Episode 7: Moses & The Exodus
On Wednesday I attended the funeral of a woman who died of cancer, a mother of two sons, the youngest 13. Her devastated husband was shaken to the core to lose this love of his life. Who am I now? he asked, without her? Impossible. This thing he must do now, to live into a future without her? It’s impossible.
Today begins Advent, a season of waiting for the arrival of our Savior. This first week of Advent is framed by hope. Hope is trusting in a future we can’t see right now. Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Martin Luther King’s closest friend and advisor, said “I don’t know what the future may hold, but I know who holds the future.” This is hope.
When our story opens, Moses is an 80 year old shepherd, who fled Egypt decades ago after murdering an overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave. After a dramatic childhood, he has lived out most of his days in the relative quiet and obscurity of the wilderness, tending sheep. When, from the bush that burns without being consumed, he is addressed by the God of his ancestors, and told that God has heard the people’s suffering, that God will be sending Moses to the pharoah to demand their freedom, and draw them into them a different future, Moses asks, “Who am I to do this?’
Who am I to do this? Who are we to bring about the future we think needs to happen? Or to stand against the future we dread coming? Who are we to move forward in impossibility and make a life of it?
God answers Moses’ question with God’s own name, “Tell then I AM Who I Am has sent you,” and then, what gets translated “I will be with you,” God’s next statement is actually more like, “You are the one I am with." Then God says, "Watch what I can do."
I Am Who I Am, and you are The One I Am With. Watch what I can do.
The baby whose life was spared by Shiprah and Puah, and saved by Jochebed and Miriam, who was first named “Drawn Out of the Water” by the pharoah’s daughter, is now called “The One Who I Am With” and summoned by God to join in as God delivers God’s people from slavery.
Moses is not the protagonist of this story. He is not the savior, he’s the sidekick. What is about to happen is not from anything Moses can do, it never has been, not with Moses or Joseph or Jacob or Sarah and Abraham – it’s always been God’s work - God’s choosing and God’s equipping, God’s plan and God’s action. Moses’ work is to surrender in obedience to God – to join in God’s work and trust that God will bring it about. Moses is called into a future he can’t see and can’t possibly make happen. But he must first know who it is who holds the future.
So God gives Moses God’s name.
This name, Yahweh, is ambiguous in that it is both outside time and timefull – past, present and future are all wrapped up at once in the word. It could be, I am who I am, I am who I will be, I am who I was, I was who I will be. God is always present, past and future, outside of time, but fully entering time with us.
The name is an action word, exist, cause to become, and come to pass are all wrapped up inside of it. We don’t know what the vowels are so we guess, and say Yahweh, or Jehovah, but to speak it alone almost sounds like breathing. It’s shortened Jah, like Hallelujah! Or, Praise God! The angels announcing God’s coming into the world sing their hallelu to Jah with the startled shepherds. The crowds waving palm branches shout their hallelu to Jah at the man on a donkey, praising the God who was, and is, and always will be right there in their midst.
Even though the name Yahweh is written 7000 times in the Old Testament, it was not spoken aloud from even shortly after the Exodus. It felt too intimate, too sacred, so it is instead translated Adonai, and everywhere it appears in our bibles it’s instead written “the Lord” in small caps. It seemed too easy to exploit, to manipulate the name of God for our own purposes, to act as though the power is ours rather than God’s. Access to God is on God’s terms, not ours, and not to be taken lightly, made into a platitude, or assumed for our own ends.
God sees the people’s suffering; God opens up God’s own self to share the suffering and makes Godself vulnerable. When God gives Moses God’s name, God says, I am for you, and you may address me, I will be here. God invites relationship. Invites trust. God comes into our broken places as God’s self. Not a nameless king or pharoah lording power over us, but I AM Who I Am, here in it with us.
“I will teach you what you are to say,” God tells Moses, who is so worried about speaking. And I will give you someone to speak with and for you, your brother Aaron. In other words, Show up. I’ll take it from there. And you are not in it alone.
So God makes Moses into a minister, as God is. Then, God invites the pharoah to minister as well, which is to say, to come back to his humanity. We are made in the image of a ministering God, and we live that truth out when we minister to others. Again and again, God commands the pharaoh to let the people go, and again and again Pharoah resists. His heart is hardened, whether by God, or his own stubbornness, or both, and he does not submit.
He will not win. God will prevail. Pharoah is used to power and control, but his power is nothing against the maker of the universe - it was no match for the trust and obedience of the lowly midwives through whom God spared the Hebrew babies and set Moses on his path. The pharoah can’t stop any of this from happening. He could help it happen, but he chooses not to, so it happens over and against him instead of with him.
When the people have fled Egypt - when the story of the Passover that becomes the meal that feeds them with memory and gratitude for centuries to come, turning their hearts to who God is and what God is up to and helping them watch for God’s coming, when the frantic departure has happened and they’ve begun the journey, hemmed in from before and behind, protected and guided by Yahweh, and it seems like they’re in the clear - then the real terror descends.
Suddenly they’re pinned between the watery chaos of the sea that is the death in front of them and the raging armies bearing down that is the death behind. Now the impossibility is stark – What are they to do? Nothing. They can do nothing. Only God can act.
When we are trapped in impossibility, when death is all we can see, there is nothing we can do to pull ourselves out or to save one another. There is nothing we can say to fix or change things for someone in that place. Who are we to make anything happen?
The command comes to them there, in that utterly hopeless place, Do not be afraid, Be still. Be still and see what God will do for you.
And then God acts. God parts the waters of death and leads them into new life. And when they’re safely across, and the impossibly powerful force of destruction that is the entire Egyptian army is utterly destroyed in their wake, sister Miriam, the now-elderly prophet, leads the people of God in singing their hallelu to Jah and praising the God who saves.
The future, and our futures, are held by I Am Who I Will Be, who calls each of us One Whom God Is With.
God comes in to be with us. Both cosmically, to save us all, and personally, to lead us through all the deaths of our lives into new life, again and again. The one who brings being into being, has come, is here. Jesus Christ is God with us. Born into this life of dying, Jesus takes our impossibility into the very heart of God.
In Christ, we are made bearers of hope in the world, and for the world. We become people through whom God brings about God’s future. People who go into impossibility alongside others as those God is with and we wait there for God to act.
We are drawn into the timefulness of Yahweh. With eyes wide open, we see the world as it is - without hiding in denial or fleeing to optimism - but we also know that what is is not all there is or will be. Trusting this, as Rev. David Wood said so beautifully a few weeks ago in his letter about hope: instead of reactive we become responsive. Instead of anxious, we become available. And instead of distracted, we become attentive, watching the one who holds the future to be now who God has been.
Our story is not our own, it is God’s. It is the story of those gone before and those to come, it is memory and gratitude, water and naming, impossibility and deliverance. It is the story of the God right here with us, who sees and bears our suffering, who sends us to be ministers to one another and receive the ministry of others, without knowing how we will do this, only promising to be with us and to tell us what we are to say. It is the story of the God who is turning the world around in hope and can be joined but cannot be stopped.
Who are we to bring about the future we think needs to happen? Or to stand against the future we dread coming? Who are we up against death and despair? When all is lost and we can’t see our way forward, when the impossibility is most stark –we can do nothing. Only God can act. And God says, Don’t be afraid. Be still and watch what I will do.
Together, for others and for this world, we trust in a future we can’t yet see, because we know who holds the future. We are people of hope.
Amen.
Where we've been -
Episode 2: Noah (conversation - so this sermon is from 2014)