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Turning Aside

Last week’s Old Testament lesson took some of you by surprise–the Abram story of split carcasses and an eery vision of smoke and fire in the darkness–but this week’s story of Moses and the burning bush is known to every child who has ever been to Sunday School. We staged it with puppets last summer in Vacation Bible Camp, complete with a branch of yaupon holly, crackling cellophane, and a flashlight. It was almost as good as being there.

In the moment before Moses sees the burning bush on the sacred mountain of Horeb, he is a shepherd in Midian, a married man content to lead his father-in-law’s flock beyond the wilderness to pasture. He thinks he has put Egypt behind him, his Hebrew birth and borrowed life as an Egyptian prince who stood by while his people slaved for Pharaoh, a life that ended abruptly when he killed a slave driver and fled the consequences. In the moment before Moses sees the burning bush, he assumes that God is absent for the time being from this rocky landscape where his sheep scrabble for footing.. Then out of the corner of his eye, he sees it–the bush that blazes but is not consumed–and he decides to turn aside from his path to investigate.

This is when Moses discovers that the flaming bush is an angel of the Lord, a messenger waiting politely to one side for his response. And “When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses! Moses!” We know the rest of the story. God reveals his intention to free the Hebrews from their oppression in Egypt, not through divine command but through the actions of a reluctant Moses. Soon Moses will leave his sheep to lead a different flock through the wilderness to that same Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sinai.

God’s encounter with Moses did not begin until Moses chose to turn aside from his path to approach the burning bush. Moses could, I suppose, have decided it was a deceptive play of light, some illusion of flame and leafy branch that did not concern him. Or he could have been staring at his feet as he walked the rocky ground and missed it altogether. We can wonder why the burning bush, the messenger, was off the path to begin with. If what God had to say to Moses was so important, then why didn’t God just drop the bush in front of Moses like a railroad crossing guard to block his way? Why take chances with the Exodus?

The answer, I think, lies in the mystery of free will that has been with us since the Garden of Eden. We usually think of free will in terms of choosing good or evil, but the myth of Eden begins with our creation as beings capable of choosing or rejecting God. From the beginning, God decided to take his chances with human beings. He decided to tie one divine hand behind his back and use the other to beckon to us. In this story of the calling of Moses, God woos Moses with a burning bush, inviting Moses to bend his will toward God and to take the necessary first step as the human partner in a divine dance that would lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt.

In retrospect, that’s all well and good, but what if Moses had rejected God’s advances? What if Moses hadn’t turned aside to see the bush or had refused to remove his shoes or let God cajole him into confronting the king of Egypt with God’s unwelcome demands? Would Moses have lived out his life as an obscure shepherd with a colorful past while God wooed elsewhere, or would the story of the burning bush have ended in a scene of divine wrath?

Our readings today from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and from Luke’s gospel seem to reflect a God who would coerce an unwilling dance partner with threats and violence. Paul compares the Christians at Corinth to the Hebrews that Moses led into the wilderness. He reminds them of the terrible consequences of God’s displeasure with the Hebrews’ idolatry, immorality and complaining-- how God struck down twenty-three thousand in a single day, how God inflicted them with serpent bites. Paul sounds a bit like a desperate parent using tales of the boogie man to frighten his children into minding. And in Luke, when Jesus is asked about the violent death of Galileans in the Temple and eighteen Jews who were standing in the wrong place when an ancient tower fell, he turns it into a prophetic opportunity to confront the crowd with its own sinfulness. Like Paul, Jesus threatens dire consequences in order to move the crowd to repentance. He warns them and us that time is short. We must demonstrate our faith in God and God’s kingdom today by works of mercy to the poor and ostracized because tomorrow may not come. If we refuse to bear fruit, the landowner will cut down the barren tree.

Everyone who reads scripture finds there both stories of a God who woos and waits and stories of a God who impatiently condemns and destroys. I wish I could solve for you and for me the conflicting images of God in scripture. Perhaps they simply mirror our own conflict over the dangerous freedom given to us by God. We are free to turn aside from God, but we do so at our peril. We are, paradoxically, willful creatures who can only be perfected through choosing what God has willed for us, just as Moses was perfected through choosing to step off the path he had chosen and open himself to God’s possibilities, just as Jesus became the Christ through his willful obedience to death on the cross.

The church teaches that we were created in God’s image with the freedom to choose or reject God, but that we somehow became enslaved to sin and were no longer able to choose God. And so God sent Jesus Christ, God the Son, to live and die as one of us, not to compel our obedience, but to restore our birthright of freedom. Even now we are free to go our own way. It is human to test God, and when we are told that we must obey God or else, it seems to be human to push the question of “or else,” like the child who must make his mother count to ten at least once to see what will really happen.

Testing is our birthright, but with all this childish testing, we risk not seeing out of the corner of our eye the bush when it bursts impossibly into flame, inviting us to turn aside to encounter God and be transformed. We risk missing the chance to enter God’s kingdom by turning from our paths of complacency or self-destruction to become who we are created to be. Lent may not be as flashy as a burning bush, but Lent is God’s messenger who appears to us each year, just in case we have begun to think that God is absent from the landscape of our lives. And it waits politely for us to turn aside and look again so that we may tread the holy ground where God will meet us. It invites us to choose God. Amen.