Watching the Burning Bush Burn

Watching the Burning Bush Burn

Mtr. Erika Takacs

Does God have a big toe? No, this is not a philosophical query for us to muse over this morning; Does God Have a Big Toe? is the name of a children’s book of Midrash written by Rabbi Marc Gellman. It is, as all Midrash is, a collection of stories about stories, stories that use imagination and humor and not a little whimsy to help us wonder about the infinite mind and loving heart of God.

One of the chapters in Does God Have a Big Toe? tells the story of Moses and the burning bush. Or, I should say, it tells a story about the story of Moses and the burning bush. In this story, God is sitting with all the company of heaven trying to decide how to choose the right person to the people of Israel out of bondage. God decides, wisely, of course, that the most important quality for this leader is patience. God knows that the process of freeing the Israelites will not be quick and easy – God needs a leader who will never give up, a leader who will never pitch a fit, take his toys, and go home. God needs a leader who knows what it is to work and to wait – a leader filled to the brim with patience.

But how, God wonders, do I best determine someone’s level of patience? It’s not such an easy quality to judge. Suggestions come in from all sides. Gabriel presents God with a wad of string and suggests that the person who could untangle all of that mess would surely have the patience to wait out Pharoah and the wandering in the wilderness. But God thinks that sounds too boring and says that someone who doesn’t mind boring things is not quite the same as someone who is patient. Michael suggests a Rubik’s Cube, but God says that a person who can solve a Rubik’s Cube would need persistence more than patience – again, not quite the same thing. Plus, the Rubik’s Cube hasn’t been invited yet.

Finally God decides on the perfect patience test. God sets a bush on fire in the wilderness and waits. Shepherd after shepherd sees the bush burning, shrugs his shepherdy shoulders, and walks away. After all, the story tells us, bushes are ordinary. Even bushes that catch fire are kind of ordinary. But one shepherd, the shepherd named Moses, sees the bush burning and comes closer to look. He sits down, settles in, and watches the bush burn. And slowly he starts to notice that this burning bush is actually far from ordinary. The burning leaves are not turning to ash, the burning branches are not falling off – the burning bush is not actually burning up. Moses sees the miracle that all of the other shepherds missed because he has the patience to sit and wait a while, watching the burning bush burn.* And once God sees this, God knows that Moses is the one.

I love this story. I think it has just the right mixture of fun and fundamentals. It’s creative and engaging but it is also completely true to the heart of the story in Exodus. And it helps me to see something about that story that I’ve never seen before. I’ve heard lots of sermons about the importance of Moses’s capacity for observation. Moses is the one who notices the bush, Moses is the one who is paying attention, Moses is the one who is open to God’s calling. I’ve probably even preached sermons like this, maybe even sermons with another, less-observant shepherd who missed the bush because he was distracted by that one klutzy sheep who was forever falling down ravines, or the strap of his sandal that was rubbing in a most uncomfortable way. And I’m sure these sermons were fine, but really – how hard is it to notice something that’s on fire? In the middle of nowhere, with nothing else around but hot rocks and a hard sky, how hard is it to notice flames shooting up into the air, the smell of smoke, the crackling sound of a bush ablaze?

Not so hard, perhaps. But how hard is it to stop and just look at a burning bush? How hard is it to observe it, watch it, let it be what it will be – burning now, in the present, I burn as I burn? That’s pretty hard. Pretty hard to avoid reacting to the sight of a fire – you know, the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, the bush was blazing, and Moses said, “I must run like the dickens to find some water to splash all over that bush.” It also might be pretty hard to avoid being bored by the sight of a fire in the middle of nowhere – the angel of the Lord appeared, the bush was blazing, and Moses said, “Well, I guess that isn’t really going to hurt anything out here, so as long as my klutzy sheep stays the heck outta there, I’ll just keep moseying along.”

But that’s not what Moses said, and that’s not what Moses did. Moses stopped and waited to see what God wanted him to see. And it must have been hard to that have that kind of patience, that kind of curiosity, that kind of openness to not only see but wait; to not only notice but watch. How long did it take him to notice that something unusual was going on there? 5 minutes? 10? How long did he sit and feel the heat on his face before he saw that the heat wasn’t getting any stronger, or any weaker, it just was. How long did he watch before he heard God’s voice calling his name?

Patience is a virtue. I’m sure you’ve all heard that phrase again and again. It was a favorite of my parents, although if my memory serves it was most often invoked not in praise but as a solemn reminder when my brother and I were being particularly unvirtuous. It’s funny how patience is the virtue that became the idiom. You never hear the phrase “Temperance is a virtue!” or “Chastity is a virtue!” Only patience.

Perhaps that is because patience is so difficult; we need the reminder of a phrase that pops up in our everyday speech. Patience is a virtue, and patience takes practice. It would be easy to moan about how patience is particularly difficult for us now, in a time when information sharing has sped up to such a pace that to much of the world, email seems slow. But patience is a virtue isn’t a phrase that has popped up since the creation of Twitter. Patience is a virtue is a phrase that people have been saying for generations, reminding themselves of over and over again for centuries. Patience has never been easy. Men and women waiting for news of desperate importance may have gotten used to having to wait for ocean liners or the pony express, but I’m guessing they weren’t any more patient about it than we are. They may have had more stamina than we do, but stamina and patience are not exactly the same thing. Patience has never been easy.    

But patience is a virtue. Not just an unfortunate reality, not just something we’d might as well try to cultivate to help keep our blood pressure down. Patience is a virtue, patience with our families, with our friends, with our enemies, with uncertainty, with unknowns, with our fears and our longings and with ourselves, patience is a way that we come to know God. Patience draws us closer to God, because when we are patient, eventually we realize that we are not actually waiting for God to show up; we are waiting to see how God is already there, how God is already with us, in the midst of whatever wilderness we find ourselves walking through. When we have the patience to watch the burning bush burn, we get this remarkable gift – God, calling our names, showing us that God has been there all along. We just know it now because we took a moment to be still.  

And patience is not only our calling; it is also our birthright. We are given the gift of patience as we are made in the image and likeness of a God who has, literally, infinite patience. We are made in the image of a God who set a burning bush to burn to see who would have the patience to watch. We are made in the image of a God who sent his Son to live in human flesh to transform the world one person at a time. We are made in the image of a God who lets fruitless fig trees live for one more year – and not just lets them live, but nurtures and pampers them so that they will have a fighting chance. We are made in the image of a God who gives us this season of Lent, year after year, to center down, again, to repent, again, to follow the path home, again.

We are made in the image and likeness of the great I am, the ever-present God, who has no where else to be but this very moment. And God knows the patience that we need, and God knows how hard it is for us to find it sometimes. But fear not. God will keep putting burning bushes in our paths to remind us to sit and watch with Him a while, to grow our patience until it begins to bear good fruit in the world. If we miss a few bushes along the way, it’s okay. God will find us again. He has, He is, infinite patience.

*"Watching the Burning Bush Burn" is the title of the chapter in Does God Have a Big Toe? written by Rabbi Marc Gellman and illustrated by Oscar de Mejo.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

6 March 2016, Lent III

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Father Abraham

Father Abraham

Fr. Sean Mullen

There is a children’s song that, although I never learned it in my childhood, I did learn it here at Saint Mark’s.  The song is called “Father Abraham.”  The song is very simple, and it is mostly a nonsense song.  Its theology-quotient is low, but its fun-quotient is high, since it involves lots of bodily movement, spinning around, and flopping down on the floor.  It’s a big hit with kids.  Every verse of the song goes like this:

Father Abraham had many sons;
Many sons had Father Abraham.
I am one of them, and so are you;
So let’s all praise the Lord!

The song has often been a feature of Vacation Bible School and Summer Choir Camp.  If you don’t know it, I can teach it to you at Coffee Hour.

And it is true, according to the biblical record, that Abraham, the father of our faith, did, indeed have many sons.  But more often than any of the others, we remember the only son born to Abraham by his wife Sarah: that was Isaac, the son he nearly sacrificed when God put him to the test.  Isaac was the fulfillment of a promise that God made to Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of heaven, and that those descendants would inhabit a great swath of land that stretched from Egypt, up across the Red Sea, through current-day Saudi Arabia, and into Iraq, encompassing Israel, Palestine, parts of what are now Syria, and all of Jordan, and Lebanon.  But for much of his life Father Abraham did not have many sons; he had no children at all, and certainly no sons of his own.  He and Sarah were childless.  And God’s promise, whispered, I suppose, into Abraham’s ear at various intervals, or spoken to him in dreams, must have seemed far-fetched to say the least.

You’d have to think that in Abraham’s time it was never very difficult to look up at night and gaze in wonder at the twinkling starlight.  There were no lit-up cities, no street lights, none of the urban light pollution that makes it difficult for us to find much wonder in the sky when we look up at it from Locust Street at night.  I assume the night sky was a familiar wonder to Abraham’s eyes.

So you have these two phenomena: the whispering voice of God in Abraham’s ear, and the twinkling, brilliant, starry night sky.  And one night the two things come together, as the voice of God wakes Abraham from his sleep to repeat the promise.  Abraham had only recently returned from a daring rescue of his nephew, Lot, and his family, who had been taken prisoner in a skirmish amongst local warring factions.  And God speaks to Abraham, late one night in a vision: "Do not be afraid, Abram I am your shield; your reward shall be very great."  But Abram (who has not yet been given the new version of his name by God) said, "O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless…”

The visions are not new to Abraham, and the promise is not new, and actually, maybe it’s all getting a bit old to him.  Maybe he is beginning to think that he would prefer his sleep to these visions that have led him only to have strained relations with his wife, who still has never carried a pregnancy to term.

And maybe it is not God who is speaking to him at all?  Maybe Abraham begins to reconsider.  Maybe the experience of having to go and rescue his nephew called into question just how serious was the commitment of the LORD who spoke to him in visions to the protection and longevity of his family and ancestral line.  Maybe this voice that spoke to him was not the voice of God at all.  And maybe God was not really God.  Maybe there was no God, at least not one making the kinds of claims that were made in the whispered conversations that took place in Abraham’s visions.

Was he sleep-walking that night when he found himself outside?  Or did the vision or the voice wake him as God called him to come outside?  Was there anything different about the stars that night?  Was there a meteor shower?  There is no suggestion in the scripture that there was: no mention of a miracle or wondrous event: just the stars shining brightly as they did every night.  Abraham had seen it all before.  But something happened that night that was not miraculous or wondrous.  It was, however momentous; because underneath that twinkling canopy of galactic light Abraham came to what one scholar has called “a new awareness that God really is God.”[i]

The point of the children’s song is not to remember Isaac, who was spared sacrifice at his father Abraham’s hand; and it is not to remember the other sons of Abraham who were born of other mothers.  The point of the song is to remember that we are the sons and daughters of Abraham; that we are his children, and the inheritors of God’s promise to him; and to remind us that God really is God.

But to say this is not to say enough, because it sounds like a claim to distant lands in the Middle East that already have quite enough people fighting over them.  To say that we are the inheritors of God’s promise to Abraham, is, rather, to say that we are the inheritors of the relationship – the covenant relationship, in which we are chosen by God.

But a lot of water has passed through the Red Sea in the meanwhile; a lot has changed.   And the covenant itself has changed: we are not waiting for God to deliver us to the much disputed land from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates.  The new covenant of God’s love was sealed for us by the shedding of Jesus’ blood, not by animal sacrifice, as Abraham’s covenant was sealed.  And the new covenant is a promise of salvation that requires no real estate at all, but only faith that our lives are meant to be more than they sometimes appear to be, and that there is a hope for us that lies beyond the grave.

So much has changed, you might wonder why it is we Christians bother telling the Abraham story any more.  Isn’t it confusing to remind ourselves of a promise that we no longer expect to be fulfilled, and that we no longer wish to see fulfilled?  Isn’t it unhelpful to be reminded of the uncompromisingly patriarchal roots of our own religious tradition, now that we have grown into a religious tradition that requires no such patriarchy?

Yes, much has changed, including our view of the heavens, which is now so obscured by our own intensely bright lights.  God could wake me up in the middle of the night and call me outside, but he couldn’t show me much of the sky, unless he flew me to Montana.  And along with the view, perhaps we have lost the assurance of the nature of a covenant relationship – in which God makes a promise to us, his people.

And if you have lost the memory of what it means to be in a covenant relationship with God, then you have lost a great deal.  If your life is not guided by a promise made by God, then what is it that guides your life? 

And even if you have looked up and seen the stars twinkling in all their glory, if those stars have never signified anything to you, then you may not know whether God really is God.  And this, I suspect is the case for so many – not because the view of the night sky is now so much harder to appreciate, but perhaps as the view has gotten harder to see, and our lives have changed so much, so has faith in God become harder for some to come by.

Abraham needed to be shown that God really is God in order to believe in the covenant, in order to keep going on with his life in faith.  But God didn’t use a miracle or any other wonders and signs, he just let Abraham see something he had never seen before, in a view that was entirely familiar to him.

And we need to tell this story, because we pray that God still does the same thing for us, even though so much has changed.  God still lets us see something we have never seen before to assure us that God really is God.  And it is not God who has obscured the view and made it unfamiliar, it’s us who have done that, by allowing the complexity of our lives to crowd out the covenant of God’s love: his assurance that he has chosen us in love to be the inheritors of a promise.

For the most part we struggle to see the stars of the night sky.  And for the most part we cannot remember the covenant of God’s love.  And in so many ways, for so many of us, we cannot say for sure that God really is God.  And this is why we need a song as simple as a children’s nonsense song to remind us that our memories are linked somehow to the ancient vision of a man awakened from his sleep and called outside to tilt his head back, or maybe to lie down on the ground and just open his eyes as wide as he could, and behold the unfathomable expanse of God’s creation, and be shown that God really is God.

As long as the stars are shining, that assurance is meant for you and for me: God really is God, and he has chosen you and me to be his people.  Abraham needed to know it, and so do we; and the sign of this revelation has become no more dim over the years, though we have done much to obscure it.

Father Abraham had many sons and many daughters;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

And the world has changed so much;

And the covenant has changed, too, though it is still a covenant of love;

And that covenant was sealed by the blood of Jesus, who died for us on the Cross;

And he knew better than we do that Father Abraham had many sons and many daughters;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

Many sons, and many daughters had Father Abraham.

Do not be afraid, though there is much in the world to frighten us.  He is our shield, and our reward will be great, though for now it may be hard to see.

Look toward the heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.  See how many there are, and how brightly they shine with the singular purpose of showing us what we had not seen there before: that God really is God.  Yes, God really is God.

And he chose Abraham and all his descendants.

And Abraham had many sons and many daughters.  And you are one of them.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 February 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

[i] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, in the Interpretation Series, John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1982, p. 143

Temptation in the Desert

Temptation in the Desert

Mtr. Nora Johnson

Just for a moment, try to imagine what the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry would be like without the devil.  Yes, I know, this is kind of an odd exercise.  And no, I’m not trying to give the devil credit for anything.  But think about it.  What would we hear about Jesus’s forty days in the desert if we heard nothing about the devil?  It would be a short, serene story: Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, went out into the desert and ate nothing for forty days.  When it was over he was hungry.  I’m sorry, our translation says “famished.”  That’s a little more interesting than “hungry,” but not much. 

We could of course say some things about a story like that.  We would note Jesus’s purity and self-control.  We would assume that Jesus prayed during that time, though in fact there isn’t anything specific said about that in Luke’s Gospel.  We would of course reflect on the fact that Jesus spent forty days in the desert just as the Israelites wandered for forty years.  We would reflect on the fact that after his baptism Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit.  But those forty Spirit-filled days pass silently in this story.  I guess they were beyond our comprehension. 

Which is to say that if it weren’t for the devil and his offers of food and power and false security, this story would tell us very little about who Jesus is and who we are. 

It’s an old problem in storytelling, isn’t it?  You can’t tell a great story about serene perfection.  The old legends about the saints who fled to their monasteries—many of them in the desert—they would never have been told if there hadn’t been demons to visit and tempt.  You can’t tell stories about monks who live happily ever after in reverent silence, because nothing happens to them.  The devil needs to pay a call!  Things have to get juicy!

In the great spiritual classic the Life of Saint Antony by Athenasius, the holy monk Antony spends long periods of time alone in his cell in the desert.  At times he is visited by evil spirits that know how to change their shapes, and they seem to break through the walls of his cell and take the form of “lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves.”  It’s vivid.  At another time visitors who are standing outside his cell—he won’t let them in—testify that they hear the sounds of great crowds of people within: “clamoring, dinning, sending forth piteous voices and crying ‘[…T]hou canst not abide our attack!’” 

Now that’s a story.  That tells us something about the holy Antony, just as our Gospel this morning tells us something about Jesus.  When the devil comes around, holy stories get interesting in a hurry.  When there is real temptation, real testing, holy men and holy women start to put some flesh on their holiness.  They start to reveal something about who God is.  I don’t say this because I want the devil to have credit for making us interesting.  On the contrary, I say this because God is so good.  God is so good to us and we don’t even know it.  God is so good to us and we won’t say a word about it because we are afraid to tell the whole story.  We are afraid even to tell the story to ourselves.

Most of us, if asked to talk about who we are and where we’ve been and what God has done in our lives will stammer and give the blandest, most formulaic response.  “I’m a cradle Episcopalian and I like your music,” we will say, or “I’ve been looking for a church and I thought I’d try this one.”  Or “I’ve been a member of this parish for years.” And though it’s sad enough that we can’t tell each other the whole rich story of how God redeemed us, most of us will do our best to forget the story ourselves.  We will forget on a daily basis that we’ve struggled just to make it into adulthood.  We’ll forget that moment of decision that could have ruined our lives, but didn’t.  We’ll forget a million ways that we’ve been saved and protected and set free because we don’t want to remember that we were ever that low.  We want to tell a story of serene perfection because we are afraid that the real dust on our feet from that long desert journey will be too shameful to expose.

And the beautiful actions of God who made us from dust and filled us with the Spirit will be forever buried along with our fear and our shame and our powerlessness.  But this is a season of remembering dust, isn’t it?  We were just here Wednesday, just getting marked with the sign of the cross in ash.  “Remember that you are dust,” we were told, “and to dust you shall return.”

So, in this season of remembering and confessing, let me ask: who are you?  What whispered in your ear on the way to church this morning?  Did you wake up and get yourself here despite the fact that your heart was filled with anxiety and crippling self-doubt?  Are you here hoping that the feelings of loss will subside, that the bad relationship will not define you?  Is today just one day, is this hour just one hour, in a lifelong struggle with addiction?  Have you fought an epic daily battle with racism in order to be here today with your self-respect and generosity intact?  Would anyone understand what your wandering in the desert has been like? How long have you been hungry?  What are you hungry for?  Are you famished?

And what devilish fantasies about being full and safe and powerful have you had to put aside?  Because those fantasies are everywhere in our world, and we need to talk about them.  How did the Spirit guide you to give up the relentless pursuit of wealth or perfection?  How did the Spirit fortify you when you were tempted to make food or fitness into a god?  When you were tempted to dwell on your resentments?  When you were tempted to judge another person with withering scorn?  How did God turn you around when your heart closed up and your feelings went cold?  How did you turn aside from contempt when it rose up in you?  How did you find the grace to admit your mistakes and your laziness and your lack of focus and your habitual boredom?  How did God find you in that desert and fill you with enough love to bring you here to this improbable place?  How did God make you honest and willing and forgiving? 

I mean this in all orthodox piety and belief, I really do, so don’t mistake me when I say “Let the devil show up.”  Let the truth be told.  Name what troubles you.  Out in his desert cell, Saint Antony’s demons were shaped like “lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves.”  Even Jesus, in his desert days, was faced with temptations to power and manipulation and soul-killing illusions of invulnerability.

And if you are willing to admit it, something is eating away at you too.  And in the particular shape of that temptation, there is a whole Gospel full of truth about God.  There is the particular shape of God’s saving grace in your life.  There is a story that no one else can tell.  There is a triumph—I don’t care how bad you feel, if you’re here today God has scored another victory—and we need to know what it is.  For ourselves, for each other, and for the world: name God’s victory.  Let the vivid truth of your salvation be known.

Name it in your heart.  Name it in conversation.  Name it at confession in the Lady Chapel on Saturday morning at 9:30, or by appointment.  Tell it all.  The works of God are infinite.  God’s mercy is abundant and ever-fresh.  And you are the teller of that tale in this world.  Speak the word.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

The First Sunday in Lent

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia