I wonder how many burning
bushes Moses walked past. We’d all like
to think that we’d notice something like that, that it takes no special
spiritual gift to notice something, to draw close to it out of curiosity, and
then be surprised by God. But, we walk
past burning bushes all the time. That kind
of attentiveness that attends to the world in a sensitive enough manner to
notice how God might be calling out to us isn’t something we just have
automatically. It is a gift, but it’s a
gift we give thanks for by working to develop it, just like musical talent, or
athletic ability.
I don’t
think it’s any coincidence at all that Moses only notices a burning bush after
he begins tending his father-in-law’s flock.
Shepherding, in all the various forms that can take, develops that
attentiveness in us. When we learn to
truly attend to the people around us with the kind of attentiveness that’s
necessary to tend a flock, or actively love our neighbor, at the same time we
really do develop a keener attentiveness to God. Maybe you’ve seen some of this through a job,
a volunteer activity, or just well-lived family or friend relationships.
For me, my
growth-spurt in that kind of attentiveness came when I was teaching. Before I entered seminary, I spent two years
teaching community college math inside San Quentin prison. I always hold that you teach people math, you
don’t just teach math, but inside there, the inmates drew on me for more support
more regularly than anywhere else I’d taught.
I found myself being reached out for help with far more than geometry,
mainly just to be a listening ear. And
as I reflected on those experiences, that they felt so right, but I felt like I
needed to be in them differently, I started to wonder what ‘differently’ might
mean, and I started to realize that that had to involve asking serious
questions about priesthood and religious life.
That was my Moses moment. It wasn’t
really a singular moment for me (and, actually, Exodus narrates a few similar
moments for Moses, of which we’ve heard one tonight, so it probably wasn’t for
him either), but it was that same experience: of tending a flock, looking out
for people, raising my concern for others, and discovering that enabled a
profounder encounter with God, a clearer vision of what He had in store for me.
Because
that’s what’s at the heart of Moses’ experience: equipped with attentiveness
from his work with the sheep, he’s readied for a deeply personal encounter with
God, and that leads to a new clarity about what his role will be in the liberation
of God’s people. It’s a face-to-face
encounter, where God puts himself on first name terms with Moses. It’s a sanctifying encounter, which makes holy
the very ground, and God invites Moses to immerse himself in that sanctity, to
take his shoes off and let the holy sound surround his smelly feet. And Moses needs to be immersed in that
holiness, because he’s about to be sent off to do something incredibly difficult:
to cooperate with God to make His people free.
That’s what
can happen to us. It’s the opposite of a
vicious circle; it’s a virtuous circle.
We start by truly caring for others, attending to them, and our
attentiveness is built up. That opens
our eyes to God’s presence all around us, invites us to immerse ourselves (even
our smelly feet; the parts of ourselves we think even God can’t love), immerse
ourselves in holiness, and that equips us to understand our part in God’s ongoing
project of redemption; liberating us from all that holds us down, all that
holds us back from being the people he calls us to be.
And if we
do that, we won’t get stuck in the position of the people who interrupt Jesus
in today’s gospel. Jesus is in the
middle of teaching, and people come to tell him about a Roman massacre of
Jews. You might think this interruption
is perfectly OK, that they’re going to ask Jesus to pray or just invite everyone
to mourn together. But, no: Jesus knows
what they want; they want to victim-blame; they want to judge the slain. And it’s actually in some ways a very natural
response: we hear of something horrible happening to someone and we want to
reassure ourselves that something that bad could never happen to us, because we’d
never make the one fatal mistake they did that led to their tragedy.
Jesus says
no to that. Jesus says that if we look
to tragedy and try to spot the victim’s sin, our vision is faulty. We’re not attending to things like shepherds. We’re curious spectators, not shepherd actors. If we want to turn our gaze to start looking
for sins, it’s not in other people we should look; it’s in ourselves. And, he goes on to illustrate, that’s not all
there is to conversion. Conversion also
sometimes means looking at situations of tragedy and failure, situations like a
fruitless fig-tree and daring to see hope, see resurrection. But, we don’t just say we see hope and move
on. Conversion moves us to make real our
solidarity, to collaborate with seemingly fruitless trees, to offer to cultivate
and fertilize. That’s the kind of
behavior that opens us up to encounter with God, and that’s the kind of
behavior that we’re strengthened for by those encounters.
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