Exodus 3:13-20
13 But Moses said to God, “If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they are going to ask me, ‘What’s this God’s name?’ What am I supposed to say to them?”
14 God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.[a] So say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” 15 God continued, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever; this is how all generations will remember me.
16 “Go and get Israel’s elders together and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me. The LORD said, “I’ve been paying close attention to you and to what has been done to you in Egypt. 17 I’ve decided to take you away from the harassment in Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land full of milk and honey.” 18 They will accept what you say to them. Then you and Israel’s elders will go to Egypt’s king and say to him, “The LORD, the Hebrews’ God, has met with us. So now let us go on a three-day journey into the desert so that we can offer sacrifices to the LORD our God.” 19 However, I know that Egypt’s king won’t let you go unless he’s forced to do it. 20 So I’ll use my strength and hit Egypt with dramatic displays of my power. After that, he’ll let you go. (CEB)
“…With All My Wonders: Moses at the Burning Bush,” Week Two
In the middle of the night under the harsh fluorescent lights of the hospital ceiling, and shaking with tears, grief, and impotent rage, the father rocked back and forth in the chair that was next to the bed where his forty-year-old son had just died. The father was beyond expressing himself in even the simplest sentences, repeating to me over, and over, and over, as I sat next to him feeling just as impotent, “Why? Why? Why?” It is the question that many pastors dread, and none more so than me as a hospital chaplain on just my third day on the job. That simple question of why—why do bad things happen to good people—that question has caused more grief to be felt, more ink to be spilled, and more sermons to be spoken than maybe any other religious question under the sun. It is the most fundamental reason for why many of us are religious to begin with—to try to find the answers to the questions we cannot answer ourselves, those questions that gnaw at our consciences, and our souls ache because of it.
This week marks the second week of a four-week sermon series that we are walking through together. This series, “With All My Wonders,” will travel verse-by-verse through the story of Moses at the burning bush in the third and fourth chapters of Exodus. It is, I pray, a spiritually fulfilling segue from the Christmas season into Lent, for Lent always begins with the story of Jesus being called and then sent into the wilderness, just as Moses was—called by God here at the wilderness of the burning bush, and then sent to the wilderness of Egypt—a land he had not lived in for forty years. Remember where this story is in the chronology of Exodus—it is not that Moses is a native Midianite, called by his own God. No, Moses is a Hebrew child raised as an Egyptian (in the royal family, no less), but then he is cast into exile for murder, and he finds the beginnings of his redemption not in the glory of his former royalty, but in the fire of the presence of God. Last week, we explored the fundamental character of God, how a God of only a small, select people could become a God of all people. This week, we take on the preposterous task of actually trying to name such a universal, all-encompassing, all-everything deity.
Now, point blank, Moses’ question in verse 13 is not so much a question as it is the first of many excuses that we will hear from him over the next three weeks, and it is a pretty weak one at that. Moses is not fleet of speech or strong of tongue, so imagine this completely tongue-tied prince-turned-shepherd asking what is a fairly lame question—the purpose of the question isn’t to get an answer, it’s to collect yourself, to stall for time as you wait for something better to say. Moses is the kid in the back of the class, gets called on, and begins his answer by saying, “So, um, essentially, uh, what you’re asking me is, er…” It’s not noble prose! Moses is looking for a way out of this commission that has been bestowed upon him just a few verses ago, as God says, “Unto Pharaoh I shall send YOU.” And his leadoff hitter is a slightly tidier version of, “Well, I don’t know your name!”
It’s a simple protestation, to be sure, but God gives us a very un-simple answer—I am who I am. In Hebrew, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, and in English…we really do not know. God’s name is translated as “I am who I am” or “I am what I am.” One way of looking at this is, God is basically telling Moses, “It is none of your business who I am! I am who I am. Let’s get the focus back to you for the moment.” That doesn’t go down quite as easily for me, for two reasons—one is that it brings to mind that scene in the Disney movie The Lion King, where Rafiki jabs adult Simba in the nose and asks, “But who are you?” when Simba is trying to find the spirit of his father, Mufasa, and I think of the situation reversed—of what I saw in that hospital room years ago, of a father wondering who he is, that his love could not save his son from death, and of who he will be now, with a son no longer with the living. But the other reason is, quite simply, I truly do not think that “I am who I am” was actually the divine name.
There is another, less-used translation of the divine name, of ehyeh-asher-ehyeh, that usually does not make it past the footnotes of any given translation of the Scriptures, and that translation is, “I will be what I will be.” Now we’re getting somewhere. No longer is God defined circularly—God is what is, but God will be defined by what God will be—and what God will do. In the Exodus story, God is about to be defined by all of His signs and wonders that He is about to perform upon Egypt, and, by extension, upon Egypt’s gods. The plagues, the separation of the Red Sea, and even the manna from heaven in the wilderness, all are the tiniest glimpses of what God will be in this story.
It is still a frustrating answer, precisely because of its richness and complexity. This is not light versus dark, this is not black versus white, this is a powerful, heart-rending, and incredibly conflicting answer all at once. And, like most answers to the simplest questions—questions like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” or “How does a God of good create a devil?” so too does a simple question like Moses asking, “What name shall I call you?” always produce an enigmatic answer. This is great for me—this is why you pay me the big bucks, right? But it is a serious obstacle to being Christian, for wanting to be so presumptuous and selfish as to actually want to be closer to a God who insists on being cloaked in mystery.
Our entire lives are like this—lives that are not light or dark, black or white, and in this way, much as we try to come as close as possible to God, what we must realize is that our lives are already an incredibly close reflection of the divine name, of the very nature of God. We rise and fall upon our own successes and failures, we live and die with the approval of our closest family and friends, and yet we are remembered most not for who we are, but for what we do in this world. Just as God will be what God will be, so too will we be what we shall be—by serving at a community center, you become a volunteer. By engaging a child to read or write, you become a teacher. And by praying to Jesus and making the world a better place for your having been in it, you become a Christian. But, you say, we can be so many of those things at once—we can teach, and volunteer, and pray, and give. Yes. So too can God. Just as our lives refuse, in all their dilemmas and crises and decisions, to be classified in labels black and white to us, is it any wonder that Scripture is utterly incapable of similarly labeling the very existence of God, or that God would resist being so bluntly labeled and say to Moses upon Horeb, “I Will Be What I Will Be?” But, to any extent that there has been a adequate label of what God is, can, and will be in this world, it is this poem by the Episcopalian priest, the Rev. Carter Heyward:
God will judge with righteousness, justice, mercy those who batter, burn, sneer, discriminate, or harbor prejudice.
God will be battered as a wife and as a child.
God will have a mastectomy.
God will experience the wonder of giving birth.
God will be handicapped.
God will run the marathon.
God will win.
God will lose.
God will be down and out, suffering, dying
God will be bursting free, coming to life, for
God will be what God will be.
God will be what God will be. Let that be enough. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
January 29, 2012
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