3-24-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Exodus.

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian.

He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Horeb at the mountain of God.

And there the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush.

And he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

Then Moses said, I must turn aside and look at this great site and see why the bush is not burned up.

Then the Lord saw he had turned aside to see, and God called to him out of the bush.

And Moses said Moses and he said, Here I am.

And then he said, Come no closer.

Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.

And he said further, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Then the Lord said, I have observed the misery of the death of my people who are in Egypt, I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.

Indeed, I know their sufferings, and have come down to lither and to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land, to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, of the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hebites, and the Jebusites.

The cry of the Israelites has come to me, and I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.

So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people and get the Israelites out of Egypt.

But Moses said to God, Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?

And he said, I will be with you, and this shall be a sign for you that it is I who sent you when you were when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.

But Moses said to God, If I come to the Israelites and say to him, The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask, What is his name?

What shall I say to them?

God said to Moses, I am who I am.

And he said, Further, thus you shall say to the Israelites, I am, has sent me to you.

God also said to Moses, Thus you shall say to the Israelites, the Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.

And this is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations.

The word of the Lord.

Today's reading is Psalm sixty-three.

We will read responsibly by the half verse.

Therefore, I have gazed upon you in your holy place.

For your loving kindness is better than life itself.

So will I bless you as long as I live.

My soul is content with marrow and fatness.

When I remember you upon my bed, for you have been my helper.

My soul clings to you.

A reading from 1 Corinthians.

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

All ate the same spiritual food, all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.

Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.

Now these things occurred as an example for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.

Do not become idolators, as some of them did, as it is written.

We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents, and do not complain, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.

These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us on whom the ends of the ages have come.

So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall to testing, has overtaken you, that is not common to everyone.

God is faithful, and we will not let you be tested beyond your strength.

But with the testing, he will also provide the same the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

The word of the Lord The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Luke.

At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, Jesus asked them, Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?

No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?

No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.

And then he told them this parable A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came looking for fruit on it, and found none.

So he said to the gardener, See here, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and I still find none.

Cut it down.

Why should it be wasting the soil?

The gardener replied, Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.

If it bears fruit next year, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down.

The gospel of the Lord.

Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you a lamb of your own fold, a sheep of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Please be seated.

I'd like to offer to you a practice called tactical breathing that serves both bi-athletes, those are the people who run and ski and then shoot Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, etc., quite well.

Tactical breathing is a way to lower your heart rate and actually get out of your reptilian brain that functions on the four F's, fight, flight, freeze, food, and live into your mammalian brain.

It allows you to not give in so much to adrenaline but to cortisol.

So the way it goes is you breathe in through your nose until not just your lungs, but your belly is full.

When you're full, you hold it for three, not one, two, three, but like one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.

You breathe out then through your mouth audibly until all the air is gone, and then you wait again three Mississippi's before you repeat.

Can we try this together three times?

See, um, Moses tried to free his own people.

We know the story.

He floated down the Nile, he grew up in the palace.

One day he sees an Egyptian taskmaster abusing a Hebrew slave.

He intervenes, kills the taskmaster, but ultimately he cannot deliver the people by his own hand, so he runs away.

He goes out into the wilderness somewhere, meets a lady named Zipporah, who teaches him how to be a shepherd, and that's the beginning of the scene today.

One day he's keeping domesticated sheep, which he knew nothing about in Egypt.

This is all at his wife's hand, and he sees, lo and behold, a bush on fire.

Now, this probably happened quite a bit in the wilderness.

The difference is this bush doesn't go out.

Curiously enough, the rabbis reading this text wonder how many bushes God had to burn up before Moses turned aside.

I think that's a helpful reading, by the way.

Finally, Moses approaches the bush, and here is God, God's own self within the bush.

The text says that Moses is afraid to look at God.

Wouldn't you think that if God is going to tell you one thing, it's going to be earth-chattering, mind-blowing, the mystery of life, and that mystery is take your shoes off.

Some of you have this custom at your home, or you've been in homes, or you lived in other countries, where not only is it the custom you don't wear shoes in the home, it's downright offensive if you do.

Any guesses for the origin of that practice?

Why it is we don't wear shoes in the home?

I saw your finger.

Why is it?

My day school kids answer this question.

Come on, why don't we wear shoes in the house?

The dirt, right?

So you didn't track in dirt.

They lived in tents.

The whole floor was dirt.

Now, some people say it's because the dirt of the field is different from the dirt in the home, particularly when you're following sheep.

Well, they leave things that fertilize fig trees, and you don't want to track that in the home.

The truth is, nobody knows, and I want you to take this imaginative leaf with me that perhaps because the ground itself is holy, there is to be no barrier between Moses and the ground.

That is, the shoe is a level of mediation between Moses and God.

We don't just do that with shoes, but quite frankly, we do carry around armor all of the time so that we can protect ourselves from disappointment, from being vulnerable with other people.

And I wonder if we couldn't hear the Bush calling today.

Before I tell you something that is really going to be transformative, you're going to have to take your armor off.

You're going to have to be willing to be present and vulnerable.

And to use, I think, the right Linton language, you need to be exactly who I created you to be, no more and no less.

This is perhaps the most um the best definition of humility I've ever received.

Humility is being exactly who God made you to be, no more and no less.

It is being present with our gifts and our faults.

Not concerned that claiming our gifts is bragging, no, it's being authentic, not diminishing our eccentricities, but quite, because quite honestly, that is who we are.

And when we can stand shoeless before God, present, when we can be that way with one another, then I think we're ready to hear something that's truly insightful.

And here's the insight: God says, hey, um, people are suffering, you already kind of wanted to take care of them.

Well, now go down and tell the favor to let him go.

And Moses says what frankly all of us would say, no thanks.

I don't want to.

And as the scene plays out over a couple of chapters, I'm not good at that.

Somebody else could do it.

Lots of objections, and the last thing Moses says is, can't you find somebody else?

And I think this is a really good pause, because it would really good to lint here.

Um, good affirmation that God is patient, and that if Moses, the hero of the faith, had to be persuaded over three chapters that there is some hope for us.

And sure enough, Moses' first objection is really quite nice.

I mean, after all, God says, You're going to go deliver the people, and this will be the sign.

When you do that, you'll come back here.

Now, that's a terrible sign.

I just want you to know, right?

After you've done all that hard stuff, you'll come back here.

Can you give me something better, God?

Moses says, Listen, I'm going to go to the people, and I'm going to say, This butch told me that you're supposed to come free.

And they're going to say, yeah, right.

But this talk.

Come on, Moses, something better than that.

God, I'm going to go to Pharaoh and I'm going to say, hey, the butch told me that you're supposed to let the slaves go.

And I'm going to be the laughing stock of Egypt.

So God, down in Egypt, they've got gods you learned about in the second grade.

They've got Osiris and Isis and Ra and Horus and Beth and Anubis and all these different gods, and all those gods have names.

And Pharaoh's gonna want to know, and your own people are gonna want to know who sent me.

Now I'm gonna chase a rabbit for about three minutes.

I'm gonna warn you.

Chasing a rabbit.

God says, and you know this, I am who I am.

That's what we got.

Sounds kind of, well, defensive in English.

In Hebrew, what God says actually is the infinitive of the verb to be, the infinitive.

That means was, will be, am presently.

What God says is, I am who I was, I am who I will be, I was who I am, I will be who I was.

Even better, what God says is, my name is being.

Which is why we pray, Holy Spirit, in whom we live and move and have our being.

This is such a big deal, by the way.

One of our commandments we read this morning is not to take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

If you're Jewish, this is God's name.

We usually think, oh, God's name is God.

Not if you're Jewish.

God's name is this particular Hebrew word, which means being, and because it's so holy in the Hebrew language, you never write it.

Which means if I were going to tell you Samuel is the verger, in Hebrew I have to write Samuel verger, period.

I can never say is or was or will be because I've just said God's name, which I'm not allowed to do.

Be.

Maybe you've heard this word Jehovah before.

It's a made-up word.

It's actually nonsense.

It has the consonants from God's name, but the vowels from a different word.

That's because Jewish scribes wanted to make sure that ignorant folk trying to read Hebrew never made the mistake of actually saying God's name, which is too holy to be pronounced.

If you know Jewish folk, they don't call God this word, they call God, frankly, the name.

That's a rabbit.

Thanks for going with me.

Because here's the real thing you need to know.

In Hebrew, I don't care what you've heard, it sounds like this.

That's my name, Moses, and you go tell the people, sent you.

So imagine this scene.

It's almost like Amos and Andy.

Pharaoh says, Who says I'm supposed to let the people go?

Who says I'm supposed to let the people go?

Are you gonna tell me or not?

I did! It was get out of here.

You can see how the scene unfolds.

This is it.

Soft, like that.

And what we're supposed to remember, this is what the rabbis say in Genesis chapter 2, when God makes the human being out of clay, it is just dirt.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

And then God leans over to the dirt and goes like this.

And the clay for the first time goes.

And the rabbis tell us that the first thing we do when we're born is say God's name.

Some of us very loudly.

And the rabbis tell us the last thing we do on earth is one last time.

And when God's name leaves us, so does our life.

How helpful it is to hear that the commandment this morning is not to avoid saying it in God's name in vain, it's to avoid saying it with malice.

Do not go like this with malice.

Good luck keeping that.

That's why it's lent again, right?

Because if you can go like this without malice, let me tell you, you've arrived on your journey.

This is really good passage today because, quite honestly, we rarely think about things that are instrumental to our being.

One of them, of course, is breathing.

Now, I do want to give you one other note.

A lot of times we say, hey, it's all about accepting Jesus where?

In our in our heart.

We say, your spirit and your soul, the center of your being is in your heart.

Well, in the Bible, it's not.

Your spirit and your soul lives right here in your neck.

In Hebrew, it's called your nephish.

And that's because this is where the breath in the name of God comes in and comes out.

And when it comes out and doesn't come back in, guess what?

Your soul is done.

Right here.

We rarely think about our soul.

This is why some people are really drawn to yoga.

If you have a good yoga teacher, they'll tell you yoga is not an exercise class, it's a breathing class.

It's a way of being present, frankly, in what we so often take for granted, our soul.

Now, look, because we spend very little time, and because we are chemical people, we know that not every breath we take is clean.

And we know scientifically that we breathe in oxygen and we breathe out poison.

Well, it's changed in the last week because we're breathing some poison.

Now, I will tell you, benzene is a performance enhancer.

I learned this running the other day.

It did not enhance the performance I was hoping of my running, it did enhance the performance of My digestive system such that I had to seek out a bathroom when I normally don't.

It was not the performance cancer I wanted.

Now we know it also enhances the performance of things like cancer growth.

And we understand that that sort of stuff is in the air, and this I think is exactly what the gospel reading is about.

See, Jesus addresses this idea that people get what they deserve.

A tower fell on some people, they must have done something wrong.

Pilate killed some people while they were offering their sacrifices.

They must have deserved it.

We breathe that air in all the time and we breathe it out.

Because the bottom line is the reason you got a speeding ticket is that you were speeding.

But other people didn't get it.

Yeah, and you know, Jesus doesn't care about that question.

What he says to us, right, is that the world is not as linear as we want to make it.

We often see a catastrophe and think they did something, and Jesus says, that's like a benzene fire.

And we don't have to breathe that in, and we don't have to breathe it out to other people.

We don't have to.

Instead, says Jesus, we've got an opportunity to repent.

To change the way we look at our life, to change the way we look at one another, to make right what we did wrong.

We have that opportunity all the time to do it right here.

This is a good Linton practice to think about something so fundamental as breathing.

See what we normally do with kids when they're not behaving is we say, time out.

I will tell you, sometimes with my kids, I put them on timeout because I need to be away from them so that I don't do something I'll regret.

That's fine.

Timeout.

But you know, one of the things we didn't always get was that time out, honestly, is a really good discipline and it's something we benefit from as adults.

Like, I need an adult timeout, please don't follow me to my room.

I sometimes say that to my kids now.

It will not be good if you follow me.

So let me have an adult timeout.

And you know what the adult timeout or the kids timeout is there to do is that sometimes the way our brain has developed is um it's really good at perceiving danger and something negative.

It's really good.

In fact, our brain is hardwired to look for negative things.

That's part of our evolutionary survival.

Really good when there's a lion in front of us to get that adrenaline going, to think we'd better fight or we'd better flee or we'd better just sit still.

But did you know that your brain responds to criticism the same way it responds to a lion?

This is true.

Same chemical reaction to criticism.

And what that means is we lose our mind and we think with our instinct.

This is the interesting thing.

A tactical breath, like we practiced, is that helps us get our brain back.

Because quite frankly, you are hardwired to react to criticism like that, like a threat to a lion, instead of it like a mammal.

I'm just gonna be honest with you.

I I don't really care who you are, if you're a priest or an imam or you're a rabbi or you're the Pope, when you think reactively, what comes out of your mouth is poisonous and toxic.

And sometimes we think, I'm just venting, and we expect other people to do what thank God trees do for us, turn our poison into breathable air.

But I wonder if instead we don't have the opportunity to come back to our soul and to the God who gives us life, and instead of breathing that poison out, to breathe out a little more oxygen for one another than we normally do.

Jesus says, look, unless we repent, we're gonna perish.

Friends, you're all going to perish.

I'm going to perish.

You're all going to die.

Jesus isn't telling us anything new here.

What he's saying, though, I think that we have to always remember is that there's death with a lowercase D, and I'm going to tell you, God made that.

God planned that for you.

If God wanted us to live forever, God would have made us out of iridium or titanium.

But God made us out of dirt.

God planned for us to die.

What God does not want for you is to live into death with a capital D.

God does not want you to be a burning chemical plume that sends out carcinogens to the world.

And we get to pick up.

And if you're still looking for a limited discipline, I might offer this to you.

Take an adult timeout just once a day, whether you need it or not.

And breathe in the name and the presence that is with you wherever you go.

So how much greater could your life be if you were aware of it?

And how much bigger could we make life for other people if we intentionally agree to them?