Sermon preached by Rev. Margie Quinn on Sunday, October 18, 2026
When we talk about getting our steps in, I don’t think anybody is better at this than the prophet Moses. From the very beginning of his relationship with God, God tells him one thing over and over again: Go. When Moses encounters God, as scripture says, a blazing bush, God says, “Go assemble all the elders of Israel. Tell them that the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham and Jacob and Isaac, sent you. Tell them that God has appeared to you, knows what’s happened to your people in Egypt, and wants to bring you out of misery.” Moses tried to get out of it a bunch of times, and God said, “Go. Go back to Egypt. Everybody seeking your life is dead already.” Moses goes back to Egypt. And God says to Moses, “Go tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go.”
Many of you know this story. God says time and time again, “Go to Pharaoh.” Pharaoh doesn’t listen. God turns water to blood. Go to Pharaoh. Pharaoh doesn’t listen. Frogs cover the earth. Go make sacrifices to me in this land. Pharaoh doesn’t like that. Livestock dead. Go. Go to Pharaoh. Pharaoh doesn’t listen. Locusts. Finally, Pharaoh says, “Okay.”
Moses takes the Israelites to the Red Sea, and all of a sudden, the people cry out. Moses cries out to God, “Do you really have our back? Because we’re walking in the middle of a sea right now, and at any moment it could just come crashing in.” God says, “Why do you cry out to me? Tell the Israelites to go. Go forward.” So they go, and they reach the wilderness. The people have just been liberated by God, and they begin to grumble. “We’re hungry. We’re thirsty. Where’s the food? Where’s the water? At least when we were slaves in Egypt, we kind of knew what was coming in our situation.” So God says, “Go strike this rock at Horeb. The same staff that you used to part the sea, strike the rock with that and water will come out.” And even after that, the people look around and say to each other, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Then they get up to Mount Sinai, and we have a series of Moses really getting steps in. He goes up to the mountain to talk to God. God says, “Go back down.” He goes up the mountain again to talk to God. God says, “Go back down.” He goes up the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights, and God hands him two stone tablets with a really important covenant on it. And while he’s up there for 40 days and 40 nights, the people have grown impatient. Because they’re not certain where God is, they build this giant calf made of gold. God hears about it and says, “Go back down the mountain. Here are the tablets written with,” and I love this, “written with the finger of God.”
Scripture says, “Is the Lord among us or not?” The people wonder when Moses is up there talking to God. So they build these idols to worship certainty and materialism. They build gods of gold. “Go down at once,” God says, putting Moses on the move yet again. And this time, God is really angry. “I have liberated you from slavery. I have freed you from oppression. I have given you manna and quail and water. What more do you want from me? You couldn’t wait for 40 days. Go. Leave this place.” God says, “You and your people, Moses, you and your people who I brought up out of the land of Egypt, go to the land that I promised you. And you know what? I’m not going. I’ll send an angel before you, but I’m not going. When you go to this land, there’s milk and honey flowing for you, but I will not go among you, because if I do, I’m going to consume you, because you are a stiff-necked people.” I love that, “stiff-necked,” because I feel stiff-necked this morning in multiple ways. What a great term.
We might be tempted to really believe that this is the last straw for God. That after complaining about their liberation because they didn’t have enough, after grumbling to Moses because they kept wanting to know, “Are we there yet?”, after turning their back on God time and time again, maybe this is the cherry on the cake of God’s abandonment.
But given God’s track record of sticking around with God’s people despite their stiff-neckedness, we might assume that, as Walter Brueggemann writes, “Because Yahweh speaks, Israel has a post-calf possibility.” That’s what Brueggemann says. Isn’t that fun? A post-calf possibility. Even though Israel is rich in things and poor in spirit, a post-calf possibility. Even though they’ve chosen gold over God, a post-calf possibility.
God is still in conversation with Moses despite the whole golden calf situation. Is the Lord among us or not? It would seem as though the Lord is.
So once again, in a sermon for another day, God changes God’s mind. “Okay, I’m coming with you.” God says, in one of my favorite verses in Exodus, God says to Moses, “My presence will be with you, and I will give you rest.”
Not just that kind of rest that some of us will go and experience after church, but the rest of settling in a community flowing with abundance. The kind of rest that trusts the presence of God. The kind of rest that doesn’t need to build idols out of fear because it deeply knows and believes God is with them.
And God keeps saying go.
Many of us know that feeling. I know actually several of you are in the midst of moving houses. God bless you. God is inviting you to a rest that doesn’t really feel possible when you’re packing up boxes and painting over holes in the wall from pictures that you put up. And still God says, “Go. There’s milk and honey on the other side of this big move.” Go. God might be telling you it’s time to find a new job. Or go. God might be inviting. It’s time to retire from a job. Go visit that family member even though travel is tiring. Go to the doctor even though you’re scared to make an appointment. Go to that new school even though you don’t really know a lot of people. Perhaps God is inviting some of you to go to Vine Street. Even though some of us like the Georgia Bulldogs. It’s quite a verb for Moses the prophet. And it’s quite a verb for us, that God is continually a God that’s on the move, who doesn’t allow us to sit stagnant in one place for too long and get comfy. God pushes us forward. Go.
And in response to this, in response to God saying, “Go,” Moses just wants to know. “God, you’ve said to me, ‘Bring up this people.’ But you haven’t said who you’re going to send with us. You haven’t let me know. You said that I know you by name, and you’ve also found favor in my sight. If I found favor in your sight, show me your ways so that I may know you, God. How shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight?”
And I don’t know if y’all heard it, but when I read this passage, I hear kind of a whiny Moses who is so insistent, who is in such a tizzy that God potentially isn’t going to go with him and the Israelites, that he keeps missing what God is saying. For those of you who raised a toddler, you know this. The toddler is like, “Can you get me a bottle of milk?” And you’re like, “Yeah, I’ll go get it.” You’ve got the bottle of— They see you with it. You’re filling it up with milk. They’re like, “You didn’t get me a bottle of milk.” You put it in the microwave to warm it up. They’re like, “I guess I’ll never have a bottle of milk.” Like, it is literally right here. You’re looking at it. You start bringing it over to them. They’re like, “I just wish you would give me a bottle of milk.” God says time and time again, “I have found favor in your sight. I know you by name. I’m coming.” And Moses is like, “I just don’t know if you are.”
But I think that’s because Moses is comfortable enough to be daring and bold and insistent and even whiny and brave in his prayers. Because this isn’t the first time Moses has talked to God. They’ve been in an intimate dialogue throughout their entire relationship. One that has never really hung up the phone on the other, so that Moses can be a guy who pleads. I was reading back over the book of Exodus, and it really is kind of one long conversation between a very human man and a very present God, with events threaded in between it. Do you feel like you can have a present conversation with God, being whiny and bold and honest and raw, knowing that God has that bottle of milk waiting for you?
This intimate back-and-forth thing they’ve got going on for a while, it’s so relatable. “God,” Moses says, “you said you would go.” “I said I’m coming. I know you by name. I’m doing the very thing that you asked.” Moses just wants to be certain. Is the Lord among us or not? When I move houses, when I switch jobs, when I enter a new relationship, when I change schools, when I try a new church, is the Lord among me or not?
He can only know if God lets him know. Walter Brueggemann says, “Israel is only Israel if God is present.” Maybe Vine Street is only Vine Street if God is present.
And Moses in this passage, he wants more from God. God’s presence is not enough for him. Moses again, he demands certainty. He looks at God and he says, “Show me your glory.” So God responds with four really powerful affirmations. God says, “I will make my goodness pass before you. I will proclaim before you my name. I’ll give you my name, Yahweh. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, Moses. And I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.” And interestingly, I love this, the literary structure of those last two promises, it’s actually a rhetorical device used to terminate a conversation. So in Hebrew, it’s like, “Okay, I’ll be gracious to whom I’ll be gracious. I’ll show mercy to whom I’ll show mercy. This conversation’s over. We’re done here.” God says, “Just trust me. I’m coming with you.”
God honors Moses’s need to experience God. Don’t we all feel that way? But God doesn’t honor it completely. It’s like this bird that I kept hearing when I was in Scotland called the corncrake. Has anyone heard of a corncrake? What? Well, let me educate y’all. The corncrake is a bird that loves to be heard but is rarely seen. People from all over brought binoculars to Iona, and we would go on walks and we could hear the corncrake, but after days, nobody saw one. Rarely do people see a corncrake. It’s elusive and mysterious and just out of reach. Kind of like God in this passage, or how you may experience God. You remember the Apostle Paul said, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.”
So whether you like it or not, you get your steps in with God. God always invites us to go. And just when we feel maybe comfortable or complacent or stagnant, God puts us on the move again. Whether the people like it or not, they go with the presence of God among them. Not just the presence of God, but a God who says, “I will give you rest, milk and honey. I promise you.” If only they will give up needing to know, needing certainty. If only they will trust that in God they are known. In God they are known.
So here comes the epic journey of wandering in the wilderness. That’s the spoiler alert for what happens next. The Israelites, and maybe you, have wilderness days coming.
So, if there’s anything I’ve learned from this passage, I want to pray like Moses. I want to be whiny. I want to be demanding and bold and insistent. I want to pray honest, raw prayers, trusting that I am dialoguing with a God who has never hung up the phone on me. And I want to trade in my certainty for faith. I don’t have to know. And I want to go. I want to go with you. Believing that, as Exodus wrote, as God said to Moses, “My presence will be with you, and I will give you rest.”
Amen.