August 28, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Stop, Look, and Listen

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 105:1–11
Exodus 3:1–15
Romans 12:9–21

Seeing
is forgetting
the name
of the thing
one sees.

From a Zen poem

As I started to log into my AOL email account yesterday, my eye caught the headline that read “Brad Pitt Saves Woman’s Life.” Pitt was shooting a movie in Scotland. One of the movie scenes involved scores of Scots (extras for the scenes requiring huge crowds) running for their lives through Glasgow’s George Square. One of those extras, a woman, fell over and was in danger of being trampled, but Pitt’s fast action in running over to scoop her up and get her out of the way saved her life.

The headline caught my eye because it was about the idea of saving—saving someone, saving people, saving human life. In today’s passage from Exodus, a saving God calls Moses to join God’s saving action and to help save lives, in this world, on this earth.

I’ve often wondered if I could ever act fast enough to save a life. Or stay calm enough.

Holden Caulfield, the uneasy main character in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, has a dream of vocation, a dream about what he’d love to be doing. He spelled that dream out to his little sister, Phoebe. Holden dreamed of saving lives.

He says to his sister, “You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my choice? You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye?’”

Phoebe corrects him as she often does: “It’s a body meet a body coming through the rye!” old Phoebe says. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”

Holden continues,

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy. (Catcher in the Rye, p. 173)

Moses wasn’t dreaming of saving lives when God called him. He wasn’t thinking about keeping little kids from going off of the edge of a cliff. He was tending sheep. It was an ordinary day of work for Moses when God appeared to him and called “Moses, Moses, help me save a people.”

Moses was an ordinary man that day with no religious intentions. His life hadn’t always been ordinary. He’d been hidden by his mother in a reed basket in the Nile when he was an infant, because as a Hebrew male infant, his life was at risk. His mother knew she had to hide him in order to save him. The Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter saw the infant baby there in the river, knew he was one of the Hebrew babies, and took pity on him and picked him up, found his mother, asked her to nurse him and paid her to do so, until Moses became old enough to become this daughter of Pharaoh’s son.

He had already been saved before, by his mother who hid him and Pharaoh’s daughter who found him.

He grew up as a Hebrew in the Egyptian courts. He’d had a privileged life until one day he looked out and saw one of the Egyptian overlords abusing one of the Hebrew slaves, and Moses was unsettled by it. The seeds of justice were already in him. He went out, accused the Egyptian, asked him to stop, and when the abuse wouldn’t stop, Moses looked around and, when he thought no one was looking, murdered the Egyptian. A few days later, Moses saw two Hebrews fighting, and he went out again to try to stop that unrest between his own people. Even then Moses was a man who found himself unsettled by oppression and injustice and fighting. “Why are you beating on one another?” Moses asked. “Who are you?” they answered belligerently. “Who are you to tell us what to do? Aren’t you the one who murdered the Egyptian the other day?” And at that, Moses realized someone knew about the murder he had committed, and he fled because Pharaoh would soon be after him. He fled to Midian, married there, had a child of his own, and spent his days, as a fugitive from Egypt, in hiding, tending the sheep of his father-in-law, living a safe and uncomplicated life away from the problems he hadn’t been able to solve. I wonder how many of us have been incensed or unsettled by the things we see and turn around, fleeing because we don’t know what to do about those things or because danger accompanies them.

Then on one ordinary day, God used an oddity of nature to catch Moses’ attention, to cause him to stop and to cause him to hear: a bush that was full of flame but wasn’t being burned. The bush was God’s prop to make Moses see and hear in a different way.

I love the words from Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Earth’s crammed with heaven . . . and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit around and pick blackberries.”

God caught Moses’ attention. Moses saw that day—saw God and the world and himself in a new way—and what he saw became far more than a burning bush. He saw the face of God and heard God’s voice: “Moses. Moses”. And Moses answered, “Here I am.” In the Hebrew, the words used for “Here I am” are words that convey the sense of a readiness to submit, a readiness to obey.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes,

An uncalled life is an autonomous existence in which there is no intrusion, disruption, or redefinition, no appearance or utterance of the holy. We may imagine in our autonomous existence that no one knows our name until we announce it, and no one requires anything of us except that for which we volunteer. The life of Moses in this narrative, as the lives of all people who live in this narrative of faith, is not autonomous. There is this One, this God, who knows and calls by name, even while we imagine we are unknown and unsummoned. (The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 1, The Book of Exodus, p. 719)

But Moses was scared, like most of us are scared. Moses didn’t think he was worthy. Moses felt incompetent. But God continued to call him because God needed him. And God has continued to call people, continues to call us, to be in this business of saving, or helping to free people from injustice or oppression or slavery.

We usually become so overwhelmed by the thought that we don’t even start, and we forget God’s promise that God will be with us, each step of the way, just as God was with Moses.

I know a woman who lives in a privileged suburb, whose children have all the privileges money can buy, and whose daughter goes to a special school where one of her classmates happens to be from one of the poorest, most dangerous, most poverty-ridden neighborhoods in the city. He is in that school because of special learning needs. My friend fought to get him a scholarship to the basketball camp her daughter goes to, and she succeeded. And throughout the summer, five days a week, though she works part time and has two kids of her own with their own demands and needs, she drove this young man from her affluent suburb back to the inner city of Chicago, a trip of about thirty-five miles one way, just so that he could attend this basketball camp, using skills and ability he was given, helping him to gain what he might not gain in his own neighborhood. She works part time. She has her own two children. It was an endeavor of saving—at least a hope. At least a step.

In the midst of the enormity of the challenges God calls us to, it helps to remember two things. The first is that the God who calls us is a saving God. A God who cares passionately. God said to Moses, “I have seen the misery of my people. I have heard their cry. I know their sufferings. And I have come down to deliver them.” I have seen. I have heard. I know. I have come down. The God who calls us is a God who is moved, who cares, who engages, who wants to save. Remembering who God is helps. The words in the Romans passage also help. They help because they are concrete. They are like a litany of dedication or a litany of basics that can be a guidepost for us when we don’t know what to do except take the next step.

Let love be genuine. Genuine means non-hypocritical.
Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.
Love one another with mutual affection.
Rejoice in hope. Be patient in suffering. Persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints. Extend hospitality to strangers.

A concrete litany to take us through when the task is overwhelming or when we lose our way. Hate what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Contribute to the needs of the saints. Do not repay anyone with evil. The movements of Gandhi and King come to mind.

Just recently, David Brooks wrote an article in the New York Times titled “The Rugged Altruists” (23 August 2011). He listed four characteristics that these rugged altruists—people who serve in developing countries—had in common. Courage: the willingness to go to a strange place or enter into a strange situation. Deference: the ability to listen to those who were being helped, rather than think they, the helpers, had all the answers. Thanklessness: the ability to keep doing the work, even without thanks in return. And finally, noncontingent commitment to a specific place or purpose.

He wrote,

As you talk to people involved in the foreign aid business—on the giving and the receiving ends—you are struck by how much disillusionment there is. Very few nongovernmental organizations or multilateral efforts do good, many Kenyans say. They come and go, spending largely on themselves, creating dependency not growth. The government-to-government aid workers spend time at summit meetings negotiating protocols with each other. But in odd places, away from the fashionableness, one does find people willing to embrace the perspectives and do the jobs the locals define—in businesses, where Westerners are providing advice about boring things like accounting; in hospitals where doctors, among many aggravations, try to listen to the symptoms the patients describe.

He concludes his article with this. “Susan Albright, a nurse working with disabled children in Kijabe, says, ‘Everything I’ve ever learned I put to use here.’ Her husband, Leland Albright, a prominent neurosurgeon, says simply, “This is where God wants us to be.” Earth is “crammed with heaven . . . and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes” Might each one of us see and then say yes to the work of cramming this earth more full of heaven. Alleluia. Amen.