitute nouns of our own choosing to replace the name of Christ—the true author and perfecter of our faith.
Rather, the God of scripture calls us to use our gifts—however imperfect, limited, fragile, exhausting as they may be—to partner with God in the act of liberation. Candidly, WE are called to help God free the oppressed. We are called to see the needs of others with Divine eyes, listen with Divine ears to hear the cries of those in need. We are called out of our comfort zones and invited to step up and DO SOMETHING—not to advance our own brand or agenda—but rather to advance the needs of others, especially those more vulnerable than ourselves…—not on our own, but with God’s help.
We’re called to shift our gaze and notice the world around us: to see that in spite of the centennial anniversary of the 19th amendment granting women in the US to vote, voter suppression remains a thing—especially for people of color. And we are reminded once more that women of all colors, creeds, identities and orientations are still not granted equal ground to our male counterparts.
As we marked the 57th anniversary of the march on Washington last week, we are called to open our eyes and see to see that all lives simply don’t matter until Black lives matter. The deep racial divide that remains in our nation is laid out before us through the differences in response of Kenosha police officers—who within days shoot a black man seven times in the back, and then ignored a white teen walking down the street carrying a semiautomatic rifle as witnesses shout at police that this young man had just shot people. Yes, as Pastor Randy indicated at the beginning of our service—it is complicated and our understanding is incomplete. Yet even though both accounts are still under investigation, the differences in the preliminary police response remain striking. And we can’t help but notice that black men and white men are not being treated equally, still.
See, our lives of faith are called to be lives of action. Living our faith means engaging our society—our neighbor, our political system, our finances—with our eyes and hearts fixed on the needs of all people—especially those who are most vulnerable.
And as God’s encounter with Moses reminds us, God is, in fact the initiator of our activism! God is the power who disrupts the “powers-that be” in the world, over and over again. All throughout scripture, God issues calls and commands that shake the foundations of the governments of our world and redirect power and agency toward the marginalized. God sets the captive free; God welcomes the outcast; God forgives the sinner; God elevates the poor and lowly…The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us:
One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice; and justice at its bet is power correcting everything that stands against love.2
As a people of faith, our challenge and our call is to pay attention:
To God
To those who are on the margins
To those who are being mistreated
To those who are marginalized for any difference
To laws and practices that create artificial hierarchies, that disenfranchise or harm.
And then we need to step into humble service, with a willingness to answer God’s call to LOVE. The words of the apostle Paul remind us of what this call looks like when enacted. It looks humble, compassionate, counter-cultural and gracious. Love enacted means loving those who are not like us, to love when it means surrendering worldly power, to love when it is uncomfortable or hard work, and to even love our enemy! Yet, like Moses, we can live into this sometimes impossible call knowing that we are strengthened, equipped and sent out by a God who first loved us.
Let us love in a manner that implements the demands of justice. Let us love in God’s name.
May it be so.
1 Thurman, Howard, Jesus and the Disinherited; p 29
2 King, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, Jr.; “Where Do We Go From Here?” – extract from King’s last Southern Christian Leadership Conference presidential address.