Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”
Sacred places. Spaces that hold special meaning. We can be in awe over a site or location in which some special event happened or where some famous person used to be. In Moses’s case, as cited above, God was in a bush that was on fire yet not being consumed. God was making God’s self known to Moses and calling Moses to the task of delivering Israel from the bondage of Egypt. This would be not only a marker in Moses’s life, but for those around him and who followed him, for all of us who read this account. There are those holy places and occasions that are markers to us as well of God’s presence. Like Jacob (Genesis 28), we may hardly recognize it at the time, but later we will see that God was with us.
When it comes right down to it, all of earth is a sacred space. When God created the heavens and earth in Genesis 1, all of creation is God’s “cosmic temple.”
Thus says the LORD:
Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool;
so what kind of house could you build for me,
what sort of place for me to rest?
All these things my hand has made,
so all these things are mine,
says the LORD.
Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the LORD.
So in the truest sense there is no spot on earth that is not sacred. Strictly speaking there is not the sacred and secular, the holy and profane. All is holy, all is made clean, that becoming clear in God’s revelation in Jesus.
Nevertheless there are still those sacred times and places to remember as we come to understand more and more that there’s not a place or time in which God, the Holy hasn’t been present.
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