Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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Growing up, Faith was important to me. From elementary to middle school, I attended a school that was connected to my home parish. I knew I wanted to serve God with my life. At the time, I thought that would be through studying Scripture.
Then a big moment came. After my first year in high school, my diocese was putting on a trip for youth to England and Taizé, a trip that was at a very affordable price.
One of our stops in England was to Winchester Cathedral. I would learn later that this is the site that Jane Austen is buried.
At the time, we were holding a prayer session in the back of our church. We would come up to either our bishop suffragan or one of the priests on our trip for a brief prayer and conversation.
I happened to go to our bishop suffragan, and he asked “What’s on your mind?” Before I could even think, the words poured out of me, “Am I to be a priest?”
After that, our bishop suffragan gave me a hug and said we’d pray for guidance.
I took the rest of the trip, particularly in Taizé, to try and sort through what had happened, to seek that guidance, to try and understand what it was that God was doing. At the end of the trip, I decided this was too big a thing, and I didn’t need to worry about it now.
Yet just thinking that made that sense grow stronger and stronger. I began to arrange my life with ordination in mind from the activities I took part in to what I studied and everything in between. I tried to model myself on what I felt it meant to be a servant of God in the world.
Being called by God to any task or ministry can be daunting. It also has a tendency to pop up out of nowhere.
That certainly is what happens with Moses. In between our readings last Sunday and now, Moses obviously grew up. At one point, he sees an Egyptian mistreating a Hebrew person. Moses intervenes and kills the man, leading him to run away as a fugitive into the desert. There he meets Jethro’s daughter Zipporah, gets married, and lives a calm and peaceful life.
Then he sees a bush burning in the desert yet not being consumed. He goes off his path to observe this strange phenomena. There God speaks to him and gives him the task to save God’s Chosen People. God even shares with Moses the Lord’s Holy Name. It’s a name that encompasses God so completely that just as it is unpronounceable, it’s meaning and implications often go beyond our human understanding.
What we also won’t see in our Lectionary is Moses’ response. He finds it hard to accept God’s task. He pulls out every excuse, including the fact that he has a stutter. When all these excuses fail, he asks God to send someone else. God doesn’t let him off the hook, but he does provide Moses with his biological brother Aaron who will be the one who physically speaks the words which God will give to Moses.
Moses doesn’t completely understand what being called by God entails. Peter doesn’t either. As we heard last week, Peter correctly states that Jesus is the Messiah. This week, however, Peter chastises Jesus for saying that He must suffer and die, the key part of Jesus’ work to save us all. Jesus in turn chastises Peter for his failure to truly understand what the Messiah is really supposed to do.
It is after this that Jesus lays out what it means to be a Disciple, just as Paul does in Romans. In this way we not only hear God’s call and accept it, we begin to mold our lives to fulfill what it is that God wants us to do in the world.
God calls us when we least expect it, so we must keep our eyes open to see whatever sort of burning bush the Lord may provide us. We may not understand what all that entails, so we must be ready to listen. Once we take the time to hear and, hopefully, understand, then we can start to mold our lives based on what God has said to us in the past to fulfill that purpose God has given us now.