Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
The Name of God
Scriptures: Exodus 3:1-15Romans 12:9-21
Consider Moses: we met him last week as his frantic mother set him adrift in the Nile in a basket covered in pitch in a desperate attempt to save his life.
The Hebrews were being subjected to a kind of genocide. Traditional genocide in the Middle East meant the men were all killed and the women kept as slaves, except that just the baby boys were being killed: the men were enslaved and put to work
As we know, Moses was rescued by an Egyptian princess and raised as her own son. A modern Canadian equivalent would be a 60s Scoop child. Moses had some sense of his language and culture – his own mother had been hired as his wet-nurse but that relationship would have ended once he was weaned. He was raised as an Egyptian royal prince in much more luxury than his own people. Even his name reflects this: Moses is not a Hebrew name; the Hebrew version is Moishe.
So Moses grows up with mixed feelings: he knows a bit about his origins, and in a burst of youthful activism he attacks a slave-driver who was beating a Hebrew and murders the man. But instead of being hailed as a hero, his own people were afraid of his temper and feared that he might kill them.
So, he fled for his life from Egypt into exile in Midian. He married a local woman and went to work for her father as a shepherd, watching the sheep and goats, which is where we meet him again, in today’s lesson.
Moses had quite the roller-coaster ride: from slave baby condemned to death; to adopted royal prince; to murderer and fugitive from justice; to a shepherd, working for his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian.
So this young man takes the sheep and goats far from their usual feeding grounds and ends up in front of the burning bush experiencing a Theophany: a direct experience of God. This is all very impressive and cool until God tells him to confront Pharaoh and demand that he release all the Hebrew slaves.
You can understand Moses’ reluctance. The Egyptian King was either his adopted grandfather or his adopted uncle by then, and Moses was supposed to order him to dismantle the economic system of slave labour that helped make Egypt rich? More than that, Moses was already wanted for murder and Pharaoh was not likely to be very forgiving. Besides, he hadn’t been married all that long; Moses wouldn’t want to leave his wife behind and can you imagine having to explain all this to his father-in-law? Sure, Jethro was a priest, but of the gods of Midian, not the God of Israel.
So Moses’ objection: “What? Why me? You’ve got the wrong guy!” is entirely reasonable. And God’s answer: “Don’t worry, I’ll be with you” probably didn’t reassure him much. People believed, in those days, that gods were pretty local, so God was basically saying to Moses that the one and only God of the Hebrews was going to waltz into Egypt, with its dozens of gods and it would all work out just fine.
Moses was standing in front of an active miracle, so whatever doubts he may have had about God’s plan he didn’t express out loud. Instead, he expressed doubts about himself: he didn’t know what to tell his own people about this God who wanted to liberate them; Moses had almost no cultural training; he hadn’t heard all the stories; and he had no confidence in his own identity as a Hebrew.
So he asked a very practical question: “What is your name?” And the result is wonderful: when God’s name is revealed, it is so much more than just a name – it is a revelation of the nature of God.
In Hebrew, God’s name probably sounds like “Yahweh” and it is related to the verb: “to be”. “I AM WHO I AM” is the way we translate it and a fascinating thing about the Hebrew language is that the same name also means “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE” – Present and Future tenses all rolled into one.
It’s amazing: God is identified as the source of all being. God is the creator, obviously, but also the living source of life; the “ground of being” to quote the theologian Paul Tillich; more than just a supreme being, but the actual source of being, the basis of existence itself.
The other dimension to this is that future tense part of the name: the sense that God is not unchanging but moving forward and that God draws us and all creation into the future, into the “will be”.
It’s all pretty mind-blowing. That’s a lot of philosophy to impart to a young man whose life has been very difficult and who has made some bad decisions, but Moses clearly was moved by all of this because he believed God’s promise and he went back to Egypt to tell ol’ Pharaoh “Let my people go”.
Moses was a troubled young man, not the sort you would consider an ideal leader, but God chose him, and worked through him with spectacular results. God’s promise was truer than Moses ever expected. God was with Moses and led the people into a future none of them could foresee.
As we resume our activities this fall we will soon have our third step in our visioning process where we try to paint a picture of our future. And a lot of the concerns expressed in Moses’ experience will come to the surface: “Who am I to say anything?” people will wonder; or maybe: “I don’t want anything to change!”; which is a very familiar cry in every church and was a complaint that Moses had to hear from the Hebrews over and over during the Exodus; or maybe, more honestly, it could be expressed as “I’m scared, I can’t see a good outcome, I’m not ready!”.
Moses wasn’t ready. He kept making excuses well beyond today’s lesson and God kept making Moses move past those excuses.
The Hebrews weren’t ready: they wanted to be free from oppression, sure, but they didn’t want to face a mass evacuation; their entire population being forced to move and give up their familiar surroundings, this place where they had all grown up; bringing their seniors and their babies out into the wilderness in hopes of some “promised land” they had never seen; but God brought them through despite some very hard times.
Of course we’re not ready for the future. No one ever is, but we can go forward with hope because we have seen that God is trustworthy and can take unprepared, unworthy, confused and just plain normal people and lead them into a very worthwhile future.
So when we gather on the 13th, let’s look for God’s presence in our gathering and open ourselves to God’s inspiration. God is the source of our very existence and God is unfolding the future before us.
May we have the courage to overcome our fears and objections, our past and our shortcomings, and follow God’s leading into a hopeful future.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 