Holy Ground at Work: What This Changes Between Us

The foyer still treats last month's sending as a private hobby. A man in this church was asked to go. The committee already said his name. He is still standing by the coffee urn with the same question Moses asked. Who am I. The people who named him keep the fellowship meal going as if holy ground were a feeling he should finish alone.

A woman across the aisle has a different finished peace. She can quote the bush if you ask her. She still introduces the reluctant name as if the sending were a rumor the room does not have to carry. The group calls that kindness. A teenager in the balcony is deciding whether this church is a people or a talent-management system with better theology.

This is a sermon about what Exodus 3 changes between you. If you preach it as a map of anyone's private calling, 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 people who cannot treat a brother's inadequacy as a private stall the table does not have to carry.

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!