The theme of this sermon has been on my heart these past days; I want the courage and faith of Moses to say to the Lord, “Here I am” – accepting where I am, who I am and what I am doing.
The sermon text is below the sermon video – they are not quite the same, as often happens when the Spirit is moving.
Click here for sermon video: https://zionepiscopal.com/Sermon%20Videos/fourteenth-sunday-after-pentecost-9-3-2023-neale.html
Sermon preached at Zion Episcopal, Washington, NC
Sunday September 3rd 2023
The Reverend Alan Neale
“Here I am”
Exodus 3:4 “And Moses said, Here I am.”
Bryan Guy Adams OC OBC is a Canadian singer, guitarist, composer, record producer, photographer, philanthropist, and activist. In 2002 Mr. Adams wrote “Here I Am” – I will neither play it nor sing it for you (thank the Lord, all ye people!) but here are the opening lyrics:
Here I am this is me
There’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be
Here I am it’s just me and you
Tonight we make our dreams come true
These lyrics outline well my sermon for today based on the text Exodus 3:4 “And Moses said, Here I am.” Here we see the 1. The acceptance of place, 2. The acceptance of person and 3. The acceptance of purpose.
You know well the situation, Moses is spending one of those usual days tending the sheep of Jethro, his father-in-law. I’m not sure how easy it was for Moses to be so dependent for food, board and employment on Jethro, but God can work miracles in the most challenging of family relationships. Moses is literally stopped in his tracks and is dumbstruck, nigh paralyzed, as he watches the miracle of the bush – burning yet not consumed. All too sadly church ministry often consumes without giving passion but that’s for another sermon. The story always reminds me of the time when Wendy and I were privileged to visit Israel and Palestine. At one point we visited St. Catherine’s Monastery which, supposedly, surrounds the original site of the burning bush, an extremely long-lived species of bramble, rubus sanctus. You can imagine our delight when we noticed a fire extinguisher not too far from the bush; oh dear yet another example of the church quenching the work of the Spirit!
Moses hears the divine voice and utters these powerful, potent, pertinent three words “Here I am” and in so doing he is part of a tradition of Bible heroes of faith from whose lips these words also fell. Abraham, Jacob, Samuel, Isaiah, Ananias and, of course, our blessed Mary (Luke 1:38) “Here I am, the servant of the Lord”.
These three words are spoken at times of significant, signal, substantial times of change and challenge – Isaiah ready to take the word to a recalcitrant and rebellious Israel, Ananias daring to greet Saul/Paul the once rabid persecutor of the Christians. And, though perhaps apocryphal, Martin Luther’s “Here I stand, I can do no other” is all too reminiscent of “Here I am”.
“Here I am” – the acceptance of place. “Here I am, and this is me, there’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be.” One of the Benedictine vows is that of stability. Thomas Merton (in his “Seven Story Mountain”) comments: “Merton explains: “By making a vow of stability the monk renounces the vain hope of wandering off to find a ‘perfect monastery.’ This implies a deep act of faith: the recognition that it does not much matter where we are or whom we live with… Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary.… Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings.”
It is all too tempting to buy into the “grass is greener” sales pitch; addicts will try so-called “geographical cures” believing that a change of scenery will invoke freedom from addiction. Moses had already experienced the Lord work mightily in his life, surely the story of his rescue from the maniacal Pharaoh committed to mass infanticide was often told; surely his interference with a soldier abusing a Hebrew was often told and… greater things were still to come. Meanwhile… Moses had the grace, the grit to (forgive the cliché) “bloom where he was planted”. It was this stability that made it possible for Moses to stop, disengage and reflect; it was this stability that made it possible for Moses “to turn aside and look at this great sight” (v.3) and it was this that the Lord noticed and led him to speak further with Moses.
“Here I am” – the acceptance of person. “Here I am it’s just me!” In Job 9:35 we read “for I know I am not what I am thought to be”. One of the greatest emotional, psychological, psychic burdens we bear is to confront this truth “I know I am not what I am thought to be”?
We hide, we mask, we deny our inner shadows and in so doing we generate a sickness of soul that leads to a wretched and chronic sickness of mind and body.
I think that one of the most poignant, pastoral moments of a priest’s ministry is when she/he uses ashes to make the sign of the cross on the foreheads of those they have come to love, especially poignant to do so on the forehead of a child, a “seasoned saint” or one’s partner. And yet the acceptance of our origin (ashes) should endow us with a sense of glorious liberty for, at the end of the day, what can you expect from a pile of ashes! Now later in Exodus Moses gathers every possible excuse to evade his calling, as if God did not know already. I quoted recently, do you remember, from the movie Junebug. One actor says to another, “God loves you just the way you are, and He loves you so much he wants you to change”. Here is the most perfect, harmonic balance – God’s acceptance of our person, and God’s offer of loving transformation. “Here I am, it’s just me!”.
And, lastly, “Here I am – the acceptance of purpose”. “Me and you… Tonight we make our dreams come true.” As a somewhat seasoned parish priest I have not always heard parish members respond with the clarity of Isaiah, “Here I am, send me”; in fact, too often have I heard, “Here I am, send her… send him”. Today’s reading from Romans 12 is just packed with a catalog of what we are called to do… read it, pray it, do it. It would be too exhausting without the power of the Spirit.
I know, we know, that these are exhausting, enervating, expending times. Maybe at times the enforced stability is creating an enforced confrontation of who we are as people, Christians, Church. But in this sorry chaos, there is a purpose and so each day we ask that God’s will be done in us and through us.
The Church in Washington (as one and as scattered) is wanting to cry out to the community, “Here I am” to offer stability, authenticity and purpose to any and all who respond.
And above all we love and worship and serve the Lord Jesus, Emmanuel (God is with us) and He ever, daily, constantly says to you and to me, “Here I am”.
Thanks be to God, Amen