Robert J Warren, the Vicar of All Saints, the Anglican Church in Rome, has a witty turn of phrase. He writes:

Moses was doing his best to lose the Egyptian accent that people had remarked on when he first landed in Midian (Exodus 2:18-19). It was an accent worth losing.  First, it was a lie: he wasn’t Egyptian.  He’d been a Hebrew child raised like a dirty secret in the heart of the Egyptian court.  Second, it provided a clue to his past misdeeds.  The child became a man back in Egypt.  His identity crisis sharpened and caused him to snap.  He’d killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave and thus became a fugitive from Egyptian justice.

Warren somewhat amusingly, yet concisely, summaries Moses’ story so far.  Exodus chapter 3 opens on Moses’ day-to-day life after having fled across the Gulf of Aqaba to Midian – an area that took its name from Midian who had been one of Abraham’s many illegitimate sons. Time has elapsed since his flight – time enough for the ever-resourceful Moses to have not simply found sanctuary but to have married the daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian.

One day while absent-mindedly leading Jethro’s flocks Moses wanders into a region described as beyond the wilderness. It’s not an incidental detail that beyond the wilderness lies at the foot of Mt. Horeb – sometimes referred to as Mt. Sinai – or the holy mountain of God. It seems that the later Deuteronomist scribes who compiled Exodus sometime in the 6^th-century BCE seem to have had a hazy grasp of geography. Midian is situated on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Aqaba – modern Saudi Arabia – yet Mt. Horeb sits at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula – so Moses has indeed been wandering far from home.

It’s helpful to picture Moses as daydreaming as he walks along – because his attention is alerted by a mysterious phenomenon which he spies in his peripheral vision – out of the corner of his eye so-to-speak. Focused concentration narrows the range of our peripheral vision. It’s only when we are not concentrating on anything closer to hand that our peripheral vision expands to take in a wider panorama. Out of the corner of his eye Moses spies something that arouses his intense curiosity. Driven by curiosity Moses leaves the beaten track and sets off across country.

In his peripheral vision Moses had caught sight of a mysterious phenomenon. Driven by curiosity – Moses arrives at his first encounter with the living God – a momentous encounter that will upend his life as he knows it.

This encounter is not only life changing for Moses but from the perspective of God’s biography it’s also direction changing for God as well. In this encounter with Moses – we hear God speaking again for the first time since his relationship with Abraham.

Throughout Genesis’ long epics of the Patriarchs after Abraham, God has remained silent. The Patriarchal cycles are stories that focus on human action in which God is assumed as background but plays no direct role. In warning Moses to take off his sandals for he is about to tread on holy ground – we hear God speaking directly to a human being again. God speaking – is the prelude to a personal relationship with Moses who for God becomes a new Abraham – that is- a human being with whom God can form and intense and personal relationship. Through his relationship with Moses –as in the days of Abraham – God once again emerges as the primary actor in the unfolding story.

Moses’ encounter with God before the burning bush is an extended metaphor which illuminates the nature of own spiritual journey. Hidden within the rich theological-biographical detail – is a story of rediscovery, of remembering, and of reset.

As Exodus chapter 2 winds to a close we witness a startling recovery of memory for God. We read:

After a long time, God heard the Israelites groaning and remembered his covenant with Abraham. God looked upon them and God took notice of them.

We might ask why has God taken so long to act? Is there a suggestion here that the enslavement is the result of God having forgotten his people? Their servitude comes to and end only when God notices their plight as he recovers his memory of Abraham. We shall never know but it is interesting to speculate.

In remembering Abraham God seems to become aware again of a need for relationship – something he last enjoyed with Abraham.  This is also a story of rediscovery, remembering, leading to a reset now with Moses as God’s chosen partner.

At the heart of this story is the surprising revelation of God’s name. God has until this point been the God of ancestors – for the Israelites a God of distant memory. In response to God’s request – Moses pressures God for something more personal in the form of a name rather than a description.  God replies: tell them I AM WHO I AM has sent you.

The English is incapable of conveying the pulsating quality of the Hebrew letters YHWH -which shimmer with ambiguity of meaning. I AM WHO I AM – can be read as a statement about who God is and has always been – a God associated with the past. But it also can be read as a statement about who God will now become – I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. The nature of who God will be – becomes revealed in future action where God is to become known as Liberator.  This is material enough for a whole sermon series yet to come.

However, today I want to focus on the element of the story captured in the phrase beyond the wilderness. I interpret this to mean – a place beyond conscious recognition – outside of the boundaries of familiar imagination.

The process of noticing what’s hidden in our peripheral vision is often best demonstrated in crime fiction where the chief witness is subjected to some kind of hypnotic process taking them back to the scene of the crime – during which they recover details of the crime lodged in peripheral vision – details that had remained hidden – inaccessible to their conscious memory.

Through the cultivation of curiosity, we begin to consciously register elements otherwise unrecognized in the peripheral vision of our daydreaming.

To venture beyond the wilderness is to leave the beaten path – the constrictions of the familiar. Matthew Syrdal – is the pastor of The Church of Lost Walls – a wild theology church in Denver, synthesizing theology and ecology. He has referred to the beaten path as the uncalled life. He bemoans that as pastors and spiritual leaders we spend too much time tending the uncalled life of the flock – by which he means:

The business-as-usual, relatively autonomous existence we often lead. In the uncalled life, Syrdal notes that: Most of us typically experience no major intrusion to speak of, nothing disrupting or redefining our identity and role in our communities, yet also no appearance or message — no larger conversation with the Holy.

He likens our uncalled life to the Israelites slavery in Egypt. In the uncalled life we are silently crying out – unknown and uncalled. In other words – being unable to notice the call of the Holy within us and around us – we remain unconsciously encapsulated in our distress – a distress emanating from the fixed and closed pattern of our lives.

Syrdal further suggests that our unconscious distress finds collective expression of the storm surges of racism, fear, and terror – forces currently in play – powerfully disrupting our civic life today.  He writes:

At times, it might seem as if the whole of western culture is enslaved in a cultural pathology — the City that Egypt represents in the Exodus narrative. The City, egocentric civilization, is almost by definition structured as a defense mechanism against the natural world and the threat it represents. In our times, Egypt is that which slashes and burns the old growth of a forgotten World, that which consumes the Earth’s resources with an insatiable appetite. We are largely, and mostly unconsciously, enculturated from early childhood with the incipient imperialism of Egypt. Moses, as a type, represents for us an awakening from the imperial dream to something like the dreaming of the Deep World.

The story of Moses and the burning bush is a story of theophany – to use the technical term. Theophany is a story or experience of divine revelation – and from the perspective of God’s biography – that is – God’s personal story -a self-revelation – a new learning for God about being God.

Theophany occurs – never in plain sight, nor along the familiar path – but always beyond the wilderness – meaning – off the beaten track hidden in peripheral vision. The trick for us is to catch its glimpse out of the corner of our eye.

Like Moses, we become changed by an encounter with the Holy – only when our lives become decentered enough – disturbed enough – to reshape our expectations, stimulate our curiosity, and pay attention to what’s happening out of the corner of our eye.