12-step Eucharist, 17A, September 2, 2026 Burning Bush, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock
Frederick Buechner calls this story of the burning bush one of the greatest moments in Old Testament history. In fact, he believes it is the key moment. Moses is a stranger and exile in Midian on the east bank of the Gulf of Aqabah. He flees there from Egypt after murdering an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave. We often forget that several of the founders of our religion are murderers. It is interesting how the people we meet in scripture are failures and sinners whom God redeems for great work. Moses settles down and tends his father-in-law’s sheep in the wilderness near the slopes of Mt. Horeb. Then the moment happens. A bush bursts into flame. It blazes up. The heat ripples the air. Leaf and stem become fire, crackling and leaping, as if the air around it were also on fire. But though the bush burns, it does not burn up because it is a miraculous fire. It is a fire that Moses cannot explain any more than we can.
Then, out of the fiery moment, a voice flames up, and of all the conceivable things it might say, its first words are a name. “Moses,” it says. “Moses.” God says it twice, and at the sound of his own name, Moses is caught, just as we would be. We are so much our own names that at the sound of them we cannot help but stop and listen. The voice that calls us by name knows us by name and has something to say to us. So Moses, the stranger and exile, stands there with the muck of the sheep on his shoes, guilty as sin of a man’s murder, and listens and answers.
“Here am I,” he says, waiting for God only knows what will happen next; maybe a lightning bolt will strike and set him on fire like the bush. But what happens next is that the voice from the fire speaks and says, “Take off your shoes. The place where you are standing is holy ground.”1
Each of us knows about a burning bush. In many ways, it brought us here to this 12-Step Eucharist. It is that voice that calls us by name. It is that moment of clarity that calls us by name to stop and realize we are standing on holy ground because God is speaking to us. We may hear this voice as silence or a whisper, but if we keep living with our lives as the center of the universe, the voice grows louder and louder, until it may become a flaming bush. This has been my experience with the Hound of Heaven. This suggests that Moses may not have previously been a good listener!
We return to the rooms where we found recovery and to this place tonight to remember the warmth of that burning bush and to remember that we were not the first to see and hear God’s voice. And Moses, of course, was not the first either. This is the God of love who will do almost anything to care for us, to let us know how much we are loved, and to offer resurrection from the many things that harm us in this life, and offer an even closer walk with that love divine in the world to come.
1Frederick Buechner, “Hope,” in Secrets in the Dark, pp. 73-81.
