God comes to Moses in a setting compounded of a mixture of ordinary elements of human experience and the extraordinary. What happened happened on a humdrum, everything-as-usual sort of day. The story is described: One day while Moses was taking care of the sheep and goats of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Michan, he led the flock across the desert and came to Sinai, a holy mountain.
And that was it; no twenty-four hour prayer vigils. No crystal cathedrals and massive choirs. No cultic pomp-and-circumstance. Just a plain old ordinary day and a man doing what he'd been doing every day for forty years. It was another in a long line of dusty, sandy, rocky, days watching over someone else's sheep and goats, like yesterday and the day before that - months on end. Continuity is the picture with more than a little monotony. It wasn't a day brightened with happiness or rapture. It was just the moderately pleasant, wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a middle-aged man with no particular pains, no special cares, without any specific worries or despair... That's when IT happened! Moses lifted up his eyes from the grind of another day and saw a bush - not a special bush, just one of thousands desert bushes common to the area - except this bush was burning and was not being consumed by the flames. So Moses, being reasonably curious said, "I will turn aside and see this great sight; why, the bush isn't even burnt." The Lord was watching and when he saw Moses turn aside, He called to Moses from out of the burning bush, 'Moses; Moses!" That's when he told Moses he was sending him on a "mission impossible", to go to Pharaoh in Egypt and demand he let the Israelite slaves go free. Moses had fled from Egypt in fear for his life. He had been hiding out from Pharaoh, met his wife, had some kids, and was working for his father-in-law, and now God wanted to sent him back!
We all hide from so many things. We hide because we don't want to have to change. We don't want to leave our comfort zones. We hide because we fear rejection, or failure, or we don't want the responsibility. We hide because we've become apathetic and comfortable. But we can't really hide from God who sees all and knows all. One day it'll happen. It might be for you the elderly neighbor from across the street who waves and smiles from the driveway. Or you meet a stranger and exchange cordial words. Or you see a homeless man clutching his soggy bag and he weaves along in the rain. Or you write one more check, sell one more widget, sweep the kitchen floor one more time. You hear a bird singing happily, or you sit at dinner with your family like you do every evening sharing a meal, asking about the day. A friend dies and you grieve. The news tell you more than you want to know about drug cartels and drug deaths, the latest news from some country in South America, news about the Presidential campaign. Bushes - common elements of our daily human existence. Bush after bush dot the landscape of our lives. Then one day, another ordinary day, when we are reading a book or playing with the baby, or talking on the phone to a friend - we do something extraordinary. We wonder about the "bush" and we draw closer, close enough to see what had always been right in front of us but somehow we never saw it. What had always been present for our hearing, but we never heard. A bush, but it's on fire and yet not consumed, and from it we hear our name being called - and the "common things are made holy and a glory on them laid."
Was the Apostle Paul (among others) correct when he insisted so vigorously that, "Since the creation of the world, God's invisible nature, namely God's eternal power and deity, has been clearly visible in the things that have been made?" Is it possible that our problem is primarily one of perception? "He sees many things," said God's prophet Isaiah, "but does not observe them; his ears are open, but he does not hear." Should this be the case, it is a serious if not fatal flaw, for as the saying goes, "What you see is what you get." Isn't it true that we mostly see what we want to see. And isn't it truer still that we see only what we have been taught exists for our sight" That's the way it is with us; our perception is as much a matter of sociology as it is physiology. More often than not we see only what our class and clan sees and tells us is present for our sight and worthy of it. We see what our teachers have taught us to see, and little more than that. We do what everyone else around us does. "There are none so blind...," "We see through a glass darkly." We see only that which lines up with our belief system and personal priorities- be they right or wrong. We turn a blind eye so easily. "For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened."
When I was young, I would see a hawk soaring and soaring and soaring on it's great wings spread over the earth and sky, and I was enthralled. Or a solitary red cardinal on a snowy branch would capture my whole attention. Beauty flowed and flashed and filled the world and my own soul to overflowing. Then I became older and properly educated and socialized - and I don't see such things. "A spade is a spade," they told me, "and you must learn to call it that." A bird is a bird is a bird. A tree is just that - a tree. And a bush that blazed up suddenly and yet was not consumed, I would not report it for fear of being taken first to an opthamologist and then to a psychiatrist whose professional mythologies contain no stories of bushes on fire with the glory of the Lord.
But within the relative safety of these walls, I admit to knowing rare times when a bush blazed and was not consumed and from within it I heard Someone calling my name. There are some who would shake their heads and mumble something about subjectivism or sentimentality. So be it. But the bush did burn. I did hear His voice as he called my name. When that happens for you, will you answer?
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