People of Hope

Exodus 7-15 

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 1: The Beginning

Episode 2: Noah (conversation - so this sermon is from 2014)

Episode 3: Hagar, Abraham & Sarah 

Episode 4: Jacob

Episode 5: Joseph

Episode 6: Brave Women of Egypt

Recipients of Grace: God-bearers and Love Sharers

 

Luke 1:26-38

 

When I announced on Facebook last week that my book is coming out in June, I experienced that Facebook phenomenon - where people from different parts of my life, people I haven’t seen in decades, people I knew in different parts of the country or different countries, responded to me with well wishes. It was so nice to hear from them, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable when I realized how many of these people sending me kind messages, are actually in the book. So many of them.  

People who said, “So excited for you, Kara! I’ve just pre-ordered my copy!” are going to open the book unsuspectingly in June and get partway through and suddenly recognize themselves on the page.  Some are there by name, many others not, but when they get to their part they will know it’s them. 

 

But somewhere in the middle of the week I shifted from mild horror to gratitude.  God has met me through so many different people, in small ways, and big ways, and ways most of them were probably not even aware of at the time. So my story is their story too.  

 

We are part of each other’s story.  We forget this, but it’s true. We are all connected. Every person’s story is part of other people’s stories, and they are all one big story – the story of God, the story of love.

 

“In the sixth month,” our text begins, which isn’t a beginning at all.  We act as though the incarnation of God coming into this world in the flesh begins here, with this moment of great invitation in the conversation between Mary and Gabriel, but it doesn’t begin here, really.  This part of the story starts six months into someone else’s story – Elizabeth and Zechariah, who were old and childless and are now expecting a baby boy who will be the messenger of the Messiah, and Elizabeth is 2/3 of the way through her pregnancy by the time Gabriel is sent to recruit Mary.  

 

But that story is inside another story too, and that inside of others; this thing goes back farther and reaches out wider than any one person or family, any one people or nation, any one year or century or millennia, even. Abraham and Sarah, Ishmael and Hagar are part of this story, Isaac, Rebekah and Jacob and Leah and Rachel and generations and centuries of a people longing for a Messiah, people enduring oppression and finding freedom, losing and finding their way, trusting and longing for God. It’s the story shaped by the rise and fall of empires, by flood and promise, and it goes all the way back to a voice speaking life into being, light into darkness.  

 

No story is ever on its own, no person’s story is ever just their own.  Which is to say, no moment or act of love is ever isolated – it’s all connected; we are all connected. 

 

So when Mary receives this invitation to be part of God’s coming in, God’s love coming right inside of all of this to be with us as one of us, she hears also, at the same time, that she is not in this alone.  That even now her relative Elizabeth in her old age has conceived a son and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. Gabriel says, Your part starts here, Mary, but Elizabeth and Zechariah – this is their story too that you are stepping into. And they are already part of yours. You are not in it alone. 

 

This is the 4^th week of Advent when we light a candle for Love.  Love is what we are here for - we are made to love and be loved.  Love is our life instinct, the energy that drives us back to our source and purpose.  Love is our deepest belonging – to God and to each other. 

Loving each other is to vulnerably give ourselves to another and receive them, and when we love another person we feel that depth of belonging, and tap into the belonging that holds us all together in God. God breathes love into us and that makes us alive, connected, human. And love never ends. Not ever.  

 

No life is ever just our own – we lie to ourselves when we act like this is so. We always belong to all others and they to us. But from this moment onward, Mary will feel it. She will know herself and all others to be held in God’s love – she will see her participation.  Mary was being invited to have her life commandeered by love. She is being asked to bear God, as God comes in to love the world. 

 

“Favored one” Gabriel calls her. That’s a misleading translation that makes it sound like it’s something Mary has done that has endeared her especially to God and earned her this place.  Really, that word “favored” means, recipient of God’s grace, one on whom God is pouring grace.  So when Gabriel says, “Don’t be afraid, you have found favor with God,” he is really saying, Don’t be afraid, God is pouring grace on you.  

 

God will come into Mary’s impossibility with grace and claim her for the embodiment of love, and from this point onward, she must see the world as loved by God. She can’t not see all other people as those to whom, for whom, God comes in, because it is through her own body that God is coming to them, it is by her hands and words and actions and tears and laughter that love will touch the world.  

 

Mary’s invitation is unique – to bear God within her, let God love the world through her. But Mary’s invitation is also the invitation God extends to us all every moment. To vulnerably open our hearts and let God claim our lives.  When we do we too will bear God within us and let God love the world through us. 

 

How can this be?  Mary asks.  It’s impossible.  And Gabriel preaches to Mary what our own tired, fearful, confused and frustrated hearts need to hear, though we can barely allow ourselves to hear it.  Our vigilant safeguarding heads block us from hearing it, but I invite you to hear it now, as Mary’s heart opened up in spite of her own protective head to hear this from God’s messenger: Nothing is impossible with God.  Nothing.

  

Lots of things are impossible with us. So many things are impossible. We know impossibility in the core of us, and we fight against it all the time. We can’t extend our lives, our health, our minds.  We can’t guarantee those we love stay always safe and well.  We have broken dreams we can’t reclaim, and broken relationships we can’t figure out how to mend, and brokenness woven right into all the complex layers of our relating to each other as a nation.  Day after day, we live right up close to impossibility.   I mean look at us, this virus that we can’t see is ravaging the human population of the whole entire world. If there were ever an Advent to feel our human impossibility, this is it.  This is the time for sitting in the darkness and longing for the light. 

 

So when God sends messengers to tell us that you and I will bear the love that we are incapable of bearing, that we will be people through whom connection and belonging reach into the world, into the places of need and struggle, to those from whom we feel impossibly disconnected, we too say, How can this be?

How can this be since I am afraid? How can this be since I feel nothing but contempt or confusion toward those people? How can this be since we have nothing in common, we don’t believe the same things even? How can this be since I am so far away? How can this be since I have nothing to give? No experience, no resources, no voice? How can this be?

 

And the word comes back to us just as that word has come to all bearers of God’s love since the beginning of time: Nothing is impossible with God.  

So it’s ok if things are impossible with us.  Nothing is impossible with God. 

 

Your story is the story of God who comes in. And it’s part of the stories of all those around you. It doesn’t start with you, your involvement begins in the sixth month—or the sixth year, the sixtieth year, the six hundredth year—of someone else’s story, just as someone else’s story starts in the middle of yours, and one day you may find that you are mentioned as having been a bearer of God to them.  We are all connected, and we are all held in love.

 

I love that Mary’s first move after the angel leaves is to hightail it to Elizabeth and Zechariah’s house.  Perhaps like those three in those days, we might look on one another as recipients of grace and remind each other that we are not in this alone. Perhaps like they did, we might help each other trust the God who comes in as God seeks to come into the world through us, and together navigate the deep toll it takes to live in such stark awareness of being so very beloved, among and alongside all these other deeply loved humans on this planet for whom God comes in. And together, like Zechariah, Elizabeth and Mary, right up against our own impossibility and the world’s, we will live from the nothing being impossible for God.

 

May it be so.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

Dust and breath

 Joel 2:12-13, Psalm 46

"Be still and know that I am God." Psalm 46:10

Remember that you are dust, And to dust you shall return.

Lent is a reminder that we are human beings, creatures, that we come from earth, soil, dust, and we will return to it.  No matter what we do on this life to try to outlive our humanity, to avoid our weakness, to transcend our station, we still ultimately die, we are creatures, trapped in our creatureliness.

But to be made from dust, to have the breath of life breathed into us…

"The Hebrew name for the divine is composite of the words Hayah, Heveh Yehiyeh (was, is, will be).  It conveys the mystery of timelessness, of infinite beingness." This is our source. This is who holds our life. The name of God is made entirely of vowels and can’t really be pronounced. It is said that if you say the name of God as it is written it would sound like an exhaled breath. 
Let’s do that together.

We just said God’s name.

The first thing a child does when it comes into the world from the waters of its mother’s womb is say the name of God.

The last thing a human being does before leaving this planet is to say the name of God.

Grace is God’s being, shared with us. That God’s love is poured out in love and care for us is the foundation of our own being. We are made to be cared for by our creator. We are made to care for each other.

But so much of the time, we reject the care of others and we pretend we don’t need god’s care.  We act as though we are in it alone. This, by the way, is sin, which we will talk more about this weekend. 

Lent is a whole season to return to the truth of our belonging to God and each other –which isn’t found in strength or invincibility, but in weakness, nothingness, and impossibility.  

Not in anything we do or accomplish or say or become or fail at. Just in our breath. Just by being. We are creatures, made in the image of God.

We cannot, on our own, transcend our nothingness. But we can trust the one who transcends all, the ineffable name, we can trust that our lives are held in something greater, that our being is secure in the love of the one who ministers to us.  God comes into this world in Jesus, taking on all death, all nothingness and impossibility, taking it into Godself so there is nothing anymore that can separate us from God.

Lent is an invitation into the courage to be honest, your real, vulnerable old self, the part that simply is.  The part that comes with breath and body and sadness and longing. It's a chance to take off some armor, to lay down some weapons, to rest in the love of God that holds you, that you mostly act like you don't need when really you absolutely do.

What would you like to let go of to make space in your life for God to encounter you?

What do you use to avoid your nothingness, to build your somethingness, to forget your creatureliness?

When boredom, despair, sadness or emptiness rise up, what do you use to distract yourself?

What's your "go to" pacifier or diversion?

Social media? TV? Snacking? Alcohol? Solitaire? Addictive patterns and habits?

How do you check out of uncomfortable feelings?

What do you use to numb?

This Lent we are going toward our nothingness.

We are welcoming the absence, and seeking God there.

You are invited to fast from (let go of temporarily) whatever it is you use to avoid the abyss.

Turns out we have a God who goes right into our places of suffering and absence, and shares them with us. We generally avoid meeting God there.

This lent we are going there.

Return to me with all your heart. God says.

Be still. our scripture says.

This appears two places in scriptures as a command from God. The first place the command is given, the people of God have been delivered out of Egypt, but Pharoah has changed his mind, and has sent his entire army after them to destroy them. They are at the edge of the Red Sea, the chaos of waters in front of them and Pharoah's whole army behind them, in the face of certain death, and God says,

Be still. The Lord will fight for you.

The second place this command is given is in our Psalm, where it says, Nations are in an uproar, kingdoms totter, God raises his voice and the earth melts.

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still is not an invitation for when you already feel content, when things are going well and you're longing for some spiritual boost. It's for the chaos. For the impossibility. For the crisis, and the injustice and the division and the shame.

When things feel overwhelming around us. Be still.

When you find yourself fleeing your nothingness. Be still.

When you feel weak or lost. Be still.

When you sense the urge to make yourself big, to prove yourself, to insulate yourself. Be still.

Be till and know.

Be still and know I am God.

You are not God.

Stop moving.

Breathe in.

Feel your breath filling your body.

Feel your feet on the ground.

Feel your creatureliness.

Be here. Be now. Be still.

Let God be God.

You be still.

Let God meet you here.