“I must turn aside” A sermon preached by the Rev. Martin L. Smith on the Third Sunday of Lent, March 11, 2007, at St Margaret’s Church, Washington, D.C.

The uncanny power of stories like Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush is partly due to the unnerving sense they give that momentous turning points may easily have never happened. Revelation often hangs on a thread. The appointment with history could easily be missed. It all depends on a moment’s impulse. In this story, as in so many others, God does not block a man or woman’s way or overwhelm them with a revelation they can’t avoid. God signals from a distance, and it is up to us to notice. Moses seems to see something odd on the mountain side. Something is on fire among the bushes a long way off, yet the fire isn’t spreading. The storyteller gives us the conclusion of a discussion that Moses has with himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” And the terse storytelling is really an invitation to us to imagine the kind of argument that Moses had with himself that eventually led to his decision to go out of his way and climb up to where the fire was.

Maybe it’s because I was remembering the struggles of a friend of mine who suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder that I imagined Moses saying to himself, “For God’s sake, Moses, you can’t just go after every single distraction. Stay on track, man. You remember what happened when your curiosity got the better of you and you meddled in that fight between the Egyptian and an Israelite. How clever was that? That’s why you are a shepherd now, instead of a prince of Egypt! Just focus, focus, focus. That bush is just an optical illusion. Ignore it.” Or maybe it is because I’m a bit hyperconscientious that I imagine Moses saying to himself, “OK, so you think it’s smart to abandon your sheep for a little mountaineering, a little sightseeing. What is going to happen to them while you are doing your little scientific expedition? Don’t you care what happens to the sheep? How are you going to explain it to Jethro, if a dozen get lost while you wandered off? Be responsible, stay with the task, stay on the job. Remember, a full day’s pay for a full day’s work.”

Well, whatever that inner conversation was, Moses had to override his reluctance, even go against his conscience. He had to get to a place where he realized, that however risky it was to leave his sheep, he just had to satisfy his curiosity about the meaning of the fire in the bush that wouldn’t go out. “I must turn aside and look…”

There is tradition going back thousands of years of reading the life of Moses as a kind of allegory of the soul’s quest for God. St Gregory of Nyssa, a pioneer of Christian mysticism, wrote a Life of Moses as a guide for men and women who were exploring intimacy with God in prayer. Maybe this story of Moses and the burning bush still speaks to us about some of the struggles that we all have to respond to God’s attempts to connect with us intimately. Think about how these words, “I must turn aside and look…” might suggest to you what you might need to do to go on to meet God where he wants to meet you next on your journey.

Religion is a dangerous thing, because it is often mixed up with our sense of duty and conscientiousness. We think we are being religious when we stick to what we are supposed to do, and do it conscientiously. But stories like Moses and the Burning Bush tell us that in order to turn up where God intends to meet us, we have to turn aside from our routine, we have to leave the track along which we are dutifully plodding. It takes chutzpah and courage to turn aside and investigate the place where God might be in wait for us. In order to be vulnerable to God’s revelation, we might need to play truant from work and the claims of other people and the dictates of our conscience. To find God we might need to get off track, and goof off. Maybe that is what a quiet time is supposed to be, why it is sometimes essential to get a bit of solitude or free time, or go on retreat, or just wander off. To pray we need to give ourselves permission to be truants. In the story God has to wait until Moses has turned aside. “When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see…(then and only then)… God called to him out of the bush, Moses, Moses.”

Moses was curious. Most people think of idle curiosity, but Moses was willing to risk the accusation of idleness. He wanted to find out what lay behind the phenomenon of the bush that seemed to be on fire but didn’t burn up. And as it happens, he discovered that curiosity is holy. Fire is a fascinating thing, and once he was near the fire he discovered that he was on holy ground. He was commanded to take off his shoes.

I wonder what it would take for us to scan the horizons of our own life, and detect where the hot spots are. We speak of having burning questions, or burning issues. Most of us have been trained to ignore them, or explain them away. We refuse to be aware of what our burning issues are. We banish them from our consciousness. Isn’t it true that the company of those who are suppressing their burning questions can be depressing and unnerving? When I am with some people, it feels like being on board a ship in which there seems to a fire deep down in the hold. You can smell a whiff of smoke coming up through the ventilators, but everyone is walking up and down the deck as if there was nothing wrong.

It is a great blessing in life, if we can turn aside and recognize that in spite of our appearance of normality, we have burning questions. Perhaps the burning bush can be a kind of symbol for us of deep issues in life itself that are of burning importance, and continue to be so all our lives. Some issues are what we might describe as flare-ups, crises that are quickly resolved and die down. But some questions are burning questions that continue burning, after we have given any particular answer. They are fundamental questions about life itself, “Who am I? Why I am here? What I am afraid of? Who is there for me? What does my life mean? What is it for? Where am I going? What is stopping me? Who desires me as I am?” These are the questions we find ourselves facing when we have the courage to turn aside…

Those who make themselves emotionally available to God, will recognize in Moses’ readiness to take off his shoes, that sense of needing to be vulnerable in that place where we face the burning questions. When we take off our shoes, we signal that we won’t run away, and that we are prepared to feel the dirt between our toes and even feel some pain from the stones and thorns on the ground. Holy ground is not a special kind of ground. It is holy to be grounded, to be in direct contact with the earth, without shoes which are a symbol of our ingeniousness in reducing our vulnerability.

As we meditate on the way God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, we can learn a great deal about what lies at the very core of religious experience. Let me suggest three avenues of exploration. Whenever we encounter God, God will touch us in these places: God will touch us through our need to face suffering. God will touch us through our need to receive a sense of purpose or calling. God will touch us through our yearning to have a sense of being and identity.

The first burning question that God helps Moses to face is the question of human suffering. “I have observed the misery of my people…” Spirituality is the polar opposite of escapist piety. To be close to God, is to be free to face the very questions that throw God’s existence into doubt. To be with God is to be free to see endemic misery and to feel it without flinching and to look to God for his and our response.

The second burning issue that God helps Moses to face is whether we are going to live in such a way as to worsen suffering, or whether we have a role to play in its solution. Am I part of God’s answer to the misery of his people? Am I part of his redemptive remedy? Have I role as a worsener or a reliever? Am I a jailor or a liberator? Do I infect or can I heal? At the burning bush, Moses learned not only to see the misery of people through God’s eyes, he learned that he was part of God answer to that misery, and that he had the power to make change in the world. “So come, I will send you…”

Moses has to struggle with God over this one. It is hard to hear that one is anointed to be a liberator. We will have to struggle over this one, too. To be a Christian is to receive a double identity. On the one hand we continue to be human beings marked by the brokenness that is at the root of our collective miseries. On the other we are called and empowered to be part of God’s solution to those miseries. In Christ we are part of God’s answer.

The third burning issue takes us into the depths. As human beings our sense of being, our sense of being real at the core, our sense of identity is very precarious. In our culture we try to assuage this precariousness by coming at the question of being from other angles. We can tell ourselves and one another what we have: I have an education, I have an ethnic heritage, I have an apartment, I have this hobby, I have this car, I have this partner, I have these political convictions, I have, I have… We can tell each other what we do; I do this job, I do these ministries, I do these things in my marriage, I do these things at church and in my neighborhood, I do these behaviors that I discuss with my therapist, I do these religious observances. This is all very well and good, but to what extent is it all an improvised cover-up for a terrible lack of a sense of being. Behind all this having and beneath all this doing, you and I know how much emptiness and hollowness there can be at the core. Who am I? Is there any real me? Do I have any being…?

Moses poses this question of identity to God. Does God have an identity? Is God real? Who are you, God? We all know the answer that comes from the burning bush. “I am who I am… you shall say that I AM sent you.” God is the source of all sense of being and reality. Because God is wholly and utterly real, and because God’s being is absolutely full, God overflows. Because I AM created us and sends us, we receive from our contact with God a mysterious sense of being for ourselves. Because I AM is sending us, I learn that I am too, and that my life is hid with Christ in God. I am too, because God is. So Moses is able to come down the mountain with strangely replenished sense of identity, which will stand him in good stead in the struggles that lie ahead for the next forty years.

Our hope then is that this Eucharist itself will be an experience in which we have turned aside from everyday cares to meet God in the burning questions. And in the Eucharist we receive our empowerment to be part of God’s solution to suffering and need, and a deep replenishment of our sense that our lives have meaning and purpose and are grounded solidly in God’s being itself, with which in our own resurrection we will one day be fully united.