2025

Becoming open to the new – now there’s a counter-cultural proposition if ever there was one. Landscapes change, challenging us to take our values, principles, and beliefs with us as we find our bearings in a new and unfamiliar landscape.

The story of the call of Moses, as we receive it in Exodus 3, is the work of the Deuteronomist scribes of the Babylonian captivity following Jerusalem’s fall and the Temple’s sacking in 586 BC. The seven decades of the Babylonian captivity confronted the Jewish exiles with the challenge of rebuilding a sense of national and religious identity in a dramatically changed landscape. Soul searching for the meaning of events that had befallen them required them to confront the painful question- had God abandoned them in their captivity? In search of an answer, the scribes returned to their stories of national and religious origin. The fruit of this exploration emerged as the book of Exodus. Returning to the stories of national origin, the Jews of the captivity found meaning in present-time events and imagined a new future in restoring national identity.

As we find in Exodus 3, the story of the call of Moses is a reassembling from the fragments of oral folk memory. Many Bible stories – particularly origin stories follow this method. Remembering has less to do with reviving an old tale than with forging a new one.

As we receive the story of the call of Moses, we note the relationship between the time in which the story is set, around 1500 BC, and the circumstances at the later period of composition between 586 and 539 BC. As I’ve just noted, projecting present-time themes back into the past is a tried-and-true method biblical writers used when it was not always safe to be transparent. It’s not only biblical writers who employ this method. Shakespeare’s history plays covering the period from 1399 – 1485 purport to chronicle the rulers and events between these years. Yet, what we see portrayed in his history plays is a picture of Elizabethan and Jacobean society’s politics, entertainment, and social situations, safely projected into the medieval period. In this way, Shakespeare commented on current events without risking losing his head – literally. The purpose of remembering has less to do with reviving an old story than with forging a new one.

The call of Moses is a multilayered story about the struggle to hold onto cultural identity during a period of national catastrophe. There is an overarching narrative linking later issues of exile with an earlier period of captivity. However, within the narrative, events become powerfully instructional. Within the story, we discover the importance of curiosity, the importance of paying attention to peripheral vision, the oscillation between forgetting and remembering, the location of divine encounter as in the place where God meets us, and the struggle to find the courage to respond to God’s call.

Curiosity and the importance of peripheral vision. The story opens with Moses shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep for fresh pasture. Walking along a familiar track, he should have focused on what lay directly ahead of him. However, he becomes distracted when his curiosity is aroused by something he sees flickering in his peripheral vision – glimpsed, as we might say, out of the corner of his eye.

Isn’t this often the way of things. It’s not what appears to be most evident that we need to pay attention to but what we glimpse – caught out of the corner of our eye. Don’t we love those detective stories in which a witness being questioned about the details of the crime remembers something crucial in solving the case? At first, they claim not to have seen anything important. Yet, through painstaking detective prompting – bit by bit, their memory is unlocked, revealing something recorded by their peripheral vision.

Moses detours from his beaten path to better view this fantastic sight of a bush burning without being consumed. As he approaches the burning bush, he hears a voice calling from the heart of the flames: Moses, remove your shoes, for you are about to enter holy ground. He does so and encounters that which will change the trajectory of his life – propelling him onto a new path toward his still-to-emerge life’s purpose.

Forgetting and remembering. Reading between the lines, we are surprised that Moses does not know the god who addressed him. In declaring that he is the God of his fathers, God jogs the collective memory fragments of Moses’ Hebrew identity. Remember, Moses was raised as an Egyptian. The reason he wanders around leading someone else’s sheep is because of the conflict between his Egyptian and Hebrew identities that eventually forces him into exile. Forgetting and remembering – the relationship of the past to the future – become the pivotal themes in the conversation between Moses and God.

God does not waste time after the introductions are over in declaring the purpose he has in mind for Moses. God is asking Moses to return to Egypt to remind the people that the god whom they have forgotten – has not forgotten them. For the hearers of the story in Babylon, this was a reminder that even as they were in danger of forgetting God, God would not forget them.

The place of encounter. Moses is leading his father-in-law’s flock through a landscape described as a place beyond the wilderness. The incurious among us might miss the significance of this description by simply picturing Moses walking through an arid desert landscape – in other words, a wilderness. But he’s not walking through a wilderness- he’s walking into a landscape beyond the wilderness – a description that implies entering a changed landscape – one beyond previous experience – devoid of recognizable signposts.

Moses is tasked with reintroducing God to the Hebrews and, in so doing, conveying a message of hope to them. As with all significant life-changing challenges – Moses is frightened and seeks to avoid the responsibility by playing down his fitness for the task. Even if I take your message to them, why should they believe me? I imagine many of us are similarly daunted by the task of reintroducing the God of the biblical record, the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, to a culture held firmly in the grasp of a modern-day Pharaoh.

God’s new name. Up to this point in the story, God has identified as the God of memory – the God of your fathers. In answer to Moses’ understandable hesitancy, God instructs him to give the Hebrews his new name, symbolized by the Hebrew acronym YHWH – translated as I am who I am. God instructs Moses to tell the Hebrews that I am has sent me to you.

The Hebrew letters YHWH shimmer with ambiguity. The ambiguity of meaning is an outstanding characteristic of Hebrew, wholly lost in English translation. The Hebrew I am who I am, suggests a shimmering oscillation between I am who I have been, and I am who I will be. A God identified with memory becomes a God of future possibility.

The God of their fathers resurfaces into Hebrew consciousness – not as a God of distant memory but henceforth as Yahweh, a God of future hope and promise – a God whom they may have forgotten -but who has not forgotten them and who is inviting them into a changed landscape – into a place beyond the wilderness – a place of new beginning replacing the mourning for the past.

Today, rather like the Hebrews in Egypt and the Jews in Babylon, we find ourselves in a culture in which God, as revealed in the biblical record, has likewise become forgotten. Most Americans no longer share a common religious knowledge, allowing us to access a shared memory of God. The younger the generation, the worse it becomes. Outright rejection accompanies a general ignorance regarding the biblical stories through which God introduced God-self to former generations.

You might object that there is a vocal minority that loudly proclaims divinely mediated knowledge of God. However, this god is not recognizable as the God of Moses. The god of popular American Christian Nationalism is a god who no longer hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed, the voice of the stranger and the dispossessed, the plight of the victims of a cruel hatred for the LGBTQ+ community. This god is vociferously celebrated for his deafness, along with his whiteness and his maleness.

Today, we painfully awaken to the experience of finding ourselves in a changed landscape. Will we reach a place beyond the wilderness where new connections forge new possibilities to be grasped?

Receiving this story in 2025, we can’t avoid the question: are we willing to take our values, principles, and beliefs into a changed landscape – into an encounter with a God of future possibility? Or will we continue to mourn the loss of previous certainties – pretending that we don’t notice things have changed? In a changed landscape – a place beyond the wilderness God reintroduces God-self to us. No longer a God of fading or even of forgotten memory – but a God of vibrant present-time hope and future possibility – calling us to slough off the dead shell of yesterday and begin to live the life to which we are called. But this requires fortitude to resist being coopted into pharaoh’s camp. It will require finding the courage to confront a culture that seeks to make one man God so that all men become slaves. My goodness, if we do, then who might we become?

March 22, 2025 0

Encounter

Robert J Warren, the Vicar of All Saints, the Anglican Church in Rome, has a witty turn of phrase. He writes:

Moses was doing his best to lose the Egyptian accent that people had remarked on when he first landed in Midian (Exodus 2:18-19). It was an accent worth losing.  First, it was a lie: he wasn’t Egyptian.  He’d been a Hebrew child raised like a dirty secret in the heart of the Egyptian court.  Second, it provided a clue to his past misdeeds.  The child became a man back in Egypt.  His identity crisis sharpened and caused him to snap.  He’d killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave and thus became a fugitive from Egyptian justice.

Warren somewhat amusingly, yet concisely, summaries Moses’ story so far. Exodus chapter 3 opens on Moses’ day-to-day life after having fled across the Gulf of Aqaba to Midian – an area that took its name from Midian who had been one of Abraham’s many illegitimate sons. Time has elapsed since his flight – time enough for the ever-resourceful Moses to have not simply found sanctuary but to have married the daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian.

One day while absent-mindedly leading Jethro’s flocks Moses wanders into a region described as beyond the wilderness. It’s not an incidental detail that beyond the wilderness lies at the foot of Mt. Horeb – sometimes referred to as Mt. Sinai – or the holy mountain of God. It seems that the later Deuteronomist scribes who compiled Exodus sometime in the 6^th-century BCE seem to have had a hazy grasp of geography. Midian is situated on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Aqaba – modern Saudi Arabia – yet Mt. Horeb sits at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula – so Moses has indeed been wandering far from home.

It’s helpful to picture Moses as daydreaming as he walks along – because his attention is alerted by a mysterious phenomenon which he spies in his peripheral vision – out of the corner of his eye so-to-speak. Focused concentration narrows the range of our peripheral vision. It’s only when we are not concentrating on anything closer to hand that our peripheral vision expands to take in a wider panorama. Out of the corner of his eye Moses spies something that arouses his intense curiosity. Driven by curiosity Moses leaves the beaten track and sets off across country.

In his peripheral vision Moses had caught sight of a mysterious phenomenon. Driven by curiosity – Moses arrives at his first encounter with the living God – a momentous encounter that will upend his life as he knows it.

This encounter is not only life changing for Moses but from the perspective of God’s biography it’s also direction changing for God as well. In this encounter with Moses – we hear God speaking again for the first time since his relationship with Abraham.

Throughout Genesis’ long epics of the Patriarchs after Abraham, God has remained silent. The Patriarchal cycles are stories that focus on human action in which God is assumed as background but plays no direct role. In warning Moses to take off his sandals for he is about to tread on holy ground – we hear God speaking directly to a human being again. God speaking – is the prelude to a personal relationship with Moses who for God becomes a new Abraham – that is- a human being with whom God can form and intense and personal relationship. Through his relationship with Moses –as in the days of Abraham – God once again emerges as the primary actor in the unfolding story.

Moses’ encounter with God before the burning bush is an extended metaphor which illuminates the nature of own spiritual journey. Hidden within the rich theological-biographical detail – is a story of rediscovery, of remembering, and of reset.

As Exodus chapter 2 winds to a close we witness a startling recovery of memory for God. We read:

After a long time, God heard the Israelites groaning and remembered his covenant with Abraham. God looked upon them and God took notice of them.

We might ask why has God taken so long to act? Is there a suggestion here that the enslavement is the result of God having forgotten his people? Their servitude comes to and end only when God notices their plight as he recovers his memory of Abraham. We shall never know but it is interesting to speculate.

In remembering Abraham God seems to become aware again of a need for relationship – something he last enjoyed with Abraham. This is also a story of rediscovery, remembering, leading to a reset now with Moses as God’s chosen partner.

At the heart of this story is the surprising revelation of God’s name. God has until this point been the God of ancestors – for the Israelites a God of distant memory. In response to God’s request – Moses pressures God for something more personal in the form of a name rather than a description. God replies: tell them I AM WHO I AM has sent you.

The English is incapable of conveying the pulsating quality of the Hebrew letters YHWH -which shimmer with ambiguity of meaning. I AM WHO I AM – can be read as a statement about who God is and has always been – a God associated with the past. But it also can be read as a statement about who God will now become – I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. The nature of who God will be – becomes revealed in future action where God is to become known as Liberator. This is material enough for a whole sermon series yet to come.

However, today I want to focus on the element of the story captured in the phrase beyond the wilderness. I interpret this to mean – a place beyond conscious recognition – outside of the boundaries of familiar imagination.

The process of noticing what’s hidden in our peripheral vision is often best demonstrated in crime fiction where the chief witness is subjected to some kind of hypnotic process taking them back to the scene of the crime – during which they recover details of the crime lodged in peripheral vision – details that had remained hidden – inaccessible to their conscious memory.

Through the cultivation of curiosity, we begin to consciously register elements otherwise unrecognized in the peripheral vision of our daydreaming.

To venture beyond the wilderness is to leave the beaten path – the constrictions of the familiar. Matthew Syrdal – is the pastor of The Church of Lost Walls – a wild theology church in Denver, synthesizing theology and ecology. He has referred to the beaten path as the uncalled life. He bemoans that as pastors and spiritual leaders we spend too much time tending the uncalled life of the flock – by which he means:

The business-as-usual, relatively autonomous existence we often lead. In the uncalled life, Syrdal notes that: Most of us typically experience no major intrusion to speak of, nothing disrupting or redeﬁning our identity and role in our communities, yet also no appearance or message — no larger conversation with the Holy.

He likens our uncalled life to the Israelites slavery in Egypt. In the uncalled life we are silently crying out – unknown and uncalled. In other words – being unable to notice the call of the Holy within us and around us – we remain unconsciously encapsulated in our distress – a distress emanating from the fixed and closed pattern of our lives.

Syrdal further suggests that our unconscious distress finds collective expression of the storm surges of racism, fear, and terror – forces currently in play – powerfully disrupting our civic life today. He writes:

At times, it might seem as if the whole of western culture is enslaved in a cultural pathology — the City that Egypt represents in the Exodus narrative. The City, egocentric civilization, is almost by deﬁnition structured as a defense mechanism against the natural world and the threat it represents. In our times, Egypt is that which slashes and burns the old growth of a forgotten World, that which consumes the Earth’s resources with an insatiable appetite. We are largely, and mostly unconsciously, enculturated from early childhood with the incipient imperialism of Egypt. Moses, as a type, represents for us an awakening from the imperial dream to something like the dreaming of the Deep World.

The story of Moses and the burning bush is a story of theophany – to use the technical term. Theophany is a story or experience of divine revelation – and from the perspective of God’s biography – that is – God’s personal story -a self-revelation – a new learning for God about being God.

Theophany occurs – never in plain sight, nor along the familiar path – but always beyond the wilderness – meaning – off the beaten track hidden in peripheral vision. The trick for us is to catch its glimpse out of the corner of our eye.

Like Moses, we become changed by an encounter with the Holy – only when our lives become decentered enough – disturbed enough – to reshape our expectations, stimulate our curiosity, and pay attention to what’s happening out of the corner of our eye.

September 2, 2023 0