Just Another Burning Bush

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word alive, powerful and true. As we open the Scriptures today, we ask for your Holy Spirit to guide us. Open our hearts to receive and our minds to understand and our lives to be transformed. Let your truth take root in us, encouraging, convicting and renewing us. Speak loud. Your servants are listening. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Today's scripture is Exodus, chapter 3, verse 1 through 10. Pure Bible, page 44. Moses was keeping the flock of his father in law, Zethro, the priest of Midian. He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of bush he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned down. When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush. Moses. Moses. And he said, here I am. Then he said, come no closer. Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. He said, further, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, 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 bring them up out of the land to good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me. I have also seen how the Egyptians oppressed them. So come, I'll send you to the Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. This is the word of the Lord. [00:02:51] Speaker B: Thanks, Paul. Good morning, everybody. Question for you. How many of you used to own one of these? Anybody? Raise of hands? Okay, a few of us, yeah. For Anyone here under 30 who might not know what a VHS is, imagine if when you took a video, instead of using your phone, you had this 20 pound behemoth that you had to carry around on your shoulder. It had to be plugged into an outlet in the wall. And when you recorded, instead of it just appearing on your phone or the cloud somewhere, it instead get recorded onto this big clunky box. You'd have to put into a bigger, clunkier box that was connected to your tv. Then you could watch it back. We had one of these bad boys when I was growing up. And we used to love to watch our home videos from when we were even younger. I mean, our whole family would gather around the TV and put it on like a movie. And over the next two plus hours, we would watch six months of our lives go by. It wasn't like now on my phone I have Hundreds of thousands 30 second videos, maybe a minute tops. No, back then you could get recordings that just ran for 10, 15, 20 minutes, maybe longer. Just filming a slice of life out of our day. We had parts of these old videos memorized. The funny moments, the silly things we would say as toddlers, the blow ups and meltdowns where the camera would just suddenly shut off. You know, it comes back on and everyone's fine. But my dad was usually the one who was acting as cameraman and notoriously, he had this habit of locking in on certain scenes. The star on top of the Christmas tree, the fire burning in the fireplace. The profile of me or one of my siblings as we just sat there unaware, looking off at something else in the distance. And he would zoom in slowly and just hold it and hold it, soaking in this moment in time that would never come back. And every time we would get to these scenes we were watching, me and my siblings would go, oh, dad, fast forward, right, come on, let's get to it. Enough with the Christmas decorations. They've been the same for three decades. Let's get to the good stuff, you know, onto the next scene of me and my sister fighting. But the truth is, I think my dad was keying into something else that we might have been missing. There's something beautiful and, dare I say, holy to the ordinary if we know how to look at it. I think there's something beautifully ordinary about this passage of scripture that we just heard from Exodus 3. Now, don't get me wrong, it doesn't stay ordinary for long. In fact, this is one of the most spectacular iconic images in the Bible. The burning bush that God speaks through. But hear me out, because I think sometimes we skip to the spectacular a little too quickly. So by the time our passage picks up in Exodus, Moses, an Israelite who was raised by Egyptian royalty, has murdered someone and had to flee for his life and escape from Egypt into the land of Midian. He gets married out there, he has a child, and now apparently, he Works for his father in law as a shepherd. Exodus doesn't actually tell us how long he was out there in Midian, but the Book of Acts in the New Testament generations later says that it was about 40 years. So apparently that was the tradition that was passed down. Regardless, a good amount of time has passed on, maybe 40 years. Moses has made a new life in Midian, and he's getting older now, maybe kind of assuming that his story is kind of wrapping up. He's lived a lot of life already, and now he's just going about his day, his normal routine, taking the sheep out to graze. He's done it thousands of times before. In Exodus 3:1, it says Moses was keeping the flock of his father in law, Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. So Horeb is another name for Sinai. This is the mountain where Moses would later return with the Israelites and receive the Ten Commandments. Became this important mountaintop in the history of Israel as a people where God would come down to meet them. But at this time, it's just Horeb, which means desert or wasteland. Right now, it's just another mountain. And the Bible says there the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush. He looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up. Okay, now listen, if I was walking up Hill Avenue and saw a bush on fire, that would be a big deal. I'd be calling the fire department across the street and trying to make sure nothing else caught on fire, right? That would be a mini disaster. But here in the wilderness where Moses is, a burning bush wouldn't really be that uncommon. Little brush fires happen in the dry landscape. And a little bramble bush on fire wouldn't really be that newsworthy or some crazy miraculous thing. On its own, it's just another bush. But Moses stops. He stops what he's doing. He stops in the middle of his workday, and he looks, he zooms in, and he notices that this bush isn't burning up. But you wouldn't notice that right away, would you? It would take a while for a bush to burn up one way or the other. So he must have stared at it, stared at this quite ordinary, everyday burning bush long enough to realize that it wasn't ordinary at all. And it's only once Moses comes over that God Speaks. When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see God called him out of the bush. Moses. Moses. Gosh, I feel like there have been multiple moments in my life where when I just wished God would light a bush on fire and speak to me as clearly as he speaks to Moses here. Anybody else, when you're facing some big decision, some fork in the road, and it's like, man, how nice would it be to just have God show up like this and tell you clearly what to do. But the more I've studied this passage, the more I've started to wonder if just how many burning bushes I've missed in my life because I didn't take the time to stop and wait and watch and notice. You know what I mean? How many times has God tried to speak to us, tried to get our attention, and we've simply been too caught up in our own busy lives to pay attention. God. It's convicting to me. God doesn't show up to Moses when he's looking for it, when he's on some pilgrimage. He doesn't show up to Moses when he's been fasting and praying. He doesn't show up in the middle of a particularly emotional worship set. God chooses to show up on an ordinary mountain in an ordinary bush on an ordinary day. And if Moses hadn't been paying attention, he might have missed it. When Moses approaches, God says, come no closer. Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you're standing is holy ground. Now hold on. Isn't this horrible? The wilderness, the desert. I feel like it's safe to assume Moses has been to this mountain before. He has led his flock here before. He's probably trampled all over this mountaintop in his dirty sandals. What makes it holy? Why now? Because the presence of God is here. The space is holy because God is holy. This moment is holy. Because God is holy and God is here. And Moses finally notices. God showing up like this in the burning bush or elsewhere is called a theophany, or literally God appearance. And there's lots of miraculous theophanies in the Bible. The burning bush, like I mentioned, is maybe the most iconic. But let's not forget about the fire and smoke and thunder that comes on Mount Sinai later, when God appears to the Israelites, or the three men who appear to Abraham, or the stranger who wrestled with Jacob, or the throne room visions of Isaiah or Daniel, or you could argue the stranger who appeared in the fiery furnace in Daniel. When I've prayed for God to show up, these are the Kinds of visions and appearances. I've hoped to receive something bold and unmistakable and tangible and in my face, something that pulls me out of regular life and launches me towards something greater, something that I can't miss. But the greatest theophany of all, greater than any of these other appearances of God, is undoubtedly in Jesus Christ. You could say Jesus is the ultimate theophany of God. But even when Jesus appears, people still aren't totally sure about him. In John 6:42, some of the crowds say, isn't this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, I've come down from heaven? Isn't this just another kid who grew up nearby? And in John 146, one of Jesus future disciples? Even questions, can anything good come out of Nazareth? It's just an ordinary town full of the most ordinary people you'll ever meet. And Jesus questions his own disciples in Matthew 16 saying, who do people say the Son of man is? And they say, well, some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others John, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. Many are saying maybe he's just another prophet or a teacher. Jesus stepped into the ordinary spaces of his time and place so well that if you weren't looking closely enough, it was possible to entirely miss who Jesus was. And I think the same could be true today, when so often we can dismiss Jesus as a great moral teacher. Just a good example, right? Maybe some of us need to hear this as an invitation today to stop, turn aside, look closer, watch and wait and listen and sit with Jesus long enough to feel. Find out for yourself how truly extraordinary he is. If we believe what he says, he cannot be just a good example. Maybe others of us feel like we know Jesus, we just don't always notice Jesus. I remember when I was a young Christian, middle school or so, I would go on these summer trips with the church youth group and we'd go up to the mountains and we would all be together in this really tight knit community and we would have worship every night and people would make decisions to follow Jesus and we'd cry and there'd be these big emotional responses to the music. And I would feel so close to God, so aware of God, it felt like God was on the move and I was just along for the ride to see what God was going to do next. And we'd come back down from the mountain on fire for God. That was always the language we used. We were on fire for God. It's like this mountaintop moment, but then Back home, instead of worshiping every night with youth group, I'd be doing homework. And instead of sitting around a campfire deep in prayer, I'd be doing chores. And the connection I felt to God and all this excitement about God doing something new would slowly wear away. I was talking to my mom about this the other day and we were laughing as she reminded me how as a young teenager I would come back from these trips and all of a sudden be so good natured. Playing with my brothers without fighting or picking on them, listening to my mom without arguing. And then a week would go by and I'd start to get a little bit more grumpy and negative. And then two weeks, maybe three weeks would go by and I'd be right back to my hormone induced teenage angst, bickering and fighting and talking back. Whatever fire for God had caught on up in those mountains would quickly be snuffed out and reduced to embers as the slog of real life caught up with me. And it wasn't until the next church, camp or big retreat in six months to a year that I would be revitalized again and enthusiastic about following God. Now I like to think I'm a little bit more spiritually healthy now than I was at 13, a little bit more stable. But at times I think I'm still guilty of assuming that some moments are holy and others aren't. And I'm definitely guilty of getting so caught up in the grind of day to day life that I miss out on how God is present through it all. In a lot of ways, I feel like I've personally been in a season of life that's been pretty ordinary. Don't get me wrong, it's been a wonderful season. Raising kids, seeing their personalities and passions start to grow. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but anyone who's raised kids knows you can only read Brown Bear, Brown Bear so many nights in a row before you recognize there's an ordinariness to the routines and the daily rhythms. And every day you're frantically marking things off your to do list and working and getting the kids fed and getting the kids to bed and washing the dishes and folding laundry and getting yourself to bed so you can do it all over again the next day. And just like in those old home videos, we often just want to fast forward this part. Fast forward the line at the grocery store or sitting in traffic or taking out the trash. We don't see those as holy moments. But see, the problem is, if we're only Ever looking for God in extraordinary places. You're bound to miss God in the ordinary places. Deuteronomy 6, verse 7 talks about teaching your children about God when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Essentially it's saying, teach them to think about God all the time. Teach them to look for God all the time in the regular rhythms of your daily life. Sometimes you don't even realize you're in a holy moment until you pause and take the time to look around. Now, holy doesn't mean happy. And I'm not here to try to convince you that every moment of every day is going to be enjoyable. Life can be hard, and I know so many of you are going through incredibly hard seasons. We don't need to deny that. But I guess my prayer for us is that we would just slow down long enough to see where God may already be present. So many of us get ready to return to school in the coming weeks. Maybe we're thinking it's just another school year or we come back from vacations and return to work. We may be tempted to think it's just another work day, it's just another meeting, it's just another commute, it's just another item to check off my to do list. Let us remember it was just another burning bush until Moses recognized that it wasn't. Let us invite God to show up in our ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. Let us be fully present in in the good and the bad and the mundane and find God in it all. I wish I could tell 13 year old Josiah that God doesn't need a mountaintop to connect with us. Jesus brought the holiness right down among us. And if we worship a holy God and if the Holy Spirit is inside of us, then everywhere we step has potential to be holy ground. Amen. Let's pray together. Dear Lord God, we thank you for being so extraordinary and yet for meeting us right in our daily lives. God, don't let us miss it. Don't let us miss you. I pray that you would give us eyes to see. Help us pay attention. Dial us in with you so that we can see you and what you're doing and how you're moving each and every day. Amen.