Sermon Preached at St Paul's Cathedral on 16th August 2009

Exodus 2: 23 - 3;10, Heb 13:1-15
"Some have entertained angels without realising it"

Sometimes, later, we look back over our lives and see who some of the angels were.

When I was in my early twenties and fairly mixed up, as many young people are at that age, I met two couple who became angels or messengers from God for me.

Michael and Margaret were a childless and very loving couple who had spent their lives in Christian work and thus had not two pennies to rub together. But their lives were transparently full of generosity, faith, joy and a deeply sensitive love. They were both, but Margaret especially, very sad that they had never been able to have children. But it was as though they took the love they had not been able to give to their own children and funnelled it into loving young adults like myself – and they did it in a very particular way – by seeing only the best in us. I used to come away from them feeling as though I had been cared for tenderly but also with a sense of shame because I knew I wasn't the person they appeared to think I was. One day this shame and sorrow became so poignant in me that I determined to become more like the person they saw and I made some life-changing decisions.

Another couple affected me deeply even though I was only in their company across a weekend when they put me up in their home. As a fairly new Christian I was, first, amazed that anyone would invite a complete stranger into their home to stay. But the person who really touched my heart was the man, Roger. He had literally just gone blind. He had been a diabetic most of his life and had woken up one morning a few days before, quite blind. It turned out to be only temporary but he didn't know that at the time. The way I was cared for on that weekend, however, you would think that Roger had no problems at all. He was a Christian and by profession the counsellor at the local university. He listened with the whole of himself and that gave me a sense of being deeply respected. I felt made whole by his deep listening.

In our reading today from Hebrews, one verse leapt out at me:
Remember your leaders, who spoke God's word to you. Look carefully at how their lives came to complete fruition, and imitate their faith. Jesus the Messiah is the same, yesterday, today and forever.

It was this verse that made me wonder who are my leaders, and which brought to mind Michael and Margaret, Roger and his wife, Joy, and many others along the way. We all have such people in our lives. But could it be said that their lives came to complete fruition – Margaret with her childlessness, Roger with his blindness? Yes, I think it could because to reach human maturity we have to experience our demons, sorrows, loss and regret as much as joy, gain and celebration. Anchored in God's grace, these experiences develop into ways of becoming more fully ourselves, of serving him and loving others. As William Blake said,

Joy and Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the Soul divine:
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the World we safely go.
(From : Auguries of Innocence)

So who was Moses' leader who spoke God's word to him? Look at the young man Moses, and you see someone whose family history made him a fairly mixed up kid. Born of a slave family, hidden among the reeds to save his life, gathered up by an Egyptian princess as her plaything, brought up in the luxury of the Egyptian court but always knowing he was not Egyptian but a member of a slave race, confused in his mix cultures, one day he decides to identify with his birth race and murders an Egyptian overseer who is beating a Jewish slave. He then has to flee for his life. He must have been one confused and distraught young man.

A few years later we meet him at the scene of the burning bush but what or who has prepared him for this encounter with God? Where has he been and has he had any leaders, friends or mentors in his life who have spoken God's word to him? One person is mentioned in our passage from Exodus who could fit the bill – Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, who is described as the Priest of Midian.

The Midianites were a desert dwelling tribe consisting of five families. They were descended from Abraham through Midian, the son of Abraham's concubine, Keturah. They had all been sent away eastwards after the birth of Isaac. They were now shepherds and when Moses married Jethro's daughter, Zipporah, he shepherded his father-in-law's flocks.

But who was this priest, Jethro, and what was his religion? We are told very little about him in our story but we can gather that he was a wise man and held in great esteem by Moses. Later in the story when Moses has successfully brought the Israelites out of Egypt to Mount Horeb, the sacred mountain, Jethro meets Moses there and hold a sacrifice to Yahweh in thanksgiving for the deliverance of Israel. On this occasion Jethro says,

Now I know that the Lord is greater than all the gods because he has delivered the people from the Egyptians, when they dealt arrogantly with them.

The next day Jethro, seeing how heavily burdened his son-in-law is with the administration of justice to the Israelites, gives Moses some wise advice on delegation, which Moses immediately puts into action. It is quite obvious that the writer of Exodus sees Jethro, the Priest of Midian, as a wise and spiritual man who recognises the pre-eminence of Yahweh and is an understanding supporter of his son-in-law. Was Jethro, the Priest of Midian, a descendant of Abraham, the one who helped prepare the ground for Moses' own encounter with God? Was it he who first showed him, by example, what a godly life is like? Was it he who taught Moses to reflect and to pray? We cannot know but most of us have had human intermediaries, angels, messengers of God, who helped set us on the right path.

But more than angels are needed, more than mentors and leaders. Without the intention of the heart towards God all messages can fall on deaf ears and stony ground. But I think that if we look at the back story of Moses, the story of the murder of the Egyptian, we can see that although Moses got it dreadfully wrong, what the confused and troubled young man was reaching for was a place where he could stand with integrity. He could have stayed with the rich and powerful, the soft and easy life of the Egyptian court – but he chose to side with the lives of his slave people. If my friends, Michael and Margaret, who only ever saw the best in people, had met Moses shortly after he had fled from Egypt, what they would have seen, was a young man who had tried to stand with and defend the people he wanted to call his own, not simply a murderer.

For someone to grow up into God other elements are needed besides mentors and leaders. Time is needed for the spiritual seed to grow. Our text from Hebrews today is largely about the social disciplines that were necessary for the Christian community to thrive, but our reading form Exodus has a subtext of spiritual disciplines. For years Moses had led the ordinary life of a shepherd, travelling sometimes far from home in search of pasture. By default he has practiced the spiritual disciplines of solitude, silence and simplicity. These disciplines are essential to spiritual development. Solitude is a withdrawal from all those relationships that we rely on so that we can be alone with ourselves and with God. Simplicity is a standing away from the scaffolding of material comforts that make us feel rich, safe and secure but which stand in the way of seeing what is truly essential and meaningful. And the most important discipline of all - silence - has the effect of helping us to listen deeply to God with all of our five senses, so that one day we wake up to the dance our Creator dances and the song our Creator sings.

These disciplines, silence, solitude and simplicity appear attractive in our over-busy world and it is easy to become romantic about them. But they lead us also into desert places – the reality of our own, alone, company. And as T S Eliot says, Humankind cannot bear very much reality. So a warning sign should be put up over this desert place, "Here be dragons." Here we meet our own darkness, our own demons. But in the end there is no way through to the mountain of God but by the way of the desert. And perhaps that is one way of reading this first verse of Exodus chapter 3,

Moses led his flock beyond the wilderness to Horeb, the mountain of God.

This verse is describing geography but perhaps it is also describing pilgrimage. Perhaps it is also describing that Moses has come through the desert of his own demons to a place where he wakes up to the dance our Creator dances and the song our Creator sings. The medium our God uses for his song and his dance is creation and in a bush that is on fire but appears not to burn and in a voice that is born of the deep silence of the desert, Moses meets God and receives his vocation.

Our lives have been describe as being like the pages of a book. We have to travel slowly, page by page through our stories, but God holds the whole volume in his hands and can open it at any page at any time. But God is not random or careless of us. He is the author and finisher of our Faith and so he provides angels in disguise along the way to bring us messages, leaders and mentors to speak the word of God to us when we are most in need, time so that we may grow at our own pace, spiritual disciplines if only we will use them to refine us, the desert to mature us, until we come to the place where we stand on holy ground, we hear our own name being called by God and we reply, "Here I am."

And this is only the beginning. There are many more chapters in the book for Moses and for us. God calls us and God sends us back into the world to the places where his name is not known. And the sending feels as though we are being sent away from the holy mountain. We would rather remain there – but we are no earthly good to God there. We must be sent back to the mess, the muddle and the pain: to where people are enslaved, so God's will may be done; Moses to Egypt – you and I to wherever God calls us. But we leave the holy mountain with three things we didn't have before. We leave knowing who we are. Moses knows he is the one called by God to lead his people out of Egypt. Secondly, although we leave the holy mountain we know that God goes with us. There will be moments throughout our lives when we will see the Creator dancing his dance and singing his song in places we never dreamt we would see him. And thirdly, there is a promise that we will one day return to the holy mountain. When our work is done, when the chapters are written, we shall return and like Moses worship God in the fullness of his glory.