Creation as a Central Character

 

This week we are exploring and experimenting with the lessons Creation is teaching and telling us.  We are examining how Creation is not a supporting character in Scripture, but key and central today in our lives.  Creation is God’s first testament before any words were written down.  Creation was God’s original way to proclaim God’s presence long before the Bible was ever written or told.  Yesterday, we stood beneath the starry sky with Abraham, naming and claiming our prayerful hopes and dreams and desires.

Today, we stand with Moses before a burning bush.  I love this story for so many reasons.  First, I love campfires with the smell of smoke and s’more and the sacredness of warmth.  Second, I love that God decides the way to get Moses’ attention to be a fire that never needs another log to keep burning.  Third, I love that once God has Moses’ attention, God upends Moses’ life by telling him to go back to where he came from.  “Go back to Egypt” ~ you know that place you fled and left skid marks in the sand because Moses had killed an Egyptian guard.  And Moses said, “Come again, God?!?”  Surely God doesn’t call us back to where we have been, does God?  Surely God knows we are all about progress and moving forward, not trying to retrieve the past.  God seems to know what William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead.  It’s not even the past.”  You carry with you experiences and encounters and events that have shaped you…or sometimes misshaped you.  I don’t know if we can ever “get over” the past, especially when it is painful.  Perhaps we find a way to make some peace, find some meaning, or (most of the time) package that hurt away in a cardboard box shoved to the corner of our soul.  Moses couldn’t run away from what was.  Creation witnesses to what was.  Think of the rings of the trees telling the story of good times of abundance and bad times of drought.  Think of plants growing sideways toward light.  There are rarely straight lines and consistent colors in Creation.  Creation continually adapts to and adopts what is.

Finally, I love how when Moses asks for God’s name, God says, “I AM.”  Present tense.  God is right now.  God is right here.  You don’t need to go out there on some great or grand adventure to part unknown.  As a matter of fact, trying to find God in our ordinary life is one of the invitations to the Spiritual life.  I pray today you might discover a burning bush ~ something of God ~ as you go about your day.  I pray you might sense God’s claiming your whole life ~ the past, present, and future.  God’s love to you.