Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on the third Sunday of Lent, March 23, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our first reading today continues the lectionary’s Lenten romp through some of the most pivotal moments in the Old Testament. This Lent, all of them in one way or another reflect on God’s promises to Israel, especially as relating to their Exodus out of slavery in Egypt and their passage through the Red Sea. 

Today’s reading is particularly resonant: God appearing in the burning bush to Moses is almost cinematic in its drama. I’m sure the first time I encountered this story as a kid was watching Cecil B DeMille’s  “The Ten Commandments.” But long before 1950s epic biblical film-making, God appearing to Moses in the burning bush has been understood to be one of the most important and multi-layered passages in the Bible, read and interpreted in many ways. This morning I’ll some time exploring just three of them.

In the Christian tradition, one of the oldest ways of understanding this episode is as a type, an icon, of the spiritual encounter: Moses goes to the deserts of Sinai to escape himself, his history; but what he finds instead, or rather who finds him instead, is the God of his ancestors, who recognizes him and commissions him to return to the land, the people, he had fled, and lead them to freedom.

One of the most frequent reasons people give up on church or faith or prayer is because they come to it with expectations that are totally and utterly disappointed. Faith is not an escape from our problems, going to church does not magically make us better or even different from who we were before, prayer does not introduce us to a higher state of being. 

The episode of the burning bush teaches us that the moment we begin to approach God, we find ourselves stopped in our tracks, disoriented, turned around. Moses saw the bush that did not burn, and when he began to approach it, God called out to him by name, saying, “Moses, stop.” “Come no closer.” Then, “take off your shoes, for this wilderness, this mountainside, this waste scrub, is holy ground.” 

Already we are somewhere very different from the serene peace and joy that so many modern spiritual gurus promise about prayer. For Moses, at first glance in any case,  his encounter with God seemed to bring him everything but. So it is with the rest of us. The closer we get to God, or the closer God gets to us, the more we are thrown back to the very things we had worked so hard to escape. 

I don’t know what that is for you, but if you’re like most, it’s some combination of your history, the shame you carry, your griefs; your most besetting sins, your most unhealthy habits of mind, your disappointments, your distractions, your temptations. Why is it that the minute we show up at church, or the minute we begin to pray, or the minute we resolve to do some good work, suddenly there they all are again, like some monstrous internet comments section trolling our good intentions? 

Well, for the simple reason that God made us who we are, and his purpose is not to make us into something else, but rather to perfect what he began. The bush does not actually burn after all, it only appears to be burning, and approaching it Moses discovers the true end of every created thing, to be bright as flame with the presence of God. 

For us lowly humans, this project always means making something with our histories, our griefs; with the basket of unruly thoughts and deeds we’d rather just ignore. It means facing them, owning them, and letting God tell another story in them than the one we’ve been telling ourselves. But that’s hard, and painful, and very difficult, and it really doesn’t feel like peace or joy or nirvana most of the time.

Moses has to go back to the Egypt he had fled, to the people he had abandoned, and, ironically, be for them the icon of God’s faithfulness and the agent of God’s liberation: be the icon of what he had explicitly escaped. You and I won’t be let off the hook any more easily than Moses. What are you being called to face? The distractions that assault your prayers might be a good place to start asking that question.

Another important element in today’s passage is the introduction of the divine Name. To this day, Jews and even some Christians have such profound respect for the divine Name that they refuse to print it completely, let alone say it out loud. Moses asks God, “If I go to your people and say, the God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask, what is his name, what should I say?” God replies with a name that is famously impossible to translate, but rendered in English is, loosely, “I am that I am,” or, “I am he who is,” or simply, “I am.” 

If you’re Moses in that moment, I can’t imagine it’s a very satisfying response. Wouldn’t a name like Baal, or Anubis, or Ishtar have been more in-genre? But it’s a remarkable name all the same, and for both Jews and Christians it has been understood to mean simply that the God we worship is being in himself. His essence is to be; he is not a creature among other creatures, there was never a time before he came into being because he always has been. 

This is an insight many of the great religions share, that there is something divine about being. But the Judeo-Christian tradition goes quite a bit further by asserting that this divine being who is the God of Abraham is personal, is capable not only of recognizing Moses, but of seeing the suffering of his people Israel, of having compassion on them, and of appointing an agent who will rescue them and bring them to the land he had long ago promised to Abraham and his descendants. 

For Judaism and Christianity, Divine being is not just a principle, it is a person, a person who is not only capable of speech, relationship, empathy, but also a person who desires such things in the first place and acts in history in order to bring them about. This is incredibly important, because suddenly it places the ultimate truth about God not in the hands of scholars or emperors or bureaucrats but into the hearts of any who are capable of replying in kind, whose longing to know God meets God’s longing to be known to them. If divine being is fundamentally personal, then the ultimate truth about God is something that can be known only by love, not by training, position, expertise, or certification.

Maybe you know the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and his famous, terrifying quote, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Frankly, he’s not far off: except, for the Christian, the abyss we stare into when we go deep into ourselves and contemplate our life, our being, is not a void, not the annihilation of all distinction, not a principle or an abstraction; but rather the abyss at the heart of our being is nothing less than the whole love of God — and what stares back at us is God’s own face, in whose image you and I were made. There, at the deepest point of our souls, of all that is, is an encounter, whose name is only and all Love.

The last thing I’ll observe this morning about this episode of the Burning Bush is that it reminds us that there is a point to all this faith stuff, there is an end to our religion that we’re eagerly anticipating, aiming at; this is all really going somewhere, it’s not just an endless repetition of readings and rites so we can have some meaning on this earth during the time we’re alive. For Moses, he was to go liberate the people of Israel so that they could leave Egypt and worship there on that very mountain where God was visiting Moses in the burning bush — Mt. Horeb, Mt. Sinai. So that, when they got to that mountain, the whole people could receive the law and ratify a covenant with God, that he would be their God and they would be his people. So that they could embark on the joyful project of living together with him in love.

In the Christian faith, the end we’re aiming at is just what we’ll say in the creed in a few moments: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” when Christ’s “kingdom shall have no end.” In this life, we do not have being in ourselves, we are creatures, God is creator; we have being insofar as God continually wills it. The promise is, that because he created us to love and delight in, that God’s purpose is finally to assume all created, contingent creatures into himself. We will participate by grace in what God is by nature, and so we will join the eternal dance.

In this life we pray, we worship, we undertake works of charity and repentance so that we might be ready for the life of the world to come when it does finally arrive. This work always entails a retelling of our own stories, a reconciliation with former, younger, lesser versions of ourselves, forgiveness for the evil we have done and the good we have failed to do; and love for the God who makes these reunions possible, love for the God in whom these reunions take place.

So, when we enter the kingdom of God, we will recognize the face of the One who greets us, and find our whole selves, our souls and bodies, restored to us, and full, finally, of every peace and joy.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.