Tonight I want to talk about one of the most significant, beautiful and profound stories in the Bible: the story of Moses and the burning bush. I'm sure most of you know it, having, like me, heard it a thousand times since we first came across it in childhood.
You know the preamble to it: how Joseph went to Egypt and rose from obscurity to become prime minister; of how he brought his whole family from Israel to Egypt to protect them from drought and how his family multiplied and filled the land; of how, after Pharoah's and Joseph's deaths, Joseph's people lost their favoured status and fell into bondage and oppression; of how the Egyptians feared this numerous bulk of foreigners in their midst and in an effort to contain them ordered the midwives to kill all Hebrew boys as soon as they were born.
Moses' story begins at this point. The midwives, tending to be people in love with life rather than with death, subverted the king's orders and allowed the little boys to live, so the king had to call in the professional killers. He got his army to wage war on the children. When Moses was born, his mother managed to keep him hidden from the soldiers, which it was possible to do for a few months, but the time came when his presence in the neighbourhood was becoming harder to conceal, so she engaged in another piece of subterfuge. She made a little boat and put the child into it, and allowed it to float down the river past where she knew some Egyptian women, including one of the king's many daughters, were bathing. The women recovered the boat, saw that it contained a child, and then, in another little piece of subversion of her father's barbaric order, the princess adopted the child and arranged for the child's own mother to be employed as wet nurse for it.
This is an important detail in the story. In the ancient world ethnicity was transmitted not by insemination, but by nurture. That is, who you were suckled by decided your nationality, not who sired you. So Moses, being fed by a Hebrew mother, was Hebrew. But he was raised also as an Egyptian, and it is a not uncommon experience of people raised between two cultures that they find themselves belonging not so much to both as to neither. So Moses grew, isolated and insecure. His name, Moshe, means "the one drawn forth" and I doubt this was a complimentary term. He was "water boy", "drip", alienated from his own people by his association with the oppressors, and from the Egyptians by virtue of his membership of the slave race. We know, from later references, that he spoke with a stutter. In adolescence his self doubt and alienation gave rise, as it does so often in young men, to anger and violence. There was an argument and an Egyptian ended up dead. His own people showed no interest in going in to bat for him, so Moses fled, running for his life into the wilderness and he ended up in the land of Midian.
It was here that his life took one of those providential turns, which happen to all of us from time to time. He happened by a well where some shepherds were harassing some young women, and his violence and impetuosity were ignited in the women's defence. The girls' father (variously named Reuel or Jethro, take your pick) thought he might be a handy kind of lad to have around and arranged for him to marry Zipporah, one of the recently rescued damsels. He found a place, albeit a not very exalted one, and there his life continued, seemingly without incident, for many, many years. He was a nobody. He had no land, no flocks of his own, no family or tribe or people, but he was adopted into Zipporah's clan and spent his life tending the flocks of his father in law. Then one day, alone in the wilderness, he saw a bush on fire, (which is not all that unusual), but the bush was not being consumed by the flames. (which certainly is). He turned aside to look more closely at this oddity, when a voice spoke to him.
"Do not approach," said the voice. "shed your sandals, for the ground on which you are standing is holy ground. "
There's a couple of things I want to draw your attention to here.
The first is, that the word used for taking off the sandals is not the word commonly used for disrobing. It is a less common word, meaning "to shed" or "to peel off" in much the same way that a snake sheds, or peels off its skin.
The second is that when he was spoken to, Moses had not yet approached the miraculous bush, so the land referred to as holy was the land on which he was already standing. That is, the holy ground wasn't some special, sacred, magical ground in the little area around the bush. It was the land Moses currently occupied. Its boundaries weren't some small confined area, but encompassed the place where he was tending his sheep, and stretched all the way back to his home with Zipporah, and beyond that to the Egypt he had come from and to the Israel he was, one day, going to head towards, and to the wilderness through which he would wander, in between times. The holy ground is boundless.
In fact it is under your own feet, right now. What stops us knowing the holiness of the ground under us is the insulating, protective layer we place between us and reality.
Think about shoes for a moment. I see you are all wearing them tonight, and for good reason. The ground is covered in sharp things, and things that might bite us, and all kinds of unmentionable stuff we might accidentally stand in. In Dunedin, without shoes, frostbite might be a real possibility. So we put on this thick layer, to protect us from all that, but the cushioning which protects also separated and deadens. "Peel it off", says the voice, "and know the reality which is never absent. Which you, in your effort to preserve yourself, have separated yourself from. "
The voice goes on. It tells Moses that it is the God of those ancestors he might remember from his previous, dimly remembered childhood. It invites Moses to take on a task - to go back to the place he was running from, and tell the king to let all the slaves go. Moses is rightfully doubtful. After all, voices speaking in your head when you're alone in the desert, and seeing odd things, might not be the most reliable guide, right?
"How do I know it's really God?" he asks. It's a good question, and it receives one of history's least satisfactory answers:
"When you've done the task, come back here and you'll know."
So why is it Moses that hears the voice and why is he offered this important job? Why not somebody more able and more influential? After all, Moses is a complete nonentity, and, a person with a speech impediment is maybe not the best choice for a task which involves persuading. But that's just the point, and there is a pattern here which is constantly repeated in the Bible. It's the people with nothing invested and therefore with nothing to lose who are most able to remove their protective layers and find the truth that is never absent. The last shall be first, because they are the most open to new vision and to a new way of being.
As he mulls things over, Moses asks another, reasonable question.
"What is your name?" he asks. "When people ask me, who do I say has sent me?"
And he's given an answer which is so profound it sits at the centre of all the great faiths which have grown out of this conversation.
"I am what I am", says the voice. "If any one asks, say "I Am" has sent you.
In answer to his question Moses is given not a noun, but a verb. The voice is the voice of Being. Of reality. It is not a set of ideas, or an image or symbol. The name which is given is the unutterable name. It is so holy that none may speak it, except (as is much later allowed for) the high priest, once a year in the most sacred part of the temple.
But there is another, more mundane reason the sacred name is unutterable. The particular combination of letters of which it consists is, literally, unpronounceable. They are all silent letters. Some 2000 years after this story was first recorded, the Jewish mystical literature called the Kabbalah offers an explanation of the name. The Kabbalah says the name is the breath. The four silent letters form two syllables which are the inward and outward breath; so that the name is the first thing uttered by every human being, and the last. It is on the lips of every person, waking or sleeping, whether they know it or not, for their whole lives. I don't know whether this is true, but I like the concept. And I like the way it gels with the story of the name's revelation. God is close, to all of us, and it is we ourselves who hide that knowledge from ourselves.
I'll finish tonight by leaving with you the words of the poet, David Whyte.
I knew then, as I had before,
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing,
speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.
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