AU United Methodist Community

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
August 28, 2011
Exodus 3:1-15; Matthew 16:21-28

Exodus 3:1-15 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.

I. BEGINNING

The city of Jerusalem drives people crazy.  I don’t know if you knew that.  It’s true.  There is something called the “Jerusalem Syndrome” that affects tourists when they arrive there—disproportionately these tourists are American—they come to Jerusalem and the next thing you know they’re wandering the streets in robes proclaiming the coming of the Messiah, or that they are the Messiah, or the end of the world.  That kind of thing.  Apparently, it’s common enough that the Hebrew University Hospital has a ward dedicated to the treatment of those who suffer from this syndrome.

There’s something about Jerusalem that does that to people.  Perhaps it’s the ancient buildings, the sense of history that has gone on for thousands of years.  Perhaps it’s because there are places there that remind them of all the Bible stories they learned as children and suddenly they feel as if they are in the middle of the Bible itself.  Maybe it’s because there are places that just overwhelm you with their… holiness.  Maybe tourists feel overwhelmed in the presence of holiness and decide that God has called them to be the prophet to the nations.

There are certainly those places in the world that inspire those feelings.  In addition to the sites in Jerusalem and Israel and Palestine there are plenty of other places that do that:  St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, the National Cathedral here in Washington, Fenway Park (okay, that last one is just for Red Sox fans). But there are places whose majesty and awe overwhelm you with a sense of the divine.

These places need not be constructed by human beings either.  Plenty of people find the divine in nature.  The Roman writer Seneca wrote:

“And when a grotto has been hewn into the hollowed rock of a mountain, not by human hands but by the powers of nature, and to great depth, it pervades your soul with an awesome sense of the religious.”

Many people experience the same grandeur looking at the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains.  John Muir, whose efforts helped to establish the National Parks System and whose name is affixed to a Redwood forest outside of San Francisco, believed that the forests he was helping to preserve were cathedrals in which God was encountered.

There are simply those places that overwhelm us with a sense of the divine and we feel that we are standing on holy ground.

II. THE TEXT

Illustration by Kathleen Kimball

Now, it’s curious that Moses didn’t know that.  So, here’s Moses, he’s fled from Egypt after having killed a man for beating one of the Hebrew slaves.  He has married into the family of a Midianite priest and is tending his father in law’s flocks out beyond the wilderness when he notices something strange: a bush that is burning but is not consumed.  So, he decides to take a look and find out what is going on.

God calls to him out of the bush and as Moses begins to approach closer God says, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”

And there it is at Mount Horeb that God announces that the sufferings of the Israelite people in Egypt have not gone unnoticed and that Moses is being sent back to proclaim this deliverance and to tell Pharaoh to let the people go.  What’s interesting is that this holy place, where Moses received his call, is no longer known to us.  That is, we don’t know where Mt. Horeb is.  We’re not even sure whether it’s the same mountain as Mount Sinia (Horeb may be just another name for Sinai) and even if we knew that it was the same place as Mount Sinai, we’re not really sure where that is either.  Oh, if you go to Egypt, there’s a mountain called Mt. Sinai that you can go up.  There is a historic Christian monastery near this mountain called St. Catherine’s.  But no one really knows if it really is the Biblical Mount Sinai.

And so, this particular piece of holy ground is lost to us.  Anonymous.  Doesn’t that seem the least bit strange?  If it were so holy, why didn’t we keep better track of where it was?  Why wasn’t it a pilgrimage site throughout the Biblical period?  Maybe it stopped being holy.  If  that’s the case, then what is it that makes something holy in the first place?

III. HOLINESS 

The word “holy” in Hebrew,  is קדוש qadosh and comes from a root that means “to set apart”.  Those things that are holy are set apart from other things.  They are specially consecrated spaces.  There was the Tent of Meeting in the Tabernacle, the inner sanctum where Moses entered to talk with God.  There was the Holy of Holies in the the Temple in Jerusalem, the innermost part of the Temple precincts: a place so sacred it was entered only once a year, by the High Priest on the holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  (That has always made me wonder how they kept it clean if only one person could enter it once a year.)   This tradition has persisted in the Christian church.  In the Orthodox churches, behind the iconostasis is a chamber that only the priest enters, preparing the holy Eucharist.  There are still vestiges of that in Protestantism as well.  Occasionally you’ll meet someone who’ll ask if it’s “okay” to be up on the chancel.

We have a long tradition of setting aside places, of consecrating them, and they become holy.  In fact, even in our book of worship, we see services of consecration for new church buildings, for parsonages (though, no one ever came over and did that for my apartment), and even for bishops.  We “set aside” all manner of things that are meant to be holy.

So, it’s not strange to think that Moses had to be told to take off his sandals. There was no reason he should know that that ground was holy.  It was just some piece of ground beyond the wilderness along a mountain where he was tending sheep.

So, Moses had no idea it was holy until God told him: “The place you are standing is holy ground.”  And then continues: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”   That is, God declares the place to be holy by announcing God’s presence there.  The place is not intrinsically holy.  There is nothing about the bush or the sand or the mountain that makes the place holy such that Moses should have known to remove his sandals as a sign of respect and reverence.  No, the place is holy not because of anything we have done to consecrate the place.  It is holy because God is there.

To be sure, we often think that way about our holy places.  We think of them as the places that God is.  The Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem contained the Ark of the Covenant, which, when it was not busy destroying Nazis and being rescued by Indiana Jones, was considered to be the Throne of God.  The reason the sacred precinct behind the iconostasis of an orthodox church is considered sacred is because of the presence of Christ in the eucharist that is there prepared.

And we certainly have that sensibility about those places where we worship: we imagine that they are holy because God is present in them.  We imagine that God lives in the churches in some way.  Certainly in a place like the National Cathedral or even in a place like Metropolitan Memorial Church across the street.  Somewhere with high roofs and stone walls.  Even our own Kay Spiritual Life Center sometimes has that reputation.  When I first arrived here, I was told by students that in addition to “flaming cupcake” the chapel was also known as “the God box”.  (Given its shape, it’s really more of a “God hat box”).

What happens when we talk like that is that we contribute to the idea that God is found only in places like that.  That holy ground is found in the likely and obvious places: churches, cathedrals, temples, shrines.   We forget that holy ground can be found where we do not expect it.  Where we have to be told to remove our sandals.

IV. HOLY GROUND

You have come to one of those places.  And one of those times.  These four years that you spend in college are unlike any other that you will have.  They are a particular time in a person’s life.  For eighteen years, very well meaning people—parents, teachers, friends, clergy—have all told you who you were.  They’ve told you what social group you belong to, what political party, what belief system, what religion.  And now, over these next few years, you get to decide whether any of that is true.  You get to ask: what does it mean for me to be a Christian? What *do* I believe?

It may take you a while to sort that out—and that’s okay.  Your sense of identity will continue to evolve over your time here.  Our time in college is a period of self-exploration; a time of growth in knowledge, in spirituality, in wisdom. In order to do it right, we have to open ourselves up to possibilities.  We listen more.  We look more.  We perceive more.  We make ourselves vulnerable.  It is a process in which we make ourselves open to the movement of the Spirit.  And in that, we encounter God.

This is an adventurous time.  It is unpredictable and risky and full of unexpected turns and twists.  There are peaks and valleys, times of joy and times of sorrow. But God is present in the midst of this no less than in the Burning Bush.

Because in addition to being present in the process of being open to the Spirit, God is present in community.  In this place—not this building, however much we might love this cupcake-shaped house of God—but in this community, this fellowship, God is known.

For it is surrounded by a community of love, that welcomes you no matter who you are, that accepts you as you are, that seeks to be in relationship with you wherever you are on that journey, wherever it takes you.  In that acceptance, in that love, we encounter grace.  And when we encounter that grace, we encounter the author of all grace.  We encounter the God who comes to us where we are: whether it’s in the middle of the desert or the middle of the Quad.

V. END

There are many places that will fill us with awe and wonder.  The great cathedrals will still cause our hearts to soar. The wonders of nature will fill our hearts with wonder.  The ancient places will still evoke emotion and power for us.  There are still those places that will provoke a profound religious response in us.

But they are not the only places we find holy ground.  That we find wherever we find God, wherever we encounter the love, grace, and power of the living God.  That we encounter in the unlikely places.  In the wilderness.  In the brokenness.  In the places of uncertainty where you question the things you’ve always known.  In the wrestling with questions of identity and faith.  In the tensions between the already and the not-yet.  In all those places and more: God is.  The God who calls to us and declares, “I am who I am.”  In the ordinary and unexpected, there we find God.

So, welcome to college.  Remove your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.