Sunday

Ex.3:1-15 / Mt.16:21-26

Moses is in the wilderness.  His history, like his heart, is full of conflict.  Why is Moses out there in the desert herding Jethro’s sheep?  He’s hiding from the law.  Moses is a murderer.  He didn’t just murder anybody—he murdered one of Pharaoh’s officials.  So he is not only guilty of murder, but of treason.  Think of it: that great prophet, the founder of Judaism, is a traitor, a murderer, an outcast from society.  That’s Moses’ past.

At present, Moses is doing pretty well for himself.  He has married the eldest daughter of a local pagan priest, Jethro, a nomadic sheik in the Sinai Peninsula.  But he does not feel at home, as reflected in the name he gives his son, Gershom, meaning, “stranger in a strange land.”  Many of us identify with the social alienation Moses feels.  His inner conflict is between who he is and who he thinks he should be.  That’s the stuff that God’s call in our lives is made of.

The theological concept of “call” is woven into the Bible right from the start in the story of the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve live in perfect harmony with YHW/H (or Life Itself) until they eat the forbidden fruit.  Then YHW/H comes walking through the Garden “in the cool of the evening” and calls them, “Adam, Eve, where are you?”  But they hide from God in their guilt.

Starting with God calling Adam and Eve in the Garden, there are many, many stories of call: Jeremiah, Isaiah, Gideon, Mary, Jesus…and, of course, you. Almost always we resist God’s call with excuses.  When God calls Jeremiah, he replies, “But God, I am too young.”  Isaiah replies to God, “I cannot go for I am a man of unclean lips.”  When God calls Gideon to fight the battle of Jericho, he first replies, “I am the least of all people; surely you don’t mean me!”  In today’s story, Moses replies to God, “But who am I to go to Pharaoh and liberate the Hebrews?”

So if you ever feel yourself resisting God’s call, you’re in good company.  I don’t mean the call to be a pastor.  I mean everyone’s call to come into a deeper relationship with God and use your gifts to do something uniquely you to bring God’s presence more fully into the world.

Like Moses, we are usually called by God to go beyond our comfort zone—to get into something we’ve never done before.  Moses finds himself in a place totally unlike the place he grew up in, which he had to escape to survive.  But the story of Moses…of Moses’ alienation and identity-confusion…is even more profound than that. Although his birth-mother is a Hebrew slave, his adoptive mother is Pharaoh’s daughter.  Who is Moses?  Hebrew or Egyptian?  Slave or slave-master?  Prince of Egypt or criminal on the run?  Who is he?  Where is his home?

Each of us asks the same questions.  Who are we?  What is our true home?  The answer —our relationship with God—is often disguised.  As a young adult, Moses hears the rumor that he is really a Hebrew, he kills an Egyptian slave-master he sees whipping a Hebrew slave, and he flees from the home of his childhood.  Now his exiled solitude as a shepherd won’t let him escape his issues.  His heart burns with the question: Who am I? It’s a flame that burns in his heart without consuming him.  From the center of this fire, Moses hears God call his name.  He knows he is on holy ground.  In the wilderness of his alienation, before the burning bush of his conscience, Moses opens himself to God’s presence.  “Here I am,” he says.

It’s strange.  Moses has no idea where he is.  He is out in the wilderness, far from home, cast out of society.  He has no idea where he is, yet when he hears the Holy One call his name from the center of that burning bush, he replies, “Here I am,” in relation to the Holy One.  In his spiritual relationship with God, he finds himself—grounds himself—in a specific identity, a specific relationship, a specific call.  In that relationship, Moses not only hears himself called by name, but simultaneously hears God’s name revealed to him: YHW/H — AM WAS WILL BE. Back in the old days, people used to say “Je-ho-vah” without realizing that those syllables are the conjugation of the Hebrew verb, to be.  Je is was, ho is is, vah is will be.  (Now we say Yah’weh or the unspoken YHW/H.)  God’s name “forever and for all generations” is AM WAS WILL BE —“Being Itself.”  When Moses replies, “Here I am,” he is stating where he is in relation to Life.

It is a relationship of total acceptance, which we call grace. In that accepting relationship, Moses finds himself.  In that acceptance of self and acceptance of what is, Moses is welcomed home: a home that is simultaneously God and Moses.  That home is grace.  Grace is that in-rushing feeling, that full-bodied experience exclaiming that your alienation is finished and you are at one with the Spirit.  Facing the truth, Moses faces himself, and his whole life is trans-formed from lost ground to holy ground.  When he faces himself, Moses is in God’s presence.

In my personal story, accepting my call was intimately entwined with accepting my gay-ness.  It was my acceptance of self and “what is” that was God’s welcome home to grace.  For you and the issues you are wrestling with, it will be accepting yourself and “what is” that will be your personal event realizing God’s unspeakable Name and the sacred ground that is your life.

Beyond initial self-acceptance, Moses’ life as holy ground includes the political.  Sorry, you cannot get around it: God is revealed to Moses in a political context.  (But do your politics support the Pharaoh or the slaves?)  The call that Moses hears from the center of the flame is not, “Stay here in the desert and meditate on this burning bush.”  No, YHW/H calls Moses to leave the burning bush, go back to Egypt, and lead his people to liberation.  When I was a young man coming out, I resisted the call to be a pastor because I did not want people to think that I was one of those religious right folks who want to repeal the 20^th Century.  It was not until I got to semin-ary and realized that there is such a thing as a progressive Christian that my life started coming together into wholeness.  Progressive Christianity is what the UCC is all about, and, whatever issues we’re wrestling with, I hope that’s the kind of home that Sixth Avenue can be for all of us.

The way to be saved, healed, liberated, made whole involves a healthy balance of politics and spirituality, action and contemplation.  When Jesus says that the consequences of his call will be great suffering at the hands of the religious and political leaders and execution on a cross, Peter objects.  “God forbid, Jesus! That will never happen to you!”  Jesus replies, “Get behind me, Satan! You are not thinking as God does, but as humans do.”  It is through prayer and meditation that we learn to think as God does.  Human thinking comes from the perspective of immediate personal profit.  God’s perspective is the common good for us and earth eternally.

It was through prayer and contemplation in the desert that Jesus heard the call and found the fortitude to answer his call.  Through prayer and meditation in the desert, Moses heard God’s call.  Moses realized that he was not primarily a Hebrew or an Egyptian.  He was primarily a person in relationship with YHW/H.  Jesus realized that he was not primarily human or divine, but primarily a person in relationship with God…and so wholly that we call him God’s son.

If you and I are alienated, if we are searching, if we are wondering who we are and/or what we should be, finding ourselves and finding God was, is and will be the same thing.  I am not saying that we are God.  But I am saying that we are part of God and that our true home is God.  Since God is Was Is Will Be, it can be no other.  It’s not about organized religion.  It’s about your personal spirituality.  When God calls Moses, Moses replies, “Here I am.”  He does not recite the Lord’s Prayer.  He doesn’t chant the rosary.  He does not say the Apostles Creed.   He does not quote the Bible.  He says, “Here I am.”  —Just as you and I say, “Here I am in the midst of my was/is/will be.”

Maybe the best way to begin is to be honest and genuine about our own journeys.  Most of us don’t think we’re perfect.  We struggle with decisions of what’s right and wrong in our daily lives.  Even more so, we struggle with things we did in the past, with mistakes we made when we were younger—how we messed things up and hurt other people, or maybe even hurt ourselves.  Maybe we are still wrestling with guilt over some of those things.  We just cannot accept the past.  Or we are unhappy right now and cannot accept the present.  Or we are at an age when we are wrestling with retirement or end-of-life issues and we cannot accept the future.  Underneath it all, we yearn to come home to the acceptance of was/is/will be…but we don’t yet know that that is God’s holy Name.  We don’t yet understand that accepting ourselves and “what is” is God, is grace, is spirituality, is our heavenly home.  We often need help to realize this, which is what a faith community like our church is for.  We are here to help each other.  As Saint Paul says [Rom.12:9] in our epistle reading for today, “Let love be genuine among us” as we share honestly about our journeys, our doubts, our mistakes and our worries.

When we struggle with our past mistakes, be they 20 years ago or just yesterday, we need to remember that Moses was a murderer who was running from the law when God called him.  Moses’ crimes in the past, his doubts and excuses in the present, his fear of confronting Pharaoh in the future did not disqualify him from God calling him into relationship with Was/Is/Will Be.  In fact, accepting his Was/Is/Will Be was what his call was all about.  For that is who God is.  It appears from the biblical record that God is not in the guilt business, God’s in the grace business.

I’ve never told anyone the story I’m about to tell, let alone in a sermon. —I think because I experienced it and still remember it as holy ground, too sacred to be spoken.  But I feel the time has come.  My first job as a pastor was starting the first church in the UCC for gays and lesbians.  (Talk about mixing politics and spirituality!)  Once we were organized and going, the association of UCC churches in the Twin Cities had to vote on whether we were acceptable to join the UCC.  I had to travel around to area churches and plead our cause at their congregational meetings.  But eventually we were voted into the UCC.  That got a lot of publicity, so we were a well-known church in the Twin Cities, even among nonbelievers.

One day, I got a call on the church office phone from a man who would not give his name, but insisted that he had to see me right away.  So I said yes and he came over to the church on a weekday afternoon when no one else was there.  He was uncomfortable being in a church, so I had us sit in the church kitchen on two metal folding chairs on the same side of one of those long tables with fold-up legs that churches have.  The sun was shining in through a window and put a square patch of light on the tabletop between us.  This was 1990.

I was young, without much experience as a pastor, and this man was older than I, which made me feel even less confident.  He began to tell me about his partner, who had died of AIDS several years before, long before the medications for living-with-AIDS that we have today.  In those days, in the 1980s, such people died miserable deaths from opportunistic diseases.  They would get emaciated like concentration camp victims, get skin cancer that covered their bodies with big purple lesions, and get pneumocystis pneumonia, which made it hard to breathe, often wheezing.  It was a hell of a painful death that often lingered on and on toward the inevitable.

Now this man was sitting with me.  He did not tell me his name, but he did tell me that he had grown up Catholic and hated the church for what it does to gay people.  But he was feeling guilty about something and could not go to a priest, so he had called me.  I said I understood.  Then he told me that, several years before, he had given in to the begging of his partner whom he loved so much, and he had held a pillow over his face until he died.  He said that even though he had “freed himself from the church,” he still felt guilty and feared that God would never forgive him, and that he would spend eternity in hell.

So I forgave him.  I didn’t know the words that Catholic priests say in the confessional, but I gave it my best shot.  My first thought was, “Who am I to forgive anyone, especially of something like this?”  I was like Moses responding to God, “Who am I that I should confront the Pharaoh and save the Hebrews from slavery?”  But as he told me his story, I realized that when this man had anonymously called me on the phone for help, it was God calling.  So I reached out, took both of his hands in mine and said, “As a called and ordained minister of Jesus Christ, I forgive you of all your sin. You are now an innocent man in the eyes of God.”  With tears in his eyes, he whispered, “Thank you. My name is Mike.”  Then he left without another word, and I never saw him again.  But he has been with me ever since.

Moses was a murderer.  Seeing a slave-master whipping a man to death was his call to save that one Hebrew.  Out of his passion, YHW/H called him to the political act of saving all the Hebrews from their suffering.  Mike was a murderer.  His partner’s pleading was his call to suffocate his lover to free him from his suffering.  Even though it was a most intimate thing, it was a political act in its way.  But God knows, even though it was against the law, it was an act of sacrificial love and compassion.  It was Holy Ground.

Life is not always clear and easy.  God’s call in your life is not the same as conventional wisdom, conformist thinking or conservative religion.  Your call is unique, right at the heart of you—it is who you are.  We come to worship to learn to listen for our call.  We learn it might come disguised as a burning bush, or a dying partner, or a stranger who has committed a crime.  Maybe you are having a hard time accepting yourself, your past, your present, your future.  But at least we know that God is not a mean man in the sky out to get us.  God is Was/Is/Will Be and has always been with you, is with you now, and will always be with you…so try not to be afraid.

It helps to have a community of faith that is a safe place to be honest about our journeys, our mistakes, and our worries.  I hope that Sixth Avenue can be that kind of place, that kind of Holy Ground, where we learn to see ourselves and each other not as humans do, but as God does, and thereby stop fearing judgment—stop judging ourselves—and simply say in response to Life, “Here I am.”  As we say in the UCC, “No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter where you are coming from, you are welcome here.”  That’s God’s grace: the acceptance of self and each other.  So let love be genuine among us.

Pastor Dan Geslin
6th Avenue UCC
22 Ordinary ‘11