Holy Ground, just one step ahead ... or to the side

 Reading:  Exodus 3:1-15 

In Exodus 3 we are just getting to know Moses.  He’s an Israelite, a child of enslaved parents in the Egyptian Empire.  Miraculously, he is raised as an Egyptian in the home of the ruling pharaoh.  But as a young man rising in the Egyptian aristocracy, he blows his cover when he murders an Egyptian military commander whom he sees cruelly beating an Israelite slave. 

Moses gets out and puts Egypt as far behind him as he can.  He escapes to the Sinai where he moves in with his Israelite father-in-law Jethro, and works for him as a sheep-herder out in the desert.  It seems he’s reached the best possible end to his story … until one day he sees something burning – but not burning up – and the rest is history, at least the beginning of the history of the people of God.

One day while Moses was taking care of the sheep and goats of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, he led the flock across the desert and came to Sinai, the holy mountain. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him as a flame coming from the middle of a bush. Moses saw that the bush was on fire but that it was not burning up. “This is strange,” he thought. “Why isn't the bush burning up? I will go closer and see.”

When the Lord saw that Moses was coming closer, he called to him from the middle of the bush and said, “Moses! Moses!"

 He answered, “Yes, here I am.”

God said, “Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground. I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” So Moses covered his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

Then the Lord said, “I [like you] have seen how cruelly my people are being treated in Egypt; I have heard them cry out to be rescued from their slave drivers. I know all about their sufferings, and so I have come down to rescue them from the Egyptians and to bring them out of Egypt to a spacious land, one which is rich and fertile and in which the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites now live. I have indeed heard the cry of my people, and I see how the Egyptians are oppressing them. Now I am sending you to the king of Egypt so that you can lead my people out of his country.”

But Moses said to God, “I am nobody. How can I go to the king and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?"

God answered, “I will be with you, and when you bring the people out of Egypt, you will worship me on this mountain. That will be the proof that I have sent you.”

But Moses replied, “When I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors sent me to you,’ they will ask me, ‘What is his name?’ So what can I tell them?”

God said, “I am who I am. [Or … I will be who or what I will be … Or something like that; it’s really hard to tell … it’s almost like God is saying, “don’t even think you’ll ever really know my name, and be able to control or predict me.”] You must tell them: ‘The one who is called I Am has sent me to you.’ Tell the Israelites that I, the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, have sent you to them. This is my name forever; this is what all future generations are to call me.”

Meditation

Whenever I read this story, I immediately imagine the desolation and extreme loneliness of the meeting-place of Moses and God when God commissions Moses to go and set his people free.  But I wonder if that emphasis on the extreme geographical isolation is largely a reflection of my own inner predisposition towards reclusiveness and solitude.

Recently I’ve read that the Sinai did not feel as empty to the people of the time as we think it must have.  Many, if not most, who lived there were sheep-herders, and leading their herds around the desert on a regular route of short-term feeding patches was simply what they did.  It was their economy and livelihood, and “the wilderness” was no more remote and unknown to the people of that day as the orchards and vineyards of Winona used to be to the people of Toronto.

I’ve also learned that some rabbinic traditions suggest the real miracle of the story and what sets Moses apart from others as a candidate for God’s liberating purpose, is not that God sets the bush on fire and Moses sees it.  Rather, it’s that unlike all the other sheep-herders  who saw the burning bush and just passed by thinking there is really nothing special about a bush burning up in the heat, only Moses, when he sees it, actually stops what he is doing and goes over to it, and stands and looks at it long enough to see it actually isn’t burning up. 

Is this what makes the ground and the story told upon it holy?  Is it Moses’ extreme curiosity, his patience, and his willingness and openness to see through the appearance of a thing to the heart of it, and to the presence of holiness afire in the ordinary – even in what seems to be ordinary destruction and loss?  In the midst of the commerce of the day, the constant search for a livelihood, the routine back-and-forth across the hard, dry face of the earth to see the fire of God’s love at the heart of it all, and hear the call to live a transforming, liberated and liberating life?

This summer because of the pandemic, the Winona Peach Festival is cancelled for the first time since its beginning in 1967.  It’s a huge loss to the community because of the spirit it generates and the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for a whole host of community organizations and projects.  Here at Fifty we’ll really miss the tens of thousands we usually make every summer from the sale of peach pies.

To their credit, though, the Women of Fifty – alone among the participating organizations of the Festival, I’m told – sat down and took a good hard look at the situation, and in short order came to see that not all need be lost.  That the Festival is cancelled – up in smoke, but the call and opportunity to raise money for all the good work it supports, is not. 

So, with the fire of holy purpose within them, this weekend – the usual weekend of Peach Festival, they’ve organized a stand-alone sale in the church parking pot of 1,000 pies and whatever peach jam and jelly they have available.  And as this weekend approached their concern quickly became not whether without the Festival as the draw they’d be able to sell the 1,000 pies they’ve arranged for, but how on earth they were going to manage the traffic flow through our parking lot and on the highway in front of our building with the overwhelming response they’ve had with all the pies sold out more than a week ago through online and phone pre-orders.

It seems people are hungry for Fifty United Peach Pies.  And jam and jelly. 

And reaching out to satisfy that hunger has taken curiosity, patience, openness to see the possibilities that emerge when what we’re used to doing is taken away, and courage to do something new about it instead.

It makes me wonder what else the people around us, in the community around our church building, may be hungry for.  And may be even more aware of, because of the pandemic and all the other crises, and slow-downs and break-downs of our time.

For friendship maybe.  For comfort and hope.  For a helping hand.  For forgiveness and freedom from some shame they’ve carried far too long?  For help in helping their children know and believe in a God of love?  Or help in knowing God’s love themselves?

Maybe for a chance to be involved in something that makes a difference for good in the world?  To connect with other people of faith – any faith, for some good purpose? 

It makes me hope that as a church we’ll bring to all our planning in mission and worship and Christian education, in pastoral care and our ways of fellowship the same kind of curiosity, patience, openness, creativity and courage that we bring to our fund-raising.

We know we can do it.  In this time of pandemic with our normal ways of gathering for worship taken from us, we’ve learned to do this – something we knew others did, but we told ourselves we weren’t up to doing, for whatever reason.  Yet here we are, and we don’t intend to stop, even when we gather again in-person.

And before the pandemic, we tried a new kind of study-and-discussion group built around a really neat video series exploring “Gratefulness” as a life style and a moral choice.  It was a little different than we were used to, and we expected the usual 5-8 people.  But because it caught the attention of one of our members, and she shared her excitement about it with friends, colleagues and clients, the first week of the series we had 25 people crammed into our meeting space – at least half of whom had never been in, or even heard of Fifty church before.

As a church, one of the questions to ask is “what are people around us hungry for?” 

To find the answer we may need to stop at least some of what we are used to doing, take time to go over and look at something off to the side, and look long enough at it to see what and where and how the heart of the community really is, and where the fire of God is.

And in our own lives – in your life, “what are you hungry for?  Where and how is the fire of God in you?” 

People have come to Fifty this weekend because they’re hungry for peach pies. 

What else are they hungry for in the wilderness of our time? 

What else are you hungry for at the heart of your bright burning life?

Remembering the way (August 23, 2020)

Reading: Matthew 16:13-20

The story this morning is one that appears in some version in three of the four Gospels, and it’s one that is necessarily retold in every age and generation and congregation of the church, including ours.  It’s a story about the followers of Jesus confessing him to be messiah – the person of God who brings healing and salvation to the world, and about Jesus helping them to understand and not to misunderstand what that means.

This is the Matthew version of the story – Matthew 16:13-20, and there are two names or titles of special mythological persons that appear in it, in the conversation between Jesus and his followers.

One is “the Son of Man” who was a figure in Jewish mythology who it was thought will appear at the end of time, to reveal and bring to fulfilment God’s perfect will for humanity and for the Earth, and thus bring an end to history and a beginning to paradise.

The other is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” who also was a figure in Jewish theology, a Holy One coming directly from God into history to bring healing, freedom and peace to all the world.  It’s interesting that in the Roman Empire a certain cult grew up that saw the Emperor – th Caesar, was this person and to be worshipped and obeyed as such.

So … here’s the story:

Jesus went to the territory near the town of Caesarea Philippi, [a Roman administrative centre] where he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man [-- the one who will wrap everything up for good] is?” 

 

“Some say John the Baptist,” they answered. “Others say Elijah, while others say Jeremiah or some other prophet.”

 

“What about you?” he asked them. “Who do you say I am?” [An interesting shift in focus…]

 

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” [the one who comes into out history with God’s way of healing the world]

 

“Good for you, Simon son of John!” answered Jesus. “For this truth did not come to you from any human being, but it was given to you directly by my Father in heaven.   And so I tell you, Peter: you are a rock [named after “petros,” the Roman word for “rock”], and on this rock foundation I will build my church, and not even death will be able to overcome it.  I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of heaven; what you prohibit on earth will be prohibited in heaven, and what you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven.”

 

Then Jesus ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. [Interesting!]

 

Meditation

 

We’re still in a pandemic.  Around the world we’re in various stages of re-opening, with having to re-close always lurking as a possibility around the next corner.  The old normal is no more.  The new normal is still mostly a matter of discussion and dream.  In the meantime, we wonder what to make of the pieces of what we used to have and used to do.

 

 

 In this situation I see three things in this story of Jesus the messiah.

 

One is that we do not need the world to be in order, and we do not need to be in control or in power or even have power, to be church as Jesus calls us to be church, and to be effective servants of God’s salvation in the world.

 

By the time this story of Jesus the messiah was remembered, retold, and written down as part of the Gospel of God’s kingdom – sometime near the end of the first century of the Christian Era, the world had changed a lot from the way it had been when the events and the conversation in the story first took place. 

 

The old normal of the city of Jerusalem as the centre of Jewish life – the Jewish court a symbolic counterbalance to the power of Rome, and the Temple in Jerusalem the people’s way of staying connected to their God – was gone.  In 70 C.E., about a generation after Jesus, Rome had had enough of the persistent, troublesome rebelliousness of the Jewish people and the ineffectiveness of the local authorities to keep the peace, and they sent the army in, in full force.  Shock and awe they might have called it.

 

The city of Jerusalem was over-run.  The Jewish king was deposed.  The Temple was attacked and destroyed – not one stone left on another.  And on the hill of Masada, where the last remaining rebels were held trapped for weeks and cruelly murdered, Rome brought the old normal for the Jewish people to an end. 

 

From that moment on, the people had no living centre.  Their new normal was a long, vulnerable dispersion as a people scattered like ashes and broken remnants across the face of the earth.

 

It’s in this situation that the Christian community remembers and starts to retell and write down stories like the one this morning about Jesus the Messiah.  And in the Matthew version the story takes place not in the Temple, not in a synagogue in some Jewish village, not even in the safety of a Jewish home – but out on the road, in the open, in the very shadow of Caesarea Philippi, an administrative centre of the alien power that has invaded and, in hindsight, is about the destroy all that they have counted on to preserve their identity as God’s people in the world.

 

And what the story is saying is that it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter what normal you find yourself in – old, new, or in-between.  It doesn’t matter if your city, your temple, your king and your kingdom are intact and giving structure to your lives, or if they’re gone and taken from you.  It doesn’t matter if you have a safe place in the world you can call your own and be in charge of, or if you’re out on the road, in the open, on a long, hard way from what was to whatever will be.  It doesn’t matter because Jesus is the messiah, son of the living God, and he is really quite portable and thoroughly adaptable.

 

It’s he who enters our history with God’s way of healing for all, calls us to be part of it, and – this is the second thing – that way that he shows us is the way of sacrifice for others.

 

The disciples and followers of Jesus always have always had a hard time accepting this.  We long to turn Jesus into a new kind of conquering hero, a new style of emperor or king, someone who will take control of things on behalf of God and God’s people and have the power to help us find and enjoy a comfortable new normal.

 

But Jesus always resists our nudges in that direction, and tells us instead to get back into line behind him in the way he is showing to be the way of true healing for all – the way of self-giving sacrifice, no matter what kind of normal and what kind of world we are in.

 

Mitch Albom, almost 20 years ago wrote a delightfully insightful little book called the five people you meet in heaven, in which he tells the story of an old man named Eddie who dies tragically after doubting for years that his life has had any meaning, and is met in heaven by five people from different parts of his life who teach him five lessons – one each, about what gave his life more meaning than he ever imagined or understood.

 

The second of the lessons is sacrifice, and it’s taught to him by someone he knows only as “Captain” – the captain of the small army troop that he fought in, in WW2.

 

“Sacrifice,” the Captain said [when he met him in heaven].  “You made one.  I made one.  We all make them.  But you were angry over yours.  You kept thinking about what you lost.

 

“You didn’t get it.  Sacrifice is a part of life.  It’s supposed to be.  It’s not something to regret.  It’s something to aspire to.  Little sacrifices.  Big sacrifices.  A mother works so her son can go to school.  A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. 

 

“A man goes to war …”

 

He stopped for a moment and looked off into the cloudy gray sky.

 

“Rabozzo [one of their troop who was killed while they were overseas] didn’t die for nothing, you know.  He sacrificed for his country, and his family knew it, and his kid brother went on to be a good soldier and a great man because he was inspired by it.

 

“I didn’t die for nothing, either.  That night, we might all have driven over that land mine that I stepped on [when I walked ahead of the jeep you guys were in].  Then the four us would have been gone.”

 

Eddie shook his head.  “But you…”  He lowered his voice.  “You lost your life.”

 

The Captain smacked his tongue on his teeth.  “That’s the thing.  Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it.  You’re just passing it on to someone else.”

 

Greater love, Jesus says, has no one than to give their life – their time, energy, love, possessions, security, for and maybe to another.  In big ways, sometimes.  In a hundred little ways, all the time.

 

And the third thing?

 

This is not something just to talk about, Jesus says.  Don’t go just telling them I’m the messiah.  Don’t just be preaching about me and trying to convince people to believe things about me.

 

Rather, go show them.  Live it out.  Just do it.  Sacrifice.  Give yourself in big and little ways for the well-being of others.  Let go possession for the sake of sharing and passing on.  Even when you don’t want to.

 

Any of you can do it, he says.  Each of us does it all the time.  In areas of our life and in ways of loving and caring for others that we may not even imagine are meaningful at all.  That maybe someone in heaven – one of our five people, will help us understand and appreciate in hindsight.

 

And let that be enough.  You can do it without even talking about it – without even talking about me, he says.  Just doing it is enough for me to know you are my disciple and friend.  Enough too for others to know that God is with them, and is there for them no matter what.

 

And isn’t that what it takes for God’s healing to enter the stream of history through any of us and all of us, for the messiah to be present, no matter what the old or new or in-between normal is in which we find ourselves?