Does anyone else think this story is deeply weird?
Familiarity and expectations can be deadly to our ability to see things as they are. I literally cannot remember a time in my life when I didn’t know the story of Moses and the burning bush. If the word “flannelgraph” means something to you, please raise your hand. For the rest of you, to borrow a line, when I was a kid in Sunday school, videos were called flannelgraphs. The flannelgraph was a flannel-covered board on a stand—ours were a medium green—and the teacher had all these paper cutouts of people and animals and other things, clip-art style, which had the backs treated with something so they could be stuck to the flannel and taken off again. I don’t know how old I was, but I can remember the little drawing of the burning bush on the flannelgraph as the teacher told us the story. Which is a good thing, on the whole—but it does create a challenge: can I see the burning bush as more than just a paper cutout?
This is a place where the wisdom of the late Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner resonates:
When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.
There truly is no telling; and there is no telling what you might see if you really look; and if either happens, there is no telling at all what you might do. But for any of that to happen, we need to be jolted out of our expectation of familiarity—from “Oh, yeah, the burning bush” to “Wait, what?” God could show up as a person, or send an angel, and he does both at various times. Here, he shows up as a fire that’s in a bush, or around a bush, but just sort of co-existing with the bush, and waits for Moses to wander by with the sheep. This is like God doing Rube Goldberg, choosing this roundabout way to strike up a conversation; we need to let it rock us back on our heels a bit and make us ask, “Why?” Thing is, if we do that, I think the question points us to the answer: after forty years of meandering through the wilderness with a rabble of dirty, smelly, hapless, stupid sheep, Moses needed his eyes jolted open. This isn’t Rube Goldberg at all, this is God anticipating Flannery O’Connor: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”