God's Use of Ph. D.s

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists
Sabbath, June 15, 2013

Texts:

OT: Exodus 3 and 4

NT: Acts 5:33-40

If you pick the right place in the movie to start watching, the story sounds like a classic, magical fairy tale.

One day Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led the flock far into the wilderness and came to Sinai, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the middle of a bush. Moses stared in amazement. Though the bush was engulfed in flames, it didn't burn up.

"This is amazing," Moses said to himself. "Why isn't that bush burning up? I must go see it."

When the LORD saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him from the middle of the bush, "Moses! Moses!"

"Here I am!" Moses replied.

"Do not come any closer," the LORD warned. "Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground. I am the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." When Moses heard this, he covered his face because he was afraid to look at God. Then the LORD told him, "I have certainly seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries of distress because of their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey—the land where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites now live. Look! The cry of the people of Israel has reached me, and I have seen how harshly the Egyptians abuse them. Now go, for I am sending you to Pharaoh. You must lead my people Israel out of Egypt." Exodus 3:1-10.

God has a mission impossible to be done. He chooses a simple, humble shepherd for the job. It's like Joan of Arc or Ellen White, young women from obscure backgrounds with no education, miraculously called to take on heroic jobs.

Moses confirms the impression we get from this initial scene at the burning bush. He thinks of himself as a nobody. He is a sheepherder not a public figure, not a leader. He protests to God:

"Who am I to appear before Pharaoh? Who am I to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt?" 3:11

God, of course, refuses to take no for an answer. “Look”, he says to Moses. “I will be with you. I will bring you and your people back to this very mountain to worship once I have accomplished the rescue.”

Moses is not persuaded. “Excuse me. I mean no disrespect. But I don't even know your name. When I go tell the people that you have sent me to rescue them, they are bound to ask me who you are, and all I can tell them is the 'nameless God of your ancestors sent me.' That isn't going to fly.”

So God tells Moses his name. It's a special name, a code name, a name God uses only in his relationship with the Jewish people, Yahweh, or in the language of the old King James Bible, “Jehovah.”

God then gave Moses a message to deliver to the Jewish elders in Egypt:

"Now go and call together all the elders of Israel. Tell them, 'The LORD, the God of your ancestors—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—has appeared to me. He told me, "I have been watching closely, and I see how the Egyptians are treating you. I have promised to rescue you from your oppression in Egypt. I will lead you to a land flowing with milk and honey—the land where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites now live."' 3:17

To summarize where we are in the story:

Moses has a divine assignment: Go rescue the Jews from Egypt.

He has God's promise: I will be with you.

He has God's code name: Yahweh.

He has a specific message to deliver: The God of your fathers will rescue the Jews from Egypt.

God even assures Moses that the Jewish elders will believe him when he shows up and that when the Egyptians are (not surprisingly!) unresponsive to Moses' message, God will work mighty miracles to cow them into submission.

Even with all this, Moses is unpersuaded. He goes back to his sense of himself as a nobody, a backwoods (or “back desert”) sheepherder. Why should anyone pay any attention to him? Either Jews or Egyptians?

God then gives Moses three magic signs which he can use to demonstrate his divine credentials.

Moses is still unpersuaded.

"O Lord,” he says. “I'm not very good with words. I never have been, and I'm not now, even though you have spoken to me. I get tongue-tied, and my words get tangled." 4:10

Then the LORD asked Moses, "Who makes a person's mouth? Who decides whether people speak or do not speak, hear or do not hear, see or do not see? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go! I will be with you as you speak, and I will instruct you in what to say." 4:11-12

But Moses again pleaded, "Lord, please! Send anyone else." 4:13

Then the LORD became angry with Moses. "All right," he said. "What about your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know he speaks well. And look! He is on his way to meet you now. He will be delighted to see you. Talk to him, and put the words in his mouth. I will be with both of you as you speak, and I will instruct you both in what to do. Aaron will be your spokesman to the people. He will be your mouthpiece, and you will stand in the place of God for him, telling him what to say. 4:14-16

So Moses, the backwoods sheepherder, the old man who stumbles over his words, went back home to Jethro, his father-in-law, his employer. "Please let me return to my relatives in Egypt," Moses said. "I don't even know if they are still alive."

"Go in peace," Jethro replied. 4:18

Probably all of us know where the story goes from here: Moses goes to Egypt and tells Pharoah, “God says, 'Let my people go!'” Pharoah says, “God who?” A series of ten plagues devastates the nation. It's like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, dozens of tornadoes from Kansas to Arkansas, 9.0 earthquakes in L. A. and San Francisco, the eruption of Mt. Rainier and a deadly pandemic hitting the U. S. all at once.

Finally, Pharoah says, “Enough! Go.”

The Jewish people march out of Egypt. And if this were a fairy tale, the next line would be, “And they lived happily ever after.” But they didn't.

The “ever after” turned out to be as difficult and challenging as the hard times at the beginning of the story. In Egypt, the Jewish people could blame all their problems on the mean, old Egyptians. But in the desert, the people encountered threats of starvation and dehydration—the consequences of their flight to freedom. They had to deal with boredom, internal conflict and attack from enemies. The people are fractious, impatient, difficult and through it all Moses demonstrated an astonishing competence and equanimity. Only once in forty years did he exhibit angry impatience.

Moses was surrounded by people suffering from all the social dysfunction created by slavery. Still he wrote a set of laws that easily equaled the greatest law codes produced in that era of human history. He built into his laws principles that have continued to inspire humane and liberal action for three thousand years. Even to this day, Moses' laws fuel activists' care for the vulnerable, protection for foreigners and application of justice to all without regard to race, color or creed.

Was this grand wisdom of Moses merely the result of the magic of God's call. No. Before Moses landed in the wastelands of the Sinai desert with a bunch of his father-in-law's sheep, Moses was heir of the throne of Egypt.

Moses was Jewish, of course, born into a slave family. But through a fantastic set of twists and turns he ended up as an adopted son in the household of the Pharoah. He was groomed to take the throne of Egypt. He received the highest education possible in that world. Formal education in the sciences and humanities. In religion. In administration and governance. Beyond this formal education, growing up in the household of Pharaoh gave Moses a deep, instinctive understanding of the most sophisticated elements of culture and society.

When God looked for someone to break the bondage of his people, to set them free, to set the trajectory of their religion and thinking for the next thousand years or two, God chose the most highly educated Jewish person in existence.

Apparently to God, education matters.

When we study the New Testament, we immediately notice that Jesus did not have a formal education. It may take longer for us to notice that Jesus was not a lawgiver. He did not spell a program of balanced legislation. He didn't detail standards or policies. Jesus gave us ideals: Love your enemies. Fret no more about your retirement plan than a bird does. Don't bother with contracts, just tell the truth. These ideals are so exalted they break every attempt to embody them in rules and regulations. Jesus ideals call us to God and inspire the highest altruism. They ill-suited as a platform for rules.

After Jesus' resurrection, God again counted on a couple of Ph. D.s. One to save the church, the other to launch it into the non-Jewish world.

Two or three months after Jesus' resurrection, when the community of Jesus followers was no more than a few thousand the apostles were arrested en masse. An angel let the men out of prison and told them to go back to the temple and continue preaching. Which they did.

The police were sent to fetch them a second time. When they were arraigned before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, the apostles were utterly uncowed. Far from apologizing, they charged the counsel with the wrongful death of Jesus. Right wingers on the council wanted to kill them. If they had been able to persuade the council, it would have probably meant the death of the church. In one fell swoop they would have eliminated the entire apostolic leadership group. And probably would have set in motion sufficient momentum to have quickly executed anyone else who dared to speak out in public about Jesus.

The church would have died before it grew beyond infancy.

God counted on the wisdom of Gamaliel, a Pharisee, a scholar, a Ph. D. in religion to save the church from extinction. Gamaliel stood up and counseled restraint. He argued that God was quite capable of looking after his cause. Leave the disciples alone, he argued. Allow God to decide on the validity of the disciples' preaching. If their message was not from heaven, he said, it would die on its own. If it was from heaven, perhaps the council would find itself fighting against God.

His argument carried the day. Gamaliel's speech had persuasive power because of his status, a status that came in large part because of the credentials and knowledge he acquired through education.

A little later in the book of Acts, we encounter the leading opponent of the Christian movement, a man named Saul. God decides to turn him.

Saul heads to Damascus in search of Christians to arrest. On the road, Jesus accosts Saul in a dramatic visionary encounter. It works. Saul is turned. He goes from Saul the anti-Christian to Paul, the Christian apostle to the Gentiles. He becomes the key figure in opening the Christian community the world outside Judaism. He wrote most of the New Testament.

Coincidentally, Paul earned his Ph. D. under Gamaliel.

God's preference employing highly educated people continued after the New Testament.

A thousand years later when the church needed a new birth of spiritual life and a new vision of the God it was John Wycliffe, a brilliant and respected scholar in England who opened new windows of hope and wisdom. His work was carried forward by two Czech scholars, Jerome and John Huss. Like Wycliffe, they had influence because of their education.

Next it was Zwingli and Calvin in Switzerland and Luther in Germany. These men are rightly famous for transforming Christianity through a renewed appreciation of grace in contrast to the idea of earing heaven through religious rites and a new confidence in the actual text of the Bible in contrast to the accumulated traditional interpretations.

We celebrate them as “The Reformers.” They are the heroes of Protestantism. Ellen White, the Adventist prophet honors them as the chosen agents of God. And every one of them, without exception was highly educated. They had the equivalent of Ph. D.s Their work in breaking the stranglehold of church authority and dysfunctional tradition rested squarely on their academic credentials and the learning they acquired in the university.

One last example: When God needed a leader in the South to help break the stranglehold of American racism, God turned to a young preacher with a Ph. D. Martin Luther King, Jr. Once again, education played a crucial role in equipping someone for an impossible mission.

Today, we are honoring our graduates. The Seventh-day Adventist Church has long expressed profound regard for education. Today, we honor the hours of effort you graduates have put into your studies. We honor the teachers who have encouraged you and challenged you. We salute your parents and others who have helped you along the way.

Education is a gift. Don't forget that. You did not create the schools that have shaped your mind and given you skills. You did not create the intellectual and cultural advantages you brought with you to school. But you can appropriately take satisfaction in what you have accomplished. Well done.

So you have graduated. What now? For some of you, it's on to more school. Others of you are launching out into the “real world.”

The real world needs you. God has more missions impossible waiting. Your education has qualified you for some of those missions. Don't hide from God's call. It's time to rid the world of tuberculosis and malaria. Maybe you can do that. We need to find ways to provide energy without generating deadly pollution. Could you help with that?

It's time to create good governance and workable tax structures in Africa so that the overall well-being of the people is raised. Are you up for that?

I believe it's possible to reduce poverty in America and violence in Honduras. We can figure out the riddles of autism and asthma. Mental illness cries for brilliance and good will.

Sometimes young people tell me they don't want to spend decades in school. They are eager to get out into the real world. I understand that, but if your dream is big enough, the most important question is not how long will you be in school, but what is the preparation needed for working on that dream. Is your dream of the future worthy of the gifts God has given you? Is your dream connected with the grand vision the prophets have painted of a world where righteousness is at home?

Whether this spring is your graduation or merely the end of another school year in what feels like an endless stream of years, know this: God values your education. God has dreams for what you can accomplish, standing on the foundation of your education. We as a church commend you for your participation in the work of education.

Maybe some of you are like Moses, decades away from your education. Maybe like Moses, you think you have been put out to pasture. You imagine your significant work is behind you. Maybe. But I encourage you to spent some time asking God, is there yet some work of significance for me to do? Is there a young person I can encourage? Is there a neighbor who needs my touch? Is there a friend whose life can be enriched with attention that only I can give.

God is so pleased you are part of his family. And every time we take note of oppression and hurt, we are looking with the eyes of God. And when we use our gifts, our backgrounds, our education to alleviate suffering, to lift others, we following the call of God.