This Lenten season has already been chock-full of Scriptural references to mountains, and here is yet another: Mount Horeb, the scene of Moses’ call. Mountains are places of lifted consciousness, of divine epiphany, of Holy instruction, symbolic of new life and new possibility by God’s blessing. Terrence Fretheim is quick to point out, lest we lose our head in the mountain-top clouds of symbolism, that there was nothing particularly holy or religiously significant about Horeb, which literally translates to “wasteland.” “There is no temple nearby where [Moses] might expect a divine appearance, no sign that this is a holy place…[yet] it would not be the last time that God chose a nontraditional, nonreligious setting for a hearing of the word.” [1]
Moses is drawn to the presence of God, not by religious intent, but, by his own curiosity. He didn’t know he was approaching the presence of God, revealed in his fear at learning that it is, in fact, the presence of God in which he stands. God uses curiosity to invite us into our calling, suggests Fretheim. [2] Take a moment to consider that. How might God be using your own curiosity and interest to call you to serve in a unique way? Back to Moses, now: there’s a bush and a fire, but the fire isn’t doing what most fires do to bushes...wouldn’t you be curious? Moses draws near and then a word, the divine word, comes “out of the bush.” “The rabbis spoke here of a divine condescension; ‘God made [God’s] presence lowly’ in order to give room for humankind to enter into a genuine conversation regarding the shape of the future.” [3]
“I’ve seen my people oppressed in Egypt; I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain.” God, here, identifies with the oppressed in three ways. God sees and hears and knows their situation. It is this third that sets God apart, claims Fretheim. “For God to know the people’s sufferings testifies to God’s experience of their suffering….For God to know suffering is to allow suffering to enter deeply into the divine being. Yet while God suffers with the people, God is not powerless in the face of it. However much God’s work may be complicated by it, the actual situation does not finally define what is possible for God; God is never stymied or immobilized by the engagement with suffering.” [4]
Then God says to Moses, “So get going, I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people out of Egypt.”
There have been other callings and divine commissions in Genesis, Abram being a fine and faithful example, but Moses’ calling in Exodus is the first of its kind: “Moses is called to be a messenger of the word of God.” [5] Moses is called to proclaim what God has seen, and heard, and known--that is, the oppression of the Israelites--and to proclaim God’s word of liberation of these people to their oppressor, the Pharaoh. Unlike Abram, however, whose response is almost too perfectly obedient to be believable, Moses puts up some resistance to this calling. The conversation seems more genuine.
“Who am I to do this?” Moses replies. One can almost hear the unwritten guffaw. Moses is not made a puppet by the presence of God nor by his divine calling. As Moshe Greenberg writes: “Those who are brought close to God retain their integrity even in moments of closest contact. They are not merely passive recipients, but active, even opposing respondents. There is true address and response, genuine give and take. The human partner has a say in shaping the direction and outcome of events.” [6]
“Who am I?” asks Moses. To which God responds, “I’ll be with you.” What if God is actually answering Moses’ question here? Who are you? You are the one with whom God is, the one whom God loves, the one whom God helps, the one whom God strengthens...before you identify yourself by your name, or your heritage, or your speech impediments, or your past sins, before you identify yourself by your weakness, your doubts, or your insecurities, recognize this: God is with you. “[Moses’] ‘Who am I’ will be undergirded by the God who knows who he is. This gives Moses possibilities he would not have in himself.” [7]
Moses isn’t satisfied with this response though, “Great, you will be with me. And I can tell the people that you sent me. Well, who are you?”
God’s response, writes Fretheim, is “one of the most puzzled over verses in the entire Hebrew Bible.” ’Eyeh ’asher ’eyeh. “I am who I am”; “I will be who I will be”; “I will be who I am/ I am who I will be.” It wouldn’t be an Old Testament sermon if I didn’t quote my seminary Hebrew professor, Carson Brisson, who suggested this translation: “I am the is-ing one.”
Over and above any and all attempts at definitively translating ’eyeh ’asher ’eyeh, lies an expression of divine self-articulation within the essence of the verb “to-be.” ’Eyeh is the first person singular form of the verb “to be,” one of my favorite verbs in all of Hebrew: “Hayah!” Say it with me. Aren’t you glad you came to church today?
The identity of God is rooted in the expression of existence. This concept opens up a whole can of worms in Paul Tillich’s systematic theology. Here is just a sampling of his work, through which I waded in putting together this sermon:
“The ontological question, the question of being-itself, arises in something like a ‘metaphysical shock’--the shock of possible nonbeing.” [8] This is, in a sense, the consciousness of mortality from which the whole season of Lent is derived: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.” This shock of nonbeing leads to tremendous anxiety, but awareness of our finitude also drives us to the question of God. [9] “[We] attribute substantiality to something which proves ultimately to be accidental--a creative work, a love relation, a concrete situation, [ourselves]. This is not self-elevation of the finite, but rather it is the courage of affirming the finite, of taking [our own] anxiety upon [ourselves]....[This is an articulation of] the courage which accepts the anxiety of nonbeing. The question of God is the question of the possibility of this courage.” [10]
If Tillich hasn’t lost you yet, you’re doing better than I.
All this to get to a profound statement about God as the ground of being. If you thought his previous material was hard to swallow, get ready for what comes next. “God does not exist. God is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny God.” [11] That is, God is not simply a being, but the one who makes all being possible. We have very limited language for expressing this reality, perhaps an indication of the difficulty we find in wrapping our heads around it. Not to discredit the profound and complex work of Tillich, but I think I prefer my old professor’s translation of God’s response to the question of God: God is the is-ing one.
It does us well to have some bewilderment and bafflement about the identity of God. This is why we don’t speak of God in terms of knowledge and knowing, but faith and believing. It also does us well to have a healthy skepticism of those who claim that they know exactly who God is. When we affirm our faith, I don’t ask “what do you know,” but “what do you believe.” I, for one, am glad that the identity of God doesn’t fit neatly in my brain, though I am also tempted, at times, to make it fit, for my own comfort. But, as we see later on in the story (in the creation of a golden calf by the anxious and doubting and desperate people), a god who “fits”, who can be directly seen and held, is an affront to the God who is the is-ing one.
Bewilderment and bafflement create a healthy curiosity about God. And God makes use of curiosity, as we see in today’s story, for God’s own purposes. Curiosity draws Moses to God, and leads him to question God. And, as Fretheim articulates, “human questioning leads to fuller divine revelation.” [12] It is through curiosity and questioning and that human action is drawn into the purposes of God. As Christians, we make a unique claim about the presence of God in humanity, which is to say that Jesus (the child who sat in the temple and asked baffling questions about God) was and is divine. As the ground of being, we cannot say that “God exists”, but we do claim that Christ exists. In Christ, God takes on the limits of time and space and form...yet somehow God’s purpose is not limited by them. The existence of the Christ is a proclamation of human existence in perfect unity with divine possibility. The cross is an expression of finitude and mortality and the anxiety of non-being. The resurrection is an expression of new-possibility and the indestructibility of the is-ing one. The cross and the Christ is the flame and bush all over again, in a sense: the presence of God is made known in a flame that does not consume the bush and in a death that does not, ultimately, consume the life of the Christ.
May our Lenten journey be a quest of curiosity that draws us nearer to the cross and the resurrection in ways that allows God to imbue our anxiety with courage, our doubt with revelation, and our life with new possibility. May your curiosity spark your calling. A calling that burns within you but does not consume you. Amen.
Footnotes:
1) Fretheim, Terrence. “Exodus” from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 54.
2) Ibid. 54.
3) Ibid. 55.
4) Ibid. 60.
5) Ibid. 51.
6) Ibid. 58.
7) Ibid. 61.
8) Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1. 163
9) Ibid. 166.
10) Ibid. 198.
11) Ibid. 205.
12) Fretheim. 62.