It reminds of that story about President Bush’s trip to the Holy Land. Israel Prime Minster Ehud Olmert and President Bush had a scheduled meeting. Olmert arrived late, and Bush let him know in no uncertain terms that he did not like to be kept waiting.

Olmert replied, “I am sorry Mr. President, I was meeting with someone more important than you are.”

“Who is more important than the President of the United States?” Bush demanded.

Olmert replied: “Moses; I was meeting with Moses.”

“You know Moses?!”, Bush exclaimed. “Get him on the phone. I want to talk to him.”

Olmert picked up the phone, dialed, listened, and then hung up. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” he told Bush. “He said the last time he talked to a bush it cost him forty years in the wilderness.”

So today, instead of focusing on Moses, I want us to focus on this God who speaks from a burning bush. I want us to look at this account for what it says to us about God, and how that is so very much at odds with our conventional expectations of whom God is and how God acts. As I see it, this falls into the category of good news, bad news, and good news.

First, the good news: the God who is revealed in this encounter is a God intimately aware of the sufferings of God’s people. After getting over the introductions, after calling Moses by name and identifying himself as the God of Moses’ ancestors, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, God gets right to the point. God has arranged this little tête-à-tête with Moses for a reason. Not because it would be a nice thing for Moses to have a personal encounter with his Creator, not because Moses may have been wrestling with some doubts about his faith and God wanted to buck him up a bit, not because Moses had been praying day and night for a closer walk with the Almighty, but because God’s chosen people have been hurting, and God has been hurting as well. Listen to the verbs God uses to describe why he is there, listen for their progression, listen to the movement: “I have observed the misery of my people, who are in Egypt (I have seen it with my eyes, their suffering is a DVD set on playback over and over again); I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters (I have heard it with my ears, their anguish reverberates within me). Indeed, I know their sufferings (It is not just that I am intellectually aware that they suffer, I know it within the depths of my being, I feel it in my bones, as it were, their experience is my experience.)”

How often in our philosophizing and theologizing we are tempted to posit a distant and disinterested Creator, a God who is so far removed from us and our human experience that surely this God, being so “other” from us, cannot be affected by the suffering and pain we endure in this life. A popular song a few years ago had the haunting refrain, one that I think the songwriter intends us to find comforting: “God is watching us, God is watching us, God is watching us, from a distance.” And yet here, right here in this seminal encounter between Moses and God, God proclaims that God is so close to us that God not only sees us, not only hears our cries, but also knows our miseries and pain. This is the same God we see in Jesus, who, not dwelling on high apart from us, deigned to take on the form even of a slave, who was born to Mary in a lowly stable, who took on all our humanity and our suffering and even death on a cross.

You might see where there is train of thought would be leading Moses, at least once he gets over the shock that he is being addressed by God Almighty. “Super, I see where this is going, and it is all good. God – the real deal, not some mountain spirit or localized deity, but the God of my ancestors, the same God who told them that they would be a blessing to all the earth – this God knows my fellow Hebrews are in a mess of trouble down there in Egypt. And, better yet, this is a God who is not just a God of words, this is a God of action! Did he actually say – I am sure, in fact, that he did -- that “I have come to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey?” This is something I will like to see!”

God is saying that God is prepared to act in an intrusive, decisive way on behalf of the slave community in Egypt. This God, Moses understands, not only does not just watch from a distance, this God, when he sees things that just are not right, is ready to act to rectify matters. And then comes the roundhouse, what I suspect surely was considered by Moses to be bad news: “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh, to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

Moses, we can imagine, is flabbergasted. He might well have expected more. Up to this point, God has shown resolution, determination, intention. God has identified the problem; God has indicated that God was going to do something about it; God has even specified the end-game, that entry of the people into the land flowing with milk and honey. And then what does God do, what action does God take? He sends Moses. Moses, by then an old man. Moses, a humble husband, father, sheepherder, a country hick, a fugitive from justice. You call this action?!

We know Moses’ train of thought here. Moses’ hopes are our hopes. We, like Moses, know that things are far from right in our communities, our families, our nation, our world, our church. We, like Moses, know that we are nobodies, people of little influence or ability or means or talent, certainly in comparison to the troubles that ail this world. And, at times, when we feel our faith is especially strong, we even believe that God will some day set this all right, that justice will be done, that swords will be beat into plowshares, that peace and forgiveness will reign, that there will be enough money available for the church to fund the many ministries it is called to further, that folk will be raised up from our midst to carry the load. But we divorce ourselves from the picture and are more than happy to passively stand by for God to do the work.

And yet the ancient testimony here is that while God is engaged with this world, while God does act, God can and will work through creaturely agents – through humble vessels of clay like Moses and you and me – to get God’s work accomplished.

This was not something that Moses wanted to hear. It is not something that we – not just you, but me, all of us, lay and ordained alike – it is not something we usually want to hear. It is not that we are not all in favor of God acting to make things right in this world, in our communities, in our church, it is just that surely there must be someone more qualified for the job, someone with less on their plate and more time on their hands, someone who might be a little less inconvenienced by taking this on, someone a little bit more open to change. But this is, strangely enough, not how the God of Scripture and tradition and our experience seems to operate. God will choose us according to God’s own criteria, on God’s own timetable, for God’s own purposes. Some might see this as good news, but many, quite reasonably, will not.

And so on to our final piece of news, good news indeed. The same God who gives Moses what surely must have seemed to him to be an insurmountable task, also promises to be with him, with power, every step of the way. It may look to the casual onlooker that Moses stands naked before Pharaoh, on his own, unaided and powerless. But the reader knows that this is far from the truth, that when Moses stands before Pharaoh, God is with him, fully engaged in the struggle. (For you movie fans, it is a powerful truth appropriated by George Lucas in his first Star Wars film – young Luke Skywalker, untrained and piloting a single-seater fighter, undertakes a last second attack on the seemingly invincible planet-destroying Death Star, and when he opens himself to the power of “the Force”, finds that he is capable of accomplishing the impossible.)

It is the same with us. When God calls us to a task, that call comes with the assurance that we will never be left alone or unaided. It is not for nothing we have that adage, “One plus God makes a majority.” Who was Moses to lead his people up out of slavery to the Promised Land? Only a man called by God to so and gifted with the resources to make it happen. Who was Nelson Mandela to lead South Africa into a post-apartheid era of racial harmony and reconciliation? Only a man called by God and then gifted with the patience and wisdom and ability to embody extravagant forgiveness so as to transform a nation and inspire the world. Who were we, here at West Parish, to successfully undertake that capital campaign to purchase this amazing pipe organ for our worship, to build that long-desired parking lot, to fund that parsonage and fellowship hall at our mission partner church in Sri Lanka. Only a gathered community of retirees and working folk, of nurses and tradesman and fishermen and hospital administrators, called by God to undertake a mighty task, then equipped with the faith and generosity of spirit and boldness to step out in faith and get it done. The world of bondage and want and the powers of death, so well known by ancient Israel in Egypt’s land, persists in our time. And yet still God hears the cries of God’s people, still God calls us as partners in this most mighty and holy of works, still God abides at our side and empowers us, even us, that God’s will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Amen.