Here All Along
Texts: Exodus 3:1-15 | Matthew 16:21-28
Moses isn't on pilgrimage. He isn't fasting, or praying, or performing any recognized act of piety. He is doing his father-in-law's work in the wilderness — just a man and some sheep on an ordinary day.
And then: a bush burning that is not consumed.
What's easy to miss is that the text doesn't say the fire appeared. It says Moses noticed it. He turned aside to look. The bush may have been burning for some time. The question is whether he was present enough to see what was already there.
The ground was already holy. What changes is not the bush, not the mountain, not the wilderness. What changes is Moses's capacity to see it.
Remove your sandals, God says. You are standing on holy ground.
Then comes one of the most extraordinary moments in all of Scripture. God gives Moses the most impossible commission imaginable — go to Pharaoh, lead my people out of Egypt — and Moses asks, quite reasonably: what sign will you give me that you actually sent me?
God says: This shall be the sign for you — when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.
The sign comes after the fact. Moses will know that it was God who sent him when he and the freed people return to this mountain. Not before. After.
This is not the sign Moses was looking for. It is a promise about what Moses will understand only in retrospect, once the work is done. Go. Do what I'm asking. And then you'll know.
This is the structure not of certainty, but of trust. And it is the structure of the entire life of faith.
God does not leave Moses without resource. The divine name — I AM WHO I AM, or equally, I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE — is a studied refusal to be pinned down. You cannot put God in a box, however pious the box. And yet the same nameless God identifies God’s self through memory and relationship: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. The God of a people's story, faithful before and faithful now. What Moses receives is not certainty but presence: I will be with you.
That is the ground he walks on.
Now return with Peter to last week's Gospel lesson. Peter has just confessed Jesus as Messiah, been blessed, been named Rock, been given the keys. A milestone has been reached.
Then immediately Jesus explains what Messiah actually means. Suffering. Rejection. Death. Resurrection.
Peter rebukes him. God forbid it, Lord. This must never happen to you.
And Jesus says: Get behind me, Satan.
The Rock becomes the stumbling stone. What Jesus identifies as the demonic temptation is not some supernatural evil — it is the utterly human temptation to accomplish God's work on human terms. Success. Triumph. Power. The insistence that things go the way we think they should go. The false self that wants certainty, wants control, wants to manage how God shows up. It is the self that builds the box.
Get behind me is not a rejection. It is a re-invitation. The posture of the disciple is to follow behind. Jesus is going to the cross. Get behind me and come.
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Jesus is not talking about asceticism or martyrdom. He is talking about releasing the false self's agenda — the self that insists on certainty, that would rather have a domesticated God than a living one. The life that is lost is the ego-self. The life that is found is who we actually are in God.
And this is a living knowledge. It cannot be known in advance. The disciples will not understand the cross until after it happens — just as Moses will not know the sign until after he has led the people to that mountain and turned to worship.
The meaning of discipleship is learned in the midst of life as it is lived. Not before. Not in theory. In the doing.
Moses was doing ordinary work. The ground was already holy — he just couldn't see it yet. He turned aside, removed his sandals, and entered an encounter that changed everything. He didn't know where it was going. He had only the promise of presence.
I will be with you.
And he went.
Not a religion of certainty, but a relationship of presence. Not a God we can contain, but the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob — the God who shows up in the ordinary wilderness, in the midst of someone else's flock, in the middle of this particular day.
The ground you are standing on is already holy.
What changes is whether we are present enough to see it. And then — whether we are willing to go.