Holy Ground at Work: The Responsibility in the Room

The elder table still has last month's holy-ground sentence in the minutes. Three chairs around this table already know which brother was asked to go and which chair still introduces the more polished mouth.

One of those chairs called the delay wisdom and then kept the meeting on time. Nobody walked toward the named sending. The week arrived like a calendar that learned how to print Sinai and still treat a frightened name as someone else's file.

A woman two chairs down signed the last vote that printed holy ground at work on the packet. She also signed the first one that left the inadequate brother in a smaller office. She has a sentence about stewardship. She has not asked who still holds the room when a living sending is still waiting.

This is a sermon about the responsibility already in the room. If you preach Exodus 3 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 charge that cannot treat a finished holy-ground sentence as the work the people who hold this room already keep.

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!