Our story resides in Christ

Let us pray.

You have given all to me.

To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.

Give me only your love and your grace,

that is enough for me.

And in the name of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Moses was herding his flock in the wilderness.

He went further than he normally did, past the scrub and lightly rooted grass where his animals usually dwelt on and closer to the mountains.

It wasn’t a difficult job in the sense he could sit on a hillside and watch the flock from above, watch them lazily chew their grass into cud, a stray straw of grass hung from one animal’s mouth.

It was monotonous though, the never changing scenery, the back and forth from home to meadow and from meadow to home, the hours spent in solitude in conversation with animals that never answered back.

And maybe the desert heat on the Arabian peninsula got to Moses, even though, most likely, he was mostly acclimated to the sunny skies and the high temperatures of the midday.

Maybe that’s why he went farther than usual.

Maybe he headed into the wilderness, into the mountains for some respite from the heat.

Maybe he knew of a small stream that flowed in the altitude above the desert before returning to the earth giving life to the sparse grass below.

So he was in the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

And in the distance from the foot of the mountain Moses saw an interesting thing.

A bush was on fire but it did not smoke and it did not burn away the woody branches and leaves, it was as if it was partially drawn, lacking the destructive force of fire but all of the light and all of the flame.

So Moses set himself to the side of the bush and looked.

And an angel of the Lord appeared to him.

And he looked closer, he looked at this bush not consumed by but engulfed in flames and a voice cried out from the fire.

The voice spoke Moses’ name, “Moses, Moses!”

And Moses, hearing his voice called from the flames, the voice of God speaking his name, squinted towards the bush and spoke the words, “Here I am”.

Jesus is preaching to thousands, parable after parable, warning after warning, forgiveness and sin, Jesus is preaching to thousands.

There is a lull.

Perhaps a time to take a sip of water in the high desert heat.

A bit of fish perhaps, Jesus liked fish and would sometimes even have some for breakfast.

Perhaps he is sitting, cross-legged on the packed dirt of the place where he sat, packed and trampled on as the thousands moved to and fro.

Picking at his lunch or maybe even drawing in the dirt as he worked on  forming the words of what he was to preach next, word came to him through the crowd.

Jesus.

Did you hear about the Galileans?

They were set upon by Pilate’s men.

They were captured and tried for treason or something similar against Rome.

And then the governor executed them.

“Our Jewish brothers and sisters,” said one of the voices in the crowd, “were martyred by Rome but they must have been sinners, for their blood was mixed with the gentiles who were executed beside them.

Jesus listened to the story.

And he thought about the sacrifice those Galileans made and the purity culture in which he was raised.

Jesus was a Galilean and Galilee wasn’t especially big.

He might have known them.

He might have grown up with them; had his path not been different, he might have even joined them, but then, he would join them later on as it was.

And Jesus thought about what happened to those folks down in Jerusalem too and how what happened to them was received by the general populace.

People thought they must  sinners because a tower fell one day and they were trapped beneath.

It wasn’t easy to talk about.

Sometimes people thought bad things happen because people do bad things, they evoke God’s wrath in their sin.

But Jesus disagreed.

Jesus knew his father did not want his people to suffer

And he rose slowly to his feet, stretching his back and got ready to continue preaching.

God sought out Moses.

God, in God’s way, knew where Moses was headed but did not direct him there.

And so God appeared in Moses’ path and greeted him there because it was time for God to act and he would act through Moses.

God spoke.

“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down 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, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

God did not want God’s people to suffer.

God led the Israelites to Egypt to escape famine in Joseph’s time and now it was time to leave.

The Israelites were being persecuted by the Egyptians.

They were enslaved by the Egyptians.

They were oppressed by the Egyptians.

God did not want God’s people to suffer.

Jesus rose to speak.

"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."

There is a myth that Jesus was addressing, that we will be punished for our sins in indirect and unrelated ways.

That if we steal a piece of gum, we will stub our toe later on.

If we commit a larger sin, perhaps even a tower will fall on us.

Yet as we read in Exodus, God is not looking for us to suffer, the Jews in Israel were not sinners in anyway greater than you and I are sinners.

And yet, it can be ingrained in us that we suffer because we sin.

God did not call God’s people out of Egypt to lead them to suffering and death.

Those Galileans did not suffer because they were worse sinners than those who pray; that tower did not crumble on God’s people because they did not follow the commandments.

God, again, does not want God’s people to suffer and yet there is suffering; there is pain; there is hurt in an imperfect world.

And it comes down to the fact that we live in an imperfect world.

Bad things can happen to good people.

Bad things do happen to good people.

And yet Jesus is preaching a different message than the superstitions of his day.

Yes, we all face our demise and yet there is freedom from the permanence of death.

For we are given the opportunity to repent; we are given the opportunity to confess our faith in Christ Jesus and God.

Repent and our fate will not be death, but life.

Repent and our story resides in Christ.

The message of this story is twofold; that God wants us to be free from oppression, enslavement, and suffering, us being all of God’s people; and that further, we escape death through our faith and repentance in Christ.

That is our faith and that is the promise of our faith.

God led God’s people out of Egypt and Christ is leading his people to salvation.

We cannot escape suffering; we cannot escape tragedy, evidence of an imperfect world, perhaps even traits of being human: sometimes broken and certainly fragile.

Yet through our faith, Christ promises that in the end and a long time from now, we are given eternal life.

And so repent.

Repent to realize a clear heart more capable of love than one still clouded in sin.

Repent to withstand the tests an imperfect world will force us to endure.

Repent so that the tragedy of this story is not the unrealized promise of a life lived in Christ and in God’s church forever.

The immediacy of Christ’s message this morning is one of repentance and it is also a continuation of the God’s love for all of God’s people.

Suffering will happen, yet God’s preferred state for us is to be released from that suffering and that release is found through Christ.

Lent is a season to focus on repentance, yet it is also a season to take on those practices that will help us realize God’s love and wants for all of us; to realize the freedom that our faith in Christ provides.

It is a season of reflection and a season to take on those practices where reflection becomes a conversation with God focused on repentance and prayer.

The invitation here is to retreat into our own wildernesses, our own mountains that will bring us closer to God, to seek out our burning bushes and hear God’s plea that we release ourselves from oppression and sin.

The invitation is to enter into a dialogue with Christ, asking for forgiveness and praying for all of God’s people, praying for ourselves as well, so that we might live in that kingdom promised by God and entered into through faith.

The invitation is to love, forgive, and repent.

Amen.