Wednesday, July 16, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Burning bush
Although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
Moses the Wise, Moses the Magnificent, Moses the Childlike. The Midian farmer will soon embark on the great mission God set out for him. Until today, the sheep herder born 80 years ago in Egypt had no idea.
Leading the priest’s flock across the Midian desert he came to Mt. Horeb (also called Sinai), which was the mountain of God.
Surely he was familiar with this land. He followed the sheep day after day, year after year through the same meadows and the same sand.
An angel of the Lord appeared to him as fire burning, in a bush which was not consumed.
Ruth Haley Barton points out that Moses was curious rather than frightened away by this fire. That’s a choice I make each time I encounter what I don’t recognize or understand. Will I investigate? Or ignore? Or run?
Moses decided, “I must go over to look at this remarkable sight!”
As he came closer God’s voice from the bush warned him to stop.
Come no nearer! Remove your sandals, for the place where you stand is holy ground. I am the God of your father, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Moses was afraid and hid his face. But he understood the language God was using. The sheep grazing just down the hill were not running away. There was no hurry. Moses had time that day to keep listening.
The cry of the children of Israel has reached me, and I see that the Egyptians are oppressing them. Come now! I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people out of Egypt.
Did Moses turn back and look toward God in the bush? Certainly he flinched. He was such a simple man, and he was afraid. Come now, the Lord said!
Who am I?
That isn’t the point, God says. Here’s the thing:
I will be with you.
Standing shoeless with Moses in the fading sunlight while the bush burns bright and brighter, I see Moses’ uncertainty ebb and flow. But God sees Moses from the inside and knows he has chosen the right man. In the words of Joan Chittister, Moses’ “own taste of darkness qualifies (him) to be an illuminating part of the human expedition.” Forty years ago in Egypt he did not die, and in Egypt he will not die now.
Sr. Joan conflates darkness and light to make spiritual sense – to me and certainly in those days to Moses.
There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it…. The clarity of it all is startling.
Imagine Moses at age 8. How did he respond to his chosen-one-childhood? Wasn’t he god so far in his life? Then one day, grown into adulthood, Moses killed an Egyptian, forgetting that he was not the One who made this man from dust. Moses panicked and feared for his life, knowing he would be killed himself because he had done what only God should do. So this Moses-who-acted-like-God escaped the spotlight of accusation and fled to a dark corner of the earth called Midian, where he hoped to hide, recover and repent. For forty years he repented, remembering and then forgetting again, that he was not god.
Now today, as he awoke at dawn, Moses the Childlike gathered the flock and started for the thousandth time on the way, where he would find Fire that knew him better than he knew himself.
(Exodus 3, Psalm 103, Matthew 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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