Stewardship, Part 2: “Presence”

October 29, 2023 – Ordinary Time

Exodus 3:1-6 || Exodus 33:7-11 || Deuteronomy 34:1-12

Pastor Mike

Thursday

By James Longenbach

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I summered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.

The phone rang. So with my left

Hand I answered it,

Sauteing the rice, then adding the broth

Slowly, one ladle at a time, with my right—hello?—

The miracle, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks dissolve,

Each graine releasing its tiny explosion of starch.

If you take it off the heat just then, let it sit

While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,

It will be perfectly creamy,

But will still have a bite.

There will be dishes to do,

The moon will rise,

And everyone you love will be safe.

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp, used to go beyond the brim of his familiar circle and talk face to face with God. That tent was their familiar meeting place, yet Moses made sure that neither he nor anyone else could just pop in on God for a moment while heading somewhere else. No, you had to turn aside and put the camp behind you. Only then could you be truly present.

Moses and God were making something. They were making a holy people of the Israelites who had been freed from Egyptian slavery. It was an act of God’s radical imagination, and Moses had glimpsed the vision. To exist in the long, hard middle of it, the rich but difficult decades of leading while wandering, Moses needed the sustaining power of presence. He made turning aside to see and talk with God the fundamental rhythm of his life.

He had learned the importance of presence on the day he was first called by God. Before Moses was a liberator, lawgiver, and leader, he was a lost and lonesome man, silently shepherding the flocks of his father-in-law in the land of Midian. He was estranged from his people and his purpose, and he had traveled so far from spiritual vitality that Moses was not even in the wilderness, the Bible’s symbolic location for testing and transformation. No, he had gone beyond the wilderness, beyond any hope of change, and had only the ancient silence of the rocks of Mt. Horeb for company.

“If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of [creation], even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” So says the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm, and so it was with Moses. Out in that place of despair, God found Moses, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in the bright liveliness of fire. God made the first move. The bush burned but was not consumed. Moses caught sight of it, but the question on which everything hung was this:

Would the sight of it catch him? Would he not merely take note of this great sight but come and behold it, be present to it? Would he turn aside and see?

Moses looked and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3:2b-4)

By one single act of presence, his life was utterly transformed.

Moses did not know that the burning bush had anything to do with God. But he did know that something strange, beautiful, and holy had appeared to him and he allowed himself to be curious, to be interrupted, to be drawn in. God does not expect us to recognize divine purposes at first, but only to come and see. The rest takes care of itself. To turn and attend is already to make space for change.

God rewards the decision to turn and see by making a second move. “Moses! Moses!” God calls. God speaks the man’s name, restores Moses to himself. Knowing God and knowing ourselves go hand in hand; when we are intentionally present to God, we receive who we are from God in the same moment. [with wonder] “Here I am.”

Turning aside also has profound political implications. Having caught Moses’ deep attention, God binds Moses to the misery and hope of the enslaved Israelites. No longer will God permit Moses to wander about aimlessly and alone. That’s the gift – maybe it feels like the danger! – of presence. We get our personhood and we get our people.

So it was that out beyond the wilderness Moses learned that life with God takes intention and attention. Like a great friendship or a romantic partnership or a relationship with a child, presence communicates and clears space for love. The daily miracles are easy to miss if we aren’t willing to stop, turn, and see.

When Moses died at the age of one hundred and twenty years old, his “sight was unimpaired, and his vigor had not abated” (Deut. 34:7). It’s a spiritual statement as much as a physical statement. Moses was one of the pure in heart who see[s] God (Matt. 5:8). He had shaped his life and ministry around intimacy with God. As a matter of course, he slowed down, turned aside, and relished God’s presence while offering his own.

The burning bush is so famous that perhaps we think of it as the greatest encounter with God that Moses ever had. But it was not. It was the first, but it was not the greatest. No, on that first day Moses hid his face from the holy flame. Better were those later, ordinary days when he and God talked “face to face” in the tent, “as one speaks with a friend.” Best of all was that very last day, when God led Moses by the hand up to the top of the mountain, showed him the vast horizon of all that had been promised, and then returned his body to the earth.

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I’m going to talk about stewardship.

The Church is an act of Christ’s radical imagination. The Church is something the Spirit is making with us and through us, just as the Spirit has worked with and through every generation of disciples. In a world of mass shootings, civilian casualties, humanitarian crises, economic imbalance, and ecological devastation, the Church is a gathering of persons who say with one voice:

“Turn aside! Come, hear God speak your name. Turn aside! Come and receive unconditional love – love that forgives and heals your past, love that steadies and empowers your present, love that grants a purposeful future. Come and encounter a God who has already come very near to us, who gives his life to us in sacraments and songs and scriptures, through the embraces of those beside us and the inner stillness of prayer. Come and have your heart riven by the one who in crucifixion and death as brought the brokenness of the world into the heart of God. God out to bind your lives to those who suffer, who are pushed to the brink of survival, whose dignity the powers of the world daily threaten. Turn aside! This is a place where there is no Jew or Greek, no male and female, no slave and free – but only Christ shining in and through the singular glory of each person. Come join a people who bear the glory of God upon them yet are not consumed. Come be present to visions that bestow true hope for a world famished for good news.”

That’s the radical dream of the Church, and stewardship means responsibly caring for it. It is no small thing that every week sixty or seventy of us gather here to pay attention to how the Spirit is working in our personal lives, in the collective experience of our congregation, and out in our community. In our go, go, go world of trends and screens and compulsive productivity, turning aside to pay attention is the only thing that allows a concern from beyond us to reach in and lay claim to us. When I ask you to consider giving money to the Church, I want you to see that that money gets metabolized here into the possibility of presence. A building to gather in. A pastor – whoever he or she is – to direct our focus to what is holy. Funds to help kids get to camp and strangers in need feel seen and cared for and the daycare to be focused on patient care not leaky walls and the list goes on.

What does our group experience of presence have to do with Maine, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine; with broken hearts in our city; with sick soil, air, and water? Everything. Presence is political. And the evil powers of our world want nothing more than to both isolate us from one another and distract us from the stakes. If God can get one person to turn aside and see, God can free a whole people. What would happen if the Church really paid attention? Stewardship allows us to live that question.

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I went to the window with Loren.

Now that it is fall and the nights are lengthening and the great tree in front of our house has shed many of its leaves, everyone at my house wakes up while it is still dark, and we can watch the sunrise through our large kitchen window. That is, if we choose to see it. One morning this week, Loren, who is two-and-a-half, began to shout, “The red and orange are back, Dada! The red and orange are back!”

It took me a couple of minutes to understand what he meant. Some gleam out there in the still-murky world had caught his eye, and he, like Moses in the wilderness of Midian, had “turned aside to see” (Exod. 3:4). And, just like Moses with Joshua, just like God with every one of us, Loren, in the joy and unselfconsciousness of being a child, was compelled to bring me inside his own turning. We stood before the window naming the changing colors until the sky as a whole turned a light morning blue.

Across my life, this is how I have primarily experienced God: in the act of turning aside to see. I have turned aside for one reason and later found myself seated beside red-clad prisoners on Death Row; craning my neck for glimpses of the birds on threatened lands; praying beside bedsides and gravesides. Wonder and awe, curiosity and the capacity for interruption, seeing with feeling, being still – those are the ingredients of presence, and when God finds them in a person or a congregation, all things become possible.

In his Diary of the Beagle expedition, the great English naturalist Charles Darwin, after venturing into a tropical setting for the first time, wrote, “the vividness of an impression gives it the effect of duration.” Presence deepens our experience of time, and makes moments feel as if they have lasted forever. Presence grounds us, helps us to be thankful, and gives us peace. Presence makes us feel that we have really lived this one, glorious, unrepeatable life. Presence holds space for all life’s seeming fragments.

As the poet says,

“There will be dishes to do,

The moon will rise,

And everyone you love will be safe.”

Amen.