Sermon Recording:

Sermon for August 30, 2026  

[The Israelites’] cry for help rose up to God from their slavery. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.

These are the verses that come before the passage that we hear this morning. And there’s more. In the intervening time between Moses’ adoption by Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses has grown up, murdered an Egyptian, fled Pharaoh’s wrath, gotten married, had a son, and become a shepherd in the wilderness. 

Whew.

The story of Moses and the burning bush isn’t complete unless we know what happened before. Because this is a story about paying attention. And the first to pay attention, even before Moses, is God. 

God took notice of them.

To which some might gently and humbly observe, It’s about darn time, God.

The Israelites have suffered for a long time. God has been silent for a long time. What took God so long? 

The question of “How long, O Lord?” echoes throughout scripture in the Psalms, and through history as the children of God suffer trauma and grief of every kind. The fact is that the concept of God as all-knowing and all powerful was not known to the tellers of the ancient stories. It was not inconceivable to imagine a God who forgot things or did not see—a God with human characteristics, arguably created in our image. But while there are some human characteristics we can imagine for God, like vulnerability for example, the idea of a careless and forgetful God is something a present-day person of faith would find to be pretty much unconscionable. So we can’t help but feel confronted here by one of the Big Questions that are part of a life of faith and part of being human: Why do bad things happen and why is God sometimes silent? 

We will not find a definitive answer here this morning—I’m not even sure if it’s possible. But we will be given a way to engage with the question. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“God took notice of them.”

“…[Moses] 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.” 

God took notice.

Moses took notice. 

They both paid attention.

It’s become a lost art, hasn’t it—the concept of giving yourself over to letting something absorb your senses to the point that something whose presence you have completely taken for granted takes on a new dimension.

How long has it been since we’ve done that? 

Cell phones don’t count. The so-called attention economy has sapped our ability to truly take notice in a way that engages us in what matters.

Amy Frykholm, formerly of The Christian Century, calls this “beholding.”

“Beholding is the practice of being in the presence of something or someone and contemplating it, allowing your own reality to be penetrated by the reality of this other.”

When we behold, we enter into relationship.

This is what God did. God took notice of the suffering Israelites, and initiated relationship by calling to Moses from out of the unconsuming fire. It was then on Moses to take notice of the burning bush.

But he had to “turn aside” to do it. 

It would have been easier not to bother. He had sheep to tend. A living to make. Things on his mind. To turn aside would be to surrender–control of his day, his worries, his routine–to surrender to something new. 

I once read, and I wish I could remember where, that to truly listen is to open yourself to the possibility of being changed by what you hear. There is so much wisdom in this, and of course it goes not just to listening, but to truly paying attention to anything—to beholding. 

But beholding involves surrender. And we don’t like to do that. We much prefer to keep on keeping on, it’s much safer.

But as Moses discovered when he made the effort to overcome his inner inertia, he found himself on holy ground.

And—and this is what we all fear and hope for in such moments—everything changed. 

God said,” 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.”

Gulp.

God definitely does not call us into our comfort zone.

Moses asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh…?” And God doesn’t really answer. God simply responds, “I will be with you.” Which is a pretty amazing promise from one who had been God in absentia for so long. 

“I will be with you.”

Then Moses asks another question, perhaps the question that provides a way to engage with the Big Question we pondered before: 

If I do this for you, who shall I say is sending me? 

The thing is, God has already made that clear in the beginning, saying the he was the God of your father, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God has connected Moses to the original Covenant and stated the divine identity. And Moses covered his face and bowed down, so he knows full well who this is. So perhaps Moses just needs some reassurance in the face of this daunting challenge. 

Who are you, really? Can I count on you?

I AM who I AM.

YHWH. Virtually unpronounceable and practically untranslatable. 

I will be who I will be. 

YHWH. Contained in those two syllables are the promise and the challenge of the God who is, simply and impossibly, Essence, Being itself. There may be suffering, there may be nothing but divine silence at times. But I AM’s presence will not waver. Moses’ call—our call—is to accept this and go forth to work for the world’s healing. That’s the assignment, and it is the holy ground of our faith.

Jesus tells his disciples, to Peter’s dismay, what Moses learned long before; that suffering– the world’s suffering, our own suffering, the suffering of God– is part of the journey of faith. We are called to behold, to pay attention, take notice, to witness—there are so many ways to say it and really only one way to follow through on it, and that is Love. 

And Love says that just to behold is not sufficient. When we take notice in Love we enter into relationship, and we cannot help but act; that is true witness. And it carries risks.

A number of you have heard me talking about Jonathan Myrick Daniels in the past couple of weeks. His feast day in the Episcopal calendar is 14 August, and 20 August is the anniversary of his death in 1965 when he placed himself between 17-year-old Ruby Sales and a shotgun blast in Lowndes County Alabama. Daniels attended seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. As Blacks’ struggle for civil rights in the South ignited, Daniels was moved to turn aside from his privileged white New England background and his studies to behold the suffering of his Black siblings in Christ. He went to Alabama to picket, to register people to vote, to help desegregate churches, to live with Black families, to get arrested. To behold the injustice of Jim Crow. And in beholding, he placed himself between sin and suffering. As Moses placed himself between Pharaoh and the Israelites. As Jesus the Good Shepherd placed himself between the Cross and his flock. Because that’s what Love does. 

I’m going to let Mary Oliver get the last word today, because she articulates this so beautifully. Her poem is, “What I Have Learned So Far”:

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don’t think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of — indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.