[The scripture reading is followed by a skit called “Here I Am, Send Claude” from The Next Voice You Hear – Sermons We Preach Together by David Steel.]
“Here I am, send me.” I wanted to start from that point because those words are quite triggering to Presbyterians. Yes, and I’m going to make it worse by acknowledging the Hymn “Here I Am, Lord.” If you did not grow up in our tradition you are probably thinking, “So what?” If you did, you probably won’t hear a word I say, because you are already mentally composing a very angry email about why we did not sing that song today!
If you’ll bear with me for a few, hopefully, it will all make sense, even though there are some plot holes with this skit that are not limited to the songs that we will sing together today. What I want to lift up about this skit is that it calls us to be part of the solution. Problems are easy to see, especially if we compare ourselves with the church down the street, or even next door – or if we just walk around the building and look at it as if this was your first time walking in. It’s an old building. We have issues.
Like I said, problems are easy to see. Solutions require a little more of us. They require us to see beyond the problem. They require us to look at the chasm and ask ourselves how we plan to get over it. Do we build a bridge or learn to fly? These are the questions that solutions require us to ask. They also require us to ask ourselves why this problem matters to us, and they require us to ask ourselves what we can offer to work toward a solution. In other words, as the author and spiritual thinker Frederick Buechner said,“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”
As important as that is to think about on a personal level and for us as a congregation, I believe our text asks something more of us, but I also believe it offers something more for us.
The first thing that I want to lift up out of our reading is that nobody is actually asking for God to do anything. The Hebrew people were not praying, and they may not have even known the God of their ancestors. Gods were often considered regional powers, and regional rulers claimed to be blessed by or connected to those powers. The first thing we notice from the text is that God is not landlocked and God hears the suffering of the people that God had promised would become a nation and who would be a blessing to all the people of the earth, everywhere.
The next thing we learn is that God doesn’t work through systems of power. God works through Moses – an outcast and a murderer. Not only that, but Moses doesn’t want to go – at all. Moses has already heard the people crying. He’s seen it. He stood up for it and killed one of the taskmasters. He’s pretty sure that if he goes back, he will die.
This is the point in every action hero movie where some supporting character looks at the hero and says, “You realize what you are asking me to do, right?” The thing is, we often think of Moses as the hero in this story, just like we like to think of ourselves as the hero in our own stories – right? I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Striving for the heroic is a great thing, but the reality is that we often get so caught up in living our lives that we just don’t see the pain and suffering of others – even when we participate in it without meaning to do it.
Some of you may have seen the TV show The Good Place that aired a few years ago. It was based on the idea of figuring out how to get into heaven and avoid “The Bad Place.” I’ll go on record as saying that it had horrible theology but great comedy and wonderful ethical questions about what it means to be good or bad. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but one of the plot twists was that the only way to be good in a global economy with oppression and environmental destruction baked into the system was to go off the grid, and even then the cards are stacked against you!
Of course, we know that “getting into heaven” is not something we earn. It’s not based on what we do or don’t do or some buzzword or catchphrase. It is based on what has been done for us by God through Jesus Christ – who is of course the hero in our story.
But who is the hero in Moses’s story? So far it is God, and not Moses. God is the one who is hearing, calling, and acting in response to the crisis. Moses is still in the “reluctant hero” role because he’s still making excuses. He wants to know who this God is and if he can trust this God because he’s pretty sure that the Pharaoh is going to want to know on whose authority is this traitor and murder telling him to ruin the economy of his nation by getting rid of his cheap labor source.
I don’t want to get into the weeds of interpreting the Hebrew of the original text, but there is something important here that we don’t often talk about. God doesn’t actually give a name to Moses. The same thing happened to Jacob when he wrestled with God until God blessed him and changed his name to Israel. The name was not given because God is beyond our ability to name and claim and identify, even though God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, right? We talked about that last week with Paul in Athens in Acts 17:23.
That’s why the word we interpret as “I AM” is actually, “I shall be.” That same word, אֶ הְ יֶה, has been interpreted over the centuries as Jaweh or Jehovah. Many Orthodox Jews simply say, “Adoni,” which is an entirely different word that means, “Lord.” That’s because the name for God in its origin was supposed to be unpronounceable, and they would rather use a word that describes their relationship with God. Ultimately the idea behind it all is to say that the One who created us out of love is greater than the God that we can conceive or think of.
Now, why does any of that matter? It matters because God had no desire to be named and claimed like all the other Gods. It matters because God chose, and chooses still, to be defined by relationships. This is the same God that had a covenant relationship with Moses’s ancestors. This is the same God who has brought about liberation and reconciliation in the past, and this is the God who chose a covenant people to demonstrate that God’s desire for all people is liberation and reconciliation!
Not only that, but God chose someone who was not sufficient for the cause because the task of liberation was not dependent on Moses’s heroic character. It was dependent on God’s! Not only that, but God did not expect Moses to overcome his weaknesses. He called Arron to come alongside him, and he gave Moses the tools he needed to complete the task.
So it is with us as God’s people. Yes, I believe that there are burning bushes all around us that sometimes seem like a forest fire of need! Yes, I believe that God is calling to us to be a part of the solution of reconciliation and liberation from systems and powers that corrupt the earth and harm God’s people.
As God’s people, through the new covenant in Jesus Christ, we know that God is still the one who is listening and acting and calling us to act, and we also know that we are not alone in our suffering. As we continue to rebuild what has been lost over the last two years of the pandemic, I am ever thankful for the ministries of this congregation that proclaim solidarity and hope like the Wesley United Campus Ministries, Meals on Wheels, United Christian Outreach Food Bank, Family Promise, and our Disaster Response ministries!
I’m also thankful for the statement on our website and the actions of inclusion taken by this congregation for those in the LGBTQ community. This week included national coming out day, and I continue to learn of people of faith in this community who do not believe that there is a church where they will be loved. I’m thankful that this is one, but I’m also aware that love has to be put into action in order to be realized.
As we move forward together, building community together, let us remember that God is the hero in our story. God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being; the ground of all being; the One who is, was, and shall be; and God is calling us to be involved in liberation and reconciliation.
May it be that we see that God is less concerned with our limitations and more concerned with what we might accomplish in covenant partnership together – as it has been, so it shall be. Amen.
“Here I am, send me.” I wanted to start from that point because those words are quite triggering to Presbyterians. Yes, and I’m going to make it worse by acknowledging the Hymn “Here I Am, Lord.” If you did not grow up in our tradition you are probably thinking, “So what?” If you did, you probably won’t hear a word I say, because you are already mentally composing a very angry email about why we did not sing that song today!
If you’ll bear with me for a few, hopefully, it will all make sense, even though there are some plot holes with this skit that are not limited to the songs that we will sing together today. What I want to lift up about this skit is that it calls us to be part of the solution. Problems are easy to see, especially if we compare ourselves with the church down the street, or even next door – or if we just walk around the building and look at it as if this was your first time walking in. It’s an old building. We have issues.
Like I said, problems are easy to see. Solutions require a little more of us. They require us to see beyond the problem. They require us to look at the chasm and ask ourselves how we plan to get over it. Do we build a bridge or learn to fly? These are the questions that solutions require us to ask. They also require us to ask ourselves why this problem matters to us, and they require us to ask ourselves what we can offer to work toward a solution. In other words, as the author and spiritual thinker Frederick Buechner said,“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”
As important as that is to think about on a personal level and for us as a congregation, I believe our text asks something more of us, but I also believe it offers something more for us.
The first thing that I want to lift up out of our reading is that nobody is actually asking for God to do anything. The Hebrew people were not praying, and they may not have even known the God of their ancestors. Gods were often considered regional powers, and regional rulers claimed to be blessed by or connected to those powers. The first thing we notice from the text is that God is not landlocked and God hears the suffering of the people that God had promised would become a nation and who would be a blessing to all the people of the earth, everywhere.
The next thing we learn is that God doesn’t work through systems of power. God works through Moses – an outcast and a murderer. Not only that, but Moses doesn’t want to go – at all. Moses has already heard the people crying. He’s seen it. He stood up for it and killed one of the taskmasters. He’s pretty sure that if he goes back, he will die.
This is the point in every action hero movie where some supporting character looks at the hero and says, “You realize what you are asking me to do, right?” The thing is, we often think of Moses as the hero in this story, just like we like to think of ourselves as the hero in our own stories – right? I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Striving for the heroic is a great thing, but the reality is that we often get so caught up in living our lives that we just don’t see the pain and suffering of others – even when we participate in it without meaning to do it.
Some of you may have seen the TV show The Good Place that aired a few years ago. It was based on the idea of figuring out how to get into heaven and avoid “The Bad Place.” I’ll go on record as saying that it had horrible theology but great comedy and wonderful ethical questions about what it means to be good or bad. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but one of the plot twists was that the only way to be good in a global economy with oppression and environmental destruction baked into the system was to go off the grid, and even then the cards are stacked against you!
Of course, we know that “getting into heaven” is not something we earn. It’s not based on what we do or don’t do or some buzzword or catchphrase. It is based on what has been done for us by God through Jesus Christ – who is of course the hero in our story.
But who is the hero in Moses’s story? So far it is God, and not Moses. God is the one who is hearing, calling, and acting in response to the crisis. Moses is still in the “reluctant hero” role because he’s still making excuses. He wants to know who this God is and if he can trust this God because he’s pretty sure that the Pharaoh is going to want to know on whose authority is this traitor and murder telling him to ruin the economy of his nation by getting rid of his cheap labor source.
I don’t want to get into the weeds of interpreting the Hebrew of the original text, but there is something important here that we don’t often talk about. God doesn’t actually give a name to Moses. The same thing happened to Jacob when he wrestled with God until God blessed him and changed his name to Israel. The name was not given because God is beyond our ability to name and claim and identify, even though God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, right? We talked about that last week with Paul in Athens in Acts 17:23.
That’s why the word we interpret as “I AM” is actually, “I shall be.” That same word, אֶ הְ יֶה, has been interpreted over the centuries as Jaweh or Jehovah. Many Orthodox Jews simply say, “Adoni,” which is an entirely different word that means, “Lord.” That’s because the name for God in its origin was supposed to be unpronounceable, and they would rather use a word that describes their relationship with God. Ultimately the idea behind it all is to say that the One who created us out of love is greater than the God that we can conceive or think of.
Now, why does any of that matter? It matters because God had no desire to be named and claimed like all the other Gods. It matters because God chose, and chooses still, to be defined by relationships. This is the same God that had a covenant relationship with Moses’s ancestors. This is the same God who has brought about liberation and reconciliation in the past, and this is the God who chose a covenant people to demonstrate that God’s desire for all people is liberation and reconciliation!
Not only that, but God chose someone who was not sufficient for the cause because the task of liberation was not dependent on Moses’s heroic character. It was dependent on God’s! Not only that, but God did not expect Moses to overcome his weaknesses. He called Arron to come alongside him, and he gave Moses the tools he needed to complete the task.
So it is with us as God’s people. Yes, I believe that there are burning bushes all around us that sometimes seem like a forest fire of need! Yes, I believe that God is calling to us to be a part of the solution of reconciliation and liberation from systems and powers that corrupt the earth and harm God’s people.
As God’s people, through the new covenant in Jesus Christ, we know that God is still the one who is listening and acting and calling us to act, and we also know that we are not alone in our suffering. As we continue to rebuild what has been lost over the last two years of the pandemic, I am ever thankful for the ministries of this congregation that proclaim solidarity and hope like the Wesley United Campus Ministries, Meals on Wheels, United Christian Outreach Food Bank, Family Promise, and our Disaster Response ministries!
I’m also thankful for the statement on our website and the actions of inclusion taken by this congregation for those in the LGBTQ community. This week included national coming out day, and I continue to learn of people of faith in this community who do not believe that there is a church where they will be loved. I’m thankful that this is one, but I’m also aware that love has to be put into action in order to be realized.
As we move forward together, building community together, let us remember that God is the hero in our story. God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being; the ground of all being; the One who is, was, and shall be; and God is calling us to be involved in liberation and reconciliation.
May it be that we see that God is less concerned with our limitations and more concerned with what we might accomplish in covenant partnership together – as it has been, so it shall be. Amen.
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