The Rev. Kenneth H. Saunders, III
St. Andrew's Episcopal Church/Christ Episcopal Church
Cleveland, NC
August 31, 2008
RCL Year A – Proper 17
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church – Homecoming Service
Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28
Surrounded by the beauty and history of this holy place, it is easy to get distracted…
So this morning, I am going to try to help you out a little bit…
Several years ago, my spiritual director taught me this centering exercise, and I still use it often to reorient myself and focus, to remind me of what my purpose on this Earth is.
So I am going to pass it along to you today… and I hope you will use it on your own spiritual journey.
I want everyone to please take a deep breath and repeat after me very slowly…
“be still and know that I am God”
“be still and know that I am”
“be still and know”
“be still”
“be”
(again)
God is!! God is a form of being… God is! God was! and God always will be!
Moses knew it! The Apostles and Prophets knew it! Paul knew it! The founders of St. Andrew’s Church knew it! and We know it still today!
God is!! – sometimes we just need to be still for a moment and remember that God is...
You and I both know that this is a busy, busy world… we should sometimes just take some time out, time out to be still and remember that God is…
Moses was busy. He had been raised in Egypt in the family of Pharaoh, and been placed as a taskmaster over some of Pharaoh’s projects. But one day, he was protecting one of the Hebrew slaves who was being beaten by and Egyptian. Needless to say, Pharaoh got word of it and sought to kill Moses. So Moses left Egypt and fled to Midian, and married Zipporah, one of the seven daughters of Jethro, who was the local priest there.
This is where we pick up the story today… Moses is busy minding his father-in-law Jethro’s flock and led it beyond the wilderness… a place of danger and mystery…
in the ancient world, the wilderness was a wild place… one just didn’t go to the wilderness for fun… often when we see the word wilderness in the Bible, it is intend to make us think of a place of thirst, hunger, and deprivation, a place haunted by beasts and demons, and a place echoing with frightful noises…
We can assume that Moses had good reason to be there… but the part that sticks out, the part that we all know and love isn’t the fact that Moses was in the wilderness, tending his father-in-laws sheep… In fact we even forget about the sheep at the point that Moses encounters the flame of a fire that is coming out of a bush…
I am sure that it wasn’t strange in a dry and barren land, to see scattered brush fires here and there… but this one was a bit different… and got Moses’ attention… Moses went up to inspect… and saw that the bush was blazing, but wasn’t being consumed…
Now most of us know that there are 3 things in our physical world necessary for fire… heat, oxygen, and fuel… Moses caught on very quickly that this fire was very real but it was missing something… fuel… the bush was burning, but is wasn’t being burned…
Then in the still quiet, out of the blazing bush, God calls out “Moses, Moses…” and Moses responds “here I am”… God instructs Moses to come no closer and remove the sandals from his feet… God tells Moses… “you are on holy ground.”
Then, in an act of complete submission, Moses removes his sandals… To a shepherd, his shoes are his protection, making it possible to navigate the rough terrain of the countryside… Removing his sandals in the wilderness makes Moses completely vulnerable to his surroundings… Moses was frightened, yet listening intently to God’s every word…
God goes on to tell Moses that God has seen the torment of the Hebrews in Egypt, and has listened to their cry… God sends Moses back to Egypt to retrieve God’s people and lead them to a land promised to them… the land flowing with Milk and honey…
and God instructs Moses to bring them back to the Mountain to worship God…
God redeems God’s people… God heard them… God heard their prayers for deliverance, and their cries out for salvation… And God sent them a savior… Moses… God delivered them out of slavery in the land of Egypt and led them across the red sea to a land flowing with milk and honey… God redeems God’s people…
And God still redeems God’s people… God hasn’t stopped…
In the time of Hebrew history when the Roman government was growing strong and dominating the lands around the Mediterranean, the whole world was a mess… God heard the cries once again of a broken and battered world… and God is faithful… God redeems God’s people… But this time, God didn’t send us a Moses to lead us out of the bondage of slavery… God came to us himself in the person of Jesus Christ… his only son, the righteous man who walked on this earth and died on a cross, God became fully human being, to save us from ourselves…
God redeemed us then from the mistakes we have made, taught us by his example how to live in community and in relationship with one another, and how to love one another. All we have to do is be still long enough to listen, follow, and believe…
Jesus reminds us this morning that following him is not going to be easy… following him is not going to be the easy way… nor even the desired way caught up in the way of the world…
He tells us that in order to be focused, and do what he needs us to do, that we need to focus on divine things… not human things…
This is where we learn from Moses… in order to be focused on divine things we should be still and listen. Listen for that still small quite voice of God…
Then we should humble ourselves… we should to take off our sandals and make ourselves vulnerable to be formed into what Christ desires for us…
we should be still for a while and listen…
Moses asks What shall I say to the Israelites when I get back to Egypt???
Gods says, “Tell them that the God of your ancestors has sent me to you, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob….”
Then Moses asks what if they ask me “what is his name?” What do I tell them?
God said to Moses, I AM WHO I AM…
Be still and know that I am God…
Be still and know that I am
Be still and know….
Be still…
Be
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