Moses and the Bush That Was Not Consumed

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Full script

A shepherd is standing in the desert with his shoes in his hand, and he has no idea why.

A few minutes ago he was walking behind some sheep, thinking about nothing at all. Now there is a bush, and the bush is on fire, and the fire is not doing what fire does. And somebody has just said his name. Twice.

He has been quiet for a very long time. He is about to be asked to say a great deal.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the book of Exodus, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it straight, as it is written. The sheep, the weather, the long walk and a few of the shepherd's small thoughts are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me begin with a man who has had a very strange life.

His name is Moses. If you have heard of him, you may be picturing a very old man with a long white beard and a very large staff, standing in front of a sea. That man comes later. The Moses of tonight is not that man. The Moses of tonight is eighty years old, which is old enough, but he does not feel like a great figure of history. He feels like a man who has had a long career that did not go well, and who has made peace with it.

Here is the career, quickly, because you may know some of it already.

He was born in Egypt, to a family of Hebrews. The Hebrews were not free in Egypt. They had come there generations before, in the days of Joseph, when there had been a famine and a welcome. But the welcome had worn out, and a new king had decided that the Hebrews were too many and too useful to be allowed to leave, and so he had made them work. They made bricks. They built storehouses. And, because that was not enough, he had given an order that the baby boys of the Hebrews were to be thrown into the river.

So Moses' mother hid him for three months. And when she could not hide him any longer, she made a little basket, and sealed it with tar so that it would float, and she put the baby in it, and she set it among the reeds at the edge of the river. And his sister stood a little way off to see what would happen.

What happened was that the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe, and found the basket, and opened it, and the baby cried. And she had pity on him. The sister, who was very quick, came out from the reeds and asked whether the princess would like her to find a nurse from among the Hebrew women. And the princess said yes. And the nurse she found was, of course, the baby's own mother.

I always think the whole story of Moses is in that little scene. Someone very small, in great danger, carried along on water, to exactly the right place, by people who thought they were only doing the next thing in front of them.

He grew up in the palace. He was brought up as an Egyptian prince, with the best tutors and a very good set of sandals. And then, one day, when he was a grown man, he went out among his own people and saw an Egyptian overseer beating a Hebrew slave. He lost his temper. He struck the overseer, and the overseer died. And Moses thought no one had seen.

Someone had seen. By the next day it was known all over the quarter, and Pharaoh heard of it, and Moses ran. He ran east, into the desert, as far as the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well.

I will not tell you the whole of what happened at the well, tonight. It is a good story, and it has seven sisters in it, and a few rude shepherds who got a talking-to. It ends with Moses being taken in by the girls' father, who was a priest of Midian, and who is called Jethro in the book. Moses married one of the daughters, whose name was Zipporah. They had a son. And Moses, who had been a prince, became a shepherd, and looked after Jethro's flock.

That is where we find him. Forty years have gone by. Pharaoh, the one who wanted him dead, has died. The Hebrews are still in Egypt, still making bricks, and still crying out. And Moses is on a hillside in the desert, a long way from anyone, looking after a few hundred sheep.

Now, I should say something about sheep.

If you have not spent much time around them, you may think that looking after sheep is a gentle, pastoral sort of job, with a lot of sitting under a tree and a bit of music. It is not. It is a job that mostly consists of counting, and of walking a long way to find the one that has wandered off, and of being a little bit afraid of the weather. It is a job in which very little happens for very long periods, and in which the only people you talk to are the sheep, and the sheep do not talk back.

And I think that is important to remember, because it means that when Moses leads the flock to the far side of the wilderness, and comes to a mountain, he is not looking for anything. He is not on a quest. He has not been fasting. He has not climbed up there for a vision. He is just a man, with a staff and a flock, and a long afternoon, looking for the next patch of grass.

The book calls the mountain Horeb, the mountain of God. It is called that, I think, from the point of view of the person writing it down, who knew what was about to happen there. Moses doesn't know. As far as he is concerned, it is a stony hill with some grazing.

The old sources do not tell us what the weather was like. I would like to believe that it was a very ordinary day. A bit warm. A bit dusty. A flat, white sky.

And then, off to the side, something catches his eye.

It is a bush.

Now, let us be clear. Bushes in that part of the world are not tall, and they are not lovely. They are scrubby, thorny, low things, and they are very, very dry. And desert bushes catch fire. It happens. Lightning, or a spark, or the sun on a bit of glass, and a bush goes up, and in a minute or two there is nothing left but a black ring on the ground. A shepherd would not look twice.

But Moses looks twice. Because the bush is on fire, and it keeps on being on fire. It is burning, and burning, and the leaves are still green, and the branches are still whole, and the fire does not eat it.

He watches for a bit. He is a man who has had a lot of quiet years in which to watch things, and he is good at it. The fire is real. He can feel it, from where he stands. But the bush is not shrinking. And so he says, to himself, in the words of the book, "I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned."

I like that. He does not say, "I will go and put it out." He does not say, "This is a sign, and I am afraid." He says, "I will turn aside and see." He is curious. A man who is curious, forty years into a very quiet life, is a man whose heart is not yet closed up.

And so he leaves the path. And he leaves the sheep, I suppose, for a minute, which I hope they bore with. And he begins to walk toward the bush.

And as he walks, the voice speaks.

The book says that it is God who sees that Moses has turned aside to look, and that it is God who calls to him out of the middle of the bush. And what he says is the thing that every one of us, I think, would love to be asked, and would be a little frightened to hear. He says Moses' name. And he says it twice.

"Moses, Moses."

And Moses says, "Here I am."

That is a very good answer. Remember it. It is the answer that Abraham gave, when God called him, in a story we have told on this show, and it is the answer that the boy Samuel gave, in the night. It is the answer that all the people in the Bible give when they are called by God and have not yet been told what for. It does not say, "Yes, I will do it." It does not say, "I am not ready." It says, "I am here. Whatever this is, I am here."

And then the voice says something that is not what Moses expects. It says, "Do not come any closer. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground."

So he does. Now, you may think this is a small thing. But think about what it is like, in the desert, to take off your shoes. The ground is stony. It is hot. There are thorns. It is not a thing that a sensible shepherd does. And Moses does it, because he has been told to, and because he understands, without being told how, that he is on ground that has been set apart.

He is standing barefoot on the side of a mountain, in front of a fire that does not burn. And the voice says, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."

And Moses hides his face. The book tells us this. He is afraid to look at God.

It is, I think, the right instinct. Not because God is a thing to be frightened of, but because he is very large, and we are very small, and there is a great kindness in knowing which is which. The saints have always said that you are most at home with God when you are least sure of yourself.

And then, out of the bush, God begins to talk. And what he says is not a thunderous, frightening speech. It is, if you listen to it, one of the gentlest speeches in the whole of Scripture.

He says, "I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings."

I have seen. I have heard. I know.

Think about that. For forty years, Moses has been in the desert, thinking of the people he left behind. He has been quietly wondering, I think, whether anyone is looking after them. Whether anyone has noticed. Whether God has noticed.

And here is the answer. Yes. He has seen. He has heard. He knows. He has not been looking the other way.

"And I have come down," says the voice, "to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey."

The Lord has come down. I want you to notice that, because it is the shape of the whole story, from now on. God does not send a letter. He does not send a general. He comes down himself, onto a stony hill, into a bush, to a shepherd, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. And the church has always said that this is a small picture, a first sketch, of a coming-down that would be far greater.

And then the voice says the thing that Moses was perhaps not hoping for. It says, "Come. I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt."

I would like to stop for a moment, here, and let you imagine what Moses must have been thinking.

He is eighty years old. He is a shepherd. He left Egypt as a fugitive, wanted for a killing, forty years ago. The king who wanted him dead is dead, but there is another king now, and no reason to think that he is any friendlier. Moses has a wife, and a son, and a very comfortable arrangement with his father-in-law. He has a quiet job. He has a flock of sheep that do what he says, most of the time.

And God has just asked him to walk into the most powerful palace in the world, and tell its king to let a whole people of slaves go.

You might say that Moses is allowed a moment.

And what he says is, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?"

It is not a rude question. It is an honest one. Who am I? I am nobody. I am a man who used to be someone, and isn't. I could not even manage one overseer, forty years ago, without making a mess of it.

And God does not say, "You are very important, Moses." He does not say, "You have more in you than you think." That is what we would say. That is what a kind friend would say.

God says, "I will be with you."

That is the whole answer. Not, here is why you are qualified. Here is why you are not alone. "I will be with you. And this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain."

Which is a very interesting sort of sign, if you think about it, because it is a sign that you only get to see after you have done the thing. You cannot check it in advance. You have to go, and you have to trust, and then, at the end, you will be standing back here, in front of the same mountain, and you will know.

Moses thinks about that. And then he asks another question. And this is, I think, the best question in the whole chapter.

He says, "If I come to the children of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"

It is a perfectly practical thing to ask. You cannot go to a crowd of people and say, "A voice told me." They will want to know whose voice. And in the world that Moses knew, every god had a name, and the name was a kind of handle. If you knew the name, you knew whom you were dealing with.

And so he asks for it. And the answer that he is given has been thought about, ever since, for something like three thousand years, and I am not going to be able to explain it, and I would not try.

God says, "I am who I am."

And he says, "Thus you shall say to the people of Israel: 'I am has sent me to you.'"

Let me say that again, slowly. I am. I am who I am. I am has sent me to you.

It is not a name like the names of the gods of Egypt, which belonged to a sky, or a river, or a crocodile. It is not a name that tells you what he is like. It is a name that says that he is. That he simply is, and has always been, and does not depend on anyone else for his being. Everything else in the world is something that might have been otherwise. He is the one who could not have been.

The Fathers of the Church loved this. Gregory of Nyssa, who was a bishop in what is now Turkey about sixteen hundred years ago, and who wrote a whole book about the life of Moses, said that the bush teaches us something about God that we can only half hold. The fire is a light that does not consume. And the voice that comes out of it is not a thing that can be seen from the outside, but a presence you are called to turn aside toward, and to stand barefoot in front of.

And then, because this is a story for Moses, and not a lecture, God goes on. He says, "Say this to the people of Israel: 'The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.' This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations."

My name forever. Not a name that he would use for a season. A name for them to say, for as long as there were people to say it.

And then God lays out the plan.

It is, if you read it carefully, a plan with a great deal of patience in it. He tells Moses to go and gather the elders of Israel, and to tell them that the Lord has visited them, and has seen what is done to them in Egypt. And he says that the elders will listen to Moses' voice. Then Moses, and the elders, are to go to the king of Egypt and ask for a very small thing: to be allowed to go three days' journey into the wilderness, to sacrifice to the Lord their God.

Three days. That is not the plan for freedom. That is the plan for a request. It is a very modest one, and I think that is on purpose.

And then, in the same breath, God says something that is honest, and a little hard to hear. "I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go."

Notice the honesty. God does not pretend that it will be easy. He tells Moses, at the beginning, that the first answer will be no. And I think that this is a very kind thing to do, because if you are sent to do something difficult, there is nothing worse than being told it will be simple, and finding out otherwise.

He says one more thing before he is done. He says that when the people go, they will not go empty-handed. The women will ask their Egyptian neighbours for silver and gold and clothing, and the neighbours will give. It is a small, strange, rather lovely detail: that after all those years of making bricks, the people will walk out of the country not as thieves, and not as beggars, but carrying the wages that had been owed to them.

Well. You would think that would be the end of it. God has called him, God has given him a name, God has given him a plan, and God has promised to be with him. And so you would think that Moses would say, "Right. Well. I had better pack."

But Moses, being Moses, and being a man, has some more questions.

The next chapter begins with a worry. He says, "But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, 'The Lord did not appear to you.'"

Which is reasonable. If you go into a crowd and say that you have met God in a burning bush, you can expect some doubt. Most of us would. We have all, I think, had the experience of being sure of something, and not being able to prove it.

And God, who is very patient, does not tell him off. He asks a question. He says, "What is that in your hand?"

And Moses looks down. And in his hand, as it has been for forty years, is his shepherd's staff. And he says, "A staff."

And God says, "Throw it on the ground."

And Moses does, and the staff becomes a snake. And Moses, who is not a fool, runs away from it.

I love that. I love that Moses runs. The prophet, the great leader, the man who will one day lift his hand and the sea will part, sees a snake, and he does what any of us would. He goes the other way as fast as he can.

And God says, "Put out your hand and catch it by the tail."

Now, I would like you to think about this. The way you are told to pick up a snake, if you must, is by the neck. Everyone knows that. The tail is the wrong end. It is the end that lets the snake turn around and bite you. And God is asking Moses to take it by the tail, which is to say, to take hold of the frightening thing by the very part that will make him feel the most unsafe.

And Moses does. He puts out his hand and he takes it. And in his hand, it is a staff again.

"This," says God, "is so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you."

That is the first sign. And there is a second. God says, "Put your hand inside your cloak." And Moses does, and when he takes it out, it is white as snow, with the skin disease that the old books call leprosy. And God says, "Put it back." And he puts it back, and takes it out, and it is as it was before.

And there is a third, which is a sign of the river. If they will not believe the first two, God says, take some water from the Nile, and pour it out on dry ground, and it will become blood.

Three signs. A staff, a hand, and a river. And all of them, you will notice, are things that Moses already has. A staff that he has carried for forty years. A hand that is his own. And water, which is a thing that Egypt could not live without. God does not give Moses a new thing to be great with. He takes the ordinary equipment of a shepherd's life, and says, this will do.

You would think that would settle it. But there is one more thing that Moses has to say, and I think it is the thing that has been on his mind for the whole of the conversation.

He says, "Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue."

And now we have it. That is the real worry. Not whether the signs will work. Not whether Pharaoh will listen. It is that Moses is afraid that he will open his mouth, in front of all those people, and not be able to get the words out.

We do not know exactly what he means. The book does not tell us whether he stammered, or whether he had simply spent forty years talking mostly to sheep and had got out of practice. But it is a thing that a great many of us know. The fear of standing up in front of people, and having the words stick.

And here is the answer, which I think is one of the loveliest things God ever says in the Bible. He says, "Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak."

Go, and I will be with your mouth.

It is not, "I will make you a great speaker." It is not, "Go and practise in front of a mirror." It is, "I made your mouth, and I will be there when you open it." The one who made the tongue is the one who is going to stand beside it.

And then Moses says the thing that he has been trying not to say all along.

He says, "Oh, my Lord, please send someone else."

I find this one very moving. Because it is so honest. After all the signs, and after all the promises, after God has told him what to say, and what to do, and that he will be there, what is left is a very small and very human voice, saying, "Please. Not me. Anyone but me."

And the book tells us, very plainly, that the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses.

Do not be alarmed at that. It is a hard moment, and the book does not soften it. But notice what God does next. He does not take it back. He does not withdraw the call. He does not say, "Fine, then, I will find someone else." He says, "Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you he will be glad in his heart."

Aaron. Moses' older brother, whom he has not seen in forty years, and who is, at this very moment, on his way. God has already sent him. He is already out there on the road, walking toward a meeting that neither of them knows about yet, and he will be glad in his heart.

I think this is one of the most tender details in all of Exodus. God does not only call Moses. He has already gone ahead of him, and arranged for him not to be alone.

"You shall speak to him," says the Lord, "and put the words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you both what you are to do. He shall speak for you to the people, and you shall be as God to him."

And then, almost as an afterthought, the Lord says, "And take in your hand this staff, with which you shall do the signs."

The staff. The very same one. The one that has been in his hand for forty years, and that he had been counting the sheep with. That is what he is told to take.

Now, the book is very brief about what happens next. And I would like to be careful, here, not to say more than it says.

Moses goes back. He goes back, in the plainest way, to his father-in-law. He says to Jethro, "Please let me go back to my brothers in Egypt and see whether they are still alive."

He does not say, "God spoke to me from a burning bush." Or maybe he does, and the book does not tell us. What it tells us is the thing that he asks for. Leave to go. A very ordinary, very respectful request, from a man who knows that he is leaving a family, and a home, and a flock that somebody else will have to look after.

And Jethro says, "Go in peace."

That is all. Go in peace. It is, I think, a quiet and generous thing to say. He does not argue. He does not ask for a reason. He lets his son-in-law go, with a blessing.

And Moses, who has been a shepherd for forty years, takes his wife and his sons, and sets them on a donkey, and takes the staff of God in his hand, and sets his face toward Egypt.

There is a great deal more to the story, and tonight is not the night. There is a plague, and then another one, and a Passover, and a sea. There is a mountain, and a law, and forty more years in the wilderness. There are some very long and difficult conversations with Pharaoh. And all of it begins here, on the side of a stony hill, with a man who turned aside to look at a bush.

Let me say something about why this story has been loved.

It has been loved, I think, because of what it says about the kind of God who calls people. It is not a god who picks the strongest, or the cleverest, or the best-spoken. The Moses of this story is a man with a past, and a fear, and a very good list of reasons why someone else should do it. And God does not argue with the reasons. He answers them, one at a time. I will be with you. Here is a sign. Here is a brother.

The Lord himself refers to this story, in the Gospel of Luke. When he is arguing with some people who did not believe that the dead are raised, he points them to the passage about the bush, where Moses calls the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And he says that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive. So even the oldest names in the story were, for him, the names of people who were still being listened to.

And in the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Stephen tells the whole story again, just before he dies. He reminds his hearers that Moses was in the desert, and that an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire in a bush, and that Moses was amazed at the sight, and that he drew near to look, and that the Lord spoke. Stephen does it, I think, because he wants his listeners to remember that the holy ground was a stony slope in a place nobody respected. Holiness is not where you would expect it. It is wherever God is.

And in the hymns of both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, the burning bush is loved for another reason. It is sung about as a picture of Our Lady, who carried the fire of God within her and was not consumed. It is a picture, not a doctrine to be argued about tonight, and I do not think you need to understand it all to find it beautiful. A fire that does not burn what it touches. A light that fills the thing it is in and leaves it whole.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything in tonight's story about the bush, the voice, the sandals, the name, the signs, the staff, the snake, the hand, the water, Moses' fears, his request that God send someone else, Aaron, and Jethro's "Go in peace" comes from the book of Exodus, chapters three and four. The words of the Lord and of Moses are told in plain paraphrase, and not word for word.

What we invented is the sheep, the weather, the long afternoon, the walk across the hillside, and a few of Moses' small thoughts on the way. We also told some of his earlier life very quickly, from chapters one and two of Exodus, and we have said so in each place.

A few details are worth being careful about. First, the book of Exodus speaks, in these chapters, both of the angel of the Lord and of the Lord himself in the bush. Teachers in the Church have read this in several ways, and we have not tried to settle it. Second, the name that God gives, "I am who I am", can be translated in more than one way in the Hebrew, and the old Greek translation read it as "I am the one who is". Both are ancient, and both point at the same wonder, and we have left it there. Third, the book does not tell us what Moses' hand looked like when it was white, beyond the word that the old Bibles translate as leprosy, and we have not guessed. Fourth, the chapter does not tell us what was said between Moses and Jethro beyond the request and the answer, and we have not tried to fill it in.

And a last note about the end of chapter four, which we left out. It goes on to a strange and difficult scene at an inn on the road to Egypt, involving Zipporah and her son. Scholars and teachers have read it in many different ways. It is in the Bible, and we have not pretended otherwise. We have simply left it for another night.

That's the story of Moses and the bush that was not consumed for tonight. If you would like to remember the prophet Moses in your prayers, the Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the fourth of September, and the Roman Martyrology names him on the same day. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you be curious enough, on an ordinary afternoon, to turn aside and look. May you hear your own name, said by someone who knows it. May you be given the courage to take off your shoes, and the honesty to say that you are afraid. May the thing you are asked to do be done with what is already in your hand. May there be a brother on the road, already walking toward you, glad in his heart. And may the one who is, and who was, and who will be, say to you what he said to Moses: I will be with you.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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