Message 11-25-07
Series: [What I’ve Always Wondered] God’s Questions of Us
Scripture: 1 Peter 3:13-22 [Exodus 4:1-17]
Title: What’s That in Your Hand?
So, did you have a good holiday?
I learned the perfect greeting for the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Some people think that it’s “happy Holidays” or “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?” But the perfect greeting for the Sunday after Thanksgiving is to stop for just a moment, look the person over and say, “You’ve lost weight.” Talk about putting people in a good mood.
Now, how long does that good mood last? Well, it may only be a moment for some people. It will last longer for men than it does for women. Men tend to receive that as a prompt – they have a vision that captures them. It’s like the heavens have opened. They can see themselves. They’re sitting on a couch or in a comfortable chair and there’s cheering all around them. It’s the sound of a crowd and they’re settling in to watch the game that afternoon and they have heard the words “You’ve lost weight” as a sign from above and they already know what they’ll be eating while they watch the game.
But women, a lot of women, they’ll push that kind of compliment away. “Oh! Ha! I wish.” And they’re not thinking of it as a golden ticket to the fridge. They’re thinking of it as a reminder. See you didn’t have any of that pie, well, except for that sliver and that wasn’t really anything. Stick with it, now. People are looking.
We all know that we have an image of ourselves inside. I’ve read that most of us have it wrong too. Most men, I’ve read think that they look better than they really do and most women think they look worse.
Do you know what’s intriguing? When you come to spiritual matters it tends to be reversed. Most women think that they’re doing okay while most men don’t think that they’re where they should be. I’m thinking that most women have a better opinion of where they are spiritually than men because when they listen to men they think – we’ll, at least I’m better than that. Did you know that the prophets of the Bible used women as a barometer of how things were going spiritually in the country? In a couple of places one prophet or another says, “Do you see how bad things are going? Even the women are losing their faith.”
Maybe that was part of the problem Moses had in coming into the presence of God. Maybe that’s part of what’s going on in our first Scripture this morning. Maybe Moses was just a regular guy and he didn’t have a good spiritual self-image. Maybe his past was hanging on to him. Moses had been a prince in Egypt, but then he killed a man and he ran off into the desert. He got sort of adopted into a tribe of Bedouins and then he marries one of the daughters and becomes a shepherd. And now he’s been a shepherd for 40 years. So he’s got this image of a guy who came through hard times, made some bad choices when he was younger, got into some serious trouble, but made his own way, collected himself and has tried to put stuff together. It isn’t a whole lot but it’s something.
And then God shows up in his life. You know, you have a couple of kids. The wife is saying we should think about going to church. You try it out and all of a sudden there’s God and you feel like it’s all about you. And the voice of God is saying, ‘I want you to do this religious thing.” You can hear it. You can feel it and you know inside you’re saying, “Hey, no, you don’t understand. I’m not the kind of guy who goes to Egypt. That’s in Africa. You need to pick some body else.”
Maybe Moses was more of a regular guy. Now, for the past several weeks we’ve consider the kinds of questions we have of God or the Bible or Jesus or about faith, but today we’re looking at the kinds of questions God asks us. And every now and then it’s a good thing to consider what if God was asking me this.
So the story goes that Moses is out with his sheep. He’s sees a bush that’s burning but isn’t burning up. The flames just keep coming, so he goes to have a look. God is there and confronts him, tells him to take off his shoes because this is holy ground and then reveals that he wants Moses to go to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to release the people of Israel.
That’s how we get to the part of the story where we have the discussion we read in our first Scripture. And God asks, “What is that in your hand?” And it’s not there, but I’m thinking that Moses took a moment looking at it and then said, “Is this a trick question?
Every now and then I think the people who copied down the Bible didn’t keep in everything that happened. I mean, I could see Moses taking a good hard look at this stick he’s been carrying around for 40 years. It’s about 6 feet long and it has this little crook at the top. And then God asks him, “What is that you have in your hand?”
But you know what it is, right? It isn’t just a stick. It’s a form of Identification. Moses is a shepherd and everyone would be able to tell from the stick. It was also a tool and by that I mean it was the thing, the main tools for taking care of, herding and protecting his flock. This was the man’s livelihood. Now we could get into how this was Moses identity and security, but I think it is better for us to move beyond and consider what God was doing with Moses.
God is teaching Moses how he sees him. Moses has the chance to see himself through God’s eyes and he struggles with that. I don’t think that’s very different than us. I think what we have here is a very real man having a real spiritual experience. For the first time in his life he is seeing himself from God’s point of view.
From God’s point of view he’s a friend of God. From God’s point of view he’s a guy who has all the right resources. From God’s point of view he’s the right man at the right place at the right time. And Moses he’s not having any. He’s hanging on – not just to the stick but to his view of himself.
You know it’s fascinating to me to compare this moment with the time when Jesus is tempted by the devil. The story is that Jesus goes out into the desert and instead of finding God in a burning bush he meets up with the devil and the devil doesn’t give Jesus a build up of seeing himself in a new light. He challenges Jesus self-image. You may remember that Jesus was tempted to turn rocks into bread because he’d been fasting, he was tempted to worship Satan in exchange for all the power over the kingdoms of the world, and he was tempted to challenge God to come to his aid in a crisis, but these weren’t the real temptations. The real temptations were all tied up in Jesus’ identity in his self-image. Satan came and said to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God…” try it out. See what it feels like to parade it around a bit. See if it’s really there.
We didn’t read it but in the first part of the conversation between Moses and God, Moses asks, “Who am I?” And God answer to that question is “I will be with you.” God’s answer to Moses questioning his self-image is “You are the one that I will be with.”
Jesus already had that. Jesus already had God’s word spoken to him saying that he was God’s man. And Jesus was taking God at his word. And that’s what he calls us to do. He calls us to look at ourselves through his eyes. “What’s that in your hand?” God is looking at us from his point of view and he’s trying to help us see ourselves from his perspective. That thing you have in your hand – your livelihood, your company, your sense of yourself, that bit of security you’re clinging to – let it go and let me show you what we can do with it, you and me together.
You see Jesus came to teach us that there was more to life than the way we experience it. Jesus came to show us the way life works when God is part of every moment, when God is deeply and intimately involved. Jesus laid down the pattern for us to follow so that we can discover that when we come to him we get made new. We get made over.
We are new people, living a new way.
This is the good news that we’ve received, right? This is what the Gospel is all about. The Gospel is all about us becoming real human beings back in touch with our Creator, living the way human beings are supposed to live.
What’s that in your hand?
Jesus came to a group of fishermen and after he shared the good news with them – that God was looking at them and from his point of view they were read to get into the adventure. Jesus said to these fishermen. “Follow me and you’re going to start fishing for men.” One of those men was Peter, the man who wrote the words I read as our Scripture of the day.
He followed Jesus and if you know anything about Peter you know he was changed. He looked at what he had in his hands and he let it go and God started using him to create a new world. And what I read describes some of what he discovered in this new world, this new life. Remember Peter? He’s the man who denied Jesus, walked away from him, claiming he never knew the guy. Peter is the man who buckled under pressure. His letter is what he wrote to a group of Christians who were under persecution. Remember what he wrote to them.
Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. "Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened." But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord.
Christians are not afraid of the kinds of things that frighten people who aren’t following Jesus. They’re afraid of what people think of them. They’re afraid of whether they look good enough or sound good enough. But they following a different “lord”. Their “lord” is fashion. Their “lord” is the crowd’s opinion. Their “lord” is the promotion. Our Lord is the one who taught us to bring the good news to other people. Our Lord is the one who taught us to lift up the worried people around us, to free people who are overburdened and overwhelmed and who are trapped inside – wherever that may be. Our Lord is the one who taught us how we can live through making sacrifices. This is Christ the King Sunday and that’s not about the Catholic church down the street. It’s the Sunday when we remind ourselves to set apart Christ as Lord in our lives and to see ourselves through his eyes.
We are the ones Jesus is with. That’s who we are. We are the ones Jesus is with. He’s the one who died to bring us to God. Remember what he said, “In the world you will have trouble, but fear not for I have overcome the world.” And “I will be with you, even to the end of the age.”
Jesus – the one who has all angels, authorities and powers in submission under him.
God is asking you, “What’s that in your hand?” And it is kind of a trick question because the right answer is: “Your hand. That’s what I’ve got in my hand. Your hand.”
