[AI translation] Dear Brothers and Sisters! We will try to examine this Word we are reading by breaking it down into three simple questions. The first question is: What does God say? The second is: What does Moses do? The third is: What does the serpent become? On this basis, I would now like to preach God's New Year's message to us.So first of all: what does God say? In the Word that was read - as people who read the Bible know very well - we heard a very small part of the story of the calling of Moses. The Moses to whom God appeared in the burning bush, the Moses that God is now calling to his service, he wants to give him a job, he wants to give him a very special task to do, which Moses has to do. For it is not enough to be a child of God. Every child of God must also be a servant of God. In this Word that I have read, it is precisely this that God is engaging His child, whom He has already made Himself known to Him, to be His servant, to perform a task entrusted to Him. If we understand this well, then we have already received something of God's message for the New Year. I think, brothers and sisters, that we will have the right attitude to the whole year ahead of us if we understand and take very seriously the fact that God is calling us. Let this New Year be God's renewed call for us to serve Him. So let us begin the year ahead as God's messengers. Not only as children of God, enjoying God's paternal love and kindness, his nearness and blessing, but now especially as servants of God, sent by God, entrusted by God with all the tasks that await us in this year that lies ahead. So behind all the work that we have to do this year, whether it is hard work or easy work, let us see the divine mandate. Behind every event and every happening in our lives, let us see God's sending purpose. Just as Moses did, we too must sense the sending God behind the great and insignificant turns of everyday life, the God who has called us, who has called us into this work, this situation, this situation we are in or will end up in.
Practically, what it means is: look at your elderly parents, for example, or your difficult children; look at your happy or burdened family life; look at the daily worries or troubles, the loneliness or the crowds around you; look at the street you live on and the bus you ride to and from work every day; so see your colleagues, your factory, your acquaintances, your enemies, your own abilities and your own helplessness or powerlessness, health or sickness, that behind all these there is a mandate from God for you. Wherever you are and wherever you go in this year, you are there as God's emissary, and whatever happens to you and around you, there is a God-given assignment for you. It is with this firm awareness and commitment to the divine call, to God's call to service, that we begin the year ahead.
We also learn from the story that Moses was not happy with this divine calling. He was reluctant to go. Let me say that I can understand him, because it is not so easy to stand before a fearsome, powerful Pharaoh and demand that he release the people of Israel from Egyptian bondage. Moses was afraid. He feared the task, finding the divine mandate too difficult and too dangerous. We know this fear all too well. Oh, so often we too shy away from something that dares to come before us and feel that it is a perilous thing, that it is not for us. In fact, I would dare say that we are in chronic rebellion, almost all of us and always against our own vocation in life. One person wants to shake off the work he has to do every day because he does it with disgust. Another can't stand the people he has to deal with every day because they make his life miserable. The third is increasingly bitter about the disease he feels spreading in his members, or the cross he has to carry into this new year, or the situation or situation he is in, the situation he is living in. There are so many things in our lives that we have never really accepted, that we want to dodge, that we are afraid to face firmly and that we don't want to face down, that this is the way it is! What we don't want to accept as a mandate from God. We do exactly as Moses did, who in no way wanted to go to Egypt. We don't want to go to our Egypt either.
And then Moses receives this command from God: reach out your hand and take the tail of the serpent. There has been much debate among theologians about how to understand this serpent story. Well Brothers and Sisters, I don't want to solve this problem theologically. I simply see this serpent as a symbol that the task to which God calls Moses is a dangerous one, a very serious one indeed. God is not one to sugar-coat things. God does not flatter anyone and say: Oh, don't worry, it's not that big a deal, you'll see, and in the meantime you'll even like the task or the test you have to solve! In fact, God says to you: be careful, because it is a very dangerous thing! That snake can bite you, it can harm you, it can even wound you to death. It is understandable, then, that Moses should be reluctant to take up the task. It's not easy, Brothers and Sisters, in this world, as God's messenger, to stop and take on the problems of life. It is easier to run away. Everyone is afraid of the serpent, but God says: stop, don't run away, seize it!
Look what Moses does: exactly, word for word, what God commands him to do. He does not wait until the serpent has the opportunity to seize Moses. Because there are only two possibilities: either Moses seizes the serpent, or the serpent seizes Moses. Either you seize destiny by the throat, or it seizes you. Either you take hold of your illness, your problem, your pain, or your illness, your problem takes hold of you. Stretch out your hand - that's the command for Moses, and guess what: Moses stretches out his hand to the serpent. I see the risk of true faith in this. In Moses reaching out his hand at God's command to the hissing, writhing, death-dealing snake. You know, brothers and sisters, that this is the very boldness of faith that God requires of us. He wants us to dare to face the problems that are before us. To dare to plunge into the most difficult situations. To dare to face the greatest trials when they come our way! Moses reached out and grabbed the serpent, and there he stands with that writhing, hissing snake in his hand. But how dare he touch it? How dare he touch it? How dare he take this terribly dangerous beast in his hands? There is really only one explanation: God told him to! So by God's command, by God! Moses dared to obey God in such a dangerous thing because God appeared to him. And Moses trusted in the God who appeared to him in the burning bush.
That is exactly why we can seize all the serpents, because God has appeared to us. Much, much more powerful and much more majestic than Moses. He did not appear to us in a bush, God appeared to us on the cross of Calvary. Seize with courage every serpent that hisses at you! Look, there is no snake whose head Jesus did not crush there on the cross, on Calvary. This means that you must not be afraid of people who hurt you, who you cannot bear, who want to make your life miserable. Do not be afraid of the surgery that may have to be performed on you this year. Don't be afraid of the retirement that may be just around the corner for you. Don't be afraid of tasks that you neither have the strength nor the desire to do. Do not fear the worries that haunt your soul and keep you from sleeping peacefully even at night. Fear not Satan and all his host that will tempt you. Go in the name of Jesus and say to yourself repeatedly, "I have strength for all things in Jesus, who strengthens me. Look to Jesus, who appeared to you and to me on the cross! Seize your tasks, your worries, your problems, every day, anew! Dare to do this at God's call!
For look what the serpent becomes: we read in the Word that the serpent became a rod in Moses' hand. What an experience that must have been for Moses! He could not have expected this, God had not said a word to him about it, he had not received any promise from God. God only gave the command: Reach out your hand and take it. Moses just had to obey and when he did what God said, the serpent became a rod in Moses' hand. When he stretched out his hand, when he took hold of it, it was still a serpent. Only later, in his hand, did it become a rod. If we do not seize our snakes, they will remain snakes! Only in the grip of faith, in the grasp of faith, does the serpent become a rod. Imagine the astonished face of Moses as he held the rod in his hand. What is this? What happened to this serpent? Well, it doesn't wriggle, it doesn't hiss, it doesn't bite! It's not a snake! It's a stick. A help, a prop, a weapon that can do a lot of good things.
Brothers and sisters! This is what we must experience. To obey God's call and see what snakes become in our hands. So let us dare to take hold of it, let us dare to take it on in the name of God, in obedience to His call! Then we will see how different will be the work we have been doing with boredom, how different will be our attitude to those unpleasant people we have been so weary of, and how different will be all the burdens and all the other miseries we have been so disgusted with. You will see what the serpent becomes in your hands. It will - this word expresses a certain process. So it may not be immediately. It may be a day from now. It may be a year from now. It may be ten years from now. But it will be! If you hold on in faith, the snake will become a stick!
The other day I received a letter from a man I visited many times in the hospital. He describes how afraid he was of the disease, how tortured he was by the surgery and then the months of treatment. How much she suffered. But she writes that she took it all on as someone who knew that God's calling was now for her, here, on her hospital bed. Afterwards, he could not help describing the many blessings, the many joys, the many spiritual enrichments he received right there on that hospital bed. He writes that now he can testify to God, to God's grace, much more courageously than before. The snake has become a vat in his hand. A positive gain. The best sticks become snakes when grasped in faith. You know, if you grab it with the faith that you are now doing a divine errand.
Remember all the good Moses did with this stick? This stick, this one snake? Armed with it, he stood before Pharaoh, and the mighty Pharaoh, surrounded by his whole army, trembled before him. With this rod he struck the Red Sea, so that it parted before the fleeing people. With this rod he drew water from the rock. This stick was a great help to him.
The grace of God wants to give us the same guarantee. Every task, every difficulty, every problem that comes to you, that you are commissioned by God to do, becomes a rod, a help, a tool with which you can do a lot of good. What seemed to be darkness has become a source of light. Your most ardent enemy becomes your best friend. Loss becomes gain, the cross becomes a crown. Just don't run from the snake! Look to Jesus! There, on Calvary, out of His pain came joy, out of His wounds healing, out of His death life blossomed. Whoever looks to Jesus in faith, fear nothing and no one!
Amen
Date: 1 January 1966.
Lesson
Róm 8,31-39