One day God spoke to Moses through a burning bush and asked him to lead the Israelites out of their Egyptian slavery. Moses first protested, "Who am I to do this for the Israelites?" and "What if they don't believe you sent me?" Then his identity/belonging crisis was revealed when he confessed, "I have never been eloquent ... I am slow of speech" (4:10).

Slow of speech? Moses was raised in the royal family, given the finest education — probably including elocution as well as military training. Some guess he had a speech problem, but I doubt that. A new insight comes from Presbyterian elder Stan Inouye, president of Iwa, Inc. (www.iwarock.org), which helps churches more effectively share the gospel with Asian Americans. He suggests Moses was reluctant because he spoke Hebrew poorly. He looked and acted too Egyptian. He was separated from his Hebrew birth family as an infant. After Zipporah first met Moses she reported to her father: "An Egyptian helped us" (2:19). From Moses' speech and appearance she and her sisters concluded he was an Egyptian. What, then, would the Israelites say if this "Egyptianized" man stood before them and said, "God told me to lead you to freedom." Moses knew they would snicker at his fumbling Hebrew. They would treat him like an alien.

Inouye says Moses was a bicultural person who didn't feel like he belonged anywhere. I call him a kind of alien. But it was precisely Moses' confused, bicultural, "don't-really-fit-in-either-world" condition that God used to accomplish one of God's greatest saving acts.

It is sometimes the alien among us — the one we regard as "foreign," the one who feels like he or she doesn't belong — that God chooses for a special redemptive role. For us they might come in any shape, size, sound or color different from ourselves. Jesus' first disciples, all of them Jewish, called them Gentiles. We can call them all kinds of things. But God loves the alien. God calls the alien. We need the aliens. Can we embrace them?

Who is today's bicultural Moses? Youth and young adults raised in our churches but schooled in a cyberworld of technology and relativism alien to their elders? Young, American-born Hispanic or Korean Presbyterians? Raised in cultures shaped by their parents' homeland, these young leaders are profoundly Americanized and schooled to succeed in this new world that is alien to their parents.

Do these people in the margins belong in this Presbyterian Church? What liberating word do they have for the church today? Is our church today in captivity? To whom? Will we listen to the voices of aliens? Are you an alien? These are questions we will explore in "The Alien Files."

Next month:
Esther: an alien in queen's clothing.