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.”
*****
This weekend launches a new semester.  For many of you, this is your initiation into New York Theological Seminary.  Welcome!

We are looking this weekend at the theme of initiation into the body.  Over the next two years at these retreats we want to look at wholeness in ministry.  This weekend we are focusing specifically on the corporate body we call NYTS as we begin.  What is this body we call NYTS, and what does it mean to become part of it?

This evening as we begin I want to turn up the heat a bit on us.  I want to find a word to help us as we begin the semester, to look for help in making sure we are headed in the right direction for this semester.  And I want to see if we can rekindle some fires.

I recently read a letter addressed to the ministers of America by a famous revivalist.  The letter read in part:

A great deal is said about a thorough preparation for the ministry, at the present day.  And certainly there cannot be too much said upon the importance of such preparation; but do permit me to ask, what in fact constitutes a thorough preparation for the ministry?  Is it a mere college and theological education?  By no means. These are important; but they are far from constituting the principal part of a thorough education. Indeed they are as nothing, when compared with the importance of the baptism of the Holy Ghost.1

That letter was dated June 3, 1840, and was written by Charles G. Finney, who was one of the leading figures in both the abolitionist movement and the women’s rights movement of his day.

Along with Asa Mahan and John Morgan, Finney was also one of the architects of the Oberlin School of Christian theology, an evangelical tradition that our own Peter Heltzel has shown to be so relevant to the 20th century evangelical search for justice.

Oberlin College opened its doors in 1835 to accommodate the students who had walked out of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati because they were ordered by the trustees of that institution to stop their abolitionist activities.  Finney was among its first professors.

Oberlin was the first school in the USA to admit and graduate persons of African descent and women.

Oberlin students were expected to sign up to be agents of the Anti-Slavery Society while they were enrolled in classes, and many worked in abolitionist ministries whether or not they occupied pulpits in the churches.

Finney’s letter indicates that questions concerning the efficacy of the ministry of the churches are not new to our own day in American society.  Faced with an ever more deeply entrenched “slavocracy,” a burgeoning middle class for whom the pursuit of mammon had become a primary occupation, and perennial questions about the continued subordination of women in church and society, Finney saw no option but to call upon the churches to be empowered anew by a fresh baptism of God’s Holy Spirit.

That baptism he and others often compared to a baptism of fire.  Sitting in classes, reading books, and writing papers is not enough, he in effect was saying.  You could be educated and still be a racist or a misogynist.  You could be well-educated and still not an effective agent for justice.  Preparation for ministry required something more, Finney was saying.  It required a fire be lit inside, that one have something of a baptismal encounter.  His admonition that we seek the leading of the Holy Spirit before engaging in any attempt to provide leadership for the church, and that in doing so we attend to questions of spirituality and justice, serves us well today.

With Finney’s exhortation in mind, then, I turn to Exodus 3:1-5, a passage that my colleague Jin Hee Han terms a “call narrative.”  There are a number of these in scripture.  This particular one constitutes the call of Moses into ministry.

The passage opens with Moses in exile.  Let me ask you:  have you ever felt like you were in a place of exile?

Have you ever been in state of mind, or in a political or social or cultural place that you could only describe as exilic?

Ever felt like you did not belong here, or that you were not in the place where you ought to be, or wanted to be, in life?

Ever been in a place where you were being “othered,” where you were being made the outsider, where you were made to feel not welcomed?

Have you ever been in a place where you just wanted to go home, but couldn’t get there?

Maybe you could not even say exactly what home means any more for you.

Moses is there with you this evening.  He is in exile.  He was of Hebrew roots, but born in Egypt, raised as the son of a pharaoh, and then because of an act that can be construed to be a rash moment of nationalist uprising, forced to go into exile in the desert of Midian, and now he is working for his father-in-law in a the family business, tending sheep.

Moses, the one-time Egyptian prince, was now tending sheep in the wilderness on the edge of a desert.

He had a great job at Lehman brothers once.  He was high up in the Pataki administration.  He had an appointment at Harvard.  He was once a prince in the land.  But then the recession hit, or a new governor was elected, or he didn’t get tenure.  Things did not work out well for him in the place where he was first making his name.

Maybe it was a church that turned out badly.  Maybe it was a place where you thought you were supposed to be.  But then somehow, in some way, through some unexpected twist or turn of fate or of divine intervention you ended up having to go into exile and you found yourself on the edge of a desert tending sheep for a living.

Working for your father-in-law.

And your really don’t like him that much.

But at least you’ve got a job.

And pharaoh can’t find you out here.

Or maybe pharaoh doesn’t even care.  Maybe you have fallen so far that no one on Wall Street or in Albany or even at Harvard even remembers your name any more.

Eric who?  Cassandra who?  Oh yes, I think I remember him.  Didn’t she have to quit and take off for Median some time back?  Wonder what ever happened to her.

There is Moses, gone into exile.  It seems like a number of our own prophetic leaders in the churches went into exile this past summer over health care.

Just when we needed them the most to help sustain a vital movement to extend health coverage to the 47 million in the USA who are without any safety net when it comes to health care, a whole lot? bunch?of them went silent, and left the airwaves to the extremists who screamed about “death panels” and blogged about Obama being a socialist.

Too many of our own prophetic church leaders went silent, and are remaining silent.  They are tending sheep in a foreign land maybe because they are afraid that speaking out will cost them in offerings, which they so badly need to keep those megachurches going.  Or maybe they just got tired of keeping on.  Maybe they just lost a bit of the fire they once felt within.

So there they are, out in the deserts of Sinai, in Median, with Moses, helping him tend his sheep.

But the text says Moses was not just in the wilderness.  The text says Moses was in a wilderness beyond the wilderness.  Verse 1 says he led his flock to the other side of the wilderness, a place beyond the wilderness.

The King James calls it “the backside of the desert.”  I like that.  I didn’t know deserts had backsides.

The word is achar.  It means on the other side, beyond, or behind.

Maybe he got lost.  Or maybe he was trying to get further away.  But whatever was the reason, there he was, in a wilderness beyond the wilderness.

I didn’t know you could go any further than a wilderness.

I didn’t know that you could go beyond a wilderness.

I thought wilderness was as bad as it could get.

I thought wilderness was the end of the earth.

I didn’t know you could come to the end of the earth, to the end of the road, to the end of your strength, to the end of the day, and then find out there was still more to come.

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought that it could not possibly get any worse…and then it did?

Have you ever been in a relationship that you thought could not get any worse…and then it did?

I’ve been in places spiritually that I thought were as dry as they could be … and then found out things could get a lot drier than I had imagined.

I have been in places of pain where I thought it was physically and emotionally impossible for things to get any worse . . . and then they did.

Moses thought he was at the edge of the world, at the end of the wilderness, but God had to lead him even further on into a place that can only be described as beyond the wilderness or the back side of the desert, for God had something to show to Moses that could only be seen in that place beyond all places, that wilderness beyond the wilderness.

Verse 2 says the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing bush.  It caught his attention.  Verse 2 says Moses looked.  Furthermore the verse suggests his look was not a mere glance, but the burning fire of the bush caught his attention, for it says, the bush was not consumed.

But then verse 3 gives us the key to the entire passage I think.  It’s not just the moment of the look that matters, it is what comes next.  Moses says to himself, to God, and to all of us who read this text through the ages, “I must turn aside and look.”

In other words, Moses says, “I must change the direction in which I am heading so as to be better able to approach and address this phenomenon of the burning bush.”

We can see this thing in passing, or we can turn aside and face it directly.

The Hebrew word here is sur, “turn aside,” “depart from.”

The word indicates a turn in direction, a deviation, a swerve, a declension.

It means to turn away from a particular direction in which one is heading, to change careers, to depart from a way of life, to head off into a new field.

It can also mean to repent, to turn away from a negative way of life, to give up behaviors or activities that are self-destructive.

Sometimes you have to change direction not because you are sinning, but because if you continue to go in the direction you are intending, you will end up sinning, or being in the wrong place, or being in a place you do not want to be.

Sometimes the turning aside that we associate theologically with repentance is not a turning away from negative behaviors, but a turning away in order not to end up missing what God is calling you to do for the rest of your life.

Repentance in this sense is a proactive and anticipatory corrective in direction, not in response to any sin you might have committed, but in order to avoid missing what God has prepared for you to do.

Moses says, I’ve got to turn aside.

I’ve got to make a change in my life.

I’ve got to find some new direction for my life.

Look, I’m going to make an unexpected turn here.

“Don’t get scared now folks,” you tell your family, “but I’ve decided I’m going to answer my call to ministry and go to seminary.  I’ve decided that God wants me to be in ministry, and I want to turn aside from the direction that I thought my life was heading in, to go to NYTS and get prepared for something new.”

Then it happens.  When you change your direction in the wilderness, suddenly you get to see something new about the wilderness that you didn’t get to see before.

For what appeared to have been a wilderness, a place of desolation, a place of emptiness, a wilderness beyond a wilderness, the back side of a desert, the place beyond any place of life, the place beyond the place of death–suddenly comes alive for you as a place of potentiality, a place of hope, a place of direction, a place of meaning, a place where you experience the presence of God in the midst of emptiness and solitude.

For it is precisely in this place, a wilderness beyond the wilderness, that God chooses to encounter us in life.

You thought the place was empty.  You thought that God was nowhere around there.

But suddenly there she is – calling out to you, calling you by name.  But you can only meet him, you can only encounter this God in the wilderness beyond the wilderness that your life perhaps has become, if you turn aside, if you change direction, if you are willing to go in a new direction.

And with that turn suddenly the place that one moment had been a wilderness beyond a wilderness the next moment turns out to be Sinai.  It turns out to be Horeb.  It is the sacred mountain, that place of holy encounter, that place where you meet God, that place that is full of the divine presence and not at all empty and isolated as you originally thought.

“Turn aside Moses!  Look at this burning bush.  Take note that the bush is not consumed.  Take off your shoes, Moses!  This is not just a wilderness beyond the wilderness.  This is holy ground.”

Moses turns to meet the heat.

****

I was a 27 year old graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, working in Minneapolis as the director of pastoral care in St Joseph’s Home for Children, a residential treatment center for behaviorally disturbed children operated by Catholic Charities.

I wasn’t making much money as director of pastoral care.  I was living with my wife and young child in Minneapolis in a small apartment on Grand Ave., and I had begun to wonder what I was doing in ministry.

A family member began talking with me about quitting my job and going in with him on a business venture.  “There is a lot of money out there,” he kept reminding me.  “We ought to get in on it.”

Another family member quit his job as a school teacher and became a stock broker.  He was soon making a lot of money and suggested I think about doing the same.

And I began to wonder, why am I doing this kind of work?  Why do I go in day after day to sit in on family therapy sessions or run chapel services for behaviorally disturbed children in treatment when I could be doing something else?

One morning I was heading on the bus to work, up Grand Ave, over Franklin Avenue, down Portland.

The bus was driving along Franklin Street, maybe 10 blocks or so from the American Indian Center.  I was thinking about turning in my resignation when suddenly I saw on the side of a building that stood next to an empty lot, written in large black letters stretching all the way across the white wall of the building in two rows of words:

“You must have a flaming moral purpose so that greed, oppression and exploitation may shrivel before the fire within you.”

The words immediately arrested me.  They were burned into my retina in an instant, to the point where I can still close my eyes today and see them still today.  

Large black letters, fuzzy edges like they were painted with a spray can,

“You must have a flaming moral purpose so that greed, oppression and exploitation may shrivel before the fire within you.’”

I began to cry.  Sitting there on the bus, on my way to work, in what had become a wilderness for me, there suddenly a flaming moral purpose, a burning bush, my own blazing fire that could not be extinguished.

I recognized immediately that these were the words of a call, the call of God being burned into my soul.

And In that instant I also saw that my life had lost any moral purpose or direction that it once might have had.  That burning desire of a fire within me had gone out.  I knew right there instantly that greed and oppression and exploitation could only flourish in my soul in the absence of the fire of God.

I went to work, and resolved to make the change in my direction.

A couple of days later I was on the same bus route, and was watching to see the words on the side of the building.

But when I got there, there were no words painted on the building, no words to read again.  I could not even see any indication that they had once been there and had then been painted over or scrubbed off the wall.  The building was still there with white walls, but there was no painted message.  A year or so later a new building was put up on the empty lot and my wall entirely disappeared.

To this day I can not tell you for sure that there were words on that wall.  Years later I heard about a fellow called “Freedom Joe” who wrote graffiti with a message on walls of buildings in Minneapolis, but I have no way of knowing if these were his words or not.

Maybe there were no words written on that wall.  Maybe they were just being burned into my psyche by the Spirit of God who was calling me, for what I experienced was a call from God to have a fire within to be sure that greed, oppression and exploitation did not consume me.

A year later I had indeed resigned from my position in pastoral care for Catholic Charities in Minneapolis, but I was back to New York City where I had lived before, and was working as a community organizer for affordable housing in Harlem and Jamaica, Queens.  I also went back into the Ph. D. program at Union Seminary to finish a degree in theology.  Two years later I started teaching in the NYTS MPS program in Sing Sing, for Sam Solivan, who was the director of the program at that time.  The following year I was working with Sam as his teaching assistant in the introduction to theology class at NYTS, and the year following that Keith Russell asked me to help with a new course he was introducing called the Practice of Prophetic Ministry.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Let me ask you this evening:  do you have a flaming moral purpose? 

Do you have a fire within you that is sufficient to turn you aside, to cause you to go in a new direction so that greed, oppression, and exploitation may shrivel within you?

Tonight I invite you to light that fire.  I invite you to turn toward that fire.  Tonight I invite you to look within yourself to find inside you that flaming moral purpose, that burning bush, that was set ablaze by the Spirit of the living God and that will not be consumed, and that will not let you go.

We will not make it as individuals, as a church, as a community, as a city, as a nation, as a people if we do not turn toward this burning bush, if we do not find a way to kindle a flaming moral purpose, if we do not find the fire of God in our bones again.  Tonight I invite you to turn in that direction.

Amen.