Unstuck: Visions and Destinations

January 15, 2017

Dr. Tom Pace

Exodus 3:1-12


We’re continuing our series called “Unstuck” and, we’re talking about how sometimes we’re stuck in our careers, in our relationships, in our physical health, in our attitudes, and certainly in our spiritual lives. And last week we looked at the story in which Jesus said to the man by the pool who was paralyzed: “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.”
We talked about how God calls us to by God’s grace at least begin to move, to just get going. And this week what we want to talk about is the direction that we go. What is God’s vision for your life? That’s the question we’re addressing. What is God’s vision for your life, and how do you discern that?
So would you listen as the Scripture is read? Follow along in your bulletin as we hear the story of the call of Moses found in Exodus.

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”When theLordsaw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then theLordsaid, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings,and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” (Exodus 3:1-12 NRSV)

Do you ever look at the Guinness Book of World Records website? You should do that – just waste some time on that because it clearly is a waste of time.
I did that this week and found some things that were really interesting. Such as: the most items kicked off people’s heads in one minute in 59 and is achieved by Silvana Shamuon. That’s kind of dumb. The fastest fifty meters walking on hands with a soccer ball between the legs is 26.09 seconds and was achieved by Zhang Shuang.
I have five children. That seems like a lot, but some woman – the wife of Feodor Vassilyez, a peasant from Shuya, Russia, in 27 confinements gave birth to 69 children. That’s sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets. That’s too many children. I don’t mean to judge or anything but…
This morning 25,000 people will run in the Houston Marathon or half Marathon. Now here’s the question that has made me think about this. Why? Why do people see how many ping-pong balls they can fit in their mouths? And they work at it for months and months trying to stretch out their mouths to see how many ping pong balls they can fit in.
Why do people spend time trying to see how many balls they can kick off someone’s head? Now think about this – why?
Here’s what I want us to consider today. I think the reason is that we are hard-wired, we are made to strive. We were created to reach for things, to try and set a goal and strive for it. That’s how God made us. And sometimes when we can’t find something that seems like it really matters, we do something that doesn’t.
Now I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with doing any of these things as long as they don’t take the place of striving to do something that really matters. But I think sometimes what happens is we don’t find something to strive for that feels like it really matters, so we settle to just improve our golf game. We settle to set a goal in something that maybe doesn’t matter so much just so we can have that sense of striving, of reaching, of working for something.
What I want to talk about today is how we might discover a vision for each one of our lives. How each one of us might discover that. And then get about the business of pursuing that vision.
So let’s pray as we consider this story of Moses together. Gracious God, open us up, open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel and then O God, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
So the first thing I want us to notice really has to do with timing, times and seasons. This is actually not printed in the Scripture that we read, but Moses was 80 years old when he encountered the burning bush. Eighty years old.
Here’s the story, you probably know it. Moses was born a Hebrew, raised in Pharaoh’s court. When he was a young man he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he stepped in and killed the Egyptian. He buried the Egyptian, and he ran off ahead of the law. For 50 years or so – we don’t know exactly – 40 or 50 years he tended his father-in-law’s sheep, not even his own sheep, tended the sheep of his father-in-law. When he’s 80 years old he encounters this burning bush.
The prophet Habakkuk is printed there in your bulletin and the language in it spoke to me. Habakkuk was a prophet in the sixth century BC. This is the time when the Children of Israel are being taken off to exile in Babylon. As that capture is impending, he sees a vision of what’s going to happen to the Children of Israel and his role in that. And I want you to note in verse 3 he says, “There is still a vision for the appointed time.”
Now here’s why I lift this up. Because I think timing matters. And as much as I hate to say it, I think some-times we need to be waiting. We need to be waiting to see what God has for us to do. For fifty years Moses waited, prepared. David was a shepherd boy and was preparing for that calling on his life to be king. Sometimes we just want it right now. I want to know right now.
The word opportunity comes from a Roman phrase ob port, and it means “off the port.” When a ship would come in, in those days a harbor was built usually with some sort of man made or natural reef that would protect the ships in the harbor. So it was shallower there. So they would have to wait ob port until the tides would come up and the winds were favorable, and they could come into the port. So they would sit outside of the port – ob port – until the time was right. And that’s where we get our term opportunity.
Sometimes we have to wait. And there comes a moment then when the time is right. As the quote from Shakespeare goes, “There is a tide in the affairs of men.” We take hold of that and we go. We see the vision.
So it can be pretty frustrating to sit around and say, “God, I know you have something for me.” There are dozens of people who say to me, “I know God has something for me but I just don’t know what it is. I just don’t know what it is.” And a lot of that is just our great desire to be in control of the times and ways that God speaks. But sometimes we just have to wait.
Now there’s one other thing about the timing that I think is really important. A woman came up to me after the service last week and talked about her life. It was kind of in passing that she said it. She said, “I’ve discovered that one way of getting unstuck is to forgive.”
She was talking about how when you spend all your time looking backward, you’re going to miss it. Because the opportunity for you, the calling for you is always in front of you. And if you’re full of regret or anger or bitterness or resentment about where you’ve been, until you let go of that and turn forward you’ll never see the door that’s opening.
Yes, you might have missed a door that closed yesterday but that’s not the only door. There is a time that God has something in store for you. And I will tell you there will come a time in your life where you stand at the edge of the River Jordan and see the vision of the angels on the other side as God is calling you to one more thing. There’s always a calling in front of you. So the first thing is pay attention to the times and seasons.
Here’s the second thing. Listen to this part of the passage. “There the angel of theLordappeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”When theLordsaw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”
If we want to discern what God’s vision for us is we have to turn aside and pay attention.
Again the prophet Habakkuk echoes the same challenge. He says, “I will stand at my watch post and station myself on the rampart. I will keep watch to see what he will say to me.” I will pay attention, I’m going to notice what God is doing.
Look, what is God doing in your life right now that might be a burning bush? This was an ordinary bush and Moses was doing the most ordinary of things. He was doing what he had been doing for 50 years, tending the sheep of his father-in-law. And he noticed the burning bush and paid attention.
Is there something going on in your life right now that might be a burning bush, something very ordinary? Is there something going on at work? Maybe there’s a burning bush there we need to pay attention to. Is there something going on in your family that might be a burning bush? We need to pay attention. Is there something going on right here in the church?
You read the list of announcements and opportunities on the back of the Inside-Out Habits Guide every Sunday and you say, “That’s nice… that’s nice… that’s nice…” Some of you don’t even read it. All that work and you don’t even read it. If you don’t read it, how can you notice the burning bush that’s right there on the page? That’s calling out to you and saying, “Pay attention! This is your vision – this is you calling! This is how you can help. This is what God intends for you.” You have to pay attention, you have to turn aside and see the burning bush.
I had coffee with a friend a few months ago, and we were talking about stuff, about the church, etc. etc. I asked him about his work and the reason I did was because I know he can’t stand his work.
He said, “You know, my work is always so full of drama, etc…” So I asked him, “How is your work?” And he said, “Oh, it’s much better.” I said, “Oh, is all that drama ended?” He was talking about everyone was disgruntled and his bosses were jerks and etc.
He said, “Oh, no, it’s still just as bad.” I said, “What’s different?” He told me about how this person came into his office and talked about how broken-hearted she was and how difficult it was at work. He encouraged her and on the way out she said to him, “Thank you so much for being here. You really have encouraged me. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here.”
He said that all of a sudden it came to him. “Why am I here?” He said, “I have a gift of encouragement. That’s how God made me, and I’m here to be the….” This is the image he used. “… to be the leaven in the loaf,” to be that encourager to all of these people who work in this difficult place and to build them up and encourage them and help them know God loves them and over and over to pray with them. And to pray for them. He sort of claimed the role of the chaplain in this particular workplace.
He said, “Then I realized that’s my gift everywhere. That’s my gift in my community. That’s my gift in my family. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. That’s what God made me to do.”
He said that it had been so neat for him to just take hold of what he felt was God’s purpose for him. Look, it was just a conversation someone that could have easily been passed, an ordinary thing that turns out to be a call, a burning bush that speaks to him.
Here’s what I find interesting. God didn’t speak – it says, “When God saw that Moses had turned aside, he said to him…,” until he turned aside, until he paid attention no voice at all. What’s going on in your ordinary life that might be a burning bush that might be a call?
So we look for times and seasons, we pay attention to what’s going on around us, in our ordinary every day life. Here’s the third thing.
I had never really noticed this before in this passage and I don’t know how I’ve missed it. This is verse nine where God’s speaking to Moses: “the cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.¹⁰So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go?’”
I want you to think about what God’s vision for your life is, not for someone else’s life but for your life. Who am I? Boy, that’s an important question. What has God made me to do?
I’ve always been moved by the work of Parker Palmer. I know I’ve shared with you before. I recommend to young people – all people – considering the ordained ministry that they read a little book he wrote. He’s a Quaker and he wrote a book called Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. It’s a short book.
I want to read you a passage from it. I’ve edited it a little for time. He begins with a quote from a poet named May Sarton. “Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places. I have been dissolved and shaken, worn other people’s faces.” I wonder if you’ve ever worn someone else’s face. Or lived someone else’s life.
He goes on, “I first learned about vocation growing up in the church. The idea of vocation I picked up in those circles, created a distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it.
“I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not, to become someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life.
“Today I understand vocation quite differently. Not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach, but accepting the treasure of a true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice calling me to be something I’m not. It comes from a voice calling me to be the person I was born to be.”
A moment of self disclosure. In my own work on my own “Unstuck” journal, and in the work that I’ve been doing spiritually, one of the things that has occurred to me at this point in my life at age 58 is that I’ve spend much of my life living up to the expectations of others. I lived up to the expectations of my parents, and then my family’s expectations as a father, and certainly to a congregation’s expectations. Think about this – here’s the definition of success in the ministry, and we talk about it as colleagues. We say, “Oh, he’s doing really well over there. They really like him there.”
That’s success. See, you find that you morph yourself to try and achieve that which you feel you’re called to achieve.
So at some point you have to ask yourself, “What is the vision that God has given me for my life – not what other people think, not for other people’s life, but for my life?” So the question I’m asking now is, what do I want to do with the last years of ministry, for example? I don’t know, I have ten or fifteen more years of professional ministry. Where do I want to invest? Don’t misunderstand me – I don’t want to leave St. Luke’s, and I don’t want to change my profession. I don’t want to buy a Corvette and drive across the country. I’m not going to do anything like that.
But is preaching what I want to be about? Is teaching what I want to be about? Is it investing in our Connect Community work in the inner city that we have in that incredibly diverse community? Is it pastoring? What should be my priority? Where should I invest my energy and time? Who is it that God really called me to be in this moment in this time in this season? What happens is we try and live someone else’s life. What other people expect of us. Because that becomes a path of least resistance.
What I want to invite you to think about is to ask the same question that Moses asked – who am I that God should call me to do this? What is that vision God has given?
So a couple of thoughts. One is – how are you gifted? What are your spiritual gifts? When you were created God made you to be a certain kind of person, to be gifted in certain ways. And when we respond to God’s call, those spiritual gifts are developed and activated in different ways. So maybe you have a gift of teaching or maybe a gift of encouragement or maybe you have a gift of hospitality. I don’t know. In what is it that you’re gifted?
You might note that in our bulletin, in our Inside-Out Habits guide, that we have a class that is beginning next week on spiritual gifts, on how discovering just how you might be gifted. We look at the spiritual gifts you read about in the Scripture and identify, so what is it within me?
The second thing you might look at is to determine just what your life vision is. What do you really care about? What are you really passionate about? As I say - what makes your heart beat faster?
Bill Hybels wrote a great book called Holy Discontent: Fueling the Fire That Ignites Personal Vision. He’s a pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, and he talks about this call of Moses. He says what is interesting is that for 50 years that discontent with the Egyptians festered. It’s almost like when you look back at his early life that it was there all along, and it festered and festered and grew and it prepared until the time came for him to follow that passion and go back and face the Pharaoh.
Now look, just because you’re passionate about something or just because you have a discontent, that doesn’t make it a holy discontent. This isn’t where you say, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore” kind of moment. This isn’t to say that just because we’re discontent doesn’t mean that that aligns with God’s heart. That might be just your discontent.
The question is what do you care about that aligns with what God cares about? So think about those areas that you are gifted and where you are passionate and begin to ask yourself, “So what is God’s vision for my life? Who am I called to be?” And receive that calling not as a challenge to become something you’re not but a gift. This is who you are. Live it. Live it with all of your might.
One more thing. So we pay attention to times and seasons, we pay attention to the burning bushes in our ordinary lives. We look at our own life, see how we’re made, how we’re created to see what God’s vision is for each of us, about what our own life is about rather than what others expect of us.
And finally, I want you to get clear about this. It’s funny, I noticed something in the Scripture this time when I read it through. So if I were to ask you this question: “God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, but what did he call Moses to do?”
I would say that most of you would answer – as I would have, by the way – that God called Moses to go to Egypt to set the Children of Israel free from their bondage to the Egyptians and the Pharaoh. And that would be true.
But that would be half of the story. Listen to the other half: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings,and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians.” That’s the part we’ve already talked about. “… and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites,” a very specific promise. “This is where I want you to go.”
See, he didn’t just lead them out of Egypt, he led them for 40 years wandering in the wilderness. He led them right to the edge of the land of Canaan. There was a specific picture of where he was to go. Sometimes we just want to get out of where we are but we don’t really know where we want to go.
How can we get more specific about it? Here’s the way that Habakkuk said it: “Then the Lord answered me and said, ‘Write the vision and make it plain on tablets.’”
In the African-American church tradition sometimes one of the things that congregants will shout out to the preacher as he preaches is, “Make it plain, preacher! Make it plain!”
I’m sure some of you want to do that often when I’m preaching but don’t have the nerve to shout it out.
Look, at some point you have to write it down. If you were here last week you received an “Unstuck” journal inside your bulletin. There are some at the Connections Center and at other places stacked around the church. One of the questions I ask of you today as you take this journal and begin to work forward is: How would you describe your life, the vision for your life a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. How would you describe the world a year from now, five years from now and ten years from now, and how can you be a part of making that happen? Write it down.
See a lot of times what we do is kind of ponder. “I think I’ll ponder it.” But at some point you have to put it down – a stake in the ground and say, “I’m going to give myself to following that vision.”
That is what I believe God’s called me to do and where I believe God’s called me to go, and I want to give myself to that. I want to write it down and make it plain. And then I can step out in faith.
Now here’s what you and I both know. It might be right, it might be wrong. You might have the wrong vision, written down there on the page. But you’ll never really know unless you really pay attention and decide to step out in faith and follow that vision that you believe God has planted in your heart for what you are to do.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, we thank you that you spoke to Moses from that burning bush when he turned aside, and we pray that you would challenge us, nudge us to turn aside as well and see the bushes burning all around us, and to hear your voice in the midst of them. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.