Taking Time to Wait on God

Exodus 24:12-18

Click Here For Sermon Audio

So, God says to Moses, “Come up the mountain to me and hang out there and I’ll give you the stone tablets with the Law and the commandment that I’ve written down for my people to live by.”  But Moses, being the type of person who would rather hang out on his couch surfing the web playing games on his phone decided he didn’t want to walk all the way up that mountain and wait for God to be God.  Seriously, nobody likes to wait.  He decides it would be easier pull out his trusty iPhone 8 and ask Siri.  He says, “Siri”.  Siri answers, “I’m listening.”  Moses thought to himself if only prayer were this easy and then he asks, “Can you give me the tablets of stone, with the Law and the commandment, which God wrote for our instruction.”  Siri says, “I found this on the web.”  Answers in hand, Moses foregoes taking time to wait on God to get around to being God and give him the stone tablets and starts swiping his way through the sites that Siri gave him and sharing a few with his friends and twenty minutes later he’s back to his games and never had to leave the couch. 

Well, I don’t think it went done like that but in this culture of immediacy in which we live, move, and have our being there are more than a few people who call that relationship with their phone being spiritual but not religious.  This thing where I can find get on the web and find my answers and believe what I want to believe but not have to commit to being part of anything. 

On the web you can find answers – sure, many answers; information, yes, lot’s of information.  It’s a tremendous resource.  I could hardly do my job anymore without all that reference material so readily available.  But we can’t find God on the net.  To find God we actually have to take the time to be with God, to wait on God and unfortunately God takes his time.  If we’re looking for answers to questions like “God are you real?”  “God, can I trust you?”  “What are you up to with me?”  “Why are you letting these terrible things happen?”  “Why don’t you answer my prayers?”  For those kinds of answers we just have to go to the source and take the time to be face to face with God not expecting instant results.  God takes time.  Faith takes time growing in Christ takes time.

That’s something we see here in the Exodus passage with Moses there on the mountain.  He went up to be with God.  God was there (albeit in a cloud of fog on a mountain where there shouldn’t be any fog) and, of course, God took his time to start getting to the point.  Moses simply had to wait.  Six whole days he sat in the fog and waited before God got around to delivering the goods.  What Moses did up there those six days?  Who knows?  There is no book on the shelves of the pop-spirituality section at Chapters entitled, Mountain Morsels: The Spiritual Exercises of Moses; and on the back cover is the promise; practice these spiritual disciplines for six days and like Moses on day seven God will come to you with a life changing revelation that’ll take you forty days to get.    

It took six days for God to get started and yes, that time span of six days is pregnant with imagery.  We’re supposed to think about Genesis 1, the great hymn of creation about how God took six days to build creation as his temple, as his place to come and dwell; and how he filled it with life and crowned it with humans whom he made to be his own image in the temple of creation.  These humans would be both the priests who praise God and caretakers who steward God’s creation. 

It took forty days altogether for God to teach Moses this new way of living and yes, that is another time span pregnant with imagery.  We are supposed to think of the forty days that Noah was on the ark riding out the flood that God used to cleanse his creation of humanity’s wickedness.  By these two references we are supposed to clue in that this new way of life that God was giving to his people would be as momentous as creation itself, as the flood itself.  This new way of life would help to cleanse God’s people and restore his image in the creation and bring humans back to doing what God created us to do: worship him and care for his creation.  For this new act of re-creative restoration to happen Moses just had to go and take the time needed to wait on God to be God. 

Well, maybe “wait” isn’t the word to use here.  Waiting is the inconvenient thing we do at the doctor’s office and grocery store checkouts.  God doesn’t call us to purposeless inconvenience.  The Hebrew literally says, “God told Moses, ‘Come up the mountain to me and be there’.”  God invited Moses to come into his presence and just be with him. 

It’s like that thing that teenagers do; going to your friend’s house to hang out.  It doesn’t matter what you do.  What matters is that you’re together.  You’re a part of a friendship and just being in that friendship shapes who you are.  So it is with time spent with God.  The simple effect on us of just being away from everything else for the sole purpose of simply being in God’s presence shapes and reshapes who we are.  What God and Moses did those first six days on the mountain, like I said, we don’t know.  They could have been eating pizza and playing video games for all we know.  Yet, somehow in that span of time they spent together, just being together shaped Moses to be who he was, the most influential leader of ancient Israel. 

I have to point out that this time spent with God had a scary side to it.  The mountains of the Sinai Peninsula are sheer granite walls with steep drop-offs.  Just climbing them, finding a way up and down is dangerous.  I’ve been up that mountain.  Jebel Musa they call it today.  It’s over 9,000ft at the summit.  The last 1,800ft are nearly straight up.  When Moses went up the mountain the glory of the Lord settled on it as a cloud.  The Sinai Peninsula is very dry.  Clouds do not come around very often, especially not one that’s going to linger for more than a month.  Have you ever been on the top of a steep mountain when a cloud comes over?  Clouds can be so thick that you cannot see more than a foot in front of you.  It’s dangerous.  Then there’s how it looked to people below.  They looked up and saw a fire consuming the mountain.  We’ve seen a lot of news footage the last few years of wildfires consuming everything in their path.  That’s what they saw…but there was no vegetation to burn, just a consuming fire.  That should make you scratch your head. 

Coming into the presence of the Lord is like being in a dense fog where we’ve only got our self and our own fears to deal with and it’s to dangerous to try to run from them because we might fall of the edge.  When other people see the Lord at work on us, to them the change happening in us is as obvious as a fire consuming a mountain.

There are times in our lives when God calls us up the mountain into the fog, into the consuming fire to be face to face with him so that he might change us, heal us, make someone new of us.  I wish I could recommend some spiritual disciple for this.  You know, pray this way, meditate on these scriptures, journal, maybe try fasting – the things we’re supposed to do the 40 days of Lent.  But, not everybody is wired for spiritual disciplines.  If there is anything I’ve learned the 35 years about relating to God, it is that we can’t be conjure up God by doing this or doing that.  But, there are times God does indeed call us to come up the mountain to him.  If God has called you to a point where you are in a fog about your life, about him, about faith, then he is calling you to come up the mountain to him and just be there with him.  It is best that when this happens we take the time to go. 

I find it enormously helpful in these foggy, fiery periods of life (and they will pass but we still have to go through them) I find it helpful to just sit and to make a place for God to sit too, like an actual chair, something to make me consciously aware that God is with me whether I feel it or not.  Do that and sit face to face with God and get it off your chest – your angers, your fears, your questions, your WTF’s with respect to God.  In time, God will show up and make things new and you’ll come down the mountain with something as certain as stone tablets in your hands.  Take the time to wait on God.  Amen.

Up on the Mountain

Text: Exodus 24:12-18; Matthew 17:1-9

          It was Sunday December 5, 1999. I had received a phone call from my brother at about 4:30 that morning to tell me that my father died. The 5^th was a Sunday morning and I had minister responsibilities in my church down in West Virginia. I could have made a few calls and excused myself, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be than in church with my church family. The service went well. Yet, I had to leave immediately afterwards to conduct another worship service at a mountain chapel where I also had responsibilities. To get there, I had to make the drive up Elk Mountain, twenty-five minutes of mountain road to get there on time. It was a warmish December morning and that made it foggy down in Marlinton which was way down in a river valley. Going up Elk about two-thirds of the way up, I found myself suddenly just above the clouds. So, I pulled over at an almost providentially well placed wayside just to take a minute and look around. The leafless trees were wet and glimmering in the sunshine. The clouds were aglow with a glory all their own. I stood about ten feet above them and it was if I was looking down on a sea of clouds that I could step out and walk on. It was beautiful, just absolutely beautiful. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was good. I got the sensation that God had created this moment just for me on that morning. Dad was finally free of his suffering and at rest and my heavenly Father just loved me enough to let me know that. Not that I didn’t know that already. I sat there a moment and thanked God but I had to go, a mountain top experience.

          I think of that experience whenever I come across the gospels accounts of Jesus Transfiguration though it pales in comparison to the mountaintop experience that Peter, James, and John had with Jesus. Jesus took them high up the mountain and there they see King Jesus in his glory joined by Moses, the bringer of the Law, and Elijah the Prophet who themselves had had very powerful mountain top experiences. Moses received the Law up on Mt. Sinai which described the way of live that would distinguish the people of God. Elijah also had found himself up on Mt. Sinai in a cave running while for his life and there he heard the still, small voice of the Lord telling him he wasn't alone in his faithfulness.

          Struck with awe Peter blurts out how good it is to be there standing in the light of the glory of God and suddenly (there's always a suddenly) a bright cloud overshadowed them; the same cloud that consumed Mt. Sinai like a consuming fire, the cloud of the glory of the LORD; i.e., the Holy Spirit. Then God the Father spoke, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” Realizing that they were in the presence of God and that Jesus, their friend and teacher, is God’s Son, Peter, James, and John went face down on the ground, absolutely scared to death. They knew that they had no right to be there. They were not worthy to be in the presence of God. A common superstitious kind of belief back then was that they should have died on the spot for having come into contact with God.

But, Jesus then said to them not, “Get up and don’t be afraid,” but rather, “Be raised and don’t be afraid!” The Greek word there for the act of rising is in the passive voice. It was done to them. They were made to get up and why every translator misses this, I have now idea. The commentators don’t, but the translators do. It is Jesus who is raising his disciples not the disciples themselves simply rising up on their own efforts. The Transfiguration of Jesus speaks also of our resurrection from the dead. By Jesus’ command and in the same power of person-establishing, creation renewing love by which God raised him from the dead, i.e., the Holy Spirit, God the Father because of Jesus the Son’s sacrifice and intercession and our union with him in through the Holy Spirit will likewise raise us from the dead by the same power of person-establishing, creation renewing love of the Holy Spirit. By Jesus own command and because of his death and resurrection for us, we who are in him have nothing to fear in the presence of God the Father ever if anybody does. We have nothing to fear. We’ve only to bask in the goodness of the glory of the Holy Trinity – the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We have nothing to fear in the presence of God.

So, back to our own mountaintop experiences, reflecting back on the experience that I shared with you. That was a moment when, I believe, God spoke to me. He comforted me, his beloved child. As Christians, we will have moments like that and they are good. Yet, let’s not major on the minors. There is something greater here that we must take in: we as Jesus' disciples in union with him, the Risen and Ascended One; we, by the free gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; we, are living in the Transfiguration at this very moment and always. What Jesus is now – resurrected and glorified – he is now also making us to share in because our life is in him. He is making us to rise up and be like him. He has poured his Spirit upon us, into us, and it is good. The Father has spoken the Word of life into us and by the powerful working of the Holy Spirit we are being transfigured to reflect Jesus Christ more and more through our own lives and our life together as a church in his name. Yet, let us not hang it all on God’s shoulders. He has also called us to obedience. The Father has commanded us to listen to his Son, to Jesus, and therefore to live according to what Jesus has said. The Christian life is more than just occasional moments of love and assurance from the Trinity and certainly more than just being good and doing our part out of a well-formed sense of duty. The Christian life is found in following; following Jesus, abiding by his teachings, immersing ourselves in prayer, studying and embodying the Scriptures, and laying down ourselves for those around us in unselfish love that they may see the love of God. Having been to the mountain and seeing who Jesus is in his glory and hearing the voice of God, Christian life is found coming down the mountain with him and following in suffering and joy bearing our cross, dying to ourselves, and being raised in him. Amen.