Toward: A Sermon on Prepositions, the Beginning, and Exodus

Location, location, location. It is one of those business clichés that sounds simple, but is anything but. It is fine to declare that the location is critical to the success of a business, whether it be retail or food service or even manufacturing. It is another to identify what that location should be, what factors make for success. Certainly you’ll make less money selling air conditioners in Siberia than you will in Florida. But the difference between Main Street in Sayville and Vets Highway is less dramatic, more shades of gray than black and white. Location is, after all, relative to something else. The gas station near the L.I.E. exit. The pizza parlor next to the youth soccer complex, filled with teams celebrating, and not celebrating, over pizza. And to position one thing relative to another, in time or in space, you need a preposition.

Prepositions are notoriously tricky parts of speech, idiomatic and strange. For example, I grew up in an area where you waited in line. Then I moved to this region where you wait on line. Which I thought was strange, because while the humans form a line of sorts, there isn’t a line on the ground for you to be on, though I suppose maybe there was at some point in the past. Maybe at Ellis Island. But then again, those folks wouldn’t know the local idioms. And don’t get me started about England a queuing up. Where exactly does the up come in?

Prepositions are tricky in translation, especially for those of us trying to read scripture in the original languages. Take, for example, the opening words of the Gospel attributed to John. We guess, though with no real proof, that this gospel comes fairly late, as the followers of Jesus have broken into schools and developed nuanced theological understandings. This, of course, reveals our bias for believing that sophistication is better than simplicity. So John starts with a statement that is theological, cosmic, not just a simple retelling of the Jesus story. Instead, John starts with the famous line, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.”

Now, we’re pretty certain that “the Word” refers to Jesus, though it is actually “logos” which also means logic or reason. But the real interesting thing is that “with” because the word is actually “pros.” And “pros” is a preposition that changes meaning depending on the form of the noun that follows. And the form for God in most of the ancient texts is “ton theon,” which is accusative. This may seem technical, a little esoteric, but it produces an interesting alternative translation. You see, when paired with the accusative, the preposition “pros” usually implies movement. So, instead of the Word being with God in some eternal, before creation nothingness, the Word is moving toward God. Which gives us a more dynamic, if not still mysterious, notion of the Godhead. Location, location, location.

With, between, before… words of location, relationship, in time and space. The Ten Commandments come before the incarnation of the Word, the Logos, as Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us. The Commandments are part of an agreement between God and the Hebrew people, an agreement that would be expanded by the priests to include over 600 regulations, but still, the idea is that God gave these ten. Five about our relationship with God. Five about our relationship with other people. None really about you, except possibly the sabbath, and when it comes to sabbath, we prefer to think of the whole lot as the Ten Suggestions.

So a covenant between human and Creator. And we can deconstruct and take a utilitarian view and agree that most of these rules are common sense and eventually any civilization that is going to survive for ay period of time has to arrive at this basic social contract. Don’t kill, steal, cheat… You can point to various moral and legal codes from the same period that arrive at many of these conclusions. But then you take God out of the equation, reducing the entirety to something humans created, then what are we to make of the first tablet, of the first five commandments, and besides, if God isn’t in the equation, why are you here?

While we’re at it, we can engage in a serious prepositional analysis of the whole Exodus narrative. Was God not in Egypt with God’s people. Are we to seriously believe God was hanging out in a bush on a mountain for decades, waiting for whoever might randomly stumble up the hill looking for a lost sheep? For that matter, can God be at anywhere? Or not at anywhere? Or maybe we can latch on to a bit of circular logic, the kind so popular with fundamentalists and other heretics, trying to convince ourselves that it was all part of God’s plan that Joseph would be sold into slavery by his brothers, and that the entire tribe descending from God’s chosen Abraham and Sarah should end up in bondage. Because that’s the sort of God I want to worship!

Maybe the utilitarian approach and the spatial approach and even, dare I say it, the logical approach, really get us nowhere when it comes to understanding the whole story. Maybe, rather than trying to figure it all out and fit it into neat little boxes that we can tie up and declare ‘Yes, I understand that,” maybe we just need to live in the story. And there is a really important bit that happens just when you stop trying to control the story.

You realize that God did the work of freeing the Hebrews first. The trip to Mount Sinai and the offer to enter the Commandments covenant comes afterward.

God was toward the Hebrew people, directionally, dynamic, moving toward them, doing for them before ever putting terms on the table. This isn’t quid pro quo. This is love. God is toward the Hebrews.

We think that the Christian understanding of God is so much more sophisticated than the understandings of the ancient Hebrews, that we’ve got it right. Which brings us right back to our sophistication-bias. And in the Reform tradition in particular, we focus on the fact that God moves toward us, offering us grace and love. Unearned grace. Unlimited forgiveness. Amazing love, amazing toward-ness. And we think we figured this out all on our own. And here are the ancient writers, two and a half millennia before the Reformation, and they already get it. God does the heavy lifting without asking anything. This isn’t like one of those trial offers where if you forget to cancel within 90 days you’ll get a book every month for life. This is free. Toward.

God does the work and frees the Hebrews. Later, only later, does God say “Look, if you wanna keep hanging out, we have to agree to how we are going to treat one another. You have to be cool, to me and to each other, if you want to be my friend. Then you can be my people, and I’ll be your God.”

But first, toward. Acts of power and of love. True, not true, lice or no lice, who cares. Buried under all of the legalism and treaties of the Hebrew priesthood is a God that enacted liberation without asking a thing. Just because. This is a God of justice and love, a God that is toward, a God that is worth worshiping.

Our God. A God that is with us. Toward us. Toward you. Doing the work of loving. Later, when it’s all over, we can work out the details. But for now. Love. Location, location, location. The location is the love of God. Amen.