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1. ON TURNING ASIDE

One of the characteristics that allows someone in the midst of an ordinary, everyday existence to encounter God is their ability to turn aside from what they are doing and to notice the daisy or the rainbow or the burning bush in the midst of the mundane. I often wonder, however, what might have happened if Moses had not turned aside at the burning bush. What if, at the crucial moment a sheep had fallen dangerously and needed rescuing so that he didn’t notice that the bush was burning, or what if he did notice but it was a meal time and he thought he might investigate at a more convenient moment, or what if he decided it wasn’t that spectacular after all and not worth turning aside to see? Of course we cannot know, because it didn’t happen. No more than we can know what might have happened if we had turned aside, on those countless moments when the sunbeam broke through, when the daisy mirrored heaven, when someone was ready to talk, and we didn’t notice. Our lives are peppered with myriad potential ‘what ifs’. What if we had done this, not that? What if we hadn’t done that?

Living a faithful ordinary life is not about torturing ourselves with the endless ‘what ifs’, so much as it is about focusing ourselves on the ‘what might bes’. If Moses had missed the moment and not turned aside, he might well have missed his encounter with God at the burning bush, but there would have been other encounters, other times when God broke through and spoke. Reflecting on what we might have missed could so easily become an exercise in regret, in living out our lives in wistful longing for what could have been if only … instead, the calling to faithful, ordinary living is about reflecting on what we might have missed, so that we don’t miss it again; so that the next time the occasion arises we are primed and ready to go.

Part of this is simply training ourselves to be the kind of people who do turn aside. People who are not so fixed on the path we tread that our curiosity cannot be piqued so that we turn off and meet something new. People whose horizons stretch beyond the grind of life’s rat-run, who simply look up from time to time, and see the bush burning, or the sunbeam breaking through. People who when they see these things recognize them for the potential they offer and who turn aside in the hope of an encounter with God. Turning aside is the most ordinary of actions but can have the most extraordinary of consequences, as Moses discovered.

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1. On curiosity and taking time

Exodus 3.1−3 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.’

For further reading: Exodus 3.1−6

It all started when he turned aside. Moses, it appeared, had been contentedly looking after his father-in-law’s sheep since he fled Egypt years before. His extraordinary existence in the Pharaoh’s palace had been replaced with an ordinary existence, shaped by little more remarkable than finding the next grazing patch for his father-in-law’s sheep. But when he turned aside, his life turned upside down. Of course, we can’t help wondering whether he arrived by accident at Mount Horeb, the mountain of God, or whether he had set his path towards Mount Horeb in the hope that he might encounter God. As with so many of the biblical stories, we are left with as many questions as answers, but whatever he intended when he brought his flock close to Mount Horeb, it was Moses’ willingness to turn aside when he saw the bush burning which transformed his life.

The Hebrew word, translated ‘turn aside’, even more than its English translation has the sense of stepping off a pre-determined path and it is this that seems so important in this story. It was Moses’ willingness to change his plan and to step off the path that he was following for this whole event to happen. In this instance, Moses’ predetermined path was finding the next patch of grass for his father-in-law’s sheep. In our high-octane, high-performance culture this may seem a benign, gently pastoral way of life. In reality it was the opposite. Grazing sheep in what is effectively desert territory is a desperate task, with no guarantees of success. Add to this the wild animals who would stalk the flock ready to pluck off a sheep should the shepherd’s attention be caught for a moment and Moses’ life begins to feel much more pressured and urgent. For him turning aside could have meant the loss of one or more of his father-in-law’s sheep.

In comparison our inability to turn aside may feel a little feeble, though nonetheless real. We spend such a lot of our lives trying to keep ‘on track’ whatever we mean by this. So often my own life involves running constantly from one thing to the to next with my eye so fixed on the next task (for which I’m often late) that I wonder whether I would notice if the equivalent of a burning bush lit up in my life. And if I did notice, would I allow myself the time to turn aside and investigate, or would I, instead mark it down on my to-do list as something to come back and explore more deeply when I’ve got a minute?

Turning aside seems to require at least two key characteristics: curiosity and the willingness to take time to explore. Curiosity is not often held up as a spiritual virtue. As a child, I was encouraged to mind my own business and instructed not to fiddle. Now I am a parent myself I understand this instruction all too well, but a child’s curiosity seems to me to be a vital part of a healthy spirituality. Good answers are, of course, very important for Christian faith but at least as important, if not more so, is the ability to ask good questions. The problem is that many of us, as adults, are simply not curious enough. We’ve learnt the childhood lesson well and mind our own business – or is that busyness? As a result we no longer explore with either our fingers or our minds.

Moses’ inner conversation with himself (which is again more vivid in Hebrew than can be expressed in English and is something along the lines of ‘Let me turn aside and …’) suggests a lively curiosity that led him to want to know more. He was intrigued and followed his instinct to see more.

This, of course, is closely connected to the second characteristic needed for turning aside: the willingness to take time to explore. Busyness can so often prevent us from doing something only on the off chance that it might produce something. Before we begin, we want to be assured of results, to be confident that the time we take out will produce fruit and be worth the time we spend on it. The problem is that God isn’t like that. God doesn’t sign on the dotted line to give guaranteed satisfaction at a pre-selected and pre-determined time before engaging with the world. Instead God gives a hint here, a suggestion there or a glimmer on the horizon. Busy people are all too likely to miss God’s presence because we do not have the leisure to follow up the hints, suggestions and glimmers on the off chance that occasionally, like Moses, we might encounter the living God.

Sometimes it all begins when we turn aside – the question is whether we have the curiosity and are prepared to take the time out to do so.

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2. And then living with the consequences

Exodus 3.7−11 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, 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 …

For further reading: Exodus 3.7—4.13

Any encounter with God should come with a health warning. Encounters with God are accompanied with life-changing consequences. Moses certainly seemed to regret the consequences of his encounter with God – if not the encounter itself – almost immediately. This is because, as is so often the case with encounters with God, God did not reveal himself to Moses simply so that Moses could enjoy the encounter, or so that he could feel better about his spiritual journey, but so that Moses could do what God asked him to.

One of the features that interests me about modern discussions about spirituality and mysticism is that sometimes – often even – what we might call religious experiences are perceived as being for their own sake: to help us along in our spiritual journey or to teach us more about God. It is hard, however, to think of any encounter with God in the Old or New Testaments that is not accompanied with the command to do something: Elijah’s encounter with ‘the still small voice’ on Mount Horeb sent him to anoint new kings; Isaiah’s great vision in the temple in Isaiah 6 comes with the command to proclaim God’s word to a people who would not listen; Ezekiel’s vision of God’s chariot in Ezekiel 1 set the scene for Ezekiel being sent as prophet to the people in Exile. For many people today the purpose of encountering God is their own spiritual journey; for the biblical writers the purpose of encountering God is mission, by which I mean being sent out to do God’s will in the world. People who have a lively spiritual life should expect to have a correspondingly lively life of mission in the world; you can’t have one without the other. Moses discovered this to his cost. What began as turning aside out of curiosity, ended as being sent on the most challenging mission conceivable: to free God’s people from slavery.

It is easy to believe that great biblical heroes are somehow more prepared for God’s call than we are; that where we stumble, hesitate and procrastinate, they leap in with guts and enthusiasm. In all honesty we can only believe this if we don’t read the texts too carefully. The biblical heroes are easily as reluctant as we are to be involved with God’s mission in the world and none more so than Moses. The opening of verse 11, ‘But Moses said …’, opens up a section in which Moses objects to God’s call. He begins by asking who he is to be called to this: ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ Exodus 3.11; moving swiftly on to who he should say God is: ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ 3.13. From there Moses looks at worst case scenarios: ‘But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me’ 4.1; and his own inabilities: ‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue’ 4.10. Finally he gets to his real point: ‘O my Lord, please send someone else’ 4.13.

The point is that although to us Moses is a great leader, to him he was simply an ordinary person about his ordinary life who was suddenly called to something so extraordinary that he found it hard to comprehend it. What we notice in Moses’ grand argument with God about why he really shouldn’t have chosen him for the task, is God’s infinite patience and reassurance. Over and over again, God assures Moses that he will be with him to provide all the extraordinary features that are needed. God makes clear in the face of Moses’ objections that he doesn’t need to be well known or a brilliant theologian able to describe in detail who God is. He doesn’t need to be an optimist believing that it will all go well, or a good communicator. He doesn’t even need, it appears, to be all that willing. All God expects is that Moses goes to do what God requests. God still calls us as we are to provide the ordinary to his extraordinary and is still, I imagine, as frustrated by our attempts to point to all the people who would be better at it than we would be. God still calls us in all our ordinariness, all we have to do is go … when we do we discover that God’s promise to Moses remains and that, wherever we go, he is with us.

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3. You cannot be serious!

Jonah 1.1−3 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

For further reading: Jonah 1.4−17 and chapters 3—4

One of the glories of deciding to choose to look at the ‘ordinary’ people of the Bible is the almost unlimited choice that this presents. The Bible is stuffed with stories of ordinary people, doing ordinary things until God breaks in to call them into extraordinariness. So why choose Jonah? Surely he was a prophet already, so not strictly ‘ordinary’? I would argue that while his job may not have been ordinary he himself, as a person, was gloriously ordinary, with ordinary responses, reactions and grumbles.

Jonah turned aside but not in the way that Moses did. Jonah’s turning aside took an entirely new direction (literally!). Jonah has to be one of the most comic books of the Bible, a comedy that begins even in its first three verses. This is even more vivid in the Hebrew than in English, where the word of the Lord came to Jonah and said, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh.’ So Jonah arose … and went to Tarshish. No one is quite clear where Tarshish is but the one thing that scholars are agreed upon is that it is in the opposite direction to Nineveh. Jonah half obeyed God in that he arose and went, the only problem is that he didn’t quite go where he was meant to go! Jonah certainly turned aside but this time he turned aside to run in the opposite direction.

It seems as though Jonah is all too aware of the consequences of encountering God, and thought that he would cut these short by eluding God’s notice. Again the Hebrew seems to stress this by saying that Jonah went to Tarshish ‘away from the face of the Lord’. The implication seems to be that God is looking from Jonah to Nineveh, therefore if Jonah scarpered to Tarshish God might be so busy looking at Nineveh he wouldn’t notice that Jonah had gone. Jonah was playing hide and seek with God but one of the many points of this story is that God is not such a local God that you can escape his gaze. Wherever we go, God is there (as the Psalmist who observed in Psalm 139: ‘If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there’). In other words there is no getting away from God.

The story of Jonah is the antidote to any fear that we might have somehow missed the moment – the one moment − when God wanted to speak to us, to which I referred to at the start of this chapter. There is, in fact, no need to ask the question of what might have happened if I had turned aside at this moment, or had the time to encounter God properly on that occasion. While it is entirely possible that we can and do miss glimmers of God’s presence in our world, the people who lose out when we miss these glimmers are ourselves. The story of Jonah is a story that reminds us that God doesn’t give up all that easily.

This is a truth that runs as a strand through the many stories of people’s calling to ordination that I have heard during twelve years of teaching in theological colleges. Over and over again, I have heard people describing that un-scratchable itch, or that unavoidable sense of calling that eventually and inexorably brings them to the point of ordination. Of course vocations are not just to ordination but to all aspects of our lives: to marriage or singleness; to having or not having children; to the work we do; to the places we live; to the communities we serve; to the churches in which we worship and the various and varying ministries to which we are called.

Whatever our vocation, the one marker of genuineness is that the sense of calling will simply not go away. So if you really want to test a vocation, whatever it is to, then fight it. Fight it with all that you have. Be like Jonah and run as far in the opposite direction as fast as you can – and you can be sure that if your calling is true, God will find you there and draw you back.

Jonah is probably the most reluctant of all reluctant servants of God. He makes Moses’ response to God at the burning bush look positively enthusiastic. One of the reasons I love him so much as a character is that he is in my mind a cross between John McEnroe (he who used to throw his tennis racket to the ground while shouting ‘you cannot be serious!’) and Eeyore, from the Winnie the Pooh stories, who is depressive and never expects anything good anyway. Jonah reminds us powerfully that for some crazy reason, despite the fact that we are often a hindrance rather than a help, God wants to include us in his mission and message of love.