Holy Ground at Work: The Practice That Makes It Visible

The discipleship class still meets on Tuesday. The whiteboard still has last month's sentence in marker. Holy ground at work. A man in the second row taught the Exodus unit and still treats the bush as the assignment. He can quote the sandals if you ask him. He has not taken the next act a watching table could name.

A woman across the aisle has a different finished card. She wrote ordinary work three weeks in a row. She still uses the sentence the way a room uses a hallway line: as proof that the class already believes the right thing. The group calls that maturity. Nobody has asked her what practice made the meeting visible.

This is a sermon about the practice that makes God's meeting visible in ordinary work. If you preach Exodus 3 as a map of anyone's rule of life, you will lie. If you preach it as Moses keeping Jethro's flock at Horeb in a real wilderness, you give this church a God who meets a man in ordinary work and sends him toward costly obedience, and a meeting that is practiced in the next named act, not stored in a holy-ground sentence.

Text

Hear the meeting as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God’s mountain, to Horeb. Yahweh’s angel appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the middle of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. Moses said, “I will go now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” When Yahweh saw that he came over to see, God called to him out of the middle of the bush, and said, “Moses!