John Corrado's hymn "Voice Still and Small" is beautiful. Not so surprising that John's still, small voice would sing; he's a musician, jazz pianist and composer. But the still, small voice inside my head doesn't have a good internal clock and often wakes me up when I'm trying hard to sleep. It's got another agenda than to calm my fears and quench my tears. And it is most definitely NOT singing! The voice inside my head is insistent, if nothing else. Its quality is less still and small than just plain loud.
I feel like Moses! Now, that may surprise you that I stand here claiming to be like Moses. Few of us have sat around thinking, "Now, just which biblical individual am I most like?" Maybe one of the many harlots or false prophets. But I'm not thinking of myself as Moses the great man who led his people out of slavery in the land of Egypt, not the man who grew up a prince, who parted the waters of the Red Sea and received the tablets of the commandments directly from Yahweh himself! That's not where I'm finding myself in Moses.
I'm thinking about the young man Moses who speaks with God - maybe not the voice still and small, maybe not in Moses' head - I don't know. Moses was just simply keeping his father-in-law's flock, making sure none of the sheep got too far away, that mothers and babes were in protected parts of the flock and nobody acted up. Making sure none escaped so that Jethro would yell at him for being a no good son-in-law and his daughter could have done better marrying just about anybody else. The part of the life of Moses that I find myself in happens on one of those days when he is caring for his father-in-law's flock. Mind my own business, keep the flock together, and what can happen?
Well, nothing except that you get out beyond the wilderness just a little bit by a mountain and, lo and behold, there's an angel in a flame of fire rising out of a bush. This little bush, of no particular kind, is blazing away but isn't burning up. Wow! And here is God talking to Moses, telling him the people are suffering and, "Moses I want you to go get the people out of this suffering, out of slavery in Egypt." And Moses answers God.
Now, this is the part that surprised me most when I read it for biblical studies professor Jane Schaberg some fifteen years ago: Moses responded: "Who am I that I should go to the Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" When I first read these words from Moses I placed in my mind the Moses of his whole life, the Moses who had done all these incredible things. But, when I read more closely, I saw that Moses was a man who had run away from home so he wouldn't get in trouble with the law in Egypt. Moses in this part of his biography is not THE MAN.
Being Moses when the Burning Bush called out is a LITTLE like what I think it might have been like to get a call from Bill Clinton a couple of months ago saying, "Hey there, I'm just calling to say I want you to go to Yugoslavia to rescue the Kosovars being persecuted there." Sure, Bill. "Who am I that I should go to Europe, and bring the Albanians out of Kosovo? So here is Moses: "Who am I to go to the leader of the greatest nation in the world-the Pharoah in Egypt-- to tell him to let most of his slaves go?" To this most powerful leader to discharge most of the work force making his administration and his building programs actually go. Right. Moses realizes he doesn't even know whom he's going to tell Pharoah sent him. "You see, Pharaoh, I was out under the hot sun all day with my father-in-law's sheep, and there was this bush that was on fire, and it wasn't burning up into ashes, and then it was talking to me and it said for me to come to you and demand you let your slaves go free. So, well, here I am." Right.
And to the Hebrew people he's to say that God has sent him to take them out of the misery of Egypt into the land of Canaan. A land flowing with milk and honey, yes, but everybody knows it's also a land already flowing with Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And he's to say to them that they're to go with him to the king of mighty Egypt and say, "The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. What us? You're the guy who talked to the bush on fire! You claim God appeared to you -- and said the Pharaoh is to let us go. But not only that Moses says go to your Egyptian neighbors and ask for their gold and silver and take it with you when you leave. People will willingly turn out their pockets and empty them of the gold and silver! Right.
Makes me think of the first Bill Cosby album I listened to in the 1960s, the one where he's Noah and God tells him to build an ark, so many cubits by so many cubits, and put mating pairs of all the animals in it. And it isn't raining and Noah doesn't even live on a lake. Right.
Moses doesn't reject this voice coming out of the fire of this burning botanical wonder. He continues to go along with it. It's not that he doesn't believe this is God. He seems to take that in stride. So if this is God, and God knows what God is doing, why not believe it and get on the road to Egypt. But not Moses. -- "But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, 'The Lord did not appear to you.'"
So God shows him many signs like a stick that turns into a serpent and back into a staff and God tells him he will have the power to make water flow out of dry land. He believes the voice (not so still and small, ---THE voice!) But still Moses hesitates: "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....O my Lord, please send someone else." I was flabbergasted to find this Moses in the Bible. Did somebody add these passages after I left Lutheran Sunday school? Where did the great and mighty leader of the Israelites disappear to? As we all know from any one of a million chances to see Charlton Heston on screen, God finally gets Moses and the rest is history. He runs out of excuses and trudges his way to the Pharaoh and the people to make his claims and follow through on what the voice of God has insisted --very patiently may I say-through a great deal of whining, complaining and "let somebody else do this"--is his to do.
But as I said the voice that comes to me often comes at night; it has never come to me in a burning bush or a lighted match. And I've learned well how to just tell it to shut up and let me sleep. I don't want to wake up right now!! Wait until I've brushed my teeth, gotten my first cup of coffee, listened to "Morning Edition" and watched a little Oprah. Not now!! Not when I've got my own agenda. My own claims on my time and my choices. And not that I haven't regretted that I shut out this voice.
Such a voice came one night almost twenty years ago with a poem about my grandmother, something about her engagement ring that had been given to me as her goddaughter when I graduated from high school the year after she died. But I convinced myself I would remember when I crawled out of bed in the morning. Wrong of course.
I've had sermon ideas and passages come in similar fashion. You'll never hear them. I put the pillow over my head.
The following came through my email a few weeks ago. It's called "Paradox of Our Times". A colleague minister Beth Ide got it from a friend and passed it along to everyone that subscribes to one of the UUA lists. It reads this way:
We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints; we spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy it less.We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, but less time; we have more degrees, but less common sense; more knowledge, but less judgment; more experts, but more problems; more medicine, but less wellness.
We spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry too quickly, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too seldom, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom....
We talk too much, love too seldom and lie too often...
We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We've conquered outer space, but not inner space; we've done larger things, but not better things; we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul; we've split the atom, but not our prejudice; we write more, but learn less; plan more, but accomplish less.
We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication; we've become long on quantity, but short on quality....
Now there is truth in this cry from out there somewhere. Truth I feel in here. But something about the little piece bothered me. I put it in the file for this sermon knowing it had something to do with it but not quite what. When I set about working on the sermon and read it again, after reading the Fulghum piece, I got an understanding of what it is about the piece that bothers me. It sets out almost arbitrary contrasts of bad and good ways of how people live. It makes gross generalizations of American life (or perhaps more inclusively of much of the over-developed world of northern Europe, some of North America and portions of Southeast Asia.)
What does this piece, and my complaint with it, have to with that voice still and small in me that won't leave me alone!!
The meaning of life that Dr. Papaderos shared with Robert Fulghum makes that reading, with all its truth, transform into whining, like Moses whining to God. It doesn't change things. It doesn't make a difference. I doubt I'm alone in shutting up the voice that calls me. Most of us have resisted what the voice inside us yearns us to hear. Yearns us to respond to. When I can stand next to the great Moses and know that early in the book of Exodus he went through the same thing, it's okay if you haven't had that experience. And yet you probably have.
It just is such a part of life to be called to do something we don't really want to do. There ARE voices in our heads that don't need to be medicated out with anti-psychotic drugs. There ARE voices in all our heads that need listening to.
And certainly, as John Corrado sings in his hymn, the voice still and small that may come to us is one that is with us in the worst and most awful of times. But I know for myself that the voice still and small - and insistent - is also there to make me move! It may not come from God outside the world. It comes from whatever is holy within this world. I can see it in the reflections that move across my face. I'm coming to see that "I am not the light or the source of the light." I receive reflection and a reflector.
I am, we are, a fragment of an incredible whole where when the reflection crosses my face, or my mind, I learn; and when I reflect what I have learned, I change things that need to be changed. These are the meaning of life.
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