Sermon for January 14, 2007Moses, The Reluctant
Liberator
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Scripture: Exodus:3:1-12 and 4:10-13
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
We are in a series of sermons examining character and we are using some of the heroes and characters of the Hebrew Bible to learn from. Last week we focused on Jacob who is such a mixture, such a work in progress – self centered, grabby, deceptive, and also reverent enough to build an altar to God in the wilderness and to promise to tithe and worship God. He is seen along with Abraham as the father of the Hebrew people, and God utilizes this mixture of a man to achieve God’s purposes. Today we focus on one of the two most visible leaders in all of the Old Testament, Moses, who was called by God to lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and into the Promised Land where they would flourish and thrive. When the gospel writer Matthew was putting together his story of Jesus, he was addressing mostly a Jewish audience and he used a great deal of the Old Testament to show how this Jesus is the Messiah that has been long awaited. In the beginning of his gospel, he compares Jesus to Moses because like Moses, Jesus had to spend some time in Egypt and then was able to come back to Israel. When Matthew portrays Jesus as a great teacher he placed the setting of the Sermon on the Mount on a mountain or a hill because that was the setting that Moses was in when he brought the teaching and the instructions from God—Mount Sinai. The gospel of Luke contains some of the same teaching material from Jesus including a version of the Lord’s Prayer, but in Luke, Jesus does not teach on a mountain but on a plain. And in Matthew as well as other gospels, when Jesus takes some of the disciples on top of a mountain and they have a vision of him surrounded by light, there are two Old Testament figures who appear there with Jesus to confirm his authority. Do you remember who they were? They were Elijah the prophet, and Moses. Moses, incidentally, was one of the most interesting Bible figures that the sculptor Michelangelo knew about, and his statue of Moses was one of his earlier works where he tried to portray the power and complexity of this biblical giant. I am going to rehearse the high points of the story of Moses and if you are an astute student of the Bible you will remember most of this, though I think I will offer you a couple of facts and insights that may be new to you, and if you, like most here, are a beginner or intermediate student, you will find help in this overview. The story begins after the Israelites have been in Egypt about 400 years. God has called Abraham and Isaac and Jacob to form this new people. It is one of Jacob’s twelve sons that was the bridge into Egypt from Canaan when his brothers sold him into slavery and the caravan that bought him took him to Egypt. His name was of course Joseph. We will look at the long fascinating story of Joseph next Sunday (it comprises the last major section of Genesis), but for today, we remember Joseph is the reason that his family and then all the Israelites wound up in Egypt. They increased in numbers so much that after 400 years there, by the time of Moses around 1300 BC, the Egyptians were scared of them and made slaves out of them. In fact, the Egyptians were so scared of how numerous the Hebrews were that the pharaoh ordered all new born male Hebrew children to be killed. When Moses was born, he was able to escape that fate because his mother and sister put the baby in a basket and he was discovered by the pharaoh’s daughter who raised him in the house and family of the pharaoh. He was raised in royalty in Egypt. When he was a young man, he was very conscious of his heritage and he saw how the Egyptians were abusing and using the Hebrew slaves in their building projects. One day, he saw an Egyptian kill one of the Hebrew slaves, and when he realized that no one else was looking, he killed the Egyptian and hid his body. But someone had seen that happen, and when Moses learned that others knew what he had done, he fled from Egypt into Midian. He was sitting by a well in the land of the Midianites when seven young women came to the well to get water for their sheep and goats. There were some shepherds nearby who prevented the young women from using the well, but Moses stepped in, helped them fill their water pots, and then was invited back to meet the rest of the family of these young women. He later married one of the women and was employed by her father tending sheep. It was in that role as shepherd or some sheep and goats that brought him to the area of Mount Sinai where he felt the call from God to go back to Egypt and ask for the Pharaoh to let God’s people go. Most of you remember the story. Moses saw a bush on fire, came close to it, heard God address him and tell him he was on holy ground. God told Moses that God had seen the suffering of the Hebrews in Egypt and God was very concerned. God chose Moses, the criminal, to go back and speak for God. Moses had all kinds of reasons why that would not work. Who was little Moses to do this? How could he possible convince people he was speaking for God, who should he say this God is who was sending him on this mission, he was not a very good speaker and he had not gotten any better since he and God began this conversation by the burning bush—in fact he might have gotten worse! God, of course, has ways of dealing with all these reservations. Finally, Moses agrees and he and his brother Aaron go to the pharaoh and tell him that Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews wants them to be set free so they can go to a new place and have a better life. The pharaoh refuses and there is a series of plagues and disasters culminated by the death of the first born sons of all the Egyptians. The Hebrews avoid that by putting the blood of a lamb on their doorposts so the angel of death will pass over them—the origin of the Passover celebration today. They finally get out of Egypt, pass through a body of water that swallows up the Egyptians following them, and then there they are in the desert on the way to something better—except what Moses has to deal with is a group of whining, complaining, bitter people who are hungry and who are now yearning for the food they had to eat back when they were slaves! God provides for them by sending quail and manna for them. Manna, by the way, is still around as a granular, sweet substance secreted by the tamarisk bush in the Sinai desert. The Israelites wander and travel for a while. Moses is seen as leader and judge and arbiter of interpersonal disputes and is often tied up all day arbitrating and mediating till his father-in-law suggests that Moses delegate that mediation role to other people and free up his time to do other things. The Israelites get to the area of Mount Sinai where Moses goes up on the mountain and receives the Ten Commandments as well as other laws and instructions or the people to live by as they make this change from being slaves to being nomads for a while and then finally settling in the land of Canaan. At Sinai a covenant is made between God and God’s people. Moses is there for a long time and the people get impatient and think they have been abandoned and they make a new god for themselves—-a bull calf made out of gold. Moses comes back with the tablets; is deeply distressed to find them in a drunken orgy centered around this new idol, breaks the tablets, and goes back up the mountain. The book of Exodus tells us that Moses argues with God there on the mountain top. God wants to just destroy everyone and start over and Moses, chapter 32 tells us, advocated and argued so that God changed his mind! One of the parts of this story that I like so much is when Moses comes down and sees the people dancing around the bull calf and asks what happened, Aaron says, “I don’t know and it is not my fault. It is their fault. We just put our gold in the fire and out came this calf!!” Most of us who are parents have heard this sort of story: Gee, mom, we don’t know how the cat got all that sticky syrup in his fur—we were just trying a little experiment and… The Hebrews are destined to wander and travel for a long time after this before they get to the land promised to them. The story of their journey is in the rest of the book of Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy. During that journey, Moses asks God to provide water for them and Moses strikes a rock in the way God tells him to and the water flows. But somehow in that process, the Bible says that Moses didn’t seem to give God enough credit for what happened so Moses does not get to enter the promised land but dies as the people get close. Moses is an exceptional person and leader and we can get some insights about character from him. Like each of us, he is a mixture of strength and weakness: he had a strong sense of justice as a young man. He was outraged to see an Egyptian abuse and then kill a fellow Hebrew, but then he became a criminal by killing the Egyptian. He was frightened by the mission, the call that God had for him to be the liberator of Israel and he did everything he could to avoid that, finally saying after all the excuses, Look God, why don’t you just find somebody else? He spoke poorly-perhaps had a speech impediment. And as we said a moment ago, he does not seem to give God the credit for one of the deeds that is done to provide water in the wilderness. But look at all of his good examples. He was deeply afraid of doing what he needed to do, but he did not let his fear stop him. He felt the fear and did it anyway. Is that an example that you need to hear about this morning with something you are fearful about? Moses felt the fear and still he went ahead and did the right thing. He was able to because of something he heard God say beside the burning bush. Do you remember what God said that helped him? God said, “I will be with you.” You will not do this all by yourself. I will be with you. I admire Moses and others who say, this is really scary, but it is what needs to be done and it is the right thing to do and I am going to do it even though I am afraid because I know that God is with me. I also like the fact that when Moses had fled Egypt and had just arrived in the land of Midian, he stood up to some bullies when those persons tried to prevent the seven sisters who came to the well for water. Moses intervened and allowed the young women to fill their water containers. Secondly, Moses put up with a lot of grumbling and complaining and whining. He knew that just goes along with being with people. He heard the Hebrews say that they wished they were back in Egypt where they were slaves because they at least had enough to eat. This was, as one Bible writer describes them, a stiff necked people, people who were stubborn and hard to lead. Moses knew that and led them. He also held them accountable when they built their own god to worship. Thirdly, Moses was willing to grow and learn and take the advice of others and change his behavior. His father-in-law sees him spending all of his time being a mediator and says to Moses, Learn to delegate. Share the role of leadership and everyone will benefit. Moses does that and changes his behavior. That is a character strength—to listen to constructive advice and then to change. Fourth, I really like the intense, close, personal relationship Moses had with God. He argued with God. He was honest with God. He told God how he felt. As I read through most of the story of Moses, I thought about Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Tevey has this intense, open relationship with God, and Tevye’s prayer life is like that of Moses-honest, straight, blunt, and trusting. Moses is a good example for us in that closeness and intensity and honesty. Fifth, Moses is persistent. That is a good character trait. There were many times he could have given up. He could have said, after the fourth or fifth rejection by the Pharaoh, Well, that’s it. I’ve had it. I’m out of here.” But he persisted—there and all the times in the wilderness when he felt discouraged by the grumbling and fear of the people. Finally, he shows us courage. What would it take to confront the Pharaoh, the most powerful ruler in the world, and to keep on doing that? Moses shows us courage and most of us can benefit from that lesson. I have been reading other stories of courage this week as we celebrated Dr. King’s birthday this weekend. I have been reading a new book edited by our own St Andrew member, Professor Margaret Whitt from the University of Denver. Margaret is an expert in the civil rights era of American history and her new book is a compilation of short stories related to that struggle for civil rights for all people. There are some powerful stories there including what it would have been like in the 1960’s to be one of the African American students going into a formerly all white school and being pioneers in helping achieve inclusion for all people. What would that have been like to have been as student or to be the parents of a child you are sending into a setting where they have to walk through a gauntlet of hateful people to get to school house door? That took courage and faith. What Martin Luther King did in being a drum major for freedom and justice in our country and our world took enormous courage and faith, and we sometimes forget that Dr. King’s movement was deeply grounded in scripture, especially the parts of scripture like the book of Amos where the prophet says that God doesn’t care about our worship life and our wonderful music and our prayers UNLESS all of that leads us to justice and upright living and fairness and compassion for all people. Moses shows us persistence, accountability, the willingness to take advice and to grow, a close and intense relationship with God, and Moses shows us courage. What of those character strengths and examples can you benefit from most this morning? Will you pray with me about that? |
