Then Moses answered, “But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’ ”

The Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?

He said, “A staff.”

And he said, “Throw it on the ground.”

So Moses threw the staff on the ground, and it became a snake; and Moses drew back from it. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Reach out your hand, and seize it by the tail” – so he reached out his hand and grasped it, and it became a staff in his hand – “so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”

Once upon a time there was a man, and his name was Abram. His story is one of the Bible stories that everyone needs to know: although many people don’t know his story too well. God made a covenant with Abram: a solemn relationship, with a promise and a blessing and a serious call to loyalty and devotion. As near as we can tell, this happened around the year 1800 BC: which is to say, some 3800 years ago. And the promise God made to Abram and his wife Sarai changed their lives, and changed their names to the names we usually remember, Abraham and Sarah, and changed their heritage, and eventually changed the world. They had no children, but then they did have a child, Isaac. And Isaac and his wife Rebekah had no children, but then they did have twin sons, Esau and Jacob. And Jacob and his harem – two wives (Leah and Rachel) and two concubines (Bilhah and Zilpah) – brought forth more than a dozen children, including twelve fine sons, and all of them got married and had children.

During a time of drought and famine they moved the whole family to the land of Egypt. They became prolific there: the families of those twelve sons grew into extensive tribes, and the whole extended throng of them were called the children of Israel.

These children of Israel lived in Egypt for about 430 years. For comparison, we might note that the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in the fall of 1620: so in the fall of 2020 that’ll be four hundred years ago. That means that for the children of Israel, the time span for their stay in Egypt was longer than the period from the beginning of the colonial period, through the Revolution, through the Civil War, through World War I and World War II, and through our lifetimes up to today.

The children of Israel had originally come to Egypt as honored guests. As their population grew they became a large ethnic group within the overall population of Egypt. And eventually fear gripped the hearts of the Egyptians, as they considered this multitude in their midst: and so they turned all these Israelite foreigners into slaves.

Once upon a time there was a man, and his name was Moses. His story is another one of the Bible stories that everyone needs to know: although many people don’t know his story too well. As the Bible tells us that story, it records for us that the lifespan of Moses was 120 years, and the narrative divides that lifespan into three segments: his time as a young man in the land of Egypt, up to age 40; his time in the land of Midian, after he had to flee from Egypt because he had killed a man, his mature years from age 40 to 80; and his time leading the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, during his elder years from age 80 to 120.

The Bible devotes half a chapter to the early years and half a chapter to the middle years: but it takes four books of the Bible – Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – to tell the story of Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Promised Land.

Exodus chapter 3 tells the story of Moses’ first encounter with God, when God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. God called him to leave Midian and travel back to Egypt, to lead the children of Israel and to set them free from slavery. Moses did not want to do it. He had found a peaceful life as a shepherd, and he was eighty years old, and he did not wish to take on any kind of new project of this magnitude.

Now when the Lord God Almighty gives you an assignment, you might guess you have to do it. Unless: maybe you can figure that you might be able to talk your way out of it? So in the second half of chapter 3, and indeed in most of chapter 4, Moses offers God several objections, explaining that he was not the man for the job.

So we pick up the story in Exodus chapter 4. Moses told the Lord, “Suppose I go to Egypt to lead the children of Israel, but they don’t listen to me; what if they say, ‘We don’t believe the Lord appeared to you.’ ”

And God replied to Moses –

We should just pause for a moment and notice the depth and complexity of this conversation between Moses and God that the Bible records for us. Your homework assignment for this evening after supper is to read Exodus chapters 3 and 4, paying special attention to the specific details of the conversation presented there. Moses speaks in paragraphs. That’s not so surprising; many of us can talk for several sentences in a row without needing to stop and rest for a while before we can say anything more. What is surprising is that God speaks in paragraphs, including some fairly long paragraphs. Perhaps it would be better to say that Moses heard God speaking in paragraphs, paragraphs that he could remember in detail and which would eventually get written down.

I have been a Christian leader, from my college days to the present, for nearly five decades, and I have never had a conversation with God like that. I know very few people who have. That tells us that having the kind of prayer life that Moses had is quite unusual. That’s part of the reason that the Bible records this material for us: because it is remarkable. We all need to pray, and we all need to learn to pray better: and in the weeks to come we will do some things that will help us learn to pray better. But just for today, we need to recognize that the prayer life of Moses was a wonderful thing: even though our own prayer lives will mostly not come out the same as his, we can draw inspiration from the clarity of detail of the conversations between Moses and God.

So, as I say, Moses worried that he could try to fulfill the assignment God was giving him, and it might not work because people would not believe that he had met with God. And God replied to Moses with a question. It is such an important question: “What is that in your hand?”

There are a lot of places in scripture that show us God asking a lot of questions. When we read about how the Lord asked someone a question, we need to consider why that is. God called to Adam and Eve in the garden: “Where are you?” Do you suppose this was because God didn’t know where they were, and needed them to call out “We’re over here!” God showed the prophet Ezekiel the vision of the valley of the dry bones, and asked him, “Can these bones come back to life?” Was this because God didn’t know whether this miracle was possible, and was hoping that Ezekiel would have the insight to provide the answer? When the multitude came to hear Jesus preaching in the wilderness, Jesus asked Philip, “Where can we buy enough bread to feed all these people?” Do you suppose that Jesus had no clue, but he was hoping Philip could check Google on his phone to get directions to the nearest bakery?

It’s not that. There’s a principle here that we should notice. When God asks a question, it’s not so that God will gain new information: it’s so that the person who got asked will gain new information. God asks Adam and Eve where they are so that they get the chance to articulate the answer: “We are hiding from you, Lord, because we are ashamed.” God asks Ezekiel whether the dry bones can come back to life so that Ezekiel has the chance to realize that he doesn’t know the answer, but “O Lord, you know.” Jesus asks Philip what to do, so that Philip has the opportunity to express the reality that half a year’s pay would not be enough to feed this multitude: which is another way of saying, “It would take a miracle.”

Our Lord asks us questions not so that God will understand better, but so that we will understand better, as we ponder the question and do our best to come up with the answer.

So God speaks to Moses, and asks, “What is that in your hand?” It’s not because God is nearsighted and can’t quite make out what Moses has in his hand. Is that a broom, or a rake? Or maybe a fishing rod? Help me out, here, Moses, the sun is shining in my eyes and I just can’t quite see what you’ve got there. No, that’s not the reason. God asks Moses “What’s in your hand?” so that Moses will take a moment to look at what he’s already got in his hand, and then consider what God might do with this thing in Moses’s hand.

Moses answers, “A staff.” It’s an ordinary tool for a shepherd. Moses supposes it won’t be any use at all in talking to Pharoah or setting free the children of Israel.

God says, “Throw it on the ground.”

I’m pretty sure Moses would not have liked that. It sounds suspiciously like throw it away, doesn’t it? I imagine that Moses really liked this staff; he probably made it himself, worked it and smoothed it over the years. He would not want to toss it aside on the ground.

But God told him to do it, and so he did. It turned into a snake, and Moses jumped back from it. What kind of a snake was it? Was it dangerous? Probably. Then God said to pick it up again, from the tail.

When I was serving as pastor for a church in Kentucky, I learned that part of the way of life there is to talk about how odd your family history has been. In particular people talk about how their family came from the hollers of eastern Kentucky. They would talk about how hardscrabble the life was, how they had to break the ice in the creek with an ax so that they could fetch a bucket of water so their mother could cook supper. Or about how they didn’t just have to walk through the snow to school, they had to shovel the path through the drifts before they could even get to the road to start. But my favorite was always the fellow who said his family lived so far up in the holler that even the Episcopalians were handling snakes in church.

I myself never went in for snake handling, but I did understand that you had to pick up the snake from just behind the head, where it couldn’t turn around and bite you. You didn’t pick it up by the tail; that was just asking for trouble.

But Moses did as God said, and picked up the snake by the tail, and it didn’t bite him: and the snake turned back into a staff again.

It’s a staff. It’s a length of wood, made from a sapling, maybe, or a pretty straight branch of a tree: it’s been shaved and shaped and smoothed. Maybe it has been bent into a hook at the top, like a traditional shepherd’s crook; maybe it’s just straight. But it is Moses’ own staff. And that’s all it will ever be. Unless – unless God does something with it.

But what if God does something with it? What if you laid it on the ground, in front of God Almighty? What if you set it down in worshipful obedience before the Lord? What might God do with it? Maybe work miracles. Maybe you’ll take that staff to Egypt and set the children of Israel free.

So let me ask us all today: what’s that in your hand? I ask that because you and I, we have stuff in our hands, too.

Maybe what you have in your hand is a pair of knitting needles. I’ve seen what people can do with those. I know a group of women who use their needles to knit little hats for newborns, which are given away to families in need in eastern Kentucky. Maybe what you have is smaller than that, it’s a needle, but it’s a sewing needle that goes on a sewing machine. I know a group of women in Kansas who make hundreds of small colorful bags every year, which get taken to the Dominican Republic and used for the distribution of medicines with Medical Ministry International, so that young mothers whose families somehow survive on a dollar and a half a day have a simple bright cloth bag to hold the medicine they need for their children.

Maybe what you have in your hand is a pen. I have known a few dozen people, mostly women but a few men as well, who write hundreds of short notes and cards each year, bringing a word of encouragement, or a word of blessing, or a word of prayer to someone in the community. They write to someone in the church, or to someone not in the church. To someone they know, or to someone they don’t know. They just do it.

Or maybe what you have in your hand is a large frying pan, and you use it to cook scrambled eggs and hash brown potatoes to feed the homeless. Or what you hold in your hand could be a checkbook: you provide the funding for some ministry that touches people’s lives with the love of Jesus. I know a group of men who hold wrenches in their hands, and they fix cars for people in need. I know a different group of guys who hold hammers and saws, and they build houses with Habitat for Humanity, and I know yet a different group of guys who hold hammers and saws, and they do home repairs for the elderly in their community.

Here’s the thing. Jesus asks me, “What’s that in your hand?” I look at the things that are in my hand, from one day to the next, and it just doesn’t seem like all that much. The thing that I had in my hand most recently was a small puppet of a dog: a pretty simple prop. I came to the conclusion, about ten years ago at Bethel Presbyterian Church in Wichita, that it would be better not to call the children’s sermon a children’s sermon: so I cast around for a better name and decided it would be better to call it Dogmatic Theology, so I gave the dog the name Dogmatic. It’s not much: a puppet, a Bible story, a funny name. But it is offered to the Lord, for him to work miracles with it. I have used this puppet to tell Bible stories, to children and to adults, for quite a few years. I’ve never seen any spectacular miracles from using it.

Yet I have seen some cumulative effect. All those lessons in Dogmatic Theology, along with all those little baby hats, all those bags for children’s medicine, all those car repairs and home repairs, all those hand-written notes – all of that has added up to an enormous gift to the world, for the sake of the kingdom of God.

“What is that in your hand?” God doesn’t ask us that question because he doesn’t know what’s in our hands, and is hoping that we’ll give him new information. No, God asks that question so that you and I will recognize that God can move forward the work of the kingdom with what we hold in our hands: so that we will realize that we have the opportunity to do some of the work of the kingdom with what’s in our hands.