Lent III

Psalm 103
Exodus 3:1-15
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

+ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

TO BE A CHRISTIAN is to live inside a story. It is a particular story, with a setting, characters, plot and an ending. The beauty of following the Common Lectionary is that we are thrown back, time and again, into our grand, overarching story to hear all the little stories that it comprises. Today's Old Testament story everybody knows. Moses was tending sheep on a mountain and heard God speak from a flaming bush, but what"s less familiar is all this about God"s name. When Moses says, "Suppose I . . . go to my people and tell them you sent me, what if they ask me your name?" God tells him to say "the Lord, the God of your fathers . . . sent me to you. This is my name forever . . . ." (Ex. 3.15.) When you see the word "LORD" written in small capitals, it is translating "Yahweh," the Tetragrammaton, the "technical term"1 for four consonants the Jews considered too sacred to even say. It's interesting that although the name appears 6000 times in the OT, the burning bush account starts to flesh it out. Derek Kidner, who wrote a little commentary on Genesis, says that "[i]n Genesis, [Yahweh] is one of various divine names on people"s lips, but still a mere name, not yet revealing any of God"s characteristics . . . . In this sense, God was not made "known" by the name Yahweh until he gave content to it in the message at the burning bush."2 Kidner means: Until this little story, there are things we didn"t know about God, so what do we now know? Two things we learn here about Yahweh are: (1) This God hears, and (2) this God shows up.

(1) God hears. Verse 9 reads: "The cry of the Israelites has come unto me . . . .” In a couple of his coffee hour talks, Fr. Conner has touched on Deism and belief in a God that creates the world but leaves it to run its course, like a watchmaker who crafts a timepiece but leaves it to run all on its own.3 It's an old idea, but extremely prevalent today. In a book called Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, the authors suggest that the dominant religious belief among teenagers in the U.S. is "moralistic, therapeutic deism," and their de facto creed is:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other . . . .
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one"s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

The God Moses meets is not that sort of God, not a distant Creator but an intimate Lord who knows us and aches to be known. He"s not absent and cut off from creation; he hears the cries of his people and cares about their suffering, which leads to the second point.

(2) God shows up. Moved by our suffering, he steps into the story himself. Watch how the grand story works – an idea or a word is introduced into the story, and later it comes back and we apprehend a deeper truth than we had before. For instance, God told Moses "I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters.” (Ex. 3.7) The word "taskmasters” actually translates a verb that means "to press down." The same word shows up in the quintessential Servant Song in Isaiah that says: "He was oppressed . . . ." (Isa. 53.7.) So some mysterious person to come will be oppressed, for a people this time. Again, God told Moses "I know their sorrows, and I am come down to deliver them . . . ." Where do we see God "knowing” our sorrows, or see someone oppressed for a people? In Holy Week, Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives to a garden called Gethsemane --Gethsemane literally meant "oil press," a mechanism they used to lower giant stone slabs onto olive pulp to push the oil out – and the weight of sin and his destiny pressed down on him so heavily that blood was literally squeezed out of him. (Mark 14.32; Luke 22.44). God doesn"t just know our sorrows in a sympathetic way, but in a real existential way. God heard our cries and came down, submitted to the ultimate oppression, and was the ultimate Moses who led us out of slavery to sin and death.

So, if to be a Christian is to live in this story, what does that life look like?

I"ll give you two examples, and they"re like two sides of the same coin. For one thing, when you see a God who would go to such lengths to be with us, how can you ever wonder whether your life matters at all? John 3.16, the one verse I practically guarantee any Episcopalian can recite, says God did everything he"s ever done because he "so loved the world.” Of course we matter.

The other side of the coin is the responsibility that comes with being loved like that. Leo McGarry is Pres. Bartlet"s chief of staff on The West Wing. Leo had been a military pilot, and his co-pilot Kenny saved his life when they were shot down in Vietnam. In one episode, it's thirty years later and that co-pilot is in trouble because he has committed securities fraud— he traded his integrity for money, essentially—and Leo is just wrecked by it. In one scene he's trying to explain to the president why he is so disappointed: "We were out in the jungle for three days. Kenny carried me on his back, hid me under piles of leaves while he went to find us water. I was delirious. I lost a lot of blood. He coulda left me, he shoulda left me. He never did. We found a clearing where we could send up a flare, and a couple hours later these two Hueys show up taking all kind of AK fire. Men died for us. We had a responsibility to live our lives with integrity and honesty to honor their sacrifice"

"Men died for us." The Christian story says a God died for us, so all of our lives" the way we love our family, our compassion for strangers, our honesty and integrity in our work —everything we do should honor that sacrifice. And no task is too small to call that integrity out of us. Most of us can"t affect US foreign policy or end famine or stop a global climate crisis, but we don"t lock ourselves into this church and wait for the end. Rather, we fling open those doors and, however haltingly, go about the business of serving God by loving our city. That"s how we live our story as a community. We tell it, and retell it and retell it again. We tell it to each other, and we aren"t ashamed to let the world listen in. Lesslie Newbigin says that is what the Church really is:

We are "the visible embodiment of [a] new reality [that] is not a movement which will take control of history and shape the future according to its own vision, not a new imperialism, not a victorious crusade. Its visible embodiment will be a community that lives by this story, a community whose existence is visibly defined in the regular rehearsing and reenactment of the story which has given it birth, the story of the self-emptying of god in the ministry, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus."7

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3d ed., F. L. Cross & E. A. Livingstone eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 1604.

2. Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale OT Cmts (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1967): 78-79.

3. "The chief mark of later Deism was belief in a Creator God whose further Divine intervention in His creation was rejected as derogatory to His omnipotence and unchangeableness." The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 468.

4. "Summary Interpretation: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism," from Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton (Oxford: University Press, 2005) <http://www.ptsem.edu/iym/research/lectures/downloads/2005/Smith-Moralistic.pdf>.

5. "Nagas," in The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000): 620.

6. The West Wing, "The Warfare of Genghis Khan" (aired 11 February 2004).

7. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989): 120.