Church of the Epiphany, Glenburn

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Prop. 17, Yr. A, Aug. 31, 2008

Church of the Epiphany, Glenburn

Rev. Craig C. Sweeney

Soli Deo Gloria

I confess that there are some weeks when the lessons given to preach on appear to me to be a blank wall - I really struggle to find some theme to work on. This week, however, it is a matter of narrowing down. All three lessons bear a complete sermon.

We are continuing, in the Old Testament, along the history of God’s Chosen People, the Jews. We’ve been through the stories of the Patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, through Joseph’s trip to Egypt and his reunion with his family.

Last Sunday we heard of Moses birth and his rescue from the river by the Pharaoh’s daughter. Today we jump ahead a few decades to the Burning Bush. Moses has killed an Egyptian soldier who was beating Jewish slaves, and has escaped out into the desert. He meets his future wife at a watering hole and settles in to tending the flocks of his father-in-law. He is, in fact, a criminal on the lam.

He approaches, as any of us would, this bush that is burning but not being burnt up and discovers there God, who speaks to him, telling him to go back to Egypt and set the Hebrew people free. Not unreasonably, Moses tries to evade this impossible task.

I mean, let’s face it - go back to Egypt, where he’s a wanted man, walk right up to the Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the world, and make any demand on him, let alone that Pharaoh should set free several hundred thousand slaves on which Egypt’s economy depends? Anyone would have to be nuts to agree to that job!

Moses tries 5 times to beg off - he can’t speak well, he is no theologian, he is no leader, no politician. He argues enough that God finally gets angry with him and Moses eventually agrees - surely muttering under his breath as he does.

But the key words from God come early: ‘I will be with you,’ God tells Moses, ‘don’t worry.’ That didn’t seem to assure Moses much, for he goes on with the rest of his arguments.

The one we note most often is simply this: Moses wants to know just which God he is speaking to, Moses wants the name of this God who is directing him back to Egypt. Now God has announced himself as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob - THAT God: what more does Moses need to know?

Moses blames this on the folks in Egypt, ‘when they ask me which God I’m talking about, what do I tell them?’ And God, perhaps getting a little testy by now, says, ‘I AM WHO I AM. Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM sent me to you.’ And God goes on to say, ‘this is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.’

I AM WHO I AM. In the Hebrew, ‘Yaweh,’ although we truly aren’t sure how it should be pronounced or exactly what it means, for Hebrew is a vague language, and the Jews take the holiness of God’s name so seriously that it is not written down, let alone spoken out loud. Jews will say ‘ha Shem’ to speak of God, which simply means ‘the name.’ In scripture, it is written, even in Hebrew, as ‘adonai,’ which is a deliberate misspelling of certain letters, used to be sure that even the scribes couldn’t write or speak God’s name by accident. Some Jews won’t even use the generic ‘god’, writing instead ‘G-d.’

In English we see in the Bible places where the Hebrew word for God is referenced by ‘God,’ and also by ‘Lord’ and sometimes by both, ‘the Lord God.’ It is thought that there were more than one school of authors of various parts of the Old Testament, and each school had it’s own way of referencing God.

Now, this all seems curious to us - isn’t God just God? That’s how I think and pray and write. But in those times, there were lots of ‘gods’. This is likely why Moses wants to be sure which god he is speaking to, and, in fact, the Hebrews in Egypt would have been surrounded by people who worshiped more than one god.

And, in point of fact, ‘g o d’ is a noun, not a proper noun. One is a god - Baal, Astaart, Apollos, Ra, etc, are ‘gods.’ Their name is not ‘God.’ And it is worth telling again that if one gave one’s name to someone else, it was viewed back then as giving someone power over you, almost a possession over you. And the ancients clearly thought that they could use their ‘gods’, the tried to manipulate them through sacrifice to get better rain, crops, hunts or winning battles.

When our God tells Moses, I AM WHO I AM, he is telling him that we are not to know his name, he just is, period. He is God, the only God and we don’t need to know his name, we just need to know that his is, always has been and always will be.

In one sense this is to state the obvious - to us today, at least: we will have no power over this God. And in another sense it broadens vastly the notions and beliefs about this God. This God isn’t some little god of crops, or weather, or hunts. This God is THE God, the God of everything, the God who IS.

We often speak of God’s ‘Holy Name.’ I mentioned it in our ‘prayer of humble access’ earlier: ‘that we may worthily magnify your Holy Name.’ And in our collect today we prayed, ‘graft in our hearts the love your Name.’ This is to remind us that we do not, and cannot, know the nature of God, cannot know and use his name for our own purposes, it is holy, separate, other. We can only know God through revelation in the world and especially in Jesus, God’s word made flesh.

God is a mystery, God’s name is a mystery. This is disconcerting to us in these times of scientific certainty, we want clear and concise answers. Hans Kung, a renegade Catholic theologian tells us, ‘Questions of faith are not like riddles or crossword puzzles; with things of this sort it may take one some time to find the solution, but once it’s found, everything is clear and simple. [faith is different] Here we have, not human truth which men can state and understand, but God’s truth which goes far beyond any statement or understanding of man’s. The faith never becomes clear.’

This is so obvious to me that I am always dumbfounded by the way so many people want to express the Christian faith in simple, black and white terms, the way folks want to point to a given verse in the Bible and declare a matter settled. I don’t know or understand God - I spend my life working on that and never will know God until I see him face to face, and even then I won’t truly KNOW God. How can I? God is totally other than I am.

And so I look for images, indications, pointers, metaphors and parables that describe God and God’s nature. I look, as I constantly say, for the ‘big picture.’ And most particularly, I look at and listen to Jesus, God’s Word made flesh, God living among us as one of us. For Jesus is all of God that we human beings can begin to comprehend.

And that is tough enough!! Today Jesus makes it sound even tougher - ‘take up your cross and follow me.’ The simple meaning of this is obvious: I’m going face to face with the powers and principalities and I’ll end up crucified. If you want to be one of my followers, be prepared for the same thing. And, so far as tradition knows, all but the disciple John in fact ended up dying because of their discipleship.

I’d like to just explain this statement of Jesus’ away as typical hyperbole, but there is, and always has been, an element of truth in this warning from Jesus. Thousands of Christians died for their faith in the early Church times. We celebrate in our cycle of prayers the martyrs of Uganda, who died for their faith withing the last 200 years. People are persecuted for their faith this very day in India, the Sudan, and Nigeria. These are people who truly have taken up the Cross of Jesus and followed him, people who were willing to die rather than to renounce Jesus. I hope to God I’m never put to that test.

And I’d bet a lot of money that no one here ever will be put to that test. On the other hand, most of us are tempted to ignore our faith constantly. We ignore the teachings of Jesus on a regular basis, for Jesus tells us to repent, to turn around. Jesus tells us to reach out to the poor, to honor the strangers among us, to feed the hungry, to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies. All of those are easy to ignore in our lives, packed as they are with work, school, shopping, errands, family responsibilities and all.

Jesus calls to us to live as he lived, to truly follow him, not just pay lip service to his Name: this call is a challenging one. St. Paul sends the Roman Christians a laundry list of what this life in Christ looks like in our Epistle this morning. It is a long one, and worth reading again - take your bulletin with you and study it.

Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, outdo one another in showing honor to each other, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord, rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. That’s only the first couple of lines, and is enough to make me tired already! But he goes on: contribute money, be hospitable to strangers, bless those who persecute you, don’t repay evil for evil, live peaceably with all, love

and even feed your enemies.

In other words, live like Jesus. To take this seriously truly is to take up our cross, for in this day and age it is very, very hard to do these things. We might pick a couple or three of them and excel at them, but trying to do all of those things seems nigh on impossible. To live like that means essentially to deny my self and my own needs, and - low and behold! - to make the needs of others equal to my own!

To live like Jesus means to love God with all we’ve got and to demonstrate our love of God by loving others as much as we love ourselves. I’m going to tell you that week in and week out, because that is the essence of what we profess as Christians. That is the essence of living like Jesus. That is the essence of magnifying God’s Holy Name. We are supposed to look like Jesus.

I read a while back that one reason it is hard to get young people into church these days is because even though they know about Jesus and admire him greatly, they just don’t see Jesus in the Church. That hurts, but it is largely true. That is why I so badly want us to find a ministry that show we truly are God’s heart and hands in the Abingtons.

And it sounds impossible. Like Moses we back away and mumble excuses and ask questions to clarify things so we can look for escape hatches. But the answer is simple, the answer to all of our fears and reluctance and excuses comes from God to Moses and aldo to us: don’t be afraid, for I will be with you.

Nothing we do in God’s name is done alone, for God will always be with us. AMEN