sermon excerpts: "Feeding the Fire of Faith"

... We don’t have the luxury that Moses did of experiencing God directly. Yet, it is quite possible that even he would have missed that opportunity if he had been just a little busier that day. From Marc Gellman’s children’s book Does God Have a Big Toe? we have the story “Watching the Burning Bush Burn” (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1989. pp.68-71)…

The bush burns (and there is some scientific inquiry as to what species of bush this would have been, isolating a certain aspect of foliage that would take on the appearance of burning, but this again is a detail that distracts us from the main thing). The bush burns, attracting Moses’ attention long enough that he can hear God’s call.

Sometimes we need to be clobbered over the head by something fantastic or tragic so that we pause long enough for God’s word to get through to us. Feeding the fire of the faith is not something that happens by what we do. It happens when we stop doing whatever it is we’re doing. It is the pause that refreshes; we nourish our spirits by taking time.

Here in the story with Moses is the first time that the idea of a sacred place is introduced in the Bible. Not during the creation of the heavens and the earth, not during the flood. I’ve mentioned before that the Jewish faith, and therefore our faith, is one based on time: commemorating and setting aside periods of time for worship and festivals and purification and sacrifice. Much of the social code was outlining how best to spend our time in a manner befitting our God.

Here, with Moses, we are invited to remove our sandals because the presence of the LORD denotes holy ground. But what makes that patch of desert wilderness so special? The fact that someone took the time to notice God was there.

This is a message that I keep coming back to because it’s one of those things that easy to remember but hard to do: honour the Sabbath and make time for our spirit, not for the sake of the church but for our own health. We remove our footwear to respect holy ground, how do we show our respect for holy time?

Let us seek to be faithful people in the rushing world. Maybe we can be open to the possibility that time spent in rest and renewal can energize us and focus our energies. If we have a little more Mary and Moses in our life, our inner Martha can work that much better. Church is a place to be filled, not drained empty and so we’ll continue to work towards this vision and reality.