“God Uses Imperfect People”
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
February 28, 2010
Exodus 3: 1-12
We all want to be useful for something and needed by someone. Part of our humanity includes a desire to be helpful in the world. Most of us also care about figuring out and doing the will of the God we have come here this morning to worship. Fortunately, God is interested in using the energy and talents of all of us too. Even when we don’t feel perfect.
Our second lesson for today is the story of Moses talking with God at the burning bush in Exodus 3. God asks Moses to do important work of returning to Egypt, a place which Moses had fled, in order to help free God’s people. Moses resists, arguing that he is not qualified to be helpful to God. Yet being qualified has never been a prerequisite for being useful to God. Reading now from God’s holy word. (Exodus 3: 1-12)
This Lent, we are engaging in a sermon series on “Good News for Imperfect People.” We began on Ash Wednesday with Psalm 51, a confessional of King David, a famous and powerful man whose infidelities brought pain and anguish. Two days after Ash Wednesday, the world heard a confessional press conference by Tiger Woods, a famous and powerful man whose infidelities brought pain and aguish. Previously, Woods seemed to have had a perfect life. Anyone who has watched Tiger Woods play golf knows that he is a perfectionist. The confessions of his press conference were a stark reminder of the great imperfection of humanity.
We have only to look at our own lives or read the newspapers to realize that we are not the people that we have the potential to be. We are mortal. We sin. We are imperfect.
Woody Allen once said, “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about God is that he’s an underachiever. “
It is often said in religious circles that humanity is the “crown of God’s creation.” If flawed humans are the crown, are we proof that God has underachieved?
The good news for you and for me is that God seems particularly drawn to choosing and using imperfect people. Over and over again in the Bible, unexpected, and often unexpecting, people are chosen by God to be helpful to humanity.
The Apostle Paul was the most hated persecutor of Christians and was chosen to become the greatest Christian missionary of all. As a boy, King David defeated the giant Goliath and went on to become the King of Israel. Mary was an unmarried teenager when she gave birth to God’s son. Jesus himself didn’t come as the messiah warrior the Israelites were looking for, but as a vulnerable baby.
Most of the disciples who went on to establish the church were ordinary folks - fisherman. And not particularly savvy ones at that. They never seem to catch any fish. Our first lesson for today is one of many in the Gospels where Jesus’ disciples seem not to understand what is going on around them. Mark’s Gospel, in particular, portrays the disciples often as “perplexed” or not understanding what Jesus is talking about. So if you ever worry that you aren’t organized enough, healthy enough, or far enough along in your career to be useful to God, read the Bible and be reassured.
And then there is Moses. Moses killed someone and tried to run away from his imperfection. Yet God chose Moses to do something important for other people.
I love the conversation between God and Moses in our second lesson. God showed deep concern about the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt and said he was going to do something about it. God “observed the misery of God’s people,” “heard their cry,” “knew their sufferings,” “had come down to deliver them,” and was going to “bring them up out of that land.” You get the feeling God is about to send the cavalry. Just when you think God is going to go save God’s people Godself, God explains that God wants Moses to do the saving. Moses is in a sort of witness protection program in Midian, and now God wants him returning to Egypt, the one place he was trying to avoid. So Moses pushes back. He starts bargaining with God. He makes excuses about why he isn’t good enough to do the work God asked him to do.
It’s often easier for us to make excuses for why we don’t make hard choices for God. Why we don’t give more of our time or treasure towards making the world more just. For why we don’t give up our vices or seek help to combat a temptation. For why we avoid saying we are sorry for something we have done. For why we don’t help those people living in emotional, physical or economic captivity today. We want to be useful, but it can be easier to bargain with God than to provide the help.
When we read further in Exodus 3 and 4, we discover that for Moses, the excuses had to do with competence, not ideology. Yet God had an answer to each one of his excuses. Moses said he wasn’t good enough to help save his people. God said, “I will be with you.” Moses said he wasn’t eloquent enough to persuade Pharaoh. God responded that God has the power over speech to help him and would involve Moses’ brother Aaron in helping. Moses stated that no one would take him seriously, and God gave him the ability to show signs.
God essentially coached Moses on how to be successful. Having the right coach can make all the difference. In watching the Olympics this week, I saw how Dutch speed skater Sven Kramer had the men’s 10,000 meter skating competition won, he was way in front, when his coach signaled him to go into the wrong lane before he crossed the finish line and Kramer was disqualified. His coach cost Kramer a gold metal. God is a guide who cares about imperfect people. Let God be your coach and see what happens.
Now why does God keep choosing and using imperfect people? It would be more efficient for God to simply use the perfect people. Well, as Rick Warren once said, “If God only used perfect people, nothing would get done.” There are no perfect people.
It would have been more efficient for God to have just gone ahead and freed God’s people. Yet God chose to work through Moses. Exodus 3 reveals something important about God. God not only wants changes in the rest of the world, but God wants changes in us.
There is a story of a man who said, “I wanted to ask God, ‘Why do you let there be so much poverty and hurt in the world?’ but I was afraid God would ask me the same question.” When we pray for God to do something about the problems of the world, we must be prepared for God to respond that we are part of the answer.
We are the ones who have a responsibility to find the broken places in this city and beyond and help them. In our Lenten service day on March 20, we have an opportunity to do that.
A friend recently shared a book by Richard Stearns, who left being a corporate CEO to become President of a Christian mission organization called World Vision. Stearns writes that in 1948, a man named Bob Pierce was finishing a long tour of Asia, preaching at evangelistic meetings for a group called Youth for Christ. A few days before he was scheduled to return to America, he preached a message to some children at a school in China about following God in Christ. One little girl, named White Jade, went home from the meeting and told her family she was becoming a Christian. Her parents reacted negatively and she was cast out of her house. The next morning, the director of the local mission, found White Jade, hungry, bloodied, crying at the front gate of their mission. The girl told the director her story, she was brought in and the director told the preacher, Bob Pierce, “she did what you told her to do; now she has lost everything. What are you going to do about it?” Bob Pierce had a dilemma. He was leaving for the U.S. the very next day. He had but $5 on him, which he gave apologetically to the girl, and he left.
“What are you going to do about it?” That question haunted Bob Pierce. He wasn’t a rich man and he wasn’t perfect, but he returned to America, told the story to anyone who would listen and began raising money to help the girl and others like her. From that experience, World Vision, a major non profit that has helped millions, was born.
When we saw the pictures of the devastation in Haiti last month, or of Chile this morning, were and are we convicted to ask ourselves, “What are you going to do about it? I hope so. That question was life changing for Bob Pierce. In the moment of his being asked that question in the presence of the little girl, Pierce had an encounter with God. And God used Pierce to change the world, much as God challenged Moses by asking him to do something about the conditions of his people.
That question, “What are you going to do about it?” is worth asking. While we can’t do everything, we can do some things. For just as God told Moses, “I will be with you,” Jesus says to all those who would be his disciples, “I will be with you always until the end of the age.” Encouraging, guiding, perhaps even coaching, us along the way. Helping us to see the familiar in a new way.
Moses found God in a place he went all the time. When Moses fled Egypt, he settled in a place called Midian, married and took up the agrarian work of his father in law. It’s likely the Moses had brought his sheep to Mt. Horeb many a time. He probably looked at the bush that would burn many times and saw nothing special. But one day he saw something different and heard the voice of the Lord telling him that he was standing on holy ground. God got Moses to look at his surroundings in a new way. And in time, God got Moses to see the land of Egypt in a new way.
Bob Pierce had gone on many mission trips, but a young girl he met caused him to see his life’s work in a new way. In our moment for mission this morning, Kate has called us to see this place differently. We worship in this sanctuary each week and can view the Columbarium as just a section of this sanctuary. Or it can be a holy place, a spiritual place, for us. A type of chapel for us here.
March 20 can be just another Saturday, or it can help us make service a spiritual discipline.
If we believe that God created the world and cares about all that is in it, than where we live, work and serve is holy ground. We just have to view it that way. When we do, maybe Lent can become an opportunity for us to examine the problems of the world and the parts of ourselves that we don’t like and ask, “What are we going to do about it?”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
