Lent 3C

Like many of us, I often miss the opening collect of the service. It comes right in the beginning of it, just when you are settling in and it is quickly over. It often goes in one ear and out the other. I should know better, because most our collects are usually succinct, yet wonderfully written theological statements. Many churches and denominations write huge volumes on their theology, we write short prayers to God.
Today’s collect is not one that easily slips out of my mind. This collect stops me in my tracks each year. We pray: “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” Each year this collect catches my attention immediately because it flies in the face of what American society tells us. We live in a society that tells us that “you can do it!” And that statement never means you can do it with help, it means if you try hard enough, you of your own volition can accomplish anything you want, solely by your own will power. If I simply gather enough information, read enough books or try so many times, it will happen. That simply doesn’t square with this collect.
I think it is easy to read this collect and feel either defeated or ambivalent. On the one extreme, you can say: “Well, if I can’t do anything without God’s help, than I won’t try and do anything. I’ll just sit here and wait for God to tell me to go do something.” On the other extreme side, you can say “The help this collect was talking about was simply the nice things Jesus said, no more. I hear scripture in church, and that’s all the help from God I need.”
Like most things in The Episcopal Church, I think a middle way is the best way to live into this collect. We need God’s help to do all things in life, but it also takes our cooperation and our perseverance. The old extreme Protestant way of dealing with this need for God’s help, for God’s grace, was to say that through the sins our first ancestors we were all born a creature that is so far gone from God’s original purpose for us that He no longer recognizes us as the humans He created. The cure was of course baptism and a mature declaration of faith. Then, and only then, would God help us.
I really find this theology really unsatisfying on a gut level. Instead, I find it helpful to look at the way our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters have understood our state. They tell us that when we are born, God see’s His creation in each of us. We know that we are created in the image of God, and that Divine handy work is inherent in each one of us. Yet, just as the other view puts forth, we know that we have fallen far short of what God had intended for us. The result of disobedience of our first ancestors is that we are born with a cloudy mind, an inability to see clearly what it is that God had intended for us. Further to that, we also live in world where it is easy to make bad decisions.
And here is where God’s grace comes in to play. God offers his grace to every single person on Earth, for God is indeed the Savior of the world. When we cooperate with God, when we say “Yes, God, I accept your help, and with your help I can handle the tasks which are in front of me,” that is when we are able to live into the Divine.
Moses was a man that had to learn all of this, and he had to learn it the hard way. In today’s reading from Exodus, we get the account of Moses and the burning bush. When we pull back and look at the entire story of Moses from his birth up to his encounter with God in today’s reading, we see the need for God’s help and grace.
In Exodus we are told that Moses was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter. While I’m not sure if Cecil B. DeMille’s vision of Moses life with Pharaoh’s daughter in film The Ten Commandments is right, I’m sure he did have a nice and cushy life.
We know what happens next. Moses kills a task master who is treating a Hebrew slave badly. In the movie Moses sees this injustice and jumps right into the fight to help the slave. From the movie, you get the sense that this was a heat of the moment decision, and that Moses never really had the intention to kill the task masters. Yet Exodus tells us something different. Moses “looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Ex 2:12). Clearly it’s wrong for anybody to be enslaved, and even worse for someone to treat an enslaved person horribly. In the movie version of this story, we excuse Moses for killing somebody because we feel righteous anger, and we know from our experience that we can go overboard when we act in the heat of the moment. Yet in Exodus, we get the picture that this was a premeditated act. It seems clear to me that this was still an anger that welled up in Moses unexpectedly. However, once this unexpected anger hit him, he stops to think about what he is going to do. The very fact that he stops to look this way and that shows that he knew he was about to do something that he should not do.
The key thing is that this a rash human decision, not a faithful decision, and not a very well thought out one at that, for Moses has to flee the land. Now, we don’t know at what point Moses actually became aware of the fact that he too was a Hebrew, but that doesn’t excuse him from making a life or death decision on his own without Divine help. If Moses was aware of God, he should have thought about what God wanted him to. If he wasn’t aware of who God really was, than chances are that he was a faithful member of the Egyptian cults, especially due to the fact that according to these cults, Moses’ grandfather, the Pharaoh actually was god on Earth.
Either way, whatever his faith was at the time, he didn’t take it into account. In the matter of life and death, something that almost all religions though out time have assigned to the dominion of the divine, Moses takes it into his own hands, and makes the decision on his own.
There it is. That cloudy decision making process that we are born into. From our perspective we can see this is a bad move on Moses’ part, even if we take God out of the equation. Disobeying the Pharaoh seems like a fool hearty move in any way shape or form. Exodus tells us that when Pharaoh heard about Moses’ act he sought to kill Moses, so he went on the run. Simply from a pragmatic point of view, Moses’ act was stupid. If he really wanted to help the Hebrews, image the influence he could held over their conditions by nature of being Pharaoh’s grandson! I imagine Pharaoh is much more likely to listen to a faithful relative than to a disobedient one who is publicly undermining him.
Yet, even through all this mess, there is a bit of hope. The very fact that Moses is angered by the treatment of the Hebrews tells us that God is at work. After all, Moses’ society had no problem with slavery, yet here we see one of the most privileged men in that society knowing deep down in his gut that this was wrong. The deep parts of Moses that still remembered their link to God, those parts that were formed from the pure love of God rose to the surface in Moses and screamed to him THIS IS WRONG! That part of him yearned for God’s grace, yet Moses chose to substitute to it for his own idea of right and wrong.
For some, this experience would have led them to understand that they need to seek God’s help in their lives to get it right. Yet Moses still doesn’t get it. However, as many of us can attest, God never gives up on us, no matter how many times we do stupid things, no matter how many times we scream NO at the top of our lungs to Him. The ways in which God keeps on offering us grace is different for each person, but in Moses’ case God chose a spectacularly visible and hard to miss way. You just don’t pass buy a flaming bush that is not consumed in the middle of mountain, and not stop!
The Lord tells Moses “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt.” There is a subtle hint in all this that God is telling Moses, they called out to ME, not you! However, God in his love and mercy makes the best of the wretched situation Moses has put himself into. God tells Moses he will be with Him, and that He is going to give Moses the help, the grace, that he needs to rescue the Hebrews. Yet despite this spectacular encounter with grand promises, Moses could have still said no. “No, God, I refuse your help, I choose to walk alone and do things my way.”
I suppose God would have let Moses walk away, yet He would have kept trying to help Moses again and again, until Moses said yes, or said no the final time before he died.
And so it is with God. He sees His beloved creation stumbling around earth in haze because they chose from the very beginning to choose their own will over His. Yet for each of us, time and time again, He reaches down and says “Take my hand, and I will lead you, I will help you.” He loves us so much he refuses to make us listen to him. God surely makes strong suggestions and tells us what will happen when we don’t listen to him, but he always lets us make the choice.
We all have the choice the make. Do we close our eyes, tune out God and surround ourselves with our own desires? Or do we say Yes, take God’s hand, and walk with Him? That’s the reason why Moses becomes the great hero. Not because of his individual work, but because of his perseverance in God’s work that he was able to carry out through God’s grace.
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves, yet you never abandon us, you always love us and you always give us a second chance to say “yes” to His grace.