Holy Ground at Work: The Road Back After Failure

The welcome-back card still has last month's holy-ground sentence in the margin. New start. God met him at work. The man who fled the wreck sits in the second chair with a restored name and a sealed envelope he handed the group leader instead of a face. The woman who still carries what he left sits two rows back.

She signed the covenant. She also learned the new grammar of this church: calling as a finished feeling, restoration as a letter, the official version as the road back. Nobody walked toward the named return. The week arrived like a calendar that learned how to print Sinai and still treat a frightened name as a file you close so the room can look recovered.

A sponsor two seats over signed the last welcome that printed holy ground at work on the packet. He also signed the first one that left the inadequate brother in a smaller office. He has a sentence about healing. He has not asked who still waits for a walk when a living sending is still in the building.

This is a sermon for a church that already knows how to survive a wreck and does not know how to walk after one. If you preach Exodus 3 as a map of anyone's private relapse, you will lie. If you preach it as Moses keeping Jethro's flock at Horeb after he fled Egypt, you give this church a God who meets a failed man in ordinary work and sends him toward costly obedience, and you take away the cheap road that hides behind a finished 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!