TURNING GOD-WARD
Dear Parish Family:
The burning bush turned Moses God-ward. Moses must have been a religious man while he lived at the royal court of Egypt’s pharaoh, but the Egyptian gods were not the God of Moses’ people, the Hebrews. When Moses was forced to save his life by fleeing from Egypt, he was cut off from his own people and their religion. He found himself among the wandering peoples of the desert, who worshipped many gods and had different religious practices. Moses even married the daughter of a local pagan priest.
But the burning bush turned Moses God-ward. By appearing to Moses in this way, God revealed to Moses, His plan to rescue the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. But God was not going to do this without Moses’ help. Moses would come to know how closely linked his life, and that of the Hebrew people, would be through forty years of testing in the desert. But first Moses needed to turn to the God beyond human knowing, the God of mystery in the burning bush.
Lent brings us face to face with this God, the God of our ancestors in the faith, the God who always wants to reveal more of Himself to us. When all our earthly needs are filled, we often and easily forget our need for God. Perhaps we take God for granted; we let our lives grow cool or indifferent toward God.
But wonder of wonders, it is often some burning bush—some unexpected illness or loss of security or a difficult situation—that turns us God-ward again. Our burning bush is often an experience of pain or sorrow, of failure, or frustration, in which we come to know our need for God. Right there, in that burning bush of our need, God meets us face to face.
Yes, God speaks to us in and through our needs, not through abundance and strength that make us forgetful of God. Sometimes God must reach us through our needs—through material poverty and spiritual hunger, a failed relationship, through unemployment, illness, and even the death of a loved one.
That is how God reached out to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. God reached out to them in their suffering, when their human resources were at an end—not when things couldn’t be better. Those Hebrew slaves came to know their need for God. If other, stronger wants have distracted us and led us away from God, often it is only when we have a real need that only God can accomplish, that we turn back toward God. God often comes to us when our crosses seem too heavy to carry. God never abandons us in our pain or suffering, although we often abandon God in our own indulgent pursuits.
Lent offers us an opportunity to learn or to relearn what Moses learned before the burning bush: trust in the Lord sustains us in our needs; trust in the Lord draws down divine help to meet our human needs; trust in the Lord provides the deliverance that we all need, most of all: deliverance from sin, this Lent and always.
Aloha ke Akua,
Fr. Scott Bush
