Dr. David D. Young
June 10, 2007
Exodus 3:1-14
Luke 3:15-16 & 21-22
"Any Old Bush Will Do"

Today’s sermon is not meant to make a political statement…Two weeks ago we celebrated Pentecost, exploring the positive summer fires of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Christian Church. Today I want to deal with the same spirit at work with Moses through the burning bush.

A question: "How much do you want God? How much do you desire to have a close relationship with God?" The degree of desire can be illustrated by this comment overheard in the hall of the V.A. Hospital in Long Beach, California following a disaster drill: "We emptied the place in six minutes and thought that was pretty good, until quitting time at 4:30 when everybody got out of the building in three minutes." Our desire often affects our action and our intensity of desire for God is usually reflected in our lives.

In a college religion class, a friend of mine shared a story that actually happened to him. And the image it conjured up in my mind has always stuck with me. One hot summer day like today and yesterday, as a young teenager, Greg was at a municipal swimming pool. He always had to stay in the shallow end because he didn’t know how to swim. Well, he saw all his friends jumping off the diving board down at the other end which looked pretty fun. So, he decided he would like to join the fun and he proceeded to go to the diving board and jumped in. He said as he struggled in the water there was nothing he wanted more than to breathe. He didn’t want a new car or a stereo or any new clothes. All he wanted was some air! Greg concluded his story by saying, such should be our longing for God.

God may be wanting to move in our lives, but unless we recognize our need for God it will be hard for much of anything to happen. And when we do recognize our need for God we can begin to be open to his movement in our lives and the new life he offers us.

Christian scholar, Kenneth Scott Latourette, after reviewing Christian history, came to the conclusion that newness in Christianity does not come from intelligence and logic-proof arguments but from "souls who have opened themselves to God and been made great by the touch of his spirit."

But our intellects are also important. You’ve probably heard the one liner, which says, "Minds are like parachutes - not much good unless they are open." And so it is with open hearts and minds that we can be ready and receptive to experience God at work in our lives. In so doing we will experience mystery all around us.

One of the truest sayings of the medieval thinkers was, "omnia exeunt in mysterium", - "All things pass into mystery." We know this to be true if we have ever stood silently, pondering the creation. Moses was awed by the mystery of God for our text which was read for us a few minutes ago says, "Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian; and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, "I will turn aside and see this mystery, why the bush is not burnt."

Moses was not only awed when he bumped up against the mystery of God, he also was receptive. He responded to the mystery by turning and moving toward it. Because he responded, God encounters him! And this is precisely what our text goes on to say in verse 4, "When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" "And he said, ‘Here am I.’" It was then and only then that a dialogue between God and Moses could ensue.

The implications of Moses’ experience on our prayer life or dialogue with God are manifold. But before we look at that, let's continue on with the story. In the dialogue with God, Moses begins to understand God’s identity, though it still remains a mystery. For who can understand fully God’s response when Moses asked him who he was, and he said, "I am who I am."

The Atta Nimsa, one of the Jewish prayers for feast days, is the answering voice to this tremendous name:

Thou art!
The hearing of the ear,
The seeing of the eye
Cannot reach Thee;
No How or Why or Where
Can lead us to Thee.

Thou art!
Hidden is Thy secret,
Who may fathom it!
Deep, so deep,
Who can find it!

God is the ground of all being. That explains God in part, but not completely. Isn’t it strange that God should appear to Moses in a burning bush? God probably wanted to strike some common ground with Moses. And what better way to do it than to use something very familiar to him and certainly there were hundreds of bushes on that mountain side. God may have said to himself, "Any old bush will do, the important thing is that I need to talk with Moses."

Well, that was several thousand years ago, what about us, who live in modern times?

In 1854 Henry David Thoreau commented on the communications revolution of his time. "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas," he said, "but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate."

Our faith affirms that God and people still have much to communicate about! Have you ever watched people talk to babies? Goo, goo, Ga, ga. It’s amazing how we are reduced to nonsensical babblers. The poor babies probably think those adults are pretty strange.

It was the great reformer, Martin Luther, who said, "When God speaks to humanity, he always speaks in baby talk." God does this, says Luther, because God is love. Therefore, he never forgets that no matter how old or how big we become, we are still like helpless, dependent, unknowing babies so far as our faith is concerned.

So God bends to our infirmities. When God speaks, he tells us only as much as we need to know, only what we can take…In a sense he talks baby talk to us. That’s what he did through the babe in the manger." Again, a common stable became the place where God chose to communicate with the world.

This morning, I want to suggest that any place can be a "burning bush" experience for us. It’s doubtful that for us it will be literally through a bush because for those of us who are here, this is our common place. Our "burning bush" experience might happen at the office, at home, in the yard, on the sidewalk, in the city or at the beach. If we look with eyes of faith to the ordinary things around us we may discover God communicating with us in ways we never were aware of before.

I also want to suggest this morning that any one of us can be a "burning bush". The great preacher, Leslie D. Weatherhead, in his book, The Will of God, has this to say,

"Picture in your mind children playing beside a tiny stream that runs down a mountainside to join a river in the valley below. Very little children can divert the stream and get great fun damming it up with stones and earth. But not one of them ever succeeds in preventing the water from reaching the river at last.

In regard to God we are often like that. Though we may divert and hinder his purposes, I don’t believe we ever finally defeat them; and, though the illustration doesn’t carry us so far, frequently our mistakes and sins are used to make another channel to carry the water of God’s plans to the river of his purpose.

How much better to flow in God’s channel – blending our will with His. When you see His glory reflected in this lovely earth, in nature around us so full of beauty, in poem and song, in picture, in music, in great architecture and in lowly service, in the lives of lovely people, in the happiness of a home, in the health of the body and the resilience of the mind and the saintliness of the soul, then, looking up to your Father in heaven, say ‘Thy will be done.’"

Any one of us can be a burning bush that draws others attention and directs them toward God. Finally, I want to suggest that any time can be a burning bush experience. Imagine most of us find time to do what we really want to. And so we are brought full circle to the question with which we began. How much do we want God to be part of the time we have been given?

Poet and writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, has said, "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."

Moses gives us a clue in his open response to the mystery. "The demand", says Rabbi Abraham Heschel, in his book, Who is Man? "As understood in Biblical religion is to be alert and open to what is happening. What is happens, comes about. Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel? The cardinal sin is in our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment, the marvel and the mystery of being, the possibility of quiet exaltation."

What is being said is that if we are not open to encounter God in the common places, the common people, and the daily grind of our lives, it won’t matter where we are, or who we are with or what time it is, because we will never be moved off of dead center and see any more than we want to see. But, if we look with eyes of faith,

any place,
any one,
any time, can be a burning bush experience!

The point of this sermon is not to focus on burning bushes, but on experience. Experience with God happens when some kind of dialogue or encounter occurs. As was mentioned earlier, prayer is just a religious word for dialogue. Scripture tells us that Jesus was in regular dialogue or prayer with God. John the Baptist picks up on the image of fire and the burning bush when he said that Jesus would baptize with it. When Jesus was being baptized, Luke records that he was praying. I had never thought of baptism as dialogue or prayer before, but it is. God is saying "I love you." The response is: "We accept." Prayer is the coming together of people with God.

So the late, Harry Emerson Fosdick could say in his book, The Meaning of Prayer, "…the thought of prayer as communion with God puts the center of the matter where it ought to be. The great gift of God in prayer is himself, and whatever else he gives is incidental and secondary."

When we pray then, we don’t need to ask for strength - rather, we can ask God to be strong within us. We don’t need to ask for power - rather, we can ask God to be powerful within us. For you see, prayer is seldom answered by a change of circumstances and conditions – rather it is through changes of people and attitudes.

Any place can be a "burning bush" experience for us. Any one of us can be a "burning bush" that draws others toward God. And any time can be an opportunity for a "burning bush" experience.

In closing, I want to share with you these words from a book called Prayer, by Olive Wyon,

"To ears which have been trained to wait upon God in silence, and
in the quietness of meditation and prayer, a very small incident, or
a word, may prove to be a turning point in our lives, and a new
opening for his love to enter our world, to create and to redeem."

As God looked at the mountainside when Moses approached and said to himself, "Any Old Bush Will Do - to accomplish my purposes." So He looks to us today and says, "any old one of you will do, too!" May God grant that his word and his life may burn within us.

Amen!