NOT A NAME, BUT A PROMISE

(Preached on Sunday, August 28, 2005)

God replied, “I AM AS I AM. This is what you will tell the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”                   -Exodus 3:14

 

This is an old story that I just have to share this morning, simply because of the scripture reading.

Seems Moses had come back to earth.  It was quite an event, and he was given royal treatment all over the world.  He dined with royalty and heads of state — banquets and entertainments in his honor.  The whole nine yards.  As his chartered 747 landed at Kennedy Airport in New York, Moses was told that he would be met by the President of the United States.  “No,” shouted Moses.  “Absolutely no.  I will not talk to that man!”  “But sir, he is the most powerful man int he world.  You should be honored!”

“Honored?  I should be honored already?  And do you know what happened the last time I talked to a bush?”

 

Here was Moses, minding his own business, tending the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro, on the backside of nowhere, when all of a sudden he is confronted by the strange sight of a bush covered with fire and yet not burned up.  Then, out of the blazing bush, the voice of God calling to him, telling him that God has a job for him to do: to help free the Israelite slaves in Egypt.

 

Moses was not an easy sell. It takes one-and-a-half chapters, 39 verses, before Moses, begrudgingly begins to do what God asks of him.

(Quite a contrast to the disciples of Jesus dropping their nets or leaving their tax table to follow Jesus.)

The very first objection Moses raises is “Who am I” to do this great thing?  To which God answers immediately, “Don’t worry about who you are.  What is important is who I am.  And I will be with you.  You will have me on your side.”  Which doesn’t seem to satisfy Moses, for the next things he asks is, “Well, who should I say you are when the Israelites ask me who is this God?  Tell me your name.”

 

It seems an innocent enough request on the surface.

Any of us want to know with whom we are talking.

But in ancient times there was much more to the question.

In Moses’ day, to know someone’s name gave you power over them.  It gave you a “handle” on them. 

To know the name of a god meant you could beckon that god whenever you needed to or wanted to and that god would have to respond.  Knowing the name of the god was the key to using the power of the god for yourself.

 

So, again, Moses was hedging his bet. 

God wanted him to go do something dangerous; God was promising to be with him; but, just suppose God disappeared, got distracted, whatever.

Moses wanted to know God’s name so he could be sure and have God present when he needed God to be present.

Instead of moving into the future trusting God, Moses wanted some guarantees, some assurance that he was in control.

 

We do the same thing today. 

We want certainty, we want to get a handle on God. 

So, we look for certainty in Creeds and Confessions: The Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, etc. 

Or, we look for certainty in the work of great Christian thinkers: Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or John Calvin, John Wesley, or Karl Barth. 

Or, we look for certainty in using the correct “name” for God, or all 107 names as the Jews believe there are.

Or, we grab for certainty in the Bible, in a particular view of scripture, or of God and what we believe God has said.

 

But we never find that certainty.

For God remains utterly free and in charge.

There was no name given to Moses.

In the Hebrew it is ‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh.

Tradition has translated that, “I am who I am,” or “I am what I am,” “I will be what I will be,” or “I am what I will be.”  But what the Hebrew really means, according to many scholars, is “I will indeed be with you.” 

In other words, God doesn’t give Moses a name, because God cannot be commanded or summoned by any human being.  Rather, God simply repeats the promise made earlier.

“I will be with you.”  And it is with that assurance that Moses is to return to face the king of the Egyptian empire.

 

That may seem like a flimsy guarantee to have only the promise of the presence of God when confronting the principalities and powers and evils of this world. 

But in truth it is the strongest possible guarantee.

For what God is telling Moses is: “I have been with you since you were born.  I have been with you every step of your life and I will never leave you.  I will continue to guide you and care for you and protect you as I always have.  So, you don’t need my name, for you already have me.  You don’t need to worry about controlling me and being able to beckon me, for I am already working within you and with you and around you for your best interest.” 

It really is an amazing promise.

It is the same promise God made to us.

Through the risen Jesus: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)  No other guarantees, no other insurance policies, nothing else but this powerful promise, “I am with you.”

 

One reason we struggle with this promise is that we have trouble seeing the presence of God in our lives. 

Not because God is not there.  God did not just appear in Moses’ life for the first time in this burning bush in the wilderness.  God had been active in Moses’ life since before he was born.  But Moses didn’t see this.  It took him 40 years of solitude, watching sheep in the wilderness, before Moses’ attention was honed enough to recognize the presence of God.

 

Our attention tends to gravitate towards problems.

That can be helpful, because we need to attend to problems in order to resolve or fix them.  But what happens if “problems and difficulties” occupy most of our attention during the course of the day?

We begin to formulate a vision of life as challenging, problematic, disappointing, and frustrating.

We don’t pay much (or any) attention to the air conditioning which keeps us cool, or the telephone system that allows us to talk with our family members, or the eyeglasses that help us see where we are going.

When our attention is always focused on problems, the results are:

Ø       a life without much gratitude

Ø       a sense that life is very hard

Ø       feelings of depression

Ø       a sense of exhaustion

Ø       a perception that nobody is helping us

Ø       lots of complaints to share with whoever will listen

Ø       a high level of anxiety.

 

But the promise to Moses is the promise to us: God is with us.  There are steps we can take to help improve our attention to God’s presence.  One of those steps is the practice of mindfulness.