A Faithful God and His Unfaithful People

Have you ever realized how unfaithful we can be sometimes? I don’t just mean in marriage, but in many aspects of life and relationships. This is even more so in our relationship with God. I only need to think about why I don’t share God and faith more in my day to day life to see where my faith falls short. Here is our God who in one moment gives us everything we have and are and in the very next we forget to give back or even just use it for his glory. Here is our God who continually reaches out to us, even coming, suffering, and dying for us and we only half-heartedly think about turning back to take his hand. Here is our God who has pulled us out of the mire, out of the darkness, out of our agony time and time again, even hourly, yet we so often keep his praise confined to but an hour or two a week. I can’t imagine any person in our life putting up with this, but thank God that even though WE can be unfaithful God is an ever-faithful God.

We can even see this faithlessness in Moses, except today he does get one thing right. Moses has a healthy amount of spiritual curiosity. Our passages today start out with Moses as a shepherd grazing his father-in-law's flock. While he is doing this, he goes by the Mountain of God, Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sanai and he sees a burning bush. Moses says “I must turn aside to look at this great sight and see why this burning bush is not burned up”. Without this healthy spiritual curiosity, Moses could have missed God. This might seem like a finer point; who wouldn’t turn aside to see something so amazing, right? Yet, we miss God’s great works and sights daily. When something amazing or even good happens, how often do we stop to look at it and ask why? We are too busy to see what God is doing and how he wants to speak to us. We are too focused to turn aside. We are too comfortable to go where God is leading us. God is always working, his blessings are new every morning, and yet how easily we miss them and keep going on our way. Instead, we should be consistently turning aside to look at the amazing work of God, asking “how is this possible?”

God is trying to speak to us in so many ways, including the things we see and experience, but we need to be seeking him out. God, literally speaks to Moses through that bush, and he can and will speak to us if we are willing enough to listen, but the signs and things he does speak too. He appears as a burning bush. A bush that is surrounded by a fiery warmth, glory, and light that would otherwise consume and destroy it. This relates to what Israel knows, but also to what they will experience. First, this is an image of what Israel is enduring. We have heard how Israel was enduring intense labour and even genocide, yet somehow in the midst of all of this, they were still fruitful and multiplied. Israel was surrounded by something that should have consumed and destroyed them, yet because God was with them they were not destroyed. This bush was a great promise from the God that is with us and with him we will not be consumed. Yet, it is also an image of God’s glory too. God is immense, uncontainable, unquenchable, and yet his fire can and will dwell with Israel and mostly not consume them. That same fire and glory of God would rain down in the plagues, would lead them through the desert, would descend on their holy tent, and would appear to them on Mount Sanai later and yet it would be a fire that acted justice, guided, protected, sanctified, glorified and lifted up Israel. Even though we are fickle, fragile, and often faithless things (like that bush), our glorious, eternal, and faithful God wants to dwell with us and in us.

Then God tries to lift up Moses to become our saviour. Yet in Moses, we see a strange, but all too familiar kind of arrogance, pride and lack of faith. In fact, Moses replies the way most of us do when called by God. Just like Moses, we make excuses, we back peddle, we look down on God and we don’t want to commit. I know I replied almost in the exact same way.

God starts by telling Moses how he has been listening and showing pity on Israel through all of their hard labour and the abuses of Egypt. He wants to lead them out of this land of slavery into a large land of great abundance: flowing with milk and honey. God is faithfully listening to Israel and faithfully wants to offer them hope and he wants to do this through Moses.

But how does Moses reply? Who am I to go to Pharoah? So you might reply, who am I to do such hard and important work? You are who God made you to be. You are a child of God, you have immense potential, and you have God in you. Moses was an Israelite and a child of Pharoah, educated in both Hebrew and Egyptian thinking. He had immense potential as we all do. Yet the greatest reality for this work is what God says, “I will go with you”. We have immense potential because God created us to have such, but if God goes with us there is nothing we cannot do - there is infinite potential. We will see later how Moses, a single man with God can challenge and defeat a whole nation.

Moses's next excuse is that the Israelites won’t believe him, so he needs God’s name. As always God provides. God’s name is “I am”. This is not a normal formal name, because no one else can be the one that just is, consistent, unchanging, unlimited, always faithful, always was and always is. We can be something. I am a father, I am a priest, I am your friend, yet only God can just be “I am” full stop. Of course, God often does willingly limit himself as we hear, “I am the God of Abraham, I am the God that will deliver you, I am the God who hears you”

The interesting thing, since God is telling Moses his name, you might think this is the first time God has ever revealed his name, yet it isn’t. Abraham and many others before Moses referred to God as Yahweh or I am. This means that either Israel or Moses actually forgot God’s name. They were crying out in their agony and injustice and yet they forgot who they were crying out to, who they needed. Again, I think we can relate. We cry out, we see injustice, we feel pain and yet we forget who it is we are reaching out to, who he is and how much we need him.

Moses still thinks people won’t believe him, so God gives him three miracles. He can turn his staff into a snake, his hand can become sick and dies in his coat and then can be restored and he can turn water into blood. Each of these miracles has immense significance as they speak to past, present and future sin. Through the staff snake that Moses can handle and control, God is showing us and Moses his power to overcome the original sin and temptation of the Eden serpent. Through the white sickly hand, God is showing Moses, his power to overcome the consequences of sin: sickness, suffering and death with restoration. Through the water into blood, God is showing Moses how he has the power to show sacrifice and through blood and water lead to life. They should all speak to us about what Jesus will do many generations later: whether it is his temptation in the wilderness, his healings, the water into wine, or his sacrifice on the cross. These were meant to speak to Israel, but they were also meant to speak to Moses and us. These miracles and signs should have been proof of the amazing reality of who God is with us, and yet Moses keeps making excuses and it would seem that we do too.

Moses’ last excuse is that he can’t speak well. God replies, who made the tongue? I will help you speak. There is no sign previously that Moses was a bad speaker, but after this we see God speak through him in amazing ways only paralleled by Jesus and Paul. God says the same thing to all our self-deprecations too. He is the one that made it all so he can and will help us through it. Finally, Moses is done with excuses, he simply buries his feet and says, “I can’t do it. Send someone else” - sounds familiar to me.

God has proven himself again and again, even though Moses should have known all of these things. God has shown himself to be powerful, thoughtful, present, and caring and yet Moses isn’t willing enough to see, hear it and respond rightly. Yet, even though God is understandably frustrated and angry after all of this, he still offers provision for Moses’ worries. In fact, he was already providing for Moses’ stubbornness before Moses says it, as Aaron was on his way and he will speak for you.

This unfaithful blindness and unwillingness to follow in the midst of a present, generous and empowering God relates to every part of our life, but especially to our stewardship. How do we use what God has given us? Moses was called to use his whole life in this saving work of God and so are we. This first Sunday after Vestry I want to take a moment to highlight our need to trust God with what we have. Since restrictions were lifted, some of you still haven’t found what ministry God is calling you to, but I have been very impressed by how many of you have been so willing to give your time and energy to serve God or learn about him. I understand also that Covid and now inflation have challenged everyone’s finances, but during Covid, our givings went drastically down and they still haven’t come close to what they were a year or two prior. Because of that we had a large deficit last year and are facing possibly the same thing again. We as your leadership team are trying to faithfully step out in trust to follow what God is already doing here, trusting that you and God will meet us there with provision, but I want you to also discern if you can trust God enough to give more, knowing that God will keep providing for your needs too. I have already applied for two grants to help all of this, but we are called to support our own ministry too. I know we can make excuses, I am full of them. What if I don’t have enough money to go where I want to go, do what I want to do, or have what I want to have? What if I don’t have enough time to get everything done? What if I don’t have enough energy to take care of everyone and everything? When we meet this faithful God, we are called to see how God transforms these “What ifs” with his I am. God says to us, I am and always will be the one who provides for you. I am your strength and wisdom, I am all you need and more. Let us respond faithfully to an ever-faithful God. AMEN