The Sacred
Ordinary
A Sermon on Exodus 3:1-15
by Griff Martin
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community
of faith
On the Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time
September 10, 2017
Incarnate
God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living
and breathing Resurrected reality we can all together experience. Be present
here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then
nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else
will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Risen Christ and the
Comforter. Amen.
In
1932 William Beebe was the first scientist to descend into the darkness of the
ocean in a very small submarine, known as a submersible. There was one tiny
window for him to look out and observe a place that up until then had been
unobservable. What he discovered was extraordinary, he did not come back to the
surface with reports of nothing but inky blackness but instead a world of
“dancing lights, pale glow, and beguiling shimmers.” In his words: “it seemed
to explode” with light and color.
The
New York Times ran a front page story last week in the Science section about
this phenomenon, they titled it “Alive with Light.” The story gave further
detail about bioluminescence, which is simply the biochemical emission of light
by living organisms. There is a fascinating TED talk on this by the scientist
Edith Widder, well worth your time. This occurs in fireflies and anglerfish;
this trait exists across the spectrum. The Times article stated that after two
years of research and over 240 deep dives, scientist have now concluded that of
sea creatures 76% have the ability to make their own light.
The
conclusion: in the one place where one would not expect to find light, miles
deep into the ocean darkness where sun light cannot travel, the world is still
alive with light.
And
this may be new to scientist, but this is not new to theology, to the study of
God. Our very book begins by telling us over and over that we will see things
in places we don’t expect to see things…. Or at least that is what we read in
our book even if we have decided it’s best to delegate our time with God, our
encounters with God, to Sunday mornings in a particular building, because that
is our own false assumption and we should know better.
For
Adam and Eve, God is a garden companion…
For
Jacob, God is a dream and a wrestling mate…
For
Abraham, God is strangers sitting in your tent….
And
for Moses, God is a burning bush.
It
begins one day when he was out tending to his father in law Jethro’s sheep,
being a shepherd for someone else’s flock. He is out on Mount Horeb, which we
now know as a thin place, a sacred ground, however Moses did not know that. In
fact what he knew is that Horeb essentially translates as wasteland… he was out
tending to someone else’s sheep near a mountain known as the Wasteland, in the
wilderness.
And
his agenda for that particular day does not include a divine encounter. I
imagine instead it included: protect the sheep, count them to make sure they
are all there, repeat and repeat, maybe there was time for lunch or a nap or a
dip into a stream, but essentially it was protect and count. Or so he thought.
And
so out there midmorning, counting and keeping eyes out for predators, a bit
bored, already tired of the day, something catches Moses’ eye. It’s a bush that
is on fire and more than that it’s a dry bush in the middle of the desert that
should burn up quickly however this one was not… it was on fire but it was not
consumed.
And
Moses is intrigued, which is one of God’s favorite characteristics. God loves
when we are intrigued, fascinated, curious, aroused, captivated, hooked, charmed,
delighted, pulled, enchanted…. these are sacred verbs. These are the verbs of
reverence. These are the verbs that call us to pay attention. These are the
verbs that tell us it is likely that God is near.
And
Moses senses this, so Moses said to himself: “I must turn aside and look at
this great sight and see why this bush is not burned up.” So Moses turns aside,
he allows the intrigue to guide him and he arrives on sacred ground where God
speaks, where God calls out Moses life in a new direction, where God reveals
God’s name. His curiosity leads him to an encounter with the divine.
Now
how many of us have desperately desired an encounter with God? We go on
spiritual retreats and pilgrimages, we fast, we pray, we memorize Scripture, we
see spiritual directors, we read book after book after book, we meditate, we
study the Enneagram and all of these are good, even necessary steps on our
spiritual journey. However how many of us have missed the most elementary
lesson, the first step in having an encounter with God….
Moses
stopped and paid attention.
It’s
an ordinary Monday morning and that means the kids have to get to school and
you have to get to work and even though you had the whole weekend you did not
get everything together so you are running around like a crazy person, and
something catches your eye, it’s a picture from a decade ago and you are pulled
into the memory of that place, of that trip and of the lesson you learned
there…. but suddenly remember all you have to do so off you go to get the kids
lunches packed, to put your shoes on and out the door….
It’s
the blooms on bougainvillea that you miss as you race out of the garage each
morning as you head to a meeting and then miss once again as you pull in each
day so tired you don’t have the energy to look anymore….
It’s
sitting with your cup of coffee early one morning before anyone in the house
wakes up, thinking about the upcoming day or one of the 10,000 thoughts that is
racing through your brain when suddenly your skin notices something and you
sense that a Presence is near but you dismiss it because you have been so
trained to believe that God shows up only on Sunday mornings at 10:30….
It’s
Sunday morning and it’s time for church and what a day it’s going to be, there
is a family dedication of a very special couple, it’s communion Sunday, you
have to get to Sunday school because you need to talk about this new governance
structure being proposed here at church and there is so much on your mind that
as you walk into church you walk right by a homeless man who knows a truth that
you need in your life…
It’s
looking down at your phone and seeing a call from a friend you have not spoken
too recently and hitting cancel because you have a to do list and don’t have
that kind of time…
You
see my guess is that we walk by burning bushes all the time and it’s not that
we don’t want to stop at them, in fact it’s much worse than that: we don’t even
notice them.
We
are too busy. We are on our phones. We are in a hurry. We have stuff to do. We
are blind to everything that is beyond the next task. We are living in our
heads. We are working. We are distracted. We are too indoctrinated to believe
that we know when and where God will show up.
We
aren’t paying attention.
We
have forgotten the great truth of our Scripture: that God is no respecter of
distance and distraction, that God is going to again and again invade our
worlds in order to get our attention. That the God who became flesh and blood
in the Incarnation is still the God of Incarnation and that there are Little
Christ all around us, God incarnate today.
That
God the Creator loves the ordinary. That the Spirit shows up in things we
understand. That Jesus himself used the everyday as his greatest teacher-
bread, fish, light, salt, family.
That
our call is to be mystics in the everyday.
That
God’s preference seems to be the nontraditional and nonreligious settings,
which might mean that encounters happen more readily on the streets than in here…
which is good news because we spend a lot more time out there and maybe this is
the place we come to be community and testify about our experiences of God that
week.
We
must learn that all ground could very well be holy ground, if we are willing to
take off our shoes which is simply our layer of protection.
If
we are willing to turn aside and notice. If we pay attention, if we reclaim
that word that is so needed in our world today… if we reclaim reverence. One of
my favorite philosophers lives here in Austin and teaches at UT, Paul Woodruff
and he has written one of my favorite books of all times- Reverence: Renewing a
Forgotten Virtue. He defines reverence as the well developed capacity to have
feeling of awe and respect at the right time and in the right way. And he
believes we need to reclaim this, in his words:
“The
virtue of reverence has been fading out of our conscious lives. We have not
lost our capacity for reverence. [or the feeling of awe at ideas such a truth
and justice which leads to a respect for other people]. The capacity for virtue
belongs to all of us as human beings. What we are losing is a language of
behavior — a self-conscious sort of ceremony — that best expresses reverence in
daily life; and, along with self-conscious ceremony, we are losing many of the
occasions on which people used to find ways to be reverent.”
I
experienced reverence a few years ago in New York City, in a place I certainly
did not expect God to show up. I was on a bachelor party trip and the groom really
wanted to see Rucker Park. If you don’t know Rucker Park it’s a famous
basketball court at the corner of 155th and Frederick Douglas
Boulevard in Harlem. It’s a basketball court that has been home to many of the
greats- Kareem Abdul Jabber, Dr. J, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant to name a
few. It’s also a place that many NBA stars have visited after achieving fame.
It’s a community space for the neighborhood and on the weekends you can’t find
a seat close to the court where there is always a game going on and often a NBA
star playing.
We
were not going to be there over a weekend so we went on a Thursday afternoon. I
was not quite as taken with the court as my friends and instead of playing a
game of pick up I sat on the bleachers beside the court in the shade and
drifted off in my own thoughts. I was brought back to the space when a woman
sat down beside me, well dressed on her lunch break, she looked at me and
smiled and said “you aren’t from around here are you?” I smiled and said “it’s
that obvious?” She laughed, broke a cookie in half and said “Let me tell you
about this place…” and then she told me about games she had seen here, friends
she had made around this place and then she said “you really should come on the
weekends, it’s really something but if you close your eyes you can still feel
it…”
And
she was telling me about so much more than just basketball, it was about her
life and history and the only appropriate word was reverence. God was near and
I almost missed it.
To
pay attention to the burning bushes because they are everywhere around us.
I
tried to put this into practice this weekend and here is what I found: it’s the
perfect running weather when it should still be so hot in Texas, it’s a sunrise
on the way to a funeral, it’s a friend in a purple wig at the San Marcos Pride
Parade, it’s sitting with a friend who is more like a brother on Rainey Street,
it’s watching you kids learn to fish and the huge smiles on their face, it’s
rediscovering the poem Happiness by Jane Kenyon, it’s seeing the faces of
Barbara Matthews and Mary Smith and the joy upon returning home from Lebanon,
it’s the 60 care packages we made for those arriving in Austin from Hurricane
Harvey. God was all around if I noticed.
So
pay attention…. The first rays of the morning sun, the stranger sitting beside
us at a coffee shop, the last blooms of the summer plants, the crossing guard
on the way to school, the book sitting on the coffee table, the sanctuary in
the middle of the week, the first sip of a cold beer at the end of a day, your
partner’s laughter, your kids smile, that song on the radio, browsing through a
book store and art gallery, sitting at the piano to play a song….
Burning
bushes are all around us. God is nearer than we ever imagine. Jesus shows up
again and again and again. The Spirit hovers nearby.
God
is everywhere. May we finally notice.
Amen
and Amen.
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