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You are here: Home / Archives for Moses

Last Epiphany: “When we should be making whoopee instead of hay” (Dillard)

March 5, 2022 by Cam Miller

Many of us thought that war in Europe
was something relegated to history
but today it is in our headlines, on our minds,
and in our prayers.
The Bishop of The Episcopal Church in Europe,
Mark Eddington, reminded
those in his diocese that is spread across
the continent rather than in just one nation,
that the place where war lives
is in the human heart.

As we pray for peace
I encourage us to do the work
of eradicating war in our hearts.

And now, I invite your focus
to be present here
and in this moment.

I say that, but I was not
where I should have been
when writing this sermon.
Here is what I mean.
We have three readings today
but I got stuck in the verses of Exodus
that appear before the ones we actually read.

But honestly, that is only half true.
I was really enthralled and taken up
with the excerpt from Annie Dillard
and hovered over it
wondering if I could preach on it
instead of Luke.
But then, because of Annie Dillard,
I got curious about Moses.
Suddenly I wanted to re-read in Exodus
where God sticks Moses into the little crack.
It is at the end of chapter 33
right before the part of the story we read today.

But before I get into that one,
the readings from Exodus and Luke that are
actually appointed for today,
have Moses and Jesus with magically shinning faces.
That is weird and unusual right?
It can’t be an accident, can it, that the architects
of the Revised Common Lectionary
put these two readings as bookends on the same day?
So what’s with the shinning faces?

I have preached on these stories
so many dang times,
and you know by now
that Luke is telling this story
to proclaim that Jesus belongs in the pantheon
of spiritual superheroes with Moses and Elijah.
That is the headline:
”Jesus seen hanging out in the clouds
talking with Moses and Elijah!”

Christians have trouble playing well with others
so it wasn’t enough for the Church
to celebrate a Big Three event.
It had to make the transfiguration
all about Jesus
and how he is greater than anybody else.

But I dare say, that wasn’t the original intent.
So all of that is fine
if we want to remain in the clouds
talking about theology
and trading intellectual nuggets with each other.
But I don’t.
I want to bring it down from the mountaintop.
I want to talk about you and me
and where we live —
without the glow,
without the magic, without the light show.

Annie Dillard and my curiosity helped me do that.

Here is a piece of Exodus just before today’s reading:
(33:)18 Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray.”

19 And (God) said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you (my) name…

20 But,” (God) said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”
21 And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock;

22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by;

23 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

So there we are,
right in the middle of Annie Dillard,
stalking the gaps.

Cleft in the rock.
”The gaps are the clefts in the rock,” she says,
where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells
the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery.”

It is such a weird little story in Exodus
about the relationship between God and Moses,
but we hardly ever get to talk about it.

Moses, being Moses, pesters God for more access.
To be honest, Moses agitates for control
in their relationship,
as if he is God’s manager or promoter.
Moses wants to see God’s face
because it is not until we look into someone’s eyes
that we really sense we know them.
To see God’s face would be
to know God’s essence,
and be with God
in the same place
at one and the same moment
would be to know God in a utterly new way.
This is like wanting to know what it is like
to swim in molten lava — you can do it
but then you’re dead.

God says, “’No,” but then throws Moses a bone.
”Because I like you,” God might have said,
here is what I will do.
I will squeeze you into a cleft in the rock, real tight, facing away from me.
Then I will cover your eyes as I pass by
and let you know I am passing.
Once I pass, and only then, you can look.
You will see where I have just been.”

Moses wants more, but because he is human,
that is the best he can hope for…and live.

So Moses was allowed
to see where God had just been
as God receded into the distance.
He could look
where God was
but not where God is
(because if he were with God
in the same time and place in real time,
he would die).

In fact, to be even as close as to where God was
just a minute ago,
was enough to alter Moses’ face forever.
From then on Moses’ face glowed.

The message is that we don’t get to be with God
in the same time and place either.
We don’t get to have God look us in the eyes
and tell us what we most want to hear.
We do not get anything like that
and we do not promise such rare delights either.
Remember, if we look upon God we die.

So message number one for you and me,
we do not get to see or know God. Period.
The part does not get to know the whole.
And as far as being a part of God,
we are but a speck — an infinitesimal
bacteria
riding on a cell
on top a dust mite
within the cosmos that is God.
Like Moses, we agitate for more
and want to be in control of the relationship
but we do not get what we want.

Even so, and point number two,
our smallness doesn’t mean we are stuck
hiding in the cleft.

Instead, we can storm the gaps.
Like Annie Dillard says, “’…There is always a temptation
to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues…’”
(But) “I won’t have it,” she says.
“The world is wilder than that in all directions,
more dangerous and bitter,
more extravagant and bright.
We are making hay when we should be making whoopee;
we are raising tomatoes
when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”

And so here is a fitting end to Epiphany
and this sermon.
Here is how we can storm the gaps.
We have a covenant,
the one we take hold of in baptism
and that we claim
is the shape of our spiritual practice.
There is nothing itsy-bitsy
or diddling about it.
If we are actively engaged in this covenant,
even if only one promise at a time,
it will get us rattled,
it will get us in trouble — good trouble —
and it will open the dangerous
dimensions of the world all around us.

We have been reminding ourselves of these promises
all Epiphany, so no one should be shocked
when we get pushed out of the itsy-bitsy
into the wind fiercely howling
between the gaps.

Here is what you and I say we will do.
Here are the promises of our spiritual practice.
You tell me if they are itsy-bitsy.
First, we promise to mine the wisdom
and stay within the community of worship
that will make us cry.

This wisdom, and this community,
will cause us to feel one another’s pain
and to voice our own,
and then to sing about it
as well as eat the bread and wine of affliction.
We promise to stay connected,
which is turbulence and trouble enough for anyone.
There is no itsy-bitsy about this promise.

We also say we will persevere
in confronting our demons —
that we will actually stalk the gaps
in our own shadow
and name the problem characters we find in there.
We say we will recognize and name
the things we do
and the tendencies we have
that we are not proud of
and that we know cause problems for others.
And then, having done all that,
we will turn around and be different.
We say that, and then we promise to do it.
That in itself is a wild promise!

Then we promise,
in our baptismal covenant,
that our lives will become — actually,
that we will become —
the wisdom, the love, and the hope
that Jesus promised.
Really, we say that.
It is in the promise we make
that by word and example
we will proclaim the divinity
that animated the human known as Jesus.
That is no diddling around in that promise.

After we have promised
that our lives will embody divinity,
we then promise that we will look for
and serve divinity in all people —
including the radical act
of loving our neighbor as ourselves.
I don’t think we have any ideas
how dangerous this promise is.

Finally, in our stalking the gaps
and putting ourselves in the hazardous situation
of trying to be where God has just been,
we promise to strive for justice
in a world and economy that bleeds injustice;
strive for peace in a world at war;
and most poignant of all,
respect the dignity of every human being.
We promise these things as if,
as if,
they were just one more thing
we will do today
along with grocery shopping
and emailing the kids.

Here is what I know.
I know that Moses couldn’t look on God’s face
and that we can’t either.

In fact, the best we can do
is see where God just was —
whether it was a thousand years ago
or twenty seconds.
We are always working with less information
than we want to know
and with a God that is less knowable
than we want or hope for.

But that does not handicap us
from stalking the gaps
and resisting the temptation
to live itsy-bitsy lives
that are measurable and safe.

We have promises to make
and promises to keep
and they are not itsy-bitsy at all.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Jesus, Moses, Whoopee

13 A Pentecost 2020: The Beginning of God (according to Exodus 3:1-15

August 30, 2020 by Cam Miller

Sermon Video

Sermon Text

We are Christians,
but the reason we talk about
the Judeo-Christian tradition
is that we were Jews first.

Jesus, who is the central figure of our religion –
the Wisdom Teacher, Gautama, or Messiah…
the HUGE One at our center – was a Jew.
If we desire to know where Jesus was coming from
then we need to know and feel
the biblical narrative that lived under his skin.

If the empty tomb is the primal Christian moment
then the burning bush is the primal moment in the Hebrew Testament.

There are other rival primal moments though,
unlike in the New Testament,
but Exodus 3:1 through chapter 4:17
is the core primal narrative to which Jesus was rooted.

WWJT – What Would Jesus Think?
Whatever it was, he would have
thought it
through the lens of Exodus 3:1-15.

Now the ancients of many cultures throughout history
believed that a story had power:
If you tell the story,
and you tell it well,
and you tell it often,
then it becomes your story.
Then – then – YOU become part of the story,
and the STORY shapes you
and the story SHAPES those who live with you.

In other words, life becomes shaped
in the image of the story.

On the surface of it,
that sounds ridiculous – we’re too sophisticated
to believe that a story has power
when we know darn well that life is shaped by bacteria,
DNA, and physics.
But be that as it may,
we also know in our bones,

in the muddy and gritty experiences of our lives,
that the ancients were right.
The story we tell shapes life.

This could be a sermon about getting in touch
with whatever story we have hitched our life to –
the story or stories that are shaping who we are and life around us.

That is a pretty big deal,
and discovering our story
is an essential chore of spiritual practice.

But I am sticking to THE story today
because the one evangelical bone in my body –
the mandible bone of the preacher –
thinks this story needs to be the core story
of our primal narrative as Christians.
As I tell you about it,
it will become obvious why it was also
the primal narrative of 18th and 19th century slave theology
in the United States.
We would do well to re-enter this story ourselves.

Anyway, just remember that the story we tell
shapes the life we live
and shapes life itself.

In the story of Exodus 3:1-15,
we learn right up front, at the very beginning,
what the differences are
between God and human beings.

Understand please, this is the very first appearance of God
in the whole of the Biblical narrative.

We heard about a few things that God did in Genesis
but until this moment with Moses,
God has been behind the curtain.
It is here that God inserts godself
smack dab in the middle of things.

Also understand
that while we are used to thinking
that the Book of Genesis
is the beginning of the bible, it is not.
Genesis is a prequel –
like the three Star Wars movies added to the first trilogy
to explain how it all began.
Genesis came later,
much later in historical time
and was then added as a preface to the Exodus story.

But the biblical story
really begins with Hebrews in slavery in Egypt.
The story begins by telling us about
an increased cruelty and oppression
heaped upon the slaves
because Egyptians lived in fear of the Hebrews
who had grown to out-numbered them.
All tyranny lives in fear of the oppressed
rising up to overthrow the tyrants.

We read about the same fear among white slave owners
in the colonial United States
and in the pre-Civil War South.

So 3:1 is the first appearance of God in the bible.
First impressions make a big difference.
Let’s look at what we learn about God
right from the beginning.

What strikes me is that, unlike us,
God knows how to create heat and light without fuel.
We, on the other hand, are consumers
from the first moment we slip from the dark.
Our fuel-efficiency is pretty poor too.
But we learn that with God,
as with all energy,
it changes form
but is never destroyed.
Isn’t that the First Law of Thermodynamics or something?

Right there in the burning bush
we have an example of God adorned
in a basic law of physics.

So we, who are consumers of energy
meet God, who is the source of energy.
And then we learn that God,
making a first appearance in the bible,
has in fact been around for a long, long time –
even longer than the story:
“I am the God of your fathers and mothers,” God says.

But now, here, in the second paragraph,
is where we learn the most important things about God –
most important to us human beings, that is.

Right up front God tells us what happened:
First, God says, “I saw the misery of my people.”

Second, God says, “I heard their cry
as they were being beaten and whipped by their taskmasters.”

Third, God says, “I know their suffering.”
I want to stop with this one
and just stare at it for a moment.
Think.
”I know their suffering” means
that God suffers too.
How did our story ever come to include a god
that was impervious to pain and above it all?

Fourth, God says, “I became present to them
so they might be delivered from their oppression.”
And finally, fifth, God says, “I acted,
so that they could be liberated
and be given an abundant alternative.”

I saw
I heard
I knew
I became present
I acted.

Going forward,
whether in Exodus, Ruth, Matthew, or Paul,
we will find one or more of these five characteristics of God.
If we don’t, then it is a different story
we are reading.

This is NOT the story of a god that just hangs out
up there or out there
as an amorphous energy –
that is the story of a different god
from the God in the Exodus story.
We know right up front
that God is a god who sees,
hears, knows,
is present,
and acts.

Now enter human beings.
Moses is the original Prophet –
a religious leader who is equal parts social critic,
political activist, and spiritual guide –
and he is also the prototype of human relationship
with God.

We notice that Moses does something smart
straight off the bat – he hides his face.

He knows, as we all know,
that being in close proximity to God
is like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
We can’t survive such intimate,
unadulterated holiness.
So Moses covers his face and turns away.

But Moses goes downhill from there,
and that is part of the beauty of the narrative:
Story don’t lie.
It is actually a very funny conversation
that gets lost in translation.
It goes like this.

”Moses, I want you to go back to Egypt
and tell Pharaoh to let my people go.”

We have to picture the look on Moses’ face
because Moses is an escaped assassin
with a price on his head –
put there by Pharaoh who felt personally betrayed by Moses.
It was a personal vendetta thing.

God could probably have knocked him over with a feather.
Moses finally responds:
Uh, you know, I am not really up to the job.
I am not powerful enough to face Pharaoh like that.”

Objection number one.

“Not to worry Moses,” God retorts,
“I will be with you and I am powerful enough for both of us.”
“Well that’s nice, O burning bush, but exactly which god are you?
I’m I dealing with a Sun, Rain, Fertility, Earth, or Wind god?
I mean, Pharaoh is a god too,
and he has lots of gods working with him.
I can’t go up against all of that power
without knowing who has my back!”

Objection number two.

”Aw, go on Moses, just go back to Egypt,
gather all the elders around you
and tell them that “I AM” sent you.
You can tell that to Pharaoh too.
Tell him I am is not ‘a’ god
but ‘I am’ THE God.”
“Well, I certainly appreciate you your ‘I AMness,’
but somehow I don’t think they are going to believe
that I am on a first name basis with THE God.”

Objection number three.

If we use our imagination, we can almost see
Moses backing away slowly from the bush
a little more with each objection.
This is where we run out of story
in today’s reading.
But because it is THE story
I am going to tell you how it ends.
God says, “Oh, don’t worry about it,
I’ll give you lots of powerful magic.
Here watch – “
and God does several very cool magic tricks.

While Moses must have been impressed
he may still thought he could smell a rat.
After all, why doesn’t God deal directly to Pharaoh.
Was this I AM god unsure it could prevail over Pharaoh?

Moses surely had plenty of survival instinct like most human beings.
He didn’t make it out of Egypt in the first place
by acting as anybody’s fool.
So Moses says, “Oh Lord, I would love to do what you ask
but really, I have a speech impediment – a very disturbing disability –
and clearly you need someone more articulate than me.

The fourth objection.

At this point God might be getting impatient
and wondering about what kind of partner Moses would be.
”I told you,” God says, “I will be with you
and I will put the words you need
right on your very tongue.”

Moses is running out of excuses.
”Oh Lord, you are so generous,
but why don’t you send someone else?”

The fifth objection.

This time there is anger in God’s voice.
”Look, you little weasel,
I will send your brother Aaron with you.
He has the gift of gab enough for both of you. Now go.”
All five objections are over-ruled so Moses finally has to go.

The whole thing ends up pretty well
following some dramatic moments of suspense.
But this beginning,
which may have been written
as a liturgical recitation of some kind,
is the core of the narrative.
It presents a pretty clear contrast between God –
who sees,
hears, knows,
becomes present,
and acts –
with us human beings –
who fear,
connive,
make excuses,
second-guess,
manipulate,
and resist.

It seems pretty obvious to me
that we have forgotten the power of the story we tell,
or been convinced that we live in a universe
that only has one story to which everything is subject –
a kind of story bubble.

Capitalist economics is one such story bubble –
we’re in a dog-eat-dog world,
and greed is the invisible hand
moving all human behavior,
so the best thing we can do
is be a winner.

Fundamentalist religion is another story bubble –
we have the truth and those who do not believe our truth
are enemies of God.
Our task is to be powerful enough
to make human society conform to truth
and so bring about God’s blessing.

Scientific determinism may be the biggest,
most powerful bubble yet today – it says that since
there is a cause or causes for everything in nature,
whether known or unknown,
and we exist in nature,
then all human action is likewise determined.

So what is your primal narrative?
It really does make a difference
because conscious of it or not,
you and I are acting out the story we have been given
or adopted.

The story we tell,
the one we see ourselves as living in,
is hugely powerful.
And not to put too dark a tone to it,
we better know what story we are in
or which story we want to be in
because there are a whole bunch of people
telling us which story we are in –
and doing so, to appropriate our stories
into theirs.

It seems to me that if our spirituality
actually has any meaning or importance to us,
that the Judeo-Christian story
is one we would want to lean into –
to see it as our story.
I do not mean literally – I am not a fundamentalist.
I mean to understand what that story tells us
about God, ourselves, and the kingdom
that God dreams for us to create on earth.

It is a story that has power
and could have more power
should we opt to live into it.

Well, as they say,
it’s just a story –
a story that each of us is living one way or another.
But it truly matters how we read it
and what version we embrace because,
under the power and influence of story,
it will become the world we live in
and the people we become.

I appreciate you being with me
and listening.
I hope it offers a fertile place for your own thoughts.
Peace be with you.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: God, Moses, your story

3 Lent C, 2019: Burning Bush Again

March 24, 2019 by Cam Miller

Sebastien Bourdon, Burning Bush

All biblical texts are not equal:
if today’s readings from Exodus and Luke
were power-lifters,
Exodus would in the Heavyweight Class
and Luke in Featherweight.

The gospel for today
is nearly undecipherable in any meaningful way –
and even if it weren’t,
it is overwhelmed by a Hebrew Scripture
that demands its voice be heard.

As I sometimes do,
I am going to act like a radio preacher
and walk through this amazing,
incredible,
absolutely fantastic,
and astounding text
from Exodus.

These verses form the bedrock
of everything there is to say
about God.

Everything else,
everythingelse
we can say about God
rests upon this single moment of revelation.

Now, because we live in the 21stcentury,
the first silly thing we want to ask is,
Did it really happen?
It’s almost a knee-jerk question,
as if the ability to answer it
is the only thing that would make it credible.
Our minds have been molded to ask such questions
even though it is impossible
for Scripture to answer them.

Instead, because deep inside of us
is buried the ancient memories
of our pre-modern ancestors, we ask:

What is the wisdom embedded here? And,
what is the question
that the text is answering?
If we ask the text those questions,
then the first thing we notice
is that Moses is not among the Hebrews.
He is watching his father-in-law’s sheep,
a man who was the priest
of another religion.
Understand that in this story,
there is no Hebrew religion.
It doesn’t exist yet.
In fact, this is where it begins.
We imagine,
because it was placed as the first book of the Bible,
that all that stuff in Genesis came first.
Nope. It starts here, with Exodus.
Genesis is a later made prequel, like in Star Wars.
The history of the Hebrews
begins on Mount Horeb,
the mountain of a Midianite God.

So, from the very beginning,
our religion, even though we quickly forgot it,
was deeply pluralistic.
Clearly there is more
than one understanding of God
right from the beginning of the story.
That is the first thing to notice about this story:
it is a story about GOD,
not “our” God, because
this God does not belong to us.

Think how different things would be
if that little piece of information had stuck!

The next something to notice
comes about with something weird happening.
The text describes a fire
that does not consume.

Now notice please,
the spookiness is assumed.
The text doesn’t ask how it happens.
It doesn’t ask why it happens.
The text doesn’t even register surprise
with such a bizarre thing taking place.

The text just says
the bush is burning without being consumed
and an angel’s voice issues from it.
No big deal.
Moses, even though he doesn’t know the God
he is about to meet,
and even though he has no experience
with any god other than Pharaoh –
whose household he grew up in –
somehow knows what to do
AND what not to do
when meeting a god.
DON’T LOOK and
TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES.

So, clearly, there were some generally known
rules of etiquette for meeting a god,
kind of like what to do when your hiking
and you encounter a bear.
Moses knows
that for humans to look upon God insures certain death.

That holds another piece of the story
we might want to notice, because
it also hints at some modern physics questions.
The finite cannot see the infinite.
The temporal cannot look upon the eternal.
The part cannot see the whole and survive.

This story does not exactly answer why,
but it does make a case for the physics in place
between the human and the holy:
the very nature of being human,
or being a small part instead of the whole,
is that if we are suddenly placed
in the presence of everything-that-is,
we will go out of existence.

If we want to think about such a big question,
it may be because, if we were to encounter God
in the same time and space and dimension,
we would lose our Self – our part-ness.

When the part is no longer a part
and becomes part of the whole, and it loses its Self.
It goes out of existence.
Which, by the way,
is also the Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Interesting…

So somehow Moses
not only knows what to do,
he also knows what to say:
“Here I am.”
And did you remember that, “Here I am”
is also what Noah said to God,
and what Abram said to God,
and what Samuel said to God,
and, by the way,
it is what Mohammad said to God?

“Here I am” is what the prophet says when God calls.
The text doesn’t tell us
how a prophet knows what to say, but there it is.

So, what we know up to this point,
is that Moses knows the protocol
for what to do and say when entering God’s air-space.

Now remember, there is no such thing as Judaism
at this point, and Christianity
is more than a millennium away.

What we need to notice from the text is that,
when it comes to an encounter with God,
there is no religion.

This is a big point in the text
that we seem to have missed somehow.
When the veil between the holy and the human
gets thin,
there is no religion.
Religion, brand name,
is utterly and totally irrelevant
at that moment.

Religion is about ideas
and rituals
and sacraments
and methodologies
and organizations,
and all those things we need
and we cherish
and we hate.

There is nothing wrong with all that human paraphernalia
but when it comes to an encounter with GOD,
it is utterly irrelevant.
At least one message of this story,
given that Moses is not any kind of religion
and he is on the mountain of a Midianite god
at the beginning of the ancient Hebrew story,
is that an encounter with God,
is beyond all religion
and available to anyone
of any religion.

But that is not the only message tucked in there.
Another message,
is that God is assumed – an encounter with God
is not out of the ordinary.
That may be something useful for us to note.
Ancient and modern poets and prophets
and many a musician and artist,
simply assume an encounter with God
is a natural part of living.

So if this story were an orchestral piece,
all of that is in the first movement.

Then the story shifts.
We leave the realm of human beings
filtered through Moses
and its implications for us,
and we move into the realm of the holy.

In other words,
the text is going to tell us something
about God.

We might imagine that,
because it is the Bible,
such information is normal.

But the Bible is far more about human beings
than it is about God.
God is stingy with information
and self-revelation,
which brings up another point.

Not all religions are alike –
that is a modern, liberal idea that is baloney.
Religions are very different,
and they reflect the very different cultures
within which they arose.

So generally, there are two categories of religion:
Revealed and Unrevealed.
The revealed religions are those that believe
God is the only source to provide information about God.
In other words, God unveils godself
only when and if God chooses to do so.
The word “revelation” means, literally, to unveil.
The UNrevealed religions,
like Buddhism and Hinduism,
believe that wisdom, or divine wisdom
if a god is involved,
can be uncovered by US.
Through our human methodologies
like meditation, yoga, tai chi, fasting,
and any number of disciplines,
humans can unlock the mysteries.
So revealed and unrevealed religions
begin from different assumptions.

As Christians,
rooted as we are in this Exodus text of ancient Israel,
we belong to the “revealed” category:
We know nothing
beyond what God wants us to know about God.
That means this text from Exodus
is God’s first and most elemental revelation
about who God is
and what God is like.
This is the first and core unveiling,
and here is what we learn about God.

First, God tells Moses “who” god is:
The god of Moses’ ancestors.
God begins the introduction,
not with an autobiography of occupations or achievements,
but with a description of God’s relationships.

Again, we might take note
that “who”we are
has to do with who
we are in relationship with,
much more than what we do or did for money.

Next, the text describes how God behaves
and it is astounding.
God sees the misery of the Hebrews in Egypt.
God hears their cries when they are abused.
God feels their suffering.

Then, because God sees and hears and feels,
God acts,
in this case, bringing about their liberation.

Now, because we are modern and post-modern people,
we may need to disengage from the idea
that God actually acts in human history,
whether on behalf of those who are marginalized
or anybody else.
That in itself is a big question.

But first, I want us to ponder this amazing fact.
Prior to this story,
the gods of the ancient world
were not this kind of god.
Prior to this Exodus text,
if you needed something from a god,
like someone to fall in love with you
or to get pregnant,
or to have your crops yield an abundant harvest,
or for your enemy to get the runs and have a miserable day,
you went to the proper god
that had the power to act
in the sphere you needed action.
Then you made a sacrifice at the proper altar
through the appointed priest.

In other words, you had to purchase the desired benefit
with the required sacrifice
and that necessitated what we call money.
Rich people, of which there were a very few,
had greater and better access to those gods
and those benefits, than everyone else.
It seemed quite natural
that the universe operated as a divine hierarchy
since human society did too.

But with the Exodus story
there enters a new God,
or a God newly encountered.
It is not quite the one and only God yet, because
monotheism would take many more generations to form.
But this newly encountered God
is a god who hears the cries of slaves.
Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who sees what is going on
among the marginalized.

Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who actually listens
to the groans of people
who are the dregs of the society.

Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who actually feels – knows personally –
the suffering of the nobodies.

You see?
Whether we think Exodus is an actual historic moment
and mystical encounter with God,
or just the emergence of an historic idea,
this is an amazing turn of events.
Even though everything that human beings can see
would suggest the existence of a God
who only cares about the powerful
and the privileged,
there appeared an ancient text
with a very different narrative:

God sees and hears and knows
the suffering of those who are
beaten and abused and exploited.
And not only that,
what God does,
what God is all about,
is acting in history on their behalf.

What an incredible text.
You see why it is so amazing?

 

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Burning bush, Moses, revealed and unrevealed religions

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