Sunday, September 03, 2017
 
In the early days of hurricane Harvey, a New York Times reporter wrote that he and his wife had saved to buy their house in a wonderful neighbourhood not far from the Houston medical center, a place where the neighbours knew each other from walking their dogs. They had been advised by the mayor to stay in place. The water came up so fast, it was coming in their door. They cooked their meat and took what supplies they would need to their second floor, all the while trying to remain calm for their 12 and 4 year old. Before they knew the water was a foot high, the plumbing was out, the electricity was out, their iPhones would be unable to recharge. All they could do was wait. What do we do when devastation strikes? Here in Toronto we are not dealing with floods, but we have our own struggles. When bad things happen, we may be tempted to cry out, “O God, why have you forgotten us?” It is hard for us to believe that God has a purpose for each one of us. 
 
As Moses tended sheep in the Sinai Peninsula he must have wondered if God had forgotten about his people. They had been in Egypt for three hundred years, and for many of those years they had been in slavery, forced to do whatever the Egyptian overseers commanded them to do. They needed rescue, and must have thought God had forgotten them. They were asking the same questions we might ask in situations of dire need, “Have you forgotten us, O God?” Moses had tried to help. That is why he has in Midian, in the Sinai Peninsula on the far side of the Red Sea, tending sheep. He had grown up in the palace in Egypt as the adopted son of the Pharaoh’s daughter, when Pharaoh had ordered all the Hebrew boys killed. He looked more like the Hebrew slaves he saw everywhere, than like the Egyptian royalty in the palace. He came to know that he was adopted as a baby and that his own people were suffering. They were not eating fine meals served by servants, as he was. In fact, they often were the servants. They did not have the freedom to ride about the countryside, as he did. They were often beaten and abused, oppressed by hard taskmasters. The day that he saw a group of Hebrew people being beaten and abused by a soldier, he was enraged and killed the man and rescued the slaves, and then he hid the body. But word got out that he had killed an Egyptian, and Moses was on the run. He fled the palace, made a new life for himself in the wilderness as a shepherd, and married a Midianite woman named Zipporah, and had a son. He gave up plans of freeing his people. Their situation seemed impossible. As far as he could see, there was nothing more he could do for his people. He was a fugitive. He was no longer in a position of power. There was nothing much he could do. 
 
A lot of us may feel helpless in terms of the suffering we see around us.  It may be caused by groups promoting intolerance and hatred, especially in the wake of Charlottesville, N.C., three weeks ago. Or the suffering may be part of an epidemic of loneliness in our society. The current generation of youth have lots of so-called friends on Facebook, but they are lonelier and more isolated than teenagers in previous generations. A girl in grade five, watched a program on TV that featured a teen suicide, and in her own depression started speaking in school about how it would be good if she ended it all. In the Nishnawbe Aski Nation in northern Ontario, there have now been 18 suicides this year, including three twelve-year-old girls who were part of a suicide pact. Loneliness is not just youth. Six adults have taken their lives in the town of Grand Bank on the Burin Peninsula, population 2300, of southern Newfoundland in the past 14 months. The mayor said, "…they had good families, good homes, good careers, big volunteers within the community…. Life appeared to be good."  Psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
 
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology in Utah, says social connection should be a public health priority. Holt-Lunstad says lack of social connection is associated with a 50 per cent reduced risk of early death”. Loneliness “exceeds the risk of alcohol consumption…physical inactivity, [or] obesity."  Maybe that is something that we in the church can do more of for others, provide meaningful social connections, counter loneliness. But first we need to talk about loneliness, our own and that of others. Paul McCartney sang, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?”
 
When Israel was in Egypt in slavery for those centuries, the people may have despaired of ever being liberated. When Moses was shepherding in the Sinai, he may have despaired of being any help to his people. On the face of it, the situation was impossible. But what is so clear about his encounter with the burning bush is that God has not forgotten about about God’s people, enslaved in Egypt. Moses was not prepared for what he sees in near Mount Horeb. He feels a source of blazing heat near him, like a fire, yet he at first sees no flames. He smells the faint smell of smoke, before he sees any. If he is like you or me, he might fear an approaching wildfire, but what he sees is a green bush, shimmering not from the heat of the day, but from the flames that engulf it, blue and yellow flames that dance on the green leaves of the bush and the leaves move as though in a summer breeze, but the air is still, and the leaves are not consumed. Above the bush he sees the heat waves rising from the fire distorting his view of the mountain behind it. But the bush is not consumed. The leaves stay green. It is impossible, but there it is. He expects to hear the crackle of wood popping, as in a campfire, but instead what he hears is the voice of God, calling his name, “Moses! Moses!” And God says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (3:7-8.) It seems impossible but there it is. And more than that, God says to Moses, “I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” It seems impossible and Moses says, “Whom am I that I should go?”, God answers, “I will be with you.” “Who sends me?”, and God replies, “I AM WHO I AM…. [Tell them] I AM has sent me to you.” And we know that the seeming impossible is what happened. Moses returned to Egypt and with a series of ten plagues and miracles, led them to freedom.
 
Moses was coming to discover the meaning of that strange name for God: I AM WHO I AM. I am whom I reveal myself to be, you will know me by my saving actions. Moses is learning what Job would say of God, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” (Job 42:2.) Moses is learning what Jesus says, “for God all things are possible.” (Mt. 19:26.) Moses is learning what Jesus says of the disciples, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed…nothing will be impossible for you.” (Mt. 17:20.) Moses is learning what Paul says, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13.) And Moses is about to experience that nothing is impossible with God.
 
The real miracle in the story is not the bush, but God rescuing God’s people from slavery, and to bring them to the Promised Land, “flowing with milk and honey.” (Ex. 3:8.) The burning bush is on the crest of the United Church of Canada, symbolizing the Presbyterians who joined the union and who since 1691 have used the burning bush as their symbol. John Calvin saw the burning bush as the people of the Church which suffers in any age or place but not even the fires of Hell can prevail against them. It is a nice way of thinking of our own suffering today, both collectively as a church and as individual members, that whatever troubles we face, they shall not prevail, however impossible they may seem. God is faithful.
 
Last Christmas in DeKalb, Indiana, Tammy Mick confided with the owner of a motorcycle shop that she suspected her eleven-year old son, Phil, was being bullied at school. He came home with bruises. That man told Tammy, “I know what it’s like to be picked on. ‘I’ve got a bunch of big-hearted biker friends who would love to help.”  He put the word out and on the first day of school, which in Indiana is in August, 50 riders on their big motorcycles from around the State met first to pray for Phil in his school year, and to give young Phil a thundering ride to his school. The whole school was impressed. The Indiana motorcyclists have organized a suicide awareness and teen bullying ride scheduled for late September. What are we seeing there? Is it not a bush that burns and is not consumed from which comes a voice, I AM WHO I AM? 
 
The Cajun Navy is a group of ordinary people from Louisiana who borrowed vehicles and got supplies, brought pirogues,  and went to Texas to help. The most terrifying call they got was from a young mom of an 8-week-old baby with breathing problems. The mother tweeted, asking for help for a couple hours with no luck. She then posted that her newborn was turning blue and was not breathing. Her phone was at 2 percent. Someone shared the tweets they were rescued and the baby was recovering. Were holy flames not burning?
 
Shortly after Charlottesville, I was talking with a white man, Kent Millard, now president of United Seminary in Dayton Ohio. He had been in theological seminary during the civil rights marches of the 1960s. While Martin Luther King called for volunteers to march, busloads of northern students risked their lives to participate, including this man. Rev. Jessie Jackson was one of the people who taught them peaceful disobedience techniques, if one person was struck down and beaten, the next person was to fall on top, so that no one person would be beaten too badly. When Kent returned home to Boston, one couple in his church was upset with him and told him, “You’re just a norther agitator. Those people down there are happy as they are. They don’t need you coming down.” A couple of decades later, Kent met that same couple again in another church he was serving, “We often wondered what happened to you.” They had changed their opinion of what he had done back then. He asked them, “What changed your minds?” They said, “When our son went off to Boston College, he asked to room with a black student. We were so upset with him. We argued with him but he insisted it was the right thing to do and he was not going to change his mind, no matter what we said. We came to love that black man. In fact, if it hadn’t been for him our son would not have passed economics. He got our son through school.” Sometimes with events in life it is hard to tell if the bush is burning. I AM WHO I AM.
 
What about you? What do you struggle with? Is it loneliness, or despair? God is still acting in our lives to save, to give fullness of life even now and in the life to come. Look for the burning bush in your life. Just look for a bush that has something different about it. Perhaps a few words of a hymn seem to shimmer, as though they are leaves that flutter when there is no breeze. Perhaps it is in the music of the anthem when notes rise up to the heavens like heat waves from a fire. Perhaps in the sermon, you hear your own name being called, as the shepherd Moses heard his from the flames. But the voice you hear is the voice of another shepherd, the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, calling you. And in that moment, you know that God has purpose for your life, that this becomes a holy place, where you need to tread reverently. 
 
You may say I am not sure if I have heard God calling me. How then do you explain the flame that others see, the tongues of fire resting on each one of you, flames that were put there at the first Pentecost, the beginning of the church? Luke says in the book of Acts, “divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit….” (2:3-4.) They burned and were not consumed. It is a flame that was put there at your baptism. You may not have noticed the flames resting on your own head, but God has made you a burning bush for others, through whom they may meet through your words and deeds, I AM WHO I AM. As St Francis said in those beautiful words, 
 
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.