Shoes

Exodus 3

1-2 Moses was shepherding the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. He led the flock to the west end of the wilderness and came to the mountain of God, Horeb. The angel of God appeared to him in flames of fire blazing out of the middle of a bush. He looked. The bush was blazing away but it didn't burn up.

3 Moses said, "What's going on here? I can't believe this! Amazing! Why doesn't the bush burn up?"

4 God saw that he had stopped to look. God called to him from out of the bush, "Moses! Moses!"

   He said, "Yes? I'm right here!"

5 God said, "Don't come any closer. Remove your sandals from your feet. You're standing on holy ground."

 

    SHOES

    They congregate in a circle every Wednesday, where an old converted warehouse has been taken over by a local church.  You wouldn't be able to pick them out; their's are the usual faces in the river that daily makes its way through the halls of the local high school.  They are, however, remarkable.  It's a stronger river against which these students set their backs, pull hard on the oars and fight upstream.  Its waters are deeper, and (worse) completely invisible.

    Culture.  Consumerism, isolation, apathy.  Better bring your flippers.

    That's why this gathering is such a strange thing.  Think about it: isn't it remarkable that these students, after a long day behind a desk, choose to take a whole evening to listen to stories from the bible?  I can think of a hundred reasons why they wouldn't.  The prevailing message of our culture is directly at odds with the beatitudes of Jesus.  It's adversarial, caustic, embraces faith while rejecting Jesus.  And at the same time we have several adults, many of them twenty-somethings, who are equally strange--why would any of them make this place a priority, a converted fridge packed with students, most of whom are ten years their junior?  It seems to me that the fact that all of these people have made Wednesday nights into a regular community is a burning bush of sorts.  With all of the odds stacked against them: messages in music, television and film telling them who they ought to be, cliques that pollute the social pool with acidic criticism, mountains of homework, the pressure to achieve--it goes on and on and on--how are they managing to stay afloat, let alone make any progress against such a deluge? As Moses asked, "What's going on here?"

    Well, the answer is this: a miracle.  And I'm taking off my shoes.

    We have a choice to make here.  I believe that it is a credit to Moses that he asked his question in the first place.  Were this story set several thousand years later, it may have been easier for Moses to look at the bush as it burned and rationalize what he was seeing.  In our modern era, that would be my first choice.  I seldom find miracles on the interstate, or in reality TV, or in the nutritional information of a diet bar.  There is little mystery in my life.  This is the result of scientific revolution--everything has an equation, everything has an explanation, and this has become our expectation.  We began by, and many scientists still are asking, "What is going on here?"  But many of us have already given up on the possibility that the answer may be, simply, "a miracle."  We Christians are among them.  Maybe if it had been me on the mountainside, I would have looked at the bush and shrugged my shoulders. 

    With that in mind, let's experiment for the time being by keeping our skepticism at bay, or at best, juggling it among other alternatives.  Maybe the pressure that these students face mixes well with a post-911 worldview of purpose questioning and philanthropy.   Other things may drive them--Christian parents who insist their children go, or a home-life that makes any evening alternative attractive.  But these would be easy answers.  I don't doubt that there are threads connecting our recent past with our current context; we are all connected in a web of personalities and choices.  But as Chief Sealth said, "Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." 

    I believe that there is a weaver, one who is masterfully spinning an incredible web, and he is inviting these students, and us as a community, to respond.  Burning bushes are invitations to wonder.  I think Moses recognized this.  I believe it takes great courage to ask, "What is going on here?" with an open mind and heart.  It's risky, because the answer is almost always so unexpected.  You'll notice that God never supplies an explanation.  Instead, he called, "Moses, Moses!"  And the man before the miracle replied, "Yes?  I'm right here!"

    This is what these students are learning, and what we can learn alongside them: there is a hand at work, and if we have eyes to see it and the courage to ask the question, we will be drawn into something larger than the interactions of molecules, the natural processes of life and death, the heat and the light of chemical reaction.  Further, burning bushes are much more commonplace than we assume.  Perhaps in our walk through life we will encounter many miracles, and our eyes will pass over the flames, and we will fail to hear our name echoing through the canyons.  It's easy to slip on cynical glasses.  But that doesn't mean we have to wear them.

    I challenge you to look around for smoke and ask the question, "What is going on here?"  The response will be a call to a holy place, to a holy purpose, with a holy God.  Where will you find yourself barefoot before the Creator?  From the mountain God called Moses to liberate the Jewish people from generational slavery and oppression, a life-changing call that shaped history.  That is the power of the burning bush.  But first, we have to recognize the miracle in the mundane. 

    For me, God is calling from the midst of a Wednesday night group.  There is mystery in an old warehouse, and there are faces in the flames.  This is the place where I remove my Nike's. 

I'm on the lookout for more.