Sabbath Day Thoughts — “Who Me?” Exodus 3:1-12
God knew the suffering of God’s people. A new leader rose to power. He stirred memories of former greatness and fanned the flames of national pride. He promised a better future and denounced the evil of other nations. He saw enemies everywhere. They practiced other faiths, loved differently, came from other lands, or held differing political convictions. His special police roamed the streets in brown shirts and jack boots. His dogs of war pushed past borders, greedy for new lands. His enemies began to disappear: vanished in the middle of the night, taken from workplaces, snatched off the street. The trains rolled on and the camps filled up, smoke rising against sullen skies. Some fled to avoid catastrophe, leaving everything behind to keep their lives.
God knew the suffering of God’s people. The color of your skin determined the quality of your life. They knew the back of the bus, the wrong side of the tracks, and the third-rate school. They endured the endless cycle of share cropper debt, and the daily humiliations of the maid, the cook, the laundress, the mammy. They had no political representation. They couldn’t vote. Men in white hoods burned crosses on their lawns. Men in speeding cars tossed Molotov cocktails through living room windows. If they forgot where they belonged, they faced jail time, a beating, a lynching.
God knew the suffering of God’s people. Long ago, they fled famine to seek sanctuary and grain from brother Joseph in Egypt. But a new Pharaoh ruled who didn’t know Joseph. A new Pharoah arose who feared God’s people. He saw them as sub-human foreigners, beasts of burden to be exploited and controlled. He oppressed them with forced work. He punished theme with harsh taskmasters. He murdered their boy babies. They ate the bread of suffering and drank the tears of bitter grief.
They escaped over the Alps, braving the heights and the weather in search of sanctuary. They scurried one by one, two by two, sometimes in small families through the streets of the village of Le Chambon. They were desperate and frightened, fleeing certain death for an uncertain future. One cold and snowy evening, Magda Trocmé opened her door to a woman in a thin coat with terribly worn, wet shoes. Magda invited her guest in and put the woman’s shoes in the oven to dry. Later, the smell of smoke alerted them that the worn, wet shoes were ruined. She fed the woman, gave her a bed for the night, and then quietly appealed to neighbors for shoes. Her husband André secured false documents on the black market to safeguard their guest’s travel. In the morning, they sent her south to safety in new shoes.
She worked as a seamstress for affluent white neighbors. One day, she left work, shopped at the local discount drugstore, and boarded a bus for home. She took a seat in the middle of the bus next to a Black man and across from two Black women. She was 42-years-old and the bursitis in her shoulders was acting up. As the bus continued along its regular route, the white-only seats filled up. At the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, several white passengers boarded, but there weren’t enough seats. The driver demanded that Black passengers in the middle rows move. Everyone near Rosa Parks did, but she didn’t. When the police came, she was arrested and charged with breaking state law. Later, she was tried and convicted. She was fined $10, with a further $4 in court fees, equivalent to about $171 today.
God knew the suffering of God’s people, but Moses wasn’t so sure that he wanted to get involved. Long ago, he left Egypt and the Hebrew people far behind. In fact, he fled the Nile delta as a wanted man, having killed an Egyptian taskmaster for abusing an Israelite slave. Moses was born an Israelite and raised as a foundling in Pharaoh’s house, but he felt he didn’t belong anywhere. Now in midlife, he had a good life in a new land. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses could think of every reason to not get involved. He didn’t have a dog in that fight anymore, he wasn’t eloquent, and Pharaoh would never listen to him anyway. But God assured Moses that those excuses didn’t matter because God would be with him. Moses returned to his father-in-law’s camp, packed up his wife Zipporah and the kids, and returned to Egypt.
Rev. Andre Trocmé, his wife Magda, and the residents of the Alpine parish of Le Chambon, France, helped more than 5,000 German refugees during the second World War. They did so despite the Nazi occupation of their nation. They did so despite incredible peril to their own safety and freedom. Perhaps most extraordinary about their actions was their belief that they were utterly ordinary people, practicing the simplest acts of Christian hospitality. Late in life, when Magda was asked why she had hosted that first refugee, she responded, “It was dinner time.” She opened the door, and before she knew it, the community was caught up in God’s great purpose for their lives.
Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience on that Montgomery bus sparked much broader social action by Blacks and progressive whites in her community. It launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Soon after Rosa’s trial, 15,000 Montgomery residents attended a planning meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke and Ralph Abernethy shared the demands of their civil disobedience. It took 381 days, but segregation on Montgomery’s public transportation system eventually ended. Many years later in her autobiography, Rosa Parks wrote that she had refused to yield her seat that day not so much out of a sense of holy purpose as it was from the awareness that she was just plain “tired of giving in.” She played a pivotal role in bending the arc of the moral universe toward God’s justice.
Upon his return to Egypt, Moses went to Pharaoh with God’s demands. Just as Moses had anticipated, Pharaoh did not listen. Ten times, God sent Moses to Pharoah with the bold demand for freedom. Ten times, God sent plagues to soften the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart. The Nile turned to blood. Frogs, gnats, and flies swarmed. Pestilence and boils erupted. Hail fell. Locusts destroyed the harvest. Darkness fell across the land. Finally, the firstborn of all Egypt died. When Pharaoh yielded to God’s demand, Moses led the people out of Egypt and on to the holy mountain, where the bush had burned but was not consumed. God blessed Moses and the people with the Law and the promise of a land that would flow with milk and honey. In saying yes to God’s call, Moses served a holy purpose that ended the people’s suffering.
God knows the suffering of God’s people. They dig through the rubble of a city destroyed by earthquake. They thirst for clean water in sub-Saharan Africa. They wait in squalid detention centers to be deported to a land where they once fled death squads. They languish in the corridors of skilled nursing facilities where family never visits. Their civil and voting rights are yet again at risk. They stand in grocery store aisles and wonder how to put enough food on the table to feed their families. God knows the suffering of God’s people.
God calls us to join God’s great work of help and healing, justice and liberation. Some days, all we can do is think of all the reasons that we really cannot commit. We’re too busy. We work too many hours. We have too few financial resources. We are too old or too young. We have a few too many personal problems. We don’t know what the neighbors might think.
This morning, the stories of Le Chambon, Rosa Parks, and Moses remind us that when God calls us, all we need is a heart that will offer hospitality. All we need is a spirit that is sick and tired of giving in. All we need is to trust that God will be with us despite our shortcomings. God knows the suffering of God’s people. So do we. When God calls through the burning bush or the importune neighbor or the overcrowded confines of a city bus or the everyday encounters of our own lives, may we say, “Here I am. Use me.”
Resources
Roger Nam. “Commentary on Exodus 3:1-15” in Preaching This Week, August 30, 2020. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22/commentary-on-exodus-31-15
Kimberly Russaw. “Commentary on Exodus 3:1-15” in Preaching This Week, September 3, 2023. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22/commentary-on-exodus-31-15-6
Cameron BR Howard. “Commentary on Exodus 3:1-15” in Preaching This Week, August 30, 2026. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22/commentary-on-exodus-31-15-7
Philip Hallie. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. Harper Perennial, 1994.
Rosa Parks, Jim Haskins. My Story. Puffin Books, 1999.
Exodus 3:1-12
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 Mount Horeb,[a] the mountain of God. 2 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. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 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.
7 Then the Lord said, “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, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 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 serve God on this mountain.”
Joann White 