Lent 3
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 63: 1-8; 1 Corinthians 10: 1-13; Luke 13: 1-9
Growing up in England I've seen lots of ruins - every time you turn around there's a castle! And that's the new stuff! There are plenty of things that date back to the time of Jesus - Roman Ruins like the villas at Verulamium - St. Albans, or Aquae Sulis - anyone? "Bath".
And you're never more than 70 miles from a beach, and, alas for my mother it seems, never more than a few miles from a cave!
I mention these three places; a ruined house, a beach, and a cave, because when I read the Old Testament reading for this morning last week I had a flood of images of places come to me: of the ruins of a house, of a beach, and of a cave.
The ruins of the house? Some walls, a flagstone floor, a well, a tomb underneath, a stone manger.
The beach is on a lake.
The cave is about 100 feet deep and, like most caves in the area, is cool and dry inside.
What makes them different?
- The house is in Nazareth, beneath the Convent of the Sisters of Nazareth. Archaeologists are 99% certain this house is the boyhood home of Jesus.
- The beach is on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and has for nearly two thousand years been venerated as related to Peter - remember that story a few weeks back about Peter fishing and Jesus preaching from his boat?
- The cave contains the remains of two olive presses and is just outside the 1st Century city walls of Jerusalem - the word "place" in Hebrew is "Gath", and olive presses is "Shemenim" - "Gath-Shemenin"....Gethsemane means "the place of the olive presses" and this cave - rather than in the open air - is the most likely place where Jesus spent his last night of freedom.
What's striking is this: the places themselves are quite ordinary: a house, a beach, a cave. What happened in or on them is what makes them special - sacred, in fact.
I've noticed that when folk enter these places they lapse into silence - When you enter these places there's an almost instinctive feel of the Sacred, of being a place which requires respect, requires talking in a whisper - it's almost impossible to go to these places and not be effected by them, not be changed by them - we are transformed by these encounters, we become new people.
We all have experiences of the Sacred in our lives at some time or another. We remember them- we remember them because we have recognized instinctively that we are in a special time, a special moment in our lives. And one of the elements that makes up that moment is the surroundings, the place we find ourselves in. Human beings have an innate ability, it seems to me, to recognize these special places where heaven and earth come together, where we encounter God.
Isn't that a part of what draws us here? This is a sacred place, a place of encounter.
Welcome to the place of the burning bush! This is Moses' experience - holy ground.
But it's not the oddly burning shrubbery that makes the ground holy, just as it's not the stone walls of the house, or the pebbles on the beach, or the darkness of the cave that makes them holy. It's Moses' subsequent realization that this place which, he clearly later realized, was holy was so because of the encounter that took place there.
This is the place of the Tetragrammaton, a Greek word meaning "a word with four letters" - YHWH.
Who shall I say you are?" Moses asks. And God replies with a phrase, which, literally translated is "I Am Who I Am" - the four consonants that form the first letters of each word are YHWH - Yahweh.
Literalism is just as unhelpful in translation as in other parts of our world! The better transaction, born out by history, is this: "I AM THE ONE WHO WILL BE THERE FOR YOU."
Notice what happens as a result of this encounter on holy ground: Moses is changed - from the loser we first hear of to someone quiet different: a devout leader, into a pillar of faith, into a person of true and enduring commitment.
He became this person because of his encounters with God. When we encounter the Sacred - whether it's a place or an experience - we can't -we don't - come away unchanged - just like Moses. Any encounter with God will only leave us unchanged if we stand in the way of the experience, if we reject the call to follow, if we ignore the promise of new life and of joy, of a place to be happy.
So here we are, mid-Lent - in the middle of the "Get Real" season.
This story of Moses and the burning bush is a "get real" story. Moses was living as a sheep-herder because he had murdered an Egyptian guard and escaped to Midian. It is, I believe, his sense of guilt and the loss of his sense of integrity that the moment of encounter addresses. "You were thinking of yourself" the Voice is telling him, "I now invite you to think of others first." The place of encounter is also always a place of challenge.
For us, we are being invited to look for holy ground, in fact to expect to encounter it, but not necessarily in the places we expect.
And it invites us to reflect on what Paul's imagery of being temples of the Holy Spirit actually means for us, because if we are, indeed, individual images of God, then when we understand the meaning of "YHWH" as "The One Who Will Be There For You" we have also to understand ourselves as "The Ones Who Will Be There For Each Other", just as we understand Jesus who, on a cross, tells us "I Am The One Who Is Always There For You."
May we find that place of encounter, hear those words of challenge, and act on them. Amen.
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