Do you ever wish that you could have been there when God worked some mighty miracle? Wouldn’t it have been cool to see the Red Sea parted with the water like a wall to the left and to the right? Amazing to see Jesus feed 5000 people with five loaves and two fish! How about the moment when the apostles saw Jesus walking across the water? Seeing something like that would change our whole belief system, right? Or, on closer examination of the Bible, do these remarkable, unusual, miraculous occurrences make a difference to faith at all? When you think about it, the Hebrew children who witnessed the parting of the Red Sea were so resistant to the ways of God that they wandered forty years in the wilderness before they proved themselves worthy of entry into the Promised Land as St. Paul pointed out in the epistle. No doubt some of those 5000 who participated in the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes were there at the courtyard of Pontius Pilate yelling “Crucify him. Crucify him.” And the faith of the twelve who saw Jesus walk on the water and calm the storm was so fragile that when he was arrested they betrayed, denied, abandoned him. That is the backdrop when we hear the Old Testament lesson for today from the Book of Exodus – the story of the Burning Bush. We probably would have been as awed as Moses was at the “remarkable sight.” But does the remarkable sight help our relationship with God? Remember, Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land because of a defect of faith on his part. All of this suggests to me that the extraordinary revelations which seem so attractive are not as important as the everyday experiences of encountering God in grounding our belief.
The Burning Bush might be cool to see but if we have on the right glasses we will see signs of God’s presence all around us. There is not well remembered musical by Rogers and Hammerstein called Flower Drum Song that has this as a theme: A Hundred Million Miracles are happening every day. “A little girl in Chungking just thirty inches tall, decided she would try to walk and almost doesn’t all – a hundred million miracles,” goes one lyric. Anyone who has ever examined the tiny curve of the ear in a new born infant or their itsy-bitsy finger nails has seen a miracle. Plant a kernel of corn in the ground and with water and sun in a few months you have a stalk as high as an elephant’s eye. A Hundred million miracles. Or, on a human level, observe the mercy of God present when the people of Mother Emmanuel AME Church extended forgiveness to the white supremacist who shot and killed nine people during a Bible Study. A hundred million miracles. The “Flower Drum Song” goes on – “and those who say they don’t agree are those who cannot hear or see.” Or, in a more modern take: “There can be miracles when you believe,” as Whitney Houston sang.
Looking at the story again, wouldn’t it be great to stand on Holy Ground? Moses was told to take off his sandals “for the place where you stand is holy ground.” Where might we find some holy ground? Maybe if we went to Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments? Or how about in Jerusalem — will we tread on holy ground when we walk the path that Jesus took up Calvary’s hill carrying his cross? Have you ever gone to Mexico City to stand on the holy ground where Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego? I can testify that those places, those sites where these miraculous things occurred are remarkably like every other place. Those of us of a certain age will remember that when Pope John Paul would come to a country he hadn’t visited before the first thing he would do coming down the ramp from the airplane was to kneel down and kiss the ground. He symbolized in doing so that the land he was entering was holy ground and needed to be reverenced. Could it be that we are limiting our understanding of holy ground too much?
Then there is the business of the sacred name in the Exodus account. Moses wants to know God’s name and God tells him “I am who am.” “This is my name forever; thus am I to be remembered through all generations.” Knowing the right name to call God was important to Moses. Which reminds me of one summer when I was in college and working at a Bible School teaching the six year olds. One boy in particular made classroom discipline impossible. He was called “Tiger” and certainly lived up to that moniker. I asked one of the sisters who was an experienced teacher to help me get control of the classroom. When Tiger acted up she said, “Maurice, I want you to take your seat.” He meekly did so. Calling him by his given name meant he did not have to live up to the nickname he had been give. From then on Maurice was my favorite student. Every parent struggles to find the appropriate name for their child. Maybe this child will be named after a favorite auntie or maybe a name celebrating a cultural heritage or, as it used to be when I was growing up, after a saint or Biblical character or maybe just a name fashioned by the parents with a creative spelling to recognize the unique nature of their child. No matter what, we recognize the sacred aspect of every name since when parents present their child for baptism the first question is “What name do you give your child?” God names us and claims us at Baptism.
The three lessons we can draw from the Bible story of Moses for today: First, there isn’t a name out there that is not a sacred name claiming each one of us as a child of God. Second, we must recognize that our whole lives long all we are doing is moving from one piece of holy ground to another. And third, every bush, if we have the eyes to see it, is a burning bush.
