“Our reluctant friend, and us”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Sunday, March 20, 2022
Exodus 3:1-15 (Forward, p. 50) CEV p. 56
I like to think that I’m a wee bit like the patriarch Moses—maybe you do as well. In him, I see some of my pretty salient character qualities. First off, there is curiosity, the urge to find out, to know. In Moses, we see this when he is confronted by the burning bush, a bush that is burning and yet not consumed. This piques his curiosity, and seeing as he simply cannot leave this unexplored, uninvestigated, he turns aside to look at it further. I have to wonder whether this ‘burning bush’ had not been there previously, and even observed previously by other people, but not investigated. And so, if this be true, they lost out. To me, it seems that Moses’ curiosity, his desire to know, in this situation is what God honoured.
Then there is the series of God’s announcements of His intents, His famous ‘I have’s’, followed by his ‘I will’s’:
I have seen, I have heard, I feel sorry, I have come down to rescue them
I will bring, I will give them.
But then there’s a catch. God ends all this by saying to Moses, “Now go to the king! I am sending you to lead your people out of his country.” Moses, as well as his people have been praying, have been crying out for deliverance, and God has responded. But notice how He responds. He responds by putting the ball back in their court. He responds by giving them, particularly Moses, a job to do. Is this not that very pattern we find echoed in the Lord’s Prayer, in the words, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. We pray something and then God expects us to play a part in the fulfilment.
Now, to be honest, Moses is rather taken back by this. It is not at all what he expected. He expected God to ‘pull this off’ entirely on His own, without any human assistance—and certainly not by his (Moses’) assistance. And so Moses protests. How much like me, and probably most of us, he is like here! He comes up a myriad of excuses why it simply cannot be him. “Who am I to go to the king?” “What shall I say to the people when they ask me your name?” “What if the people refuse to listen to me?” and the clincher, “I’m not very eloquent or persuasive in speech.” And yet, even though God provides a deputy, in the person of his brother Aaron, He doesn’t let Moses off the hook. Moses still has a job to do and God expects him to do it. God will provide resources and lots of help, but it is still Moses that has to take the lead.
I think that this is equally as true for each of us. We each have a calling, a calling from God. Like Moses at the burning bush, we need to stop, to pause in our daily activities, and listen for God’s voice for His direction. And then, we need to leave off with the excuses that will invariably come to mind, take up the resources that God provides, and get on with it. God is there with us, directing us, and He will help us every step along the way. Amen.
Forward notes: “But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’” (verse 11)
“We have all probably felt unworthy for a particular task at some time. We may have thought our skills didn’t match the job. Perhaps the situation required us to go beyond our comfort zones. I think of people who are introverts by nature and feel uncomfortable when they are asked to mingle with a crowd of people. Someone who feels more like a follower than a leader may feel ill-equipped to chair a committee.
“’Who am I that I should go?’ Moses asked God. He must have felt that he lacked the skills God was looking for; surely, there was someone more suited to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
“Without downplaying Moses’s concerns, God simply said, ‘I will be with you.’
“If we are called to a ministry but are reluctant to say yes because we think we lack the necessary skills, we must remember God’s promise to Moses and trust that God will be with us, too. As someone wise once said, ‘God doesn’t call the qualified; God qualifies the called.’
Moving Forward: “Is God calling you to carry love into the world?