Exodus 3:1-15
We tend to lose the personality of historic figures as we reduce them to stereotypes, to either villain or hero. Few discuss the playfulness of the Rev. Dr. King, though I have been blessed to meet some of his colleagues in the prophetic ministry of the Civil Rights movement and have heard talk of pillow fights and laughter, very human ways of dealing with the incredible stress and daily fear.
In the same way, we tend to celebrate his loftiest speech and ignore the snarky, but that was there too, on occasion. For example, in 1967 the Rev. Dr. King said:
“A few theologians are trying to say that God is dead. And I’ve been asking them about it because it disturbs me to know that God died and I didn’t have a chance to attend the funeral. They haven’t been able to tell me yet the date of his death. They haven’t been able to tell me yet who the coroner was that pronounced him dead.”
King was responding to a theological movement that was quite old, but first took modern form with the publication of Syracuse University professor Gabriel Vahanian’s book “The Death of God” in 1961. The idea moved from the academy to popular consciousness when an April 1966 cover of Time Magazine asked “Is God Dead?,” white letters on a plain black background.
This question, asked by theologians, was provoked by rapid secularization, the loss of religion as a central organizing principle of life for most Americans. We have a history of peaks of religious fervor and participation, periods known as Great Awakenings, and though few historians saw it at the time, the period after the Second World War was one such period, the result of an anti-communist hysteria and the role of the church as a “third good place” for women as men returned to traditional roles in the workforce.
Two decades later, as so many Americans came to question the anti-communist war we were losing in Vietnam, that fervor had cooled. It would peak again by the end of the Twentieth Century with the rise of the mega-church, the perfect marriage of mass media and religious consumerism, Godliness measured in knick-knacks and cheap jewelry, ironically manufactured in Communist China.
We are in a bit of a religious trough at the moment, despite the political rise of white Christian nationalism, with church attendance at a historic low. This time around though, the decline is not ideological, not because the gospel has lost its power, but because so many are physically and emotionally exhausted as end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism occupies our time with two-factor authentication, denied claims from our health insurance companies, all new ways to gamble in the misguided belief that we can wager our way out of poverty, and the ever-present cancer of social media.
In recent years, religious leaders have bemoaned the rise of individuals who described themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” only to see that label replaced with the “Nones,” an indication of no religious engagement at all, no concept of spirituality.
Despite all of that, God is most certainly not dead. There are, however, understandings of God that deserve to die, that stubbornly refuse to die, and that become sources of confusion for those without spiritual community and spiritual practice. This morning’s reading provides a perfect example.
The Modern Hebrew language is an invention of Zionism. Hebrew had not been a living language for centuries, reduced to use in Jewish liturgy. Over a century before Jesus was born, so few Jews in the Diaspora could read Hebrew that the Jewish Bible, our Old Testament, was translated in Koine Greek, the language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. This Koine Greek translation of the Jewish Scripture, called the Septuagint, was used by the authors of the Christian Testament.
Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, though most would have spoken Koine Greek as well. We know Jesus could read Hebrew for religious purposes, as he did in the synagogue. Galilee was ethnically diverse, and if the Acts of the Apostles is accurate, the streets of Jerusalem echoed with many languages, much like modern-day Manhattan.
The written Hebrew of the Torah, which includes the Book of Exodus, is very old indeed, and incredibly difficult. The manuscripts we have are in the Aramaic alphabet, though we know there was an earlier script. What was written down was mostly just root words of three consonants, no vowels. Presumably this was enough for the tiny percentage of the population that was literate, mostly priests, merchants, and the royal court.
The earliest form of God’s name as revealed to Moses likely had only three letters, but by the time we receive it, there are four consonants, YHWH. The way we pronounce these four letters, Yahweh, is a guess. History tells us that during the Second Temple Period, the name was only spoken by the High Priest once on Yom Kippur, and that the pronunciation itself was forgotten once the Temple and priesthood were lost during the Jewish War that ended in 70 C.E.
Given that the writing system is difficult and the vowels unknown, translation is the biggest guess of them all. The most common rendering in English of Yahweh is “I Am,” so that God says to Moses, “Tell them I Am sent you.” But a better rendering might be “I Will Be Who I Will Be,” or better still, “I Am Becoming.”
I prefer this idea that God is dynamic, that God can change. When early Christianity encountered the philosophy of Plato, we ended up with this abstract God who is distant and unchanging, yet at the very same time, inexplicably engaged in who wins a high school football game, willing to heal some people but not others for mysterious reasons, but not even slightly interested in the slaughtered children of Gaza.
And these understandings of God as unchanging are not the only contradictions with which our faith has wrestled. The story that the Jewish people wrote for themselves was that of one family, of all the families on the planet, chosen by God. That this one family became one people preferred by God. That God rescued this one people from bondage, the story that begins with our reading this morning. And I can get behind this idea of liberation, but then the story turns. We are told that God orders the ethnic cleansing of Canaan, even the murder of infants, so that this one people can possess the land. No wonder those who claim to be the heirs of this divine promise are so cruel!
This is the story of a God who kills people because his, always his, ego has been insulted. It is no wonder that the early Christian theologian, Marcion, got in trouble for suggesting that this understanding of God, as violent and demanding, could not possibly be the same God as the one Jesus called Abba. And yet, the loving God of grace and glory is also there in the Jewish Scriptures, in the work of the prophets. It is almost as if the authors of the nationalist history texts like Joshua and Judges, authors that tell of this violent God, had a different agenda than the prophets who sought justice for the economically oppressed.
Christians have traditionally claimed that there has been no revelation, nothing new from God, since John of Patmos wrote down his fever dream revelation, that we have been on hold listening to elevator music ever since, yet it would be centuries after John before people would decide which books even belonged in the Christian Testament, before they would articulate a Trinitarian theology, before they would issue a statement about the nature of Jesus, before they would gather in Nicaea to write a creed that would come to define Christianity.
We have been taught so many contradictory things about God, some of them not worthy of our worship, then told that we should not think about them, that we should just paper over our discomfort by calling it mystery. And sisters and brothers, let me tell you, I believe that is an insult to God.
The God I worship is good and is alive and will never ever fit in the little boxes I create or the words I use. God is bigger than one species of primate or one binary on our 23rd chromosome.
I use words, I imagine God as having thought and will and agency like I have thought and will and agency because it is my nature, and it makes it possible for me to speak about God, to think about God. But my every statement about God must carry an asterisk, even the statement that God is alive and can change, even my statement that as long as I am alive, my understanding of God can change, because no words can contain all that is holy mystery.
God is alive, and God is good, and God is not a book assembled by humans many centuries ago, is not the customs and practices of some ancient and pre-scientific culture. God is not a creed or a bunch of theses nailed to a door by Martin Luther, or the moment your denomination or local congregation was founded.
We experience God in creation, and creation is a process of serendipitous creativity, of chaos and complexity, of breathtaking beauty. Creation is change. Surely the source of all of that is just as amazing!
“I Am Becoming” calls you to constantly lean into beauty and creativity, to see Holy Mystery everywhere, in the least among us, the hungry on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific returning from an insane war, and those imprisoned in the deportation camps run by our white supremacist government.
“I Am Becoming” calls you to see every tree as sacred, to use the resources of this planet wisely.
“I Am Becoming” calls you to crawl up out of that place of fear, to embrace the fact that we are tiny and temporary little explosions of the Sacred, with a capital “S.” You might say we are the “S” bomb, fearfully and wonderfully made, alive now, alive always, for like the biblical demoniac, we contain legions, countless generations, legions not of evil, but of love and holy imagination.
“I Am Becoming” suggests that God is a verb, not a noun. So are you. May it be so until it is your time to go home, as part of the living holy. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
This week, as we remember Dolly Parton, we also remember the power of literacy.
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
Scripture calls Jesus your Word,
moving toward You as creation unfolds.
Words are how we build culture,
how we pass knowledge,
how we resist.
It is no wonder
that the slave master banned books,
that the mine owners cared not if the miners could read,
that the billionaires want to defund public education,
that fascists want to make advanced education unaffordable.
As the academic year begins,
we ask you to bless the teachers,
that they might follow the wise counsel
of bell hooks,
teaching to transgress.
We ask you to bless the students
that they might understand learning
not as survival
but as a key to living
in service and in love.
We pray for children studying
in bomb shelters in Ukraine,
in tents in Gaza,
after lockdown drills here in America.
Jesus gave us the words to approach you,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…
BENEDICTION
Slang changes all the time, and honestly, I am just too old to keep up with whatever crazy is happening on TikTok these days. I remember back when the word “word” was slang. You might want to describe a great mixtape by saying “That mix was fire!” Someone agreeing with you would respond with “Word,” which meant “true.” Little did they know they were doing serious theology.
May the Word, the wisdom and truth of Holy Mystery, moving toward and with God, be with you, and may you speak that Word into the world, with love and hope, this day and always. Amen.