“Moses: Barefoot in the Sanctuary”
(3rd in the Sermon Series: Divine Interruptions)

Exodus 3:1-15
Scott Huie

Westminster Presbyterian Church
May 3, 2009

Tell me about your call to ministry?  That is a question I have heard quite a bit during my 15 years in ministry at Westminster as well as in my previous three years of seminary training.  We ministers get asked that a lot, I suppose.  Maybe folks are just being polite, but by and large, it seems, folks want to hear our stories.


Stories of divine interruption.  Stories of God calling someone to a specific mission.  Abraham was called to father a great nation and to get up and move.  Jacob was called to wrestle with God and received a new name.  As a teenager Samuel was called in the middle of the night to pronounce judgment upon the house of Eli. Isaiah was called through an earthquake in the Temple.  Paul was called through a blinding light and was thrown to the ground.  Indeed high drama, divine interruptions!



I’ve always thought my call to ministry pales in comparison.  No lightning bolts.  No special effects.  I would describe it simply as a really intense tug at the heart.  One spring day back in 1990, I was asked by a minister at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, where Karla and I attended, to be a “guest lay preacher” on a Sunday afternoon in the summer.  I said, “Yes.”  It was a wonderful experience writing the sermon and then delivering it.  As I stood in the pulpit that afternoon to share what I felt God was calling me to share, there was this deep peace that what I was doing was something I needed to do more of.  It felt so right.  It felt that this was where God wanted me and was calling me.  I went home that night and shocked my wife with these words, “I think the Lord is calling me into the ministry.”   And it wasn’t long after resuscitating her from the floor that we were moving south to Decatur, Georgia for me to enroll at Columbia Seminary and train to become a minister.



As I look back, however, it wasn’t just through some sudden preaching experience that I felt God was calling me.  He was planting seeds throughout my life.  It began with Ms. Irene, the old lady who took Sunday School attendance every week throughout my childhood.  One day she pulled me aside as a sixth grader and said, “Scott, I am praying that you will become a Presbyterian minister someday.”  For years she kept reminding me that she was praying for me—when I came home from college for summer; when I returned home to visit during my New York years for holidays.  She wouldn’t let up.  When she turned 99, she even put it this way, “Scott, I am living for the day when I see you in the pulpit!”  Wow, talk about pressure.



It continued with folks like Ty Brooks, a Presbyterian Christian educator when I was in high school on a missions trip to Haiti.  While we were painting a hospital, she pulled me aside and said:  “Scott, I am sensing God may be calling you to ministry.”  All I could do was smile and say, “Thank you.”  But on the inside, I was thinking, “No, that’s not me.  I’m going to become the best sports broadcaster since Howard Cosell.”



Years passed.  Dreams of announcing Monday night football games were now distant memories, as I was beginning a career as an entertainment agent in New York City.  However, the voice of various other women in my life were challenging me in another direction.  Emma Jones, church elder and dear friend, asked me to stay after Sunday School one day.  She pulled me aside and said, “Scott, I feel God wants you to become a minister. Please pray about it.”  I said I would, but what I was thinking was, “I don’t think so.  I think I will become a hot shot agent, the next Jerry McGuire.”



And then on another day, of all people, my Mom broached the subject as well.  My parents were always very careful not to put pressure on their kids in one direction or another career-wise?  But one day as we were talking, she asked, “Son, have you considered the ministry.  We feel you have the gifts.  Could God be calling you?”  Mom had never spoken to me like that before.  The next week I was asked to be a deacon at church.  A couple of weeks later, I was asked to teach an at-home Bible Study at our church.  Well, it wasn’t long before God got a hold of me.  No, it wasn’t a burning bush.  But through a confluence of people and events, through conversations with folks that really mattered in my life and through earnest prayer, I felt the call of God to go into the ministry.  That was 20 years ago, and ever since, I have felt that call from God confirmed in my life.  In fact, when I enrolled in seminary all the way back in 1991, the first thing I did was take Ms. Irene a dozen roses to thank her for her persistent prayers.



Now some may respond by saying that, “Yeah, ministers may be called, but the rest of us just get jobs.”  If you feel that way, then let me be as pastoral as I can be:  horse hockey!  The question of call is not limited to prophets or those in the professional ministry.  I believe that every child of God, all the way down to little Chase and little Kinley, who we just baptized, has a calling from God.  I think we all struggle—some more than others—to find our way in life.  God is calling us into being, not just as a one-time event, but every day.  God is not some cosmic career counselor who grabs us by the scruff of our necks and plops us down into that church or that office or that school or that store.  But God is constantly calling us to take stock of our lives and to listen to that still small voice, that voice that calls us to liberate people from bondage in a way unique to each of us.



I love the way Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner puts it, when he says, “The place where God calls us is where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”   I love that: The place where God calls us is where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. God’s hand is always in our choosing, and what a blessing it is when our gifts match what needs to be done in the world.



Or as another way to consider one’s calling, What makes your heart sing?  Church ministry, and youth ministry, made my heart sing, and still do.  Music ministry also makes my heart sing, and that is why I feel called to two different vocations in my life.  Besides being a youth pastor, I also book Christian rock bands all around the world.  Last Friday, I was in Fort Myers, Florida, with 2000 people praising God through song at a Newsboys concert, a band I represent.  It was a beautiful thing.  Being there reconfirmed in my mind that God has called me to music ministry as well.



Moses hardly considered himself a candidate to be called by God.  He was a simple shepherd tending to his father-in-law’s sheep far away from the bright lights and big city in Egypt.  Moses saw himself as a backslidden sinner, a fugitive from the law as he had killed an Egyptian in anger.  He was a flawed man with a past and a skeleton in his closet.



But God chose Moses.  In this amazing divine interruption, God called Moses by name from the burning bush:  “Moses, Moses, come no closer, but remove your sandals, for the place you are standing in holy.”  Surely, wherever God is is holy.  God then revealed God’s identity,  “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I have heard the cry of the Israelites, and now I will use you, Moses, to deliver then from bondage and take them to the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey.  I will send you to Pharoah to let my people go.”



Moses frankly was a bit dumfounded.  “Who am I that I should go to Pharoah and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”   And he goes on with a whole litany of excuses why he’s not the man for the job.  Though not mentioned, reason #1 is likely that Moses fears for his life.  He is given a seemingly impossible task, and he’s a wanted man, wanted for murder.  This would be like me showing up at the doorstep of the White House telling President Obama I’m talking all the Georgians and we’re leaving for the Caribbean—and I don’t even have a criminal record.  God, however, answers every excuse with the promise that God will be with Moses and will equip him for the task.  God sees in Moses, like he sees in us, something special.



When God calls someone—when he calls us, God doesn’t select us to crash and burn.  Rather, God gives us power to get the job done.  As I once heard, “God doesn’t call the qualified.  God qualifies the called.”  As with Moses, we may see ourselves at times as not suited for the job.  It was hard for me to imagine being a minister.  I wasn’t a Bible scholar or some deep thinker or super Christian.  I didn’t want to go on hospital visitations.  I didn’t want to drive a Buick, as I thought all minister did, and play golf with parishioners—I hate golf.  And Karla and I both kinda liked having weekends off.   But God doesn’t call the qualified.  God qualifies the called.  It took me a while to realize that.  I still have moments of insecurity, but I truly feel that God qualifies the called, and God has called me.



My friends, where is God calling you?  Where does your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet?  I love a recent news report of fourteen year-old McKay Hatch, from Southern California, who launched a counterattack on cussing when he organized a No Cussing Club in his middle school.  Yes he was taunted by his classmates when he did this, but he persevered.  He started with a website, and it wasn’t long before the movement exploded worldwide.  He was even interviewed on CNN and a couple of months ago landed a guest spot on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.  “It’s about talking to people with civility,” he said, “and making people feel good about themselves.”  That’s a calling.  That is where McKay’s deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.



As you think about your life, maybe you are a high schooler or the verge of heading off to college.  How do you feel led in terms of areas of study?  What makes your heart sing?  Is God calling you to pursue a career in medicine or business or maybe even ministry?  Not to put too much pressure on so early in life, but it’s important to seek discernment even now.



Callings, however, come not just early in life, but throughout life.  In these tough, crazy economic times, maybe God is calling some of you adults to change direction, to find new meaning and purpose in your life.  I believe that God often does some of God’s best work in people in such times of crisis.  Where is God calling you?  Maybe you need to quit work and spend more time with family?  Maybe you need more time to volunteer.  Maybe you need to start a new business, yes, even in these tough times.  Maybe you need to go to seminary.



And how to do you regard the work that God has given you?  With dread or with joy?  I love what it says in one of our Presbyterian confessions, the Confession of 1967.  One line stands out.  It reads:  “Life is a gift to be received with gratitude and a task to be pursued with courage.”  How true! Life is a gift to be received with gratitude and a task to be pursued with courage.  Moses truly embodied that, in spite of his lack of credentials and the incredible difficult task that stood before him.  He was no longer just a shepherd.  But now he was the very mouthpiece of God and rescuer of a nation of people



Why?  Very simply, because he was called by God, a God who so defied expectation.  This God was and is not like a typical king who deals with issues through subordinates or at some distance.  God does not look at people’s suffering from the outside as if through a window.  Rather, Moses’ God—our God—is one who, as the scripture states, observes the misery of people, who hears their cry, who knows their suffering, and who comes down to deliver them.   



God knows people’s pain from the inside.  When God’s people suffer, God suffers too.  Yet, while God suffers with people, God is not powerless in the face of it.  We know that God came down in a small Roman municipality called Bethelehem in bodily form in Jesus Christ, the greatest fact of history that changed the world.  And God continues to come down in us today through the gift of God’s Spirit through God’s people.  That’s you and me.



When God calls us, however God calls us, whether it regards a big decision or even a little decision, we can’t help but be in awe.  We can’t help but acknowledge God’s very presence, and it becomes a “goose-bump moment.”  When God is here, we are led to mark the occasion.  In Biblical days, when you were in the presence of the Lord, you took off your shoes, as Moses did, as a sign of respect and reverence.  So if you feel the presence of God in your life, or if you simply have a deep desire for God to move in your life, then let’s get a little crazy.  Let’s take off our shoes for the rest of this service, for the place where we are standing is holy ground.  God is here.  And not only here, but elsewhere too.  But God is here.  It’s time to get barefoot in the sanctuary.    Thanks be to God.  Amen.