Welcome to Resurrection Parish on this the second weekend that we have “re-entered” the church for public Mass afternearly 3 months of staying at home. (Of course we also welcome those who might be watching the live-stream of this Mass as you continue to take the caution of staying at home.) This weekend we are kicking off our summer message series, “Moses: Lifelong Journey of Faith.” Over the next 8 weeks we are going to look at one of the most important people in the Old Testament, and we are going to see that Moses’ life has a lot to teach us for our own lives today.

I am presuming that most of us have seen the Cecil B. DeMille’s movie classic, “The Ten Commandments.” It really is a wonderful movie, and much of it is the story of Moses’ life. However, the Bible is still a better place to turn to really get to know Moses. The life and adventures of Moses is told in four of the first five books in the Bible: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, so over the next 8-weeks we will be drawing on passages from those books.

But first, some background before we start looking at Moses’ beginning. Our father of faith is Abraham, with whom God made a covenant to make of him a great nation and give him land. Abraham did move to the Promise Land, and he had a son, Isaac. Isaac had two sons, but the covenant promise was passed on to his youngest son, Jacob. God gave Jacob a new name, Israel, and Israel had 12 sons who would become the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of the nation of Israel. One of Israel’s sons, Joseph, was sold into slavery by his envious brothers. Joseph ended up in Egypt, but after he was able to interpret the Pharaoh's dreams, he was made Pharaoh's steward – the second most important person in Egypt. A famine broke out in the Promise Land, so Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt to get grain. Long story short, Joseph and his brothers make up, and he tells them to move to Egypt where he could take care of them. So Israel, his sons, their wives and children – 70 people in total – left the Promise Land and moved to Egypt.

All of what I just cover is in the book of Genesis. At the end of Genesis we are told that 400 years pass and a new Pharaoh who knew nothing of Joseph came to power. What this new Pharaoh did know was that in the last 400 years the Hebrews had really grown in numbers. It was no longer a mere 70 Hebrews living in Egypt, but nearly a quarter million of them. Afraid that they might join with his enemies, this new Pharaoh made the Hebrews slaves. But their numbers continued to increase, so he ordered all male Hebrew babies to be killed.

It was into this situation that Moses was born. Instead of killing him, his mother hid him for three months. When she could hide him no longer, she put him in a basket, and put the basket in the reeds of the Nile River, and had her daughter watch to see what would happen to him.

As luck would have it, Pharaoh's daughter came to the river to bath, and heard baby Moses crying. Even though she knew he was a Hebrew child, she had pity on him and decided to adopt him as her own son. So begins the story of Moses.

All of this is in the Book of Exodus. What is not in the Bible, but I would be curious to know, is how did Pharaoh react to his daughter adopting this child? I mean, if it was obvious to his daughter, then it would have been obvious to him that this was a Hebrew boy. He was the guy that gave the order to have all the Hebrew boy babies killed, and now his plan was unraveling in his own home. I suspect that Pharaoh must have been furious – at least at first.

Know who else would have known that he did not belong growing up in Pharaoh's household? Moses himself. As he grew up, he would have had an understanding that he wasn't an Egyptian and he didn't belong in Pharaoh's household, but he belonged out with his family, with his people who were in slavery. Moses knew that even though he was raised in an Egyptian household, even though he came to like Egypt food and maybe he enjoyed Egyptian culture, he knew that he wasn't an Egyptian, that he belonged at home with his people, with his family in slavery. Moses grew up with an understanding of his story. He knew where he came from.

Moses had an acute sense of appreciation for the life that he had and what he had been saved from because every day when he woke up in Pharaoh's palace, he knew that he didn't belong there. He knew that he probably shouldn't even be alive. He knew that he had been saved. We have also been saved. Just as Moses was born into a life that was almost certainly destined for death, so too we were born into a life that was destined for death. Because we were born with original sin, we were born into a sinful world with sin in our hearts and there was nothing that we could do to overcome it on our own.

The scriptures tell us that the wages of sin is death, and that surely would have been our story. But by the grace of God, we have been saved. Just as Moses was drawn out of the waters of the Nile, so too we have been drawn out of the waters of our baptism. And just as Moses was adopted into a new family, we have been adopted into God's family. 

Life itself is a gift from God and all that we have, all the blessings of this life are all of God's goodness and God's favor and God's faithfulness and God's grace in our lives, so our lives should be filled with gratitude.  In the first week of this series, Moses shows us early on in his life that gratitude is the foundation of greatness. Gratitude is the foundation of greatness because God would use Moses to do some incredibly great things in his life. God would use Moses to do some amazing things in his life but it all starts with gratitude.

Moses shows us that when we express our gratitude to God, it exposes us to God's will and the great things that God has for our lives. That when we cultivate a heart of gratitude when we express our gratitude to God, it exposes us to more of God's goodness, to more of God's gifts, to more of God's grace. So let's be like Moses. Let's have an acute sense of appreciation for all God's goodness in our lives. We can make gratitude a daily habit. We can wake up each morning grateful for what God has done for us because gratitude is the foundation of greatness.

So let's be great. But first, let's be grateful.