Sermon for Sunday, August 30, 2026 || Proper 17A || Exodus 3:1-15

Twelve years ago this week, I preached the most personally impactful sermon of my entire ministry. They say if the sermon doesn’t resonate with the preacher, it won’t resonate with anyone else. I never know for whom I am writing a particular sermon, but that one twelve years ago was for me. I needed to hear it, and it turned out so did a lot of other people. Today, I’m going to revisit that sermon because it’s message is perennial, and it turns out I need to hear it again now.

Twelve years ago, the twins were one month old. I thought I was prepared for the tectonic shift of parenthood, but as much as you prepare logistically, you can never prepare mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically for the demands of new parenthood. I knew it was going to be hard, but my definition of “hard” had never reached the superlative level of caring for multiple newborns. Thankfully, joy and love were the constant companions of the challenge of new parenthood. But both joy and love often got buried under the weight of bone-wearying exhaustion, and at the end of the day or at the end of the night – and with newborns they are pretty much the same thing – all you could say is, “We survived.” And you’re too tired most of the time to appreciate that survival, in itself, is a pretty astounding gift.

I felt desperately inadequate as a new father, and I brought those feelings into my reading of the story of Moses in today’s passage from the book of Exodus. And what I saw were those same feelings of desperate inadequacy in the Hebrew Scripture’s biggest hero. Today’s story takes place on Mount Horeb, but let’s back up and see how Moses got there.

After growing up the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses was caught between two worlds, the life of privilege of the king’s house and the life of slavery of Moses’s family of origin. One day Moses visits the work camps and sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Moses secretly kills the Egyptian, but such an act can’t stay secret for long, and when Pharaoh finds out, Moses flees.

Settling in the land of Midian, Moses meets his wife at a well. Zipporah brings Moses home to her father, who takes him in and teaches him to be a shepherd. A long time passes, and Moses finds himself with the flock beyond the wilderness on the mountain. God calls to him from the burning bush and gives Moses the task of delivering God’s people from the hands of the Egyptians. And this is where Moses’s feeling of desperate inadequacy rises to the surface. He asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

You can see where Moses is coming from. He’s been gone so long. Who would remember him? He wasn’t even raised among his own people. Who would accept him? Later, he mentions he’s not a very persuasive talker. Who would listen to him? All of these worries and fears boil under the surface of Moses’s question. But God stops Moses in his tracks.

And here we must pause for a reminder about my favorite Bible study technique. Whenever you read the Bible, I want you to pay especially close attention to how questions are answered. More often than not questions are not answered directly in scripture. When God in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus in the Gospel answer questions, they often answer the one they wish they had been asked, rather than the one that was asked. So pay special attention to how questions are answered.

Let’s turn this special attention to Moses’s question. Moses asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” His feeling of deep inadequacy weighs the question down, but God lifts him back up with the answer: “I will be with you.”

This doesn’t answer the question Moses asked. “Who am I?” he pleads. And the response. “I will be with you.” So the question God answered, the question God wished Moses had asked, was: “Will you be with me?” And the answer: a resounding “Yes.”

God’s answer to this question reverberates throughout the Bible. God shows Abraham the way through the desert to a new home. God comes to Elijah not in the storm but in the sound of sheer silence. God descends into the den of lions with Daniel. God gives Jesus a second name, Emmanuel, which means, “God with us.”

And so when I read the story of Moses and the burning bush in the light of my own desperate inadequacy in the month after the twins were born, I realized I had been asking the wrong question. Like Moses, I had been asking, “Who am I? Who am I that I should be able to accomplish the task of helping to care for these two precious lives?” But that’s not the question God was answering.

Instead, God was prompted me to ask the question God yearned for me to ask all along: not “Who am I” but “Will you be with me?” And God answered that question with the same resounding “Yes” which God promised Moses. Yes, I am with you in the helping hands and loving hearts of the friends and family who gave countless hours of their time. Yes, I am with you when you breathed deeply in moments of serenity and when your patience stretched past the breaking point when the crying wouldn’t stop. Yes, I am with you in the peace that came from a few hours of treasured sleep. Yes, I am with…always.

The feeling of desperate inadequacy can paralyze us. Perhaps a challenge seems too big for us to even begin to grasp. Perhaps we’ve been down a certain road before and failed. Perhaps we’re facing something new and the fear of the unknown cripples us. Whatever the case, we can begin to move past our inadequacy or whatever else is holding us back by changing the question we ask of God. Rather than asking, “Who am I to take care of my aging parents”; or “Who am I to be able to find friends at my new school”; or “Who am I to make the slightest difference in a world full of pain”; rather than asking, “Who am I” ask the question God yearns for you to ask.

Ask, “Will you be with me?” And believe in the deepest core of your being that the answer to that question is always and will always be, “Yes.” When you hear that “Yes” resound in your core, you will begin to see with new eyes and reach out with less burdened arms and discover all the ways God is already using you to shine God’s light in this darkened world, no matter the inadequacy you feel.

It’s been twelve years and the teenaged ones loom and I still feel inadequate a good chunk of the time. We’ve been through a lot since I first preached a version of this sermon. And we’ve had so much help, so much love showered upon us from this community. Through it all, the question that God wishes Moses had asked has become my daily question of faith. I invite you to make it yours as well. “Will you be with me?” Listen deeply at the core of your being for God’s first and fundamental promise, a resounding “Yes, I will be with you always.”

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Banner: Adam dressed as an extra for the last act of E.T. about 20 minutes before the twins were born.