Exodus 3:1-15
October 22, 2006
Sermon preached at Rev. Joseph Tsang’s Installation Service at First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Most of us can remember our first jobs. I started my paying job career as a Chinese waiter at my father’s restaurant. We had to put all of the tips in a common bowl to divide up after the day is done. Then I worked as a stock boy at the Boston airport where I graduated to being a sandwich man, then a short-order cook, and finally a salad man in the main restaurant. Everyday, people wanted to eat. I knew that these were only jobs that helped pay the bills.
While I had this food service work experience, I had a church related line of jobs too. During the summer, I worked at a Baptist camp washing pots and pans that eventually turned into being a camp counselor. My very first church paying job at $10 a week was riding a school bus down the streets of Boston picking up children for Sunday school. Eventually when I started seminary is when I started to see myself first as a seminarian and then a minister.
Food service was good paying job but it didn’t give me the meaning in life that I sought. Church work gave me a lot of meaning in life, but it didn’t always pay well enough to pay the bills! Getting through life sometimes means that we do jobs that are not always good-paying or meaningful or even challenging. But when we discover a job that is meaningful, that challenges us by tapping our gifts and talents then we have found our vocation. Not just a job that helps pays the bills, but a way of life that gives us deep meaning and what God had in mind when he created us. We then become a part of God’s overall plan.
Comfortable Moses
The Moses we see in today’s Scripture is a Moses in his mid-life years with a comfortable, cautious, careful outlook on life. We see a Moses who has nothing to get excited about. He had a job tending sheep that paid his bills.
This was the same Moses who started out as a political refugee in a basket, who became the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, who, in a fit of compassion and outrage defended his Hebrew heritage by killing an Egyptian, who as a wanted murderer became an exile in the distant desert of Midian, who rescued the seven daughters of Jethro from attack. But the Moses we see is no longer the passionate, rebellious and complex man but rather he has become a settled, domesticated sheep herder, a husband and a father. He is an owned man now, answerable to his in-laws for both his security and his wealth.
Moses life has become predictable, comfortable, boring and God has become vague in his life. Moses’ dreams and gifts have become buried in the dust of the desert. Today’s Scripture say that Moses led his sheep across the arid sand to a place called Horeb.
The word, “Horeb” means “wasteland,” and we must wonder if it describes not only the terrain of the desert, but also the terrain of Moses’ life. Moses was wasting his life in his comfortable, predictable, and boring job as a sheep herder.
Moses’ predictable life was in so much of a rut that God chooses to appear to him in a dramatic way. All of a sudden in the midst of Moses doing his good-paying job of sheep-herding, fire appears. A burning bush, something spectacular enough to get Moses’ attention, something hot enough to spark Moses’ curiosity, something so unusual to shake up Moses from his usual routine job.
What was just an arid desert wasteland that Moses performed his boring sheep-herding job, God got Moses’ attention and told him that he was standing on holy ground. No longer are we talking about the ordinary when we are experiencing the extraordinary; no longer can Moses hide away from God and be content in just heading sheep, but Moses had to give attention to God’s plan for him. No longer can we only be content with our jobs even if they are good-paying ones when God is causing bushes to catch on fire in our lives.
Joseph Tsang’s Burning Bush
Burning bushes happen to us too, in the midst of our middle-class, middle-age, mildly meaningful lives. God’s burning bush appeared to Pastor Joseph.
Pastor Joseph was serving the Chinese Bible Church in Farmington Hills, Michigan. No offense to the Wolverines or the World Series contender Detroit Tigers and all the Michigan fans, but when you compare San Francisco to Michigan, Michigan is Horeb! Pastor Joseph was settled and was in a successful ministry with the good people there. But God’s burning bush appeared to him.
Although the people in Michigan also need to hear the good news of Christ, God got Pastor Joseph’s attention with a burning bush to come back to California where he first served a church in Sacramento, where he knows that there are thousands of new immigrants that come to San Francisco Chinatown in search of meaningful work and worthy lives, where in the Bay Area he has friends and family who also need his Christian witness. Perhaps life was becoming too predictable and too comfortable and too settled in Michigan for Pastor Tsang so a burning bush appeared to him.
I was told that Pastor Joseph’s burning bush is his wife, Brenda. Brenda got Joseph’s attention and burn through his comfortable life in Michigan to come to San Francisco. She spoke on behalf of God to show Joseph that people in the Bay Area need his witness of Jesus Christ. She was a part of God’s overall plan to bring Pastor Joseph to accept his new vocation as our Pastor of Chinese-speaking Ministries.
New Job
When we answer God’s call to come out of our comfortable existence to become what God’s plan is for us, we discover our chosen vocation. For Moses, his new job strangely resembles the old job that he left behind. The call is the call to his true self, the self that has somehow gotten buried in the wastelands of mid-life.
Moses’ true self is the self that feels; he feels pain and passion and suffering. It is the self that cares; he cares about freedom for himself and his people. It is the self that risks life in order to save life. Moses’ true self, his real vocation is nothing else than his Godself—the image of God, burning in a bush and burning in his own soul.
Pastor Joseph’s true self is like what Moses experienced. He feels the pain and the suffering of Chinese people who do not know Jesus Christ as their personal Savior. He wants to challenge us to become revitalized and renewed in our faith so that we may become effective good news people for the unchurched. When Pastor Joseph answered God calling him to come to our church, he discovered his true self, his real vocation, the image of God burning like the burning bush in his soul. Pastor Joseph is God’s man for the job at FCBC!
God’s Jobs for Us
God does not work alone. God enlists his people for divine purposes. Just as God takes an ordinary bush and uses it as an extraordinary sign to get our attention, God takes an ordinary man like Moses to do extraordinary things with him. God inspired Brenda to get Joseph’s attention so that God can do extraordinary things for him. God does the same for all of us—ordinary people in our comfortable and predictable lives to perform extraordinary things that would change history.
There are four lessons that we can learn from today’s Scripture. First is that God comes to us with a job when and where we might least expect it. There are people here this afternoon who could tell a story of what it’s like to be on the run from God, hiding out, crouching in some lonely place because it’s lonely. And yet, in that lonely place was the very place where God found you, caught you, called you.
Like Moses, you turned toward the burning bush, curious at what you see and your life has changed because God intruded in your comfortable lifestyle and gave you a new vocation.
Sometimes when a child misbehaves, a mother might say, “That was uncalled for!” For a Christian, that is one of the saddest things that can be said about us and our lives.” “That was uncalled for!” Our goal in life is to be called by God for his divine plan.
Secondly, God calls forth the curious among us, those who dare to enter into dialogue with God. Some of you may be here this afternoon because you are curious. You wonder who is this Pastor Joseph! You are curious about what an installation service is. Your friends may describe you as “very spiritual,” a curious person. You are fascinated by things that others may find beyond the fringe, outside of the normal circumstances in life. They may even think that you are too weird about being a Christian. But you are the kind of people God can work with.
Keep your curiosity. Like Moses, turn toward the burning bush and see what you can see. Most of us live rather flat, uneventful lives. But sometimes, God pulls back the curtain between himself and us and we get to peek a glimpse of God and know that it has always been God in charge in our lives. God was there when you chose your college classes. He was there when you decided on your major. He was there when you gave up what were just jobs that might have paid you well and called you to your God chosen vocation. God is present in Pastor Joseph’s life when he sat comfortably in Michigan. God called him to keep his curiosity and turn toward the burning bush. Pastor Joseph discovered that God was pointing him to San Francisco!
Thirdly, God seems to choose ordinary, everyday objects and experiences in the world to confront, call, speak to us and say, “I am who I am.” You may need to pay better attention to once seemingly ordinary people, places and things. Who, what might be that lowly bush that bursts into flame that becomes the very voice of God calling your name? When Pastor Joseph calls you on the phone or when he talks with you as you are leaving worship or when he shares a concern with you, heed his call because God is using Pastor Tsang to speak to you.
Once seeing, hearing God, Moses is now filled with fear, afraid to look at God, yet he stays and speaks, speaks face to face with no one less than God Almighty. We may never have such a revelation from God Almighty himself like Moses, but I can tell you that God is always using ordinary and everyday objects and experiences in the world to say to us, “I am who I am!” And when we listen to God, our lives become like Moses’—dedicated to carrying out God’s purpose.
And fourthly, all of this is God’s gracious initiative. It’s God’s idea to encounter us. Moses didn’t asked to be disturbed from his comfortable and predictable life as a sheep-herder. It was God’s idea. Moses was not out desiring a closer relationship with God. He was done with his old life. Moses wanted no special, risky job to do with God. He knew how dangerous that was. It was all God’s idea for Moses to go up against Pharaoh and to cross the Red Sea with soldiers in hot pursuit of them.
God has heard the cries of an oppressed people. God is now on the move, beginning to overturn those in power, preparing to make the big move on Pharaoh. And God chose Moses to help him. God takes Moses’ gifts and abilities that he had hidden from his first time around and told him that he still needs those gifts and abilities to free his people.
I know that if Pastor Joseph could have it his way, he would still be in Michigan. Who in his right mind would give up a big church in the suburbs in Michigan to come to the ghettoes of Chinatown! Who in their right mind would move to such an expensive place to live! It wasn’t Joseph or Brenda’s idea but it was God’s idea that they are here. God knew that Pastor Joseph has a burning passion to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the Chinese so God takes his gifts and abilities that he was hiding in Michigan and said to him, “I need you to go to San Francisco!”
If God has called Pastor Lauren and Pastor Chris and now Pastor Joseph, God is calling you too! Moses’ story is your story too. Some of you have had God come to you at some “Horeb,” in that place you thought you were safe from God, perhaps wasting your life away. God came to you when and where you least expected. God came, calling out the curiosity in you so that you dared to enter into dialogue with the divine. You weren’t out looking for God. To your surprise, God was looking for you!
We are God’s People for the Job
Pharaoh asked Moses, “Moses, who sent somebody like you to come, and harass and command me? Moses replied quite honestly, “This is all the Lord’s directing and doing.”
If you were to ask Pastor Joseph, “Who sent somebody like you to come to San Francisco?” Pastor Joseph can only say “It’s the Lord. He said I am the man for the job!”
Just as God called Pastor Joseph to leave his comfortable position in Michigan to come to San Francisco, God is calling you by your name too. And when you hear God calling you, you, like Moses might say, “I may not be the best person in the world for the job, but I think I am the person you are calling to do the job.”
And all this is God’s idea, not yours. If someone asks you, “What is a person like you doing in a place like this? All you can answer is, “God called my name for this job. Here I am.”
Let us pray.
Lord, we are not here today at our initiative, but at your behest. Few of us were out looking for you; indeed, we knew not how even to search for you. Few of us sought to make our lives count for something; indeed, we knew not even what it would mean for our lives to count. Then you came to us. Then you reached out to us, grabbed us, embraced us, beckoned us, called us like you called Pastor Joseph Tsang for the job. We pray that you’ll continue to bless and empower Pastor Joseph for his ministry at this church. We are also here today as those whom you have a claim on our lives, who feel summoned to do your will. Give us the gifts we need to be a part of your divine plan. Strengthen us to fulfill the tasks that you set before us. Keep calling us, for in your vocation is our salvation. Amen.