This sermon, which is the second in a sermon series on the Book of Exodus, was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday August 30, 2020. Worship Program here
Readings for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 17 – Year A)
Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28
This morning we continue our journey through the book of Exodus, which began last Sunday. As you may recall, the original name for the book of Exodus was not Exodus, but Shemoth, which means “Names” (and that is still the name of this book in the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh). That title invites us to pay attention to the names in the book; and that is a very appropriate invitation for us today as we read about God revealing to Moses His Name. I want to reflect with you on the meaning of the Name of God as revealed in the Book of Names and show us how that meaning can help us understand why Jesus uses such a harsh name in chastising his disciple Peter, whom he had recently affirmed as the Rock upon which he would build his church.
About a year ago, I led a retreat in Trinidad on the 14th century English mystical treatise called the Cloud of Unknowing written by an author who preferred to remain anonymous, nameless. Reflecting on the story of Moses’s encounter with God on the mountaintop, the anonymous author saw the Name of God (“I am what I am”) as a way of describing God as our Being, as the Ground of our Being, as the root and source our Existence. Everything that exists is part of God. The author said, “God is your being. You are not God’s being. God is your being.” The fact that you exist means that you are part of God just as much as anyone else or anything else that exists. All who enjoy the gift of existence are part of God, who is our Existence and our being.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says that when he has trouble sleeping, he reflects on the simple fact that he exists. He doesn’t reflect on existence itself, but on the factual reality that he exists. And that existence is pure gift. Inspired by the Cloud of Unknowing and the Name of God, Richard Rohr invites his readers, “Offer up your simple naked being to the joyful being of God…Don’t focus on what you are, but simply that you are!”[i]
That’s a profound teaching in itself. You are because God is. Without God, you don’t exist because without God, there is no existence. So therefore God is because God is existence (and so much more). God is the Ground of all Existence and all Being. I am because I am. I am what I am. And therefore God is invested in and cares deeply about all that exists, especially those who are made in God’s image, which is all of humanity.
But when he’s talking to Moses here in the Book of Names, he reveals something else about his character and his name. God says, “I have observed the misery of my people; I have heard their cry. I know their sufferings…” God is a God who sees and listens and empathizes, especially with those who are oppressed. He says, “The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So I will deliver them and I will send you, Moses, to fulfill my mission.”
The medieval French Rabbi Rashi connects God’s Name with God’s revelation that he has seen and heard and even felt the suffering of his people. It is a revelation of divine pathos and divine solidarity with all those who suffer. When God revealed himself as “I am what I am” or in the Hebrew “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” Rashi hears God saying, “I shall be with them in their anguish just as I shall be with them (and all people) in future crises! That is who I am. I am who I am.” While others might look at suffering and say, “It is what it is,” God looks at suffering and says, “I am what I am and I am a God who listens and has compassion and saves.”
God is a God who listens. God hears the cries of those who are breathing in smoke and ashes throughout California and all those who have had to evacuate from their homes. God hears the cries of those suffering and dying from COVID-19, from profound loneliness, and from mental illness. God hears the cries of those bearing the brunt of Hurricane Laura. God hears the cries of struggling business owners, of the unemployed, of parents who can’t feed their children, of those whose loved ones are first responders in the military, in the police force and in health care. And God hears the cries of those who are suffocating under the brutal weight of racial injustice and violence. God hears the cries for justice and freedom among people of color. God hears all their cries. That is who God is. It is God’s character and Name. God is who God is.
And then God calls people to step up as leaders to liberate those who are oppressed. God calls Moses, who will now suffer as the target of hatred from the most powerful man in the world and all of his supporters. Moses will be maligned as a disturber of the peace, a rabble rouser and a violent troublemaker, who is disrupting the status quo and challenging the established order of things.
Now God who is the Ground of all Existence also cares about the people of ancient Egypt. Not only do the ancient Egyptians participate in God (the Great “I AM”) by virtue of their existence, they are also made in the image of God as fellow human beings. And God remains invested in them because God knows that oppressors need liberation from oppression as well, even if they (especially if they) are ignorant of their own oppressive behaviors. God cares about them even though they completely misunderstand who God is. They completely misunderstand God’s nature and God’s Name because God is not a God of empires. As we see in our reading today, God is a God who cares about the victims of empire.
Most of the people of Egypt probably thought of themselves as morally upright citizens who believed their leader to be a kind of deity, but they were dead wrong. God does not endorse empires built on slavery and injustice and God does not endorse leaders like pharaoh who perpetuate that injustice; and so the empire was about to get a massive pummeling from the right hand of the great “I AM.”
The God who gave us the gift of existence is the God who cares about the oppressed and who is going to do something about it, by using others who are willing to sacrifice their safety and wellbeing for the sake of the vulnerable. That’s the God of Exodus. That’s the God of the Bible. That’s the God whose name is “I AM” and that’s the God whom Jesus Christ embodied.
Jesus had many opportunities in his ministry to claim political power and glory and to enjoy great riches and success. Many times people tried to crown him the king of Israel with the hope that Israel would become a great empire to overthrow Rome, but Jesus kept throwing away those opportunities, because he knew that that would not be true to God’s nature, that would not be true to God’s Name.
Remember last Sunday when Peter confessed Jesus as the Messiah, the son of the Living God. He was absolutely right but he completely misunderstood what that meant and what that would look like. Peter thought that the Messiah would overthrow Rome with great force and launch the Golden Age of Israel. He thought the Messiah, the Son of David, would make Israel great again like it was in the days of King David. With Jesus as King, Israel could become the greatest empire in the world, he thought.
But Jesus had been trying to tell his disciples, “That’s not who God is. God is a God who cares about the oppressed, the wounded, the scapegoated, and all those victimized by the empire. And I, as the Messiah, will make the true nature and Name of God known to you by undergoing great suffering at the hands of ‘religious’ people who are in bed with the empire. I will reveal God’s true nature by suffering as a victim of religious and political violence, by enduring a form of execution that the Roman empire reserves for those whom it hates the most. By doing this, you will know that whenever someone suffers at the hands of empire, God is not on the side of the empire, but on the side of the victims, listening to their cries and seeing their suffering.”
The symbol of the crucifix is a symbol of a man murdered by state-sanctioned imperial violence. That’s Jesus’s way of saying, “This is who God is. The God who gave us the gift of Existence (The God who is Existence) is the God who is in deep solidarity with all victims of violence.” By doing this, he began to dismantle all the violent mechanisms of empire and expose all of its hypocrisies, corruption and sin.
As we heard in the Gospel today, Jesus goes so far as to say that the empire and the temptations towards imperial power are satanic and even the best of us succumb to its lure, especially when the empire smacks of such holiness and righteousness. But succumbing to that temptation is like gaining the whole world while forfeiting our souls. Peter, the great Rock of the church, succumbs to this temptation when he tells Jesus, “This suffering must never happen to you. You can’t suffer, Jesus. You can’t be vulnerable. That’s not what the great golden age of Israel should look like.”
And Jesus says, “Peter, I love you and I know you love me, but you need to change your understanding of who God is because if you think God is a God of empire who oppresses innocent people and then calls it Law and Order and the Peace of Rome [the Pax Romana], then you need to get behind me because that is satanic.” I know that sounds harsh. We know that Peter loved Jesus and Jesus loved Peter, but Jesus fully understood that his job was to reveal to us all that the true God is the One who disclosed himself to Moses at the burning bush, the One who said, “I am what I am; and I am the Source of all Existence and I listen to the cries of the oppressed and I see their suffering and I will save them because my name is also Salvation.” And in Jesus (Yeshua), this God becomes incarnate and asks us what are we willing to give up in order to help fulfill the mission of the One who gave us all the gift of existence. Because whenever we cling to something that obstructs God’s mission (whether it be wealth or prestige or political power or the whole world), then we are, in the words of Jesus, at risk of forfeiting our souls.
Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.
[i] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019), 224.
“I am, Including You”
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 