FROM THIS POINT ON

August 28, 2011
Pentecost 11
Exodus 3:1-15
Romans 12:9-21

(prayer)

There was this time when Jesus asked his followers a couple of ‘pointed questions’ – I assume that the phrase pointed question refers to one that cuts right to the point, it slices through the fluff and digs right in to the centre of the matter. Pointed Questions can sometimes catch us off guard.

So Jesus dug deep with these:

ÿ Who do people say that I Am? and

ÿ Who do YOU say that I Am?

That was the gospel lesson we focused on last week in church. If you know the story, you know that the rumour mill was willing to go as far as saying Jesus was a mighty prophet. But Simon earned his ‘rocky nickname’ by admitting that he believed that Jesus was the anointed one of God – the Messiah, the Christ!

In that story, Jesus’ identity was questioned. Today, we heard that Jesus was right in line with the long-standing scriptural heritage. In Exodus, chapter three, we can read about God’s identity being questioned and Moses’ identity being confirmed.

God has seen the suffering of the people; God is offering them liberation, a new land and a new life.

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Moses grew up in the Egyptian court – raised as the adopted son of pharaoh’s daughter. Her father was a paranoid tyrant who feared that the descendants of Jacob who had lived in Egypt since the time of Joseph had grown too numerous and so they were enslaved. To keep the numbers in control, the story goes that he ordered the young boys to be killed.

It seems that he wasn’t concerned about the girls. He should have been! Many Hebrew boys escaped the infanticide because some of the midwives refused to commit murder, even under royal orders. Moses’ mother hid him for the first three months after the edict was issued and his sister watched over his floating basket hideout, camouflaged in the reeds, every time the death squads can close. Finally, another woman (pharaoh’s daughter) played the key roll in Moses’ survival. It probably horrified Miriam when she saw that her brother’s basket had been discovered. But it was not a tragedy – the princess knew that this was one of the Hebrew children and yet she defied her own father’s orders and raised him as her own. She, coincidentally, even got Moses’ birth mother to be his nurse maid.

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It appears that Moses grew up not knowing his true heritage. But he had a heart of fairness that was odd for a grandson of Pharaoh. He was violently angered by the beating of a Hebrew slave at the hands of an Egyptian overlord (leading to Moses killing that Egyptian). Later he berated two Hebrew men for fight amongst themselves.

When it became obvious that his murder of the Egyptian was know, he feared for his life and fled east into the Sinai wilderness. It was there that he met the family of Jethro, the priest of Midian, whose seven daughters worked in the fields with flocks of sheep. Moses married one of Jethro’s daughters and started raising a family.

He had moved on from his life in the court of Egypt. From that point on he was a shepherd. And life was good.

The final three verses of Exodus chapter two, which lead directly into the passage that was read today say... 23After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. 24God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 25God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.

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It was a normal day, most likely. Moses was deep in the Sinai wilderness with a flock when he noticed a small fire on the mountain called Horeb. The longer he looked, he noticed that the fire wasn’t spreading and it wasn’t burning out. This warranted a closer look.

As Moses suspected, it was a fire – a bush was ablaze; but the wood was not burning up. Even the leaves remained. Very strange. But not as strange was what happened next.

The bush talked!

“Moses, before you come any closer, take off your sandals for this is Holy Ground.”

“I Am the God of YOUR ancestors – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

“I have heard my people’s cries of suffering in Egypt and will come to deliver them and bring them to a new land. Actually, you’re going to do much of the work – I Am sending YOU to Pharaoh to get him to Let My People Go.”

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And here is where God’s identity is questioned: “who are you again?”, Moses asks the bush.

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The gods of Egypt all had names – they each had their sphere of influence. It was all clear and neat. Now, this bush-god was telling Moses he was Hebrew (maybe he had suspected this) and that he was to be the spokesperson for this god. His Egyptian way of thinking assumed that gods had names to distinguish them from each other.

“Who will I tell them has sent me?”

“I Am Who I Am” (I will be who I will be – the tense in Hebrew can be ambiguous).

“Tell them: ‘I Am’ has sent me to you.

“Tell them: Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has sent me to you.

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God’s name is I Am. God’s name is a verb: the verb ‘to be’. God’s name proclaims that God exists. In the last verse of the Exodus passage we heard today, God is called Yahweh – which is the so-called Divine Name; it is the name of God in the Bible. It is most often translated in English language bibles as “The LORD” (using capital letters). The name Jehovah is a really bad translation of Yahweh. There are good and logical reasons why translators use the LORD and why Jehovah has no historical significanc, but I won’t go into that now (ask me after church, if you like).

The origins of the name Yahweh are in the verb ‘to be’ – hayah – As God told Moses: “I Am”.

And from that point on, the direction of Moses’ life completely changed. He would become the key figure of Hebrew history – the liberator of the people, the giver of the Law.

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At each given moment in time, there is absolutely nothing we can do about anything that has happened before – whether that be years ago or the second that has just past.

• The past is our teacher – we learn the lessons of our experiences – the good and the bad.

• The future is our canvas, ready for us to create.

• Each moment contains the choice of how to live – what ethic will guide and influence us.

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The Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome was written relatively late in his missionary career. As such, the theology – the basic tenants of faith that Paul had been teaching had reached a fairly developed stage. By the late 50s when he wrote this letter, he had his lessons pretty much worked out.

In the section from chapter 12, which we heard this morning, Paul details a description of what a Christian life will look like.

• Genuine Love. Not fake, surface, lip-service love, but genuine love! And show mutual affection to each other.

• The only thing to hate is...evil. Hold fast to what is good.

• Have hope, patience, perseverance.

• Wish the best for others - live in harmony with others; don’t be vengeful - don’t repay evil with evil, but act noblely. Overcome evil with good (it really messes evil people up when you do that – they usually will react with remorse: love has that impact on people).

• Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.

• Don’t be arrogant or alluff (sp?) – but associate with everyone.

• And everyone of you, individually, always look for the possibility for peaceful living with all!

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That’s good stuff!

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Paul told the Romans in that letter and to us as well as we read it, that the Jesus’ Movement needs to put its faith in action. If we are united with each other in our individual and corporate relationship with the Great I Am, we are to live for the sake of bringing God’s purposes to life in the world – and we do this most authentically, by living faithfully in each moment with the promise that from this moment on, our love will be genuine and it will be obvious to anyone who takes care to notice.

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I know that this seems ‘pie in the sky’ and very impractical in a world where acts of vengeance and mistrust and arrogance and trampling on the ‘little guy’ is rewarded with wealth and power.

It looked that way in Paul’s time too, as it did back in Moses’ time.

As we read on in Exodus, we see that Moses questioned the wisdom and practicality of God’s plan on many occasions.

In Paul’s time, the Roman empire was the ultimate power in the world – there was only peace because they had such a military presence, even in the out-lying areas that any small rebellions of revolts were quickly and violently quashed. I imagine that could not have been more obvious that right in the City of Rome, where this group of believers tried to live the Christian Life.

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I may have told some of you this story before, but bare with me.

A boy was walking along the ocean shore at low tide. Across the beach were hundreds of starfish who had been marooned as the water receded. It was a hot sunny day and he knew that many of them would die before the tide rose again, so he started tossing starfish into the surf. A man came along and noticed what the boy was doing and said: “you’re wasting your time, there are thousands of them; you can’t make a difference.” The boy paused and looked at the starfish in his hand and tossed it in the water and said: “I made a difference to that one.”

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Paul knows that the church as a body has very little influence and so he speaks to the individual Christian: “So far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”

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In our time, the Church as an institution holds little power or influence within the wider society (maybe there was a time when we were more enmeshed, but those days are long gone).

We are more similar to Paul’s church in Rome where the place of impact is more local. One life at a time; one moment at a time.

The tenant of our faith that makes this possible is that we believe that “God Is” – God exists. With that hope, liberation and transformation are possible.

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THE central message of Jesus’ ministry is unconditional love ( in the Greek of the New Testament): love God with you whole heart, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

is also used in Romans – let your unconditional love be genuine. Just imagine how our world might be if everyone who professed to be a follower of Jesus pledged to live this way from this point on.

Let us pray:

Yahweh, God of Love;

We are grateful that you are always with us. Inspire us to make the next moment one of Genuine Love. In Jesus’ name, we pray, Amen.



#333VU “Love Divine”