March 08, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
When the veil between the holy and the human gets thin or is removed altogether, there is no religion. Religion, Brand Name is utterly, totally irrelevant at that moment. Religion is about ideas and rituals and sacraments and methodologies and organizations and all those things we need and cherish and hate. There is nothing wrong with all that human paraphernalia but when it comes to an encounter with GOD, it is utterly irrelevant.
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Sermons @ Trinity
March 7, 2010 @ 10:30 a.m.
by The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
If the Hebrew Scripture and the Gospel
were power-lifters,
Exodus is in the Heavyweight Class
and the Gospel is in the Featherweight Class.
The gospel for today is undecipherable in any meaningful way – and even if it weren’t,
it is overwhelmed by a Hebrew Scripture that demands
it’s voice be heard in our little world of 2010.
So I am going to do like the Television Preachers do,
and walk through this amazing,
incredible,
absolutely fantastic and astounding text in Exodus.
Can you tell I really like this text?
But you need to know it goes beyond
any Cam eccentricities –
these verses from Exodus form the bedrock
of everything there is to say about God.
Everything else, everything else we can say about God,
rests upon this moment of revelation.
Of course the first silly thing we want to ask is,
Did it really happen?
It’s one of our knee-jerk questions
as if the ability to answer it held the credibility of the story.
Our minds have been molded by modernism
to ask such questions
even though it is impossible for Scripture to answer them.
Instead, because deep inside us is buried
the ancient memories of our pre-modern ancestors,
we ask:
What is the wisdom embedded here?
Or, what is the question that the text is answering?
If we listen to the text like that
then the first thing we notice is that Moses
is not among the Hebrews.
He is watching his father-in-law’s sheep,
a man who is the priest of another religion.
There is no Hebrew religion at this point.
The history of the Hebrews begins on Mount Horeb,
the mountain of a Midianite God.
So from the very beginning of our religion,
even though we quickly forgot it,
we have a deeply pluralistic in our theology.
Clearly there is more than one understanding of God,
right from the beginning of the story.
The message:
This is a story about GOD,
not “our” God – this God does not belong to “us.”
Think how different things would be
if that little piece of information had stuck!
Next something weird happens.
The text describes a fire that does not consume.
Now notice please, the spookiness is assumed.
It doesn’t ask how it happens.
It doesn’t ask why it happens.
It doesn’t even seem surprised
that such bizarre things happen.
It just says the bush is burning without being consumed
and an angel’s voice issues from it.
No big deal.
Moses, even though he doesn’t know the God
he is about to meet,
and even though he has no experience
with any god other than Pharaoh,
whose household he grew up in,
somehow knows what to do and what not to do
when meeting a god.
DON’T LOOK and TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES.
Moses knows that for humans to look upon God
insures certain death.
The Message:
The finite cannot see the infinite.
The temporal cannot look upon the eternal.
The part cannot see the whole and survive.
It is in the very nature of being human,
or being a small part instead of the whole,
that if we are suddenly placed in the presence of
everything-that-is…
we will go out of existence.
We would lose our Self – our partness.
The part
is no longer a part
when it becomes part of the whole –
it loses its Self.
It goes out of existence.
Which, by the way,
is also the Buddhist concept of Nirvana.
Interesting…
So somehow Moses not only knows what to do,
he also knows what to say:
“Here I am.”
Did you know that “Here I am” is what Noah said to God,
and what Abraham said to God,
and Samuel said to God,
and, by the way,
it is what Mohammad said to God?
“Here I am” is what the prophet says…
when God calls.
So what we know up to this point, is that Moses
knows the protocol for what to do and say
when entering God’s air-space.
Now remember, there is no such thing as Judaism at this point
and Christianity is more than a millennia away.
The message is:
When it comes to an encounter with God,
there is no religion.
Get it?
When the veil between the holy and the human
gets thin or is removed altogether,
there is no religion.
Religion,
Brand Name is utterly, totally irrelevant at that moment.
Religion is about ideas
and rituals
and sacraments
and methodologies
and organizations and all those things
we need and cherish and hate.
There is nothing wrong with all that human paraphernalia
but when it comes to an encounter with GOD,
it is utterly irrelevant.
Clearly the message of the story,
at least on some level,
given that Moses is not any kind of religion
and he is on the mountain of a Midianite god
at the beginning of the Hebrew story,
is that an encounter with God
is beyond all religion
and available to anyone of any religion.
Then there is another message tucked in there.
The other message,
for those of us who have not figured out how to bore
our way through the oppressive rationalism and logic
of the scientific method,
is that God is assumed,
and an encounter with God is not out of the ordinary.
That is something useful for us to note.
Okay, now the story shifts
as we leave the realm of human beings
filtered through Moses and his implications for us,
and move into the realm of the holy.
In other words,
the text is going to tell us something about God.
We might imagine that, because it is the Bible,
the such information is normal.
But the Bible is far more about human beings
than it is about God.
God is stingy with information and self-revelation,
which brings up another point.
Not all religions are alike –
that is a modern, liberal idea that is balone.
Religions are very different,
and they reflect the very different cultures that create them.
Let’s note that as well:
culture creates religion much more than
religion creates culture.
So generally there are two categories of religion:
Revealed and Unrevealed.
The revealed religions
those that believe God is the only one who can give information about God –
God unveils godself only when and if God so chooses.
The word “revelation” means, literally, to unveil.
The unrevealed religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism,
believe that wisdom, or divine wisdom if a god is involved,
can be uncovered by us,
through our human methodologies
like meditation, yoga, tai chi, etc.
As Christians,
rooted as we are in this Exodus text of ancient Israel,
we belong to the “revealed” category:
We know nothing
beyond what God wants us to know about God.
So this text from Exodus
is God’s first and most elemental revelation
about who God is
and what God is like.
There is nothing that any biblical religion can proclaim
with any credibility
if it violates or contradicts this first core unveiling.
Here is what we learn about God.
First God says “who” god is: The god of Moses’ ancestors.
God begins the introduction,
not with God’s occupation or achievements,
but with a description of God’s relationships.
Again, we might take note
that “who” we are
has to do with who we are in relationship with,
not what we do for a living.
Then God describes what God does,
and it is astounding.
God sees the misery of the Hebrews in Egypt.
God hears their cries when they are abused.
God feels their suffering.
Then…
because God sees and hears and feels,
God acts to bring about their liberation.
Now those of us who are stuck in our “science-head”
will need a moment to catch up here
because we are muttering to ourselves, “Yeah, sure…”
So just disengage from the idea that God
acts in human history
on behalf of those who are marginalized,
and ponder this amazing fact instead.
Prior to this moment,
or if you do not believe this was an actual moment,
prior to this idea,
the gods of the ancient world were not this kind of god.
Prior to this Exodus text, if you needed something from a god,
like someone to fall in love with you
or get pregnant,
or have your crops yield an abundant harvest,
or for your enemy to get the runs and have a miserable day…
you went to the proper god
that had power to act in the sphere you needed action;
and then you made a sacrifice
at the proper altar
through the appointed priest.
In other words,
you had to purchase the desired benefit
with the required sacrifice
and that undoubtedly necessitated money.
Rich people, of which there were a very few,
had greater and better access to those gods
and those benefits,
than everyone else.
It was quite natural that the world operated
as a divine hierarchy
since human society did too.
But now enter a new God,
or a God newly encountered.
It is not quite the one and only God yet…
monotheism would take many more generations to form.
But this newly encountered God
is a god who hears the cries of slaves or indentured servants.
Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who sees what is going on among the marginalized.
Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who actually listens to the groans
of people who are the dregs of the society.
Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who actually feels – knows personally –
the suffering of the nobodies.
You see?
Whether think this is an actual moment,
an actual mystical encounter with God,
or the immergence of an historic idea,
this is an amazing turn of events.
Even though everything that human being can see
would suggest the existence of a God
who only cares about the powerful
and the privileged,
there appears an ancient text that says:
Actually,
God sees and hears and knows
the suffering of those who are
beaten and abused and exploited.
And not only that…
what God does,
what God is all about,
is acting in history on their behalf.
What an incredible text.
You see why it is so amazing?
Okay, I am about to go over my normal time limit
but this will be worth it.
So before I share with you the final,
and perhaps most useful things for you and me
to know on a very personal level about this text,
let me just remind us of what we have learned so far
from these few verses.
1. This is not “our” God – God belongs to no one.
2. A part cannot see the whole; the finite cannot know the infinite. We have a basic limit to what we can know about God.
3. When it comes to an encounter with God there is no religion.
4. God, and encountering God, is an assumed part of the human experience…not out of the ordinary.
5. “Who” god is, is a god in relationship with humankind.
6. “What” god does is grounded in the fact that this God sees, hears and feels the suffering of those who are exploited, and then acts to liberate them.
So that is a lot to learn about a God in a short a time.
But here is something you and I need to know:
God has a name.
Now there are actually many names for God
in the Hebrew Scripture
but this text is revealed the first,
perhaps most revered Name.
There is a lot to learn from a name,
much more than we imagine.
Elohim is one of the names for God.
It is masculine and refers to powerful beings,
powerful princes, in short it’s a name about power.
Elohai, derived from Elohim, means “my God” or my powerful god.
Elohaynu, likewise derived from Elohim,
means “our God” or “Our God is the Lord.”
These are names that begin as a phrase,
like “Our God is the Lord” – Elohaynu.
But over time, the phrase gets shortened to a proper name:
Elohai.
Or, Elohaynu actually becomes the name…Elijah.
There are many phrases that become proper names.
El Saddai is another Hebrew name for God.
The root of Shaddai means “the one who said ‘dai’.
It refers to God the Creator, in Genesis,
who after each day of creation looks out
at all that has been created and says, “Dai!”
Which doesn’t mean, Die!
but means “It is Good.”
Or even, “Dai dai!” which means, very good.
Halleluyah, which this congregations likes to shout,
is a one word distillation of an original phrase
that we might be more reticent to shout:
“Praise the Lord!”
The prophets had a name for God
that does not appear in the first books of the Bible (Torah).
The prophets called God: Tzva’ot (I don’t really know how to pronounce it) but it was a phrase that became a name:
“Lord God of Hosts” is what it meant.
“The Lord of Hosts” referred to God’s leadership
or sovereignty.
So in this Exodus text the divine Name is revealed
to Moses for the first time.
YHVH (Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei).
It is related to the Hebrew verb: “to be.”
It is often translated as the phrase,
“I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be.”
It is another phrase that becomes a name.
The phrase Yahweh,
or I will be who I will be,
gets shortened over time to “Yah” or even “Yahu”
which references another phrase:
“The Lord is my Salvation.”
So Yah, or “The Lord is my Salvation”
becomes a proper name: Yo-shua.
Yoshua is of course the name we know as Joshua.
The name Joshua becomes Latinized as Jesus.
So Jesus is Joshua, which is Yoshua,
which is Yah,
which is short for “The Lord is my Salvation”
which is a reference to Yahweh,
which is the name that means:
I will be who I will be.
But Jesus brings us a new Name for God too.
He may well have referred to God as
Yah or Yahu or Elohaynu in public worship
but his name for God was “Abba.”
“Abba” is Aramaic for “Daddy”
and it conveyed a relationship of intimacy.
Not “Father” – too formal.
Not “Dad” – too old.
But “Daddy…Daddy.”
Or, and I don’ think this is a stretch:
“Mommy” if we wish to image our God as feminine.
So here is the punch line to all of this for you and me in 2010.
What is your name for God?
You don’t have one?
Then you don’t get to have a relationship with God.
Seriously, imagine someone that does not know your name
but who wants to be a close, personal friend of yours.
Right up front they need to know your name, right?
They need to call you by the name by which
you wish to be called.
If you do not have a name for God,
a name that your is rooted in your encounters with God,
then you need to listen for one.
God has a Name, a name that God wants to be known by…
by you.
It is crucial that we figure this out.
If we want to encounter God,
and know God as God would be known,
then we need to know which name
God wants us to know God by.
Clearly there is not only one name,
there is a whole slough of names by which God is known;
and the discernment is to know
which name fits our relationship with God,
and to use that one
rather than one that does not fit the two of you.
Finally, do you know God’s name for you?
Which power
or quality
or character
or energy
does God call you by?
By which name are you known by God?
If we do not know which name God knows us by,
we will not hear it when God calls to us…
and we won’t be able to say, “Here I am.”
Seriously, we may think that some generic name we have been taught will fit our relationship with God,
but that is part of the problem we have with encountering God – we have a generic relationship
instead of an intimate one.
We need to be on a first name basis with God
in order to encounter God.
So if we want an encounter God, to experience God,
then we have to move beyond the generics.
What name does God know us by,
and by what name does God want to be known by us?
I don’t have the answer by the way –
that is your spiritual journey,
all we can do here is help one another listen better.
Amen.
