August 31—Turning Toward the Burning Bush

Passages: Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

Have you ever planned and eagerly anticipated a vacation or a visit from friends, only to be disappointed by the results? Perhaps you’re more pragmatic than I am, and have never felt that way, but I have certainly experienced this sensation many times. I set up all sorts of expectations for what something will be like, and then the experience of it loses all joy when it differs from those expectations. In contrast, some of the times I have most enjoyed in my life were the moments I never expected anything from—a simple bike ride down the Minuteman Trail, Swedish meatballs at Ikea, talking with my grandfather at the kitchen table. The moments in which I loosen the controlling stranglehold I attempt to keep on my life, perhaps, provide just enough room for the Divine Mystery to enter in.

This phenomenon seems to also hold true even in some of the major courses my life has taken. The internship that eventually set me down this crazy divinity school path? Started as a mock job interview project for a college class. My first encounter with the person who would become my life partner? A rather unremarkable introduction at the Kentucky State Fair. I expend considerable energy attempting to chart my life course, but in retrospect, the significant moments often come when I’m not looking for them at all.

If we consider Moses’ story a prototype for God’s call, then perhaps God is usually found where we least expect it. In our lectionary passage today, Moses is really minding his own business when God encounters him. You could say that Moses has already tried to make his stand for justice and failed—in Exodus 2:11-15, we are told that Moses kills an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews. The result? Moses’ authority as a leader of the Hebrews is explicitly rejected in 2:14, and he has to skip town.

So when God encounters Moses, he has prudently chosen to lie low in the wilderness more or less indefinitely. Alienated from both his Hebrew tribe and his adopted Egyptian family, stripped, like the Joseph of a few weeks ago, of the power and privilege of his royal upbringing, Moses is truly “an alien residing in a foreign land” (2:22) at the beginning of chapter 3. The opening verse tells us that Moses “led his flock beyond the wilderness” (v. 1), suggesting that metaphorically, if not literally, Moses is lost and adrift at this stage in his life.

That’s when Moses comes upon God—or more accurately, God reveals God’s self to Moses. Upon seeing a bush that is burning but not consumed, Moses remarks that he must turn aside to see the strange sight. Now, I still don’t think Moses quite gets the significance of what he is seeing here. His tone is one of awed curiosity, like the tone you get when you go to Yellowstone National Park and see your first wildlife up close: “Would you look at that, kids?! That’s a real, live buffalo crossing the road!”

But then God speaks from the bush, and Moses finally gets it. Like Joseph before, like Samuel and Isaiah afterward, Moses responds to God’s call with the words, “Here I am.” Before he even knows what might be asked of him, Moses has already presented himself before God for the task ahead. It is paradigmatic of the life of faith, really. If you’re in a tradition that practices infant baptism, then other people signed you up for Christian faith. But even if you came to faith later in your life, of your own accord, you probably had no real notion of what the Christian life would entail. You responded to God’s call with your own “here I am,” just as clueless as Moses to what God might actually tell you to do. God surprised us, and continues to surprise us, just as that burning bush came unexpectedly upon Moses in the wilderness.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably wished for God to give you a burning bush experience that will tell you what to do. We all want to stop stumbling our way along, being confronted with ambiguous forks in the road where we’re not sure what to do next. And yes, it is true in this passage that God tells Moses exactly what the Holy One is going to do and how God expects Moses to be a primary player in it. So are we doing something wrong if our call isn’t always that clear cut?

I don’t think so. Think of it this way—how many times would Moses have led his flocks through that same wilderness, far from home? Perhaps he had wandered past Horeb before, wondering whether the God of his ancestors was merely a myth, asking why this fabled God did not do something to end the Israelite oppression. Yet as passage clearly points out later in verses 13-15, our attempts to control the wild, mysterious divine presence are futile. Just as God will not be named, will not be put into our boxes and conformed to our labels, God will not spit out answers to the challenges of life like a magic eight ball.

Rather, like Moses, we can only be open to the unexpected and receptive to the call as it comes. Because we don’t know when we will catch sight of that burning bush out of the corner of our eye.

August 3-- Feeding the Crowds (Instead of Turning and Running)

Passages: Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7, 15; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21

Life in the Boston area, I have discovered, always involves crowds—you just never seem to be able to escape them. My husband and I drove all the way to Salem a few nights ago for a quiet, relaxing seaside dinner. We made it through road closures, traffic snarls, and blocks of parking spot-less curbs, only to finally dine in a restaurant so loud that we could hardly hear one another speak. When I recently went to experience the meditative, peaceful environs that inspired Walden, I was shocked to find Walden Pond swarmed by hundreds of people crammed onto its tiny beaches, their voices drifting up in a dull roar that echoed through Thoreau’s hallowed woods. In Massachusetts, especially during the summer tourist season, it seems that the only path to true solitude leads to somewhere in upstate Maine.

So we folks from Massachusetts can feel some of Jesus’ pain when, in today’s gospel lectionary passage, he gets in his boat and sails off for some R&R, only to find that he just can’t escape those pesky crowds. Jesus has good reason to seek solitude—he has just heard the news of John the Baptist’s death, and John’s killer thinks that Jesus is a resurrected John (14:1-2). It is smart for Jesus to lie low for a few days.

But someone in Jesus’ camp isn’t good about keeping his itinerary secret. For just like Walden Pond’s beaches on a sunny Saturday afternoon, upon coming ashore Jesus sees the beach jammed with people from the nearby towns. If Jesus had been like you or me, he probably would have cruised a little further up the coast for a more secluded beach. This being Jesus, though, “he had compassion for them and cured their sick” (v. 14).

Yet Jesus has something more in mind for this crowd than simply a few healings. To understand what’s going on, it helps to take a step back and think about the role this story plays in Matthew’s larger narrative. Many scholars have pointed out that for Matthew, Jesus is a latter-day Moses, the new lawgiver (Moses is threatened at birth but miraculously escapes; Matthew’s Jesus is threatened at birth but miraculously escapes. Moses gives the children of Israel the Law on Mount Sinai; Matthew’s Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7). So when Jesus feeds the crowds twice in Matthew’s gospel—here in 14:13-21 and again in 15:29-39—there are echoes of Moses providing manna and quail to the Israelites on God’s behalf in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11. Jesus is to these people as Moses was to their ancestors, God’s miraculous messenger sent to lead them to the Promised Land.

But is Jesus really Moses here? Or is Jesus actually playing out the divine role in this little Exodus/Numbers parody? For when the disciples come to Jesus and ask him to send the crowds away, he doesn’t respond by telling everyone how God has promised to feed them, as Moses did. Instead, he tells the disciples, “You give them something to eat” (v. 16). When they offer all that they have, Jesus himself does the miraculous, transformative work that before had been reserved only for God. Here Matthew clearly states that Jesus is not simply a new Moses, but greater than Moses. Jesus not only speaks for God, but is the Son of God.

What about those disciples, then? The disciples, like Moses, are God’s servants to the people. They participate in the miracle, not only bringing the five loaves and two fish, but also distributing the meal to the crowds. The whole passage has a ritualistic, liturgical undertone to it—with all this blessing and breaking, giving and receiving, it sounds a lot like our own Eucharist services today. Jesus is inaugurating a new community to follow his teachings, a community where God amplifies our limited human tools to effectively serve the world. Jesus’ disciples find that with his help, they can in fact meet the needs of the crowds. They may not be new lawgivers, as Moses was, but they find that what they have to give is enough to do the job.

In these dog days of summer, when the needs of those around us threaten to swallow us like voices swallowed up in a crowded restaurant, remember Jesus feeding the five thousand. It isn’t just about the abundant feast that Jesus has put before us to nourish and sustain us on our personal journeys. For we are not only the crowds, but we are the disciples—called to offer grace and mercy to others as Christ has offered us grace and mercy. Our tools can seem woefully inadequate to the task. But through Christ’s transformative power, our lack becomes God’s abundance in us. Through Christ’s grace, we find sustenance for ourselves and strength to serve the world.