Vocation = Anticipation
I have always enjoyed the story of Moses and the burning bush.
Moses had killed a man back in Egypt and escaped before Pharaoh and his henchmen could track him down and put him in solitary confinement. Moses gets a cruisy job with his father-in-law Jethro looking after the sheep in the top paddock, and you would have thought that would be the end of the story and Moses would have lived happily ever after. All is perfect and polished until one day…
Moses comes to the mountain of Horeb and sees a burning bush. But all is not as it seems. While there are flames, the wood is not consumed. His curiosity piqued, Moses naively says to himself
‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’.
Of course it's really an invitation for Moses to do an impossible task, it’s just that He doesn’t know it yet. The next thing you know, Moses is handed a job description to go back to Egypt, confront Pharaoh and release his brothers and sisters from slavery.
Moses understandably puts up every argument as to why this is not a good idea.
‘Who am I?’ says Moses. ‘I’m a person of no consequence.’ But God responds with the assurance that he will always be with Moses.
‘I don’t know who you are, Lord. Who will I say has sent me?’
So God reveals himself. ‘I am who I am.’
But, says Moses … Suppose they don’t believe me. What happens then? And that’s when we get the whole serpent/staff trick together with the leprous hand miracle.
But then Moses points out that he’s no good at public speaking. Maybe he had a speech impediment, a stutter or never came top in his class in English. ‘I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.’
God has to point out that he created the tongue and the mind and that really Moses… you’ll be fine.
Having run out of excuses Moses is left with just a simple plea. ‘Please send someone else.’
By now God is becoming cantankerous.
“Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, ‘What of your brother Aaron the Levite? I know that he can speak fluently;’” so Aaron becomes Moses’ wingman.
At one level the story is about vocation. How we are drawn to a particular way of life, a particular path, a specific person and outwardly, like the burning bush we are curious and intrigued. It’s only later that we discover that there is actually more going on here than what we first thought.
And sometimes, like Moses, when we discover what the job really entails, we quickly put up every excuse, every flimsy reason and yet… and yet… God uses our misgivings, our ineptitude, our own spectacular disasters to his glory and to bring his purposes about, even when and especially when we don’t want the job. Even when we are sure that there must be more competent candidates who have applied for this career opportunity.
On the way, like Moses, we will discover who God is. He will reveal Himself in ways that are often unorthodox and very different.
Remember the burning bush that got Moses into all this trouble in the first place? As Moses approaches the bush, I strongly suspect that there was a flutter of anticipation as he saw something that was new, unusual and unexpected.
Fr. Glenn Loughrey put it this way.
Alongside vocation is anticipation. Being Christian invites you to be anticipatory to be constantly looking for what is coming next. Anticipation looks for the new, the unusual the unexpected, and the not seen before and engages with the ongoing nature of creation as a never-ending action of God of which we are a part.
To play our part we are to be ready for what is next and what we haven’t seen before. It is a mindset of possibilities not one of passive participation
We need to be active participants engaged in an ongoing seeing and speaking with the divine, with ourselves and with others.
Anticipation allows us to grasp opportunities.
Sometimes we see and then choose to ignore. We can do this because we forget that God operates outside the of Church building and some of his finest angels are not with us in the pews.
Remember this from Satara on the 23rd of July.
“Dr. Williams suggested that in an increasingly secular world, although churches are emptier, people continue to be baffled by natural phenomena, stopped in their tracks by something so strange, and exhilarated at unknown prospects. In his words, this was God continuing to make Himself known to humankind, albeit in subtler ways – or unconventional ways”. While God operates inside the Church is it not also possible, nay probable, that he works outside the Church? I mean … When you’re God you can operate wherever and whenever you like.
So not only in bread and wine, but also in a loving heart a teardrop on a cheek, the spontaneous outburst of laughter, the child kicking autumn leaves. Things that are simple and yet breathtakingly profound.
We are called to look for him, to experience him in the unlikely, the unusual, things not seen before. Like a burning bush, the smile of an infant and especially within you and within me. These are God’s gilt-edged invitations to confront our own ‘pharaohs’ and bring liberty to all God’s children.