We state that we believe in the Trinity, but in practice we often neglect the Holy Spirit, demoting a full person of the Godhead to the status of an impersonal force. Even our language is inadequate to this task, calling this active, personal deity “it.”
But the Holy Spirit is the real presence of God at work. We see this in the story of Pentecost, when the church erupted out of a scared group of blue collar men and women. This is the same presence we can experience today. Anne Lamott writes:
It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.
We are here to ask and learn, as communities and as individuals, are here to learn what it means to be Spirit-filled, and how to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit. This search is of a piece with the deconstruction many of us are going through, taking apart the human structures that make up church in the wake of failure, betrayal and hurt that many of us have experienced. We are seeking to strip away the accretion of man-made structures that have not up and to come as we are to God as He is, in the person of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s scripture is the “origin story” of Moses, whet he fist encountered the living God. The people of Israel have moved into Egypt, a relationship that started well but over the years had degraded into slavery and infanticide. We see this people group described in two ways in the story – the Israelites, when describing them as the people of the covenant God made with Israel, or the Hebrews, when describing them as the ethnic community being oppressed by Egypt.
Moses was one of these Hebrews, who escaped the campaign of infanticide and was adopted by the daughter of Pharaoh, raised in the royal court Egypt. As the original “third culture kid” Moses is caught between two worlds, which boils over when he kills an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, only to find himself rejected by those people as well. And so he flees into the wilderness, marries into a community of itinerant herdsmen and lives as a refugee for many years.
And that is where God meets him, and where his origin story begins.
God calls to him, repeating his name in a pattern we see throughout scripture, calling from a fire that burns but does not consume. He calls to him to put off his sandals because he stands on Holy ground.
This combination of protection and awe, of safe and holy, is key to understanding the nature of God. The fire burns but does not consume, the ground is holy but we are called to stand upon it.
This is how the Holy Spirit approaches all of us, and the safety God provides to each person means that that each person is accepted in their diversity and identity, and the community of faith is made up of an infinite combination of holy, safe relationships between believers and the Holy Spirit.
We see this play out directly centuries later at Pentecost, when fire again burns but does not consume, and deity again calls frightened refugees into His service, again empowering men and women to spread His message. This was promised by the prophet Joel:
I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days.
As we as a church move forward, whatever changes come, this should be our focus and our goal. We are called to be a place that is safe and holy, a place where people between identities, like Moses can come and find their new identity in God.
— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood, WA, June 7, 2026
Images by CHATGPT.