Too Much to Lift: Exodus 4:24-26
Sunday, October 4, 2026
The Rev. Megan Collins
When Dave and I were in graduate school, we were moving from our one bedroom to a two bedroom apartment in seminary housing. (You got to upgrade from one to two bedrooms if you had a baby. I'm not saying this is why we had our first child, but the two bedrooms were so much bigger.) Our new place was just down the street. The seminary wasn't really involved in the move, but they did give us one instruction: Don't drive up on the grass with a truck. What a silly instruction, we thought. Why would we drive a truck up on the yard?
Halfway through the move, we had to stop. We had this huge, heavy pine armoire, and we were moving to a second floor apartment. It seemed impossible that we could move it.
So we did what graduate students do. We sat down to think it through, and debate the options. We could take it up the stairs. We could dismantle the armoire and take it up in pieces. But what if there was another option? We had this perfectly good balcony, facing the grass, just a few (12) feet up. If we backed a pickup truck right up underneath it, two people could stand in the truck bed and lift the armoire up. Then someone else would be on the balcony to grab the edge and tip it over the railing, and it would slide right into the apartment.
Easy peasy. So smart.
Thinking time was over, and we got to work. We loaded the armoire into our friend's pickup truck, looked around for anyone official, and drove up onto the grass, right under the balcony. Our friends lifted the armoire up from the truck bed, just like we planned. Then Dave reached down, grabbed the edge, and started to tip it up and over the railing. It was working.
See? You can do anything if you just think it through, and work hard.
Then the armoire started to tip back the other way, toward the yard, and our friends.
This next part happened in slow motion. The bottom of the armoire at this point was teetering back and forth a couple of feet above our friends' heads, too high for them to reach. Dave is up on the balcony, putting all of his strength into keeping it in the air. And instead of jumping out of the way, our friends in the truck just stood there, looking up at it. (And now we’re all leading churches. Which is . . . . terrifying).
It turns out, you can do all the thinking and doing, but sometimes, it’s just too much to lift.
You’ve got your own version of a ridiculously heavy armoire you have to lift.
A job that's asking way more of you than it did a year ago.
A kid you're worried about.
Caregiving for a spouse or a parent.
A diagnosis.
Grief. Fear. Exhaustion.
And the world. Oh, the world.
It’s just too much.
Whatever you armoire is, you’ve got one, and you do what we all do. Think it through and get to work.
Read the book. Look up the research. Make a list, an action plan.
Then roll up your sleeves, and do the thing that need to be done. Push through it.
But what if the thing in front of you is bigger than even the best plan, heavier than you can lift on your own?
We’ll be picking back up in the Moses story in Exodus today, and this story is a doozy. It’s one of those weird fragments Dave talked about, the kind of thing you'd think would have been left on the cutting room floor when they decided what made it into the Bible. But let’s dig into it.
At this point, Moses is out walking alone, and he sees this bush that's on fire, but not burning up. Even if you've never been to church until today, you've probably heard this story of the burning (not burning) bush.
God calls out from the bush: Moses!
Moses says "Here I am."
Then the Lord says he has come to rescue his people.
Moses is like “Awesome. Good plan, Lord.”
Then the Lord says this:"Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt." (Exodus 3:10)
Wait . . . . go? Me?
Moses is now paying very close attention. You can practically see his brain reeling. He starts asking questions.
Who am I to do this?
Who should I say sent me?
What if they don't believe me?
My personal favorite: I'm not even a good public speaker.
Moses is really thinking it through. Finally, after weighing all of the information, he ends with:
"O my Lord, please send someone else." (4:13)
But this call from God was less of a volunteer opportunity and more of what we call in the church being volun-told. Thinking time is over. It’s time to go. Somewhat reluctantly, he loads up his wife and children and heads for Egypt. He knows how dangerous it is. He's going to walk right up to Pharaoh and demand the release of a whole people. But he is ready to do it anyway.
Most of the times I've heard this story, the next part picks up with Moses and Aaron confronting Pharaoh. But there are three little verses before that, and we skip right over them. I think you'll quickly see why. Let's read:
On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him and tried to kill him. (Exodus 4:24)
Wait, what?
Moses, the one God chose, the one God spoke to from the burning bush, who is literally on his way to confront Pharaoh, and the Lord tries to kill him? What on earth is going on?
But the text doesn’t address it. It just keeps going. Then Moses’ wife joins the growing line of women who bail Moses out when he’s in trouble.
25 But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, touched his feet with it, and said, "Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" 26 So he let him alone. It was then that she said "a bridegroom of blood," because of the circumcision. (Exodus 4:25-26)
Then the Bible story casually goes back to its regular programming.
And we have SO MANY QUESTIONS.
Most importantly . . . . . what?
But also, why would God try to kill Moses?
So this week I went to our stacks of commentaries. The scholars have lots of thoughts, and none of them really answer the question. Some of them said, in a much more scholarly way, “God sure is crazy sometimes.” I even looked at the Hebrew, hoping the word for "kill" meant something else like “stop in his tracks.” It doesn't. It means put him to death. The one thing the scholars seem to agree on is that it's, in highly technical terms, super weird.
The only thing we know directly from the text, is that it tells us that God wanted to kill Moses, but then Zipporah circumcised their son, and they all survive.
Now circumcision was important. Way back in Genesis 17, we learn that circumcision was commanded by God, and it was supposed to be done by the 8th day after the child was born. It was a sign of the covenant, a way to establish their relationship with God and with their community.
Leading up to this story, Moses had done lots of thinking and planning.
He had asked so many questions.
He clearly wanted to understand God, or at least God’s plan.
He wasn’t afraid to do something hard. He was ready to go and confront the Pharoah.
But he hadn’t done one thing: He hadn’t circumcised his son.
And it seems this oversight was why God was angry.
Now, I’m not sure why God was angry enough about this to kill him. I wish the story wasn’t so weird. I wish it could have been just a conversation between God and Moses, maybe a slight reprimand. I don’t pretend to know why it was recorded this way. It may be related to some foreshadowing to the passover that is coming up soon in our story, and we’ll talk more about that when we get there. But still, as the story stands on its own, it would be easy to just blow past it.
But I do think the timing of the story is interesting.
Moses is facing something very heavy. He was doing a great job in the planning and doing. But the thing he had neglected was this mysterious, physical sign that would mark his son as belonging to a people. It would have been a clear way to show that he understood that God was mysteriously and truly there, with him, even if he didn’t fully understand it. It would have shown that he knew he wasn’t some cowboy, fighting bad guys alone, that he was a part of a people.
And that's where I think this strange story connects with us.
We are a thinking people, you and I, especially here in this church. We ask good questions. We make plans, usually with multiple points in them. We research and we trust the science. We learn about Greek and Hebrew and systematic theology and wrestle in a very intellectual way with our faith. This is so, so good and important.
We also are a doing people, you and I, in this church. We take seriously the call to go and do the hard things, to fight for justice out there. We serve and we protest and we challenge people in power and we have courage. This is so, so good and important.
But we don’t always have a lot of patience for the mysterious, the things we can’t plan for, or do, or really explain. Why do we need some ritual when we believe the right things in our minds, and do the right things out there? I wonder if that’s what Moses thought. But that sign of the covenant, it was essential for Moses to take the next step.
Those signs and rituals are actually essential for us too.
For us, the signs and rituals we have are not circumcision. But we do have something that works the way it did. In fact, Jesus gave us two.
In Matthew 28, he says:"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."
And in Luke 22:"Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.'"
Baptism and Communion. We call them sacraments. Like circumcision, they are physical, in that it is something we do with our body, and they are communal, because they mark us as a part of a community. And, much like in our passage today, they are very mysterious, especially communion. Try explaining to someone who has never been to church that once a month we take little cubes of bread and a little bit of juice and as we eat it we say it is the body and blood of our God, but not literally body and blood, but not just a reminder of the body and blood our God either, like somewhere in between.
Some might say that sounds crazy. I like mysterious.
I can give you seminary answers about communion, the ones we wrote on ordination exams. That we experience signs and seals of God's grace when we take communion, that it’s the work of the Holy Spirit drawing us into the presence of God, that we're nourished for the work of discipleship and knit together as a community. I believe all of that.
But I can't really explain it, especially not what happens to us when we take it, what it feels like, how it changes us.
I do know that, in our lives, there are things are too heavy, too big, for us to think or do our way through. Maybe part of the reason we take communion every month, instead of just once, is that we keep trying to do everything on our own. We keep making the plan and rolling up our sleeves. We need to be reminded, every month, that we don't have to, that we need God’s help, that we need each other.
When that armoire was hanging in the air above our friends in the truck, there was nothing we could plan or do at that point that would fix it. Dave had a grip on it, but he was alone on the balcony trying to hold all of its weight. Our friends down below couldn't reach it if they tried. (They could have moved out from under it, which would have been smart). And then suddenly another friend from the apartment, the one who had been until now watching from the window. He came running out onto the balcony, and grabbed on to help pull it over.
(So for those of you who were worried, our friends in the truck did survive our move).
The things you’re facing right now are a lot more than a heavy armoire. You need help.
Maybe you are making plans that sound something like “I’ll just lift it up onto the balcony myself.” What if, instead, you let this time in communion today, be a time to give it to Jesus? Lay it down. Stop trying figure it out or do all on own. Commune with god for a moment
I was talking to a friend this week, and I mentioned how as I watched the things happening in the world, I felt so angry. And that as I worked on writing about communion, it felt like a disconnect. She reminded me that Jesus came into the world, this world, with its messiness and heartache and violence. He lived in it. He felt what we felt. He experienced the grief and the pain and the struggle that we experience. And he took the weight we couldn’t carry, before it came down on top of us. "This is my body, given for you."
I don’t know how a little loaf of bread and a cup of juice holds all of that.
But somehow, it does.
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