Sermons
September 28, 2025 (Proper 21)
“Please don’t ask me to do that.”
Exodus 2:23-3:15
We have skipped quite a lot between last week’s story—Jacob’s dream in which he sees angels ascending and descending a ladder from earth to heaven—and where we pick up today. Jacob, in the course of time after he has that dream, marries two wives—sisters Rachel and Leah—as well as two secondary wives, and has twelve sons and a daughter. The older sons become murderously jealous of the next-to-youngest, Joseph, and he ends up in Egypt. Through a series of twists and turns, Joseph ends up second in command to the king of Egypt, and saves many people from a long famine, including his own father and brothers and their families. His family end up settled in Egypt; and they do pretty well there, even after Joseph’s death.
But then, after many years, a new Pharaoh comes to power in Egypt, a king whom Exodus tells us “did not know Joseph.” He was afraid of the Israelites, who were at this point very numerous, so he implements policies to enslave them and eventually to destroy them altogether. One of those policies is the requirement that all male Israelite babies be cast into the Nile River—turning that source of life into an instrument of death.
Then a baby is born to an Israelite couple. They hid the baby as long as they could, but finally they could not hide them any longer, and they put him in the river as required…only they put him in a waterproof basket, presumably in the hope that he would eventually be rescued, which is what happened.
It was the daughter of the cruel and genocidal Pharaoh who found the baby in the basket, and she took him as her own, giving him an Egyptian name—Moses, meaning “my son”[1]—before turning him over to an Israelite wet-nurse, who just happened to be his own biological mother. The daughter of the Pharaoh who ordered all male Israelite babies killed paid the mother of one of those babies to care for her own child!
Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s household, but at some point he became aware of his Israelite identity, and tried to become their champion and defender against Egyptian cruelty. But his effort was clumsy, violent, and unsuccessful, and he was forced to flee the country. He ended up in the household of a certain Jethro, priest of Midian, married to Jethro’s daughter Zipporah, and tending Jethro’s flocks.
That’s where today’s story picks up.
The first few verses of the reading set the scene. Things have changed in Egypt since Moses left. The fearful, genocidal Pharaoh of old had died and a new Pharaoh—possibly Moses’ adoptive Egyptian mother’s brother—was sitting on the throne. And the Israelites began to cry out the misery of their slavery, and God heard their cries.
Had God not noticed their suffering before? Or was it that the Israelites’ groans indicated they were no longer passively accepting their enslavement, and that, coupled with the enthronement of a new Pharaoh, meant the time was ripe for change?
It’s really not all that surprising that God chose Moses for the task of leading the Israelites out of slavery. He occupied a very unique position—an Israelite who had never known the degradation of slavery, but identified with his people, and who had grown up in and was thus family with—and familiar to—the Egyptian power structure. He stood with one foot in each world—enslavement and power.
But Moses didn’t want the job.
I can’t exactly blame him. He had a comfortable life: a respectable job, a family, in-laws who had welcomed him as their own. And the task to which he was begin called was a dangerous one, with—to human eyes—stood only the slimmest chance of success. So Moses tries everything he can think of to talk God out of sending him.
“Who am I,” he asks, to do this thing?
God says, it doesn’t matter who you are, because I know who I am, and I’ll be with you.
Moses says, “Well, what do I tell Israel and Egypt when they ask who sent me? What is your name?”
God says, “You tell them, I am who I am.” It’s a loose translation of God’s actual name, but would the Israelites be satisfied with that?
That’s where our reading ends today, but the story goes on for quite awhile after that.
Moses says, “But what if they don’t believe me?” God gives him a series of signs he can perform to demonstrate the power of the One who sent him.
Moses tries one final excuse: “You know I don’t speak well. Put me in front of Pharaoh and his court, and I’m guaranteed to stutter and stumble over my words and make an absolute fool of myself. I can’t speak to them.”
God says, “I’ll send your brother Aaron with you; he speaks just fine, and you can tell him what to say.”
At that point Moses gets desperate: “O God, please just send somebody else.” Please don’t ask me to do this.
And that, as Bill Engvall would say, is when the fight started. Well, not really; because when God’s face grew as red as the bush that was burning there on Mount Sinai, Moses knew better than to say any more.[2]
I totally identify with Moses’ attempt to talk God out of sending him back to Egypt—so much so that this was the scripture I chose for my ordination service. Chances are I’m not the only one who understands pretty well what Moses felt like when he stood barefoot in front of that burning bush speaking to him with God’s voice.[3] Perhaps some others here have similarly thought God had made a mistake when we discovered we were being called to a ministry we felt utterly unqualified, if not unable, to take on.
One thing I find interesting in the text is what it says about God.
Having chosen Moses for this task, God didn’t simply say, “You’re going and that’s final.” That’s ultimately where the conversation ended up, but not without some negotiation. God promises to go with Moses, giving him the tools to demonstrate that he was backed up by the power of God. God tells Moses his Name, so Israel might know who was with him. When Moses objects that he doesn’t have the gift of public speaking, God offers to send Aaron, who does, with him. And again, when Moses’ fear and desperation get the better of him, God again promises to go with him as he undertakes this seemingly impossible mission.
That’s good news for us when we feel like we’re being called to do something difficult or impossible—whether that be parenting, or teaching, or public speaking, or caring for the sick, or the hard work of leading an organization into the future.
But I think this text tells us something even more important about God—something that we find throughout the Bible, actually.
Back in Genesis, as Abraham and Sarah grew impatient waiting for the child God had promised to give them, Sarah sent her Egyptian servant Hagar to sleep with Abraham and act as a surrogate mother for her. Maybe she didn’t trust God; or maybe she thought, as many do, that “God helps those who help themselves,” and thus she needed to do something to access God’s promise. Either way, once the baby was on the way, and especially after he arrived, Sarah became jealous and mistreated Hagar. Eventually, after Sarah’s own child Isaac was born, Sarah ordered Abraham to send Hagar and her son into the desert.
God sees what has happened to Hagar, and though she is a foreigner, God acts to save her and her son. Hagar gives God a name: El-Roi, the God who sees. And since God heard her cries from the suffering Sarah inflicted on her, Hagar named her son Ishmael, which means “God hears.”
God sees and hears the cries of people who are suffering or oppressed. We know that from lots of places in the Bible. For instance, in Exodus 22, there is a commandment that says if you take a poor person’s cloak as collateral for a loan, you have to return it at sundown—even if the loan hasn’t been repaid—because if that poor person has nothing else to wrap up in against the cold night, and he shivers, God will notice.
But this text, in which God calls Moses, we learn that God doesn’t just notice when people are being mistreated.
God says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.” And then he takes it a step further: “Indeed, I know their sufferings.”
God has done more than just see what the Israelites are going through. God has compassion for them. If you look up the meaning of the Latin words which are combined into the word compassion, you’ll see that it means suffering with someone whose way is hard. God has taken the Israelites’ sufferings into himself; he feels what they feel.
God enters into human oppression, feels the suffering of the oppressed as if it were his own, and seeks to deliver people from that suffering. That is very good news…at least it’s good news for people who are oppressed.
It might not, however, be good news for their oppressors.
[1] In Hebrew his name is Mosheh, which is a play in another word, mashah, meaning “drawn up.” But the name Moses is Egyptian, common as part of names found in inscriptions there. The rabbis have said that because Pharaoh’s daughter called the baby “my son,” God gave her a name, too: Batyah, meaning “daughter of God.”
[2] There are a number of interesting details in this story that get lost in translation from Hebrew to English. First, the mountain on which this scene takes place is alternatively called Horeb, which means “wasteland,” and “Sinai,” which is a play on the Hebrew word sanah, which means “to burn,” as the bush Moses encountered did, and as the pillar representing God’s presence did as it led the freed Israelites back to this mountain. Second, in Hebrew the same word, af, means both “face” and “anger”; Hebrew is a very embodied language, which means that emotions are often referred to in terms of the effect they have on one’s body—such as the way many of us, when we are angry, become red in the face.
[3] The rabbis wondered what God’s voice sounded like coming out of the bush. Had it been the voice of a friend, it might not have carried much authority. Had it sounded like a king, Moses’ fear might have prevented him from hearing. So, they concluded, God spoke in the voice of Moses’ father—authoritative but loving.