A God with No Name (17th Sunday after Pentecost; World Communion Sunday; Exodus 2:23-25; 3:10-15; 4:10-17; October 1, 2017)

A God with No Name

17th Sunday after Pentecost
World Communion Sunday
Exodus 2:23-25; 3:10-15; 4:10-17
October 1, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The Hebrew Bible is a large collection of books and, even after you take out the prophets and other poetic texts, the wisdom literature, and the laws and regulations, it is still a long story. The folks who put together the Narrative Lectionary that I've been using have set themselves the task of covering the story from Creation to Pentecost each year using different texts. They decided that they had to get to the New Testament by Christmas. I can't say that I blame them.

But that means covering the Old Testament in three and half months. And that in turn means that it moves very quickly when we might want to slow down and linger a little. The story of the Call of Moses, our story for this Sunday, takes up three chapters in Exodus, but we have only these few snippets. But the snippets are pretty good, so I'm going to stop complaining now.

The part about the bush that was on fire but never burned up is missing, but I promised not to complain, so this isn't a complaint. It's just an observation. So we have to picture Moses barefoot before a bush that burns without burning up. Moses is in "dialogue" with God, which in this case means that Moses is allowed to say whatever he needs to say, but it makes no difference.

The conversation fits the common pattern of call stories: God summons a person to service. The person offers up one or more excuses as to why this would be a really bad idea. God tells the person to "stop with the excuses already"; they can do what they are called to do because God is going to help them. The person says, Well, then, okay, I guess.

Moses, Jeremiah, even Jesus. Remember how it went in the garden when Jesus prayed, "I don't want to do this. Do I have to? Well, okay."

Only one call story breaks this mold, the story of the call of Isaiah, in which God summons Isaiah and Isaiah says, "Here I am. Send me!" That's the way we imagine that a call story should go. There are no hymns that start, "Okay, I'm here but couldn't you please send someone else?"

Why do we think, in spite of the evidence, that being called is fun? And yet, somehow we think that. And then when we find out what it's really like, we feel resentful. And maybe that resentment comes out sideways. My sister Jody, a librarian at Drew University, notices that the largest number of missing books, books that have mysteriously disappeared from the stacks without having been checked out, the largest number of missing books are from the religion sections. She puts it bluntly, "Never trust anyone who says they are called."

Being called is dangerous. People who are called can start to think they are privileged. People who are called can start to think they can cut corners, cheat a little for the sake of God's dream. People who are called can become dangerous to the people around them, but also to themselves when they start to justify and rationalize what they are doing. Being called is dangerous.

It's very much like being a "chosen" people, since being a chosen people is just like being called only on a larger scale. Chosen people are tempted to believe that their lives are more important than the lives of their neighbors. Chosen people can start to think that international law doesn't apply to them. They can get to thinking that because they are a "city on a hill" and a "beacon of light" everything they do must be right and good and true just because they are the ones doing it. Chosen people are tempted to stop listening even to their friends when they have gone deeply astray. Chosen people sometimes start to wear the disapproval of others as a badge of pride.

A special relationship with God is very tricky. Isaiah was too young to know any better. Maybe why he was so eager: "Ooo! Ooo! Pick me! Pick me!" Moses was a little older, a little more experienced, a little wiser: "Who am I to go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? You know how much I hate public speaking. I've never been any good at it. Please, my Lord, just send someone else."

Moses was smart.

An advantage of having our reading come as bits and pieces from three different chapters is that different bits are next to pieces we're not used to seeing them next to. Maybe that's why I noticed something I hadn't seen before. When Moses is called, he says something strange. He says, "If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' they are going to ask me, ‘What's this God's name?' What am I supposed to say to them?"

Moses was smart.

Names are important. Names are powerful.

In Thailand, for example, people have two names. One name is their true name, but it is a secret, never uttered without taking precautions to make sure that it is not overheard. The other name is their public name, deliberately chosen to sound like an insult. This is so that invisible powers will be unable to use their real name in a curse.

When a story is told about Jesus casting out a spirit, he often forces the spirit to tell him its name. Knowing the spirit's name makes it easier to overpower it. The spirits know this and usually refuse to say their names. Jesus' forcing a spirit to tell its name is itself an impressive demonstration of power.

Everyone knows that if you happen to meet a dragon never let them learn your name. Your name gives them power over you.

If we think that any of this is silly, I ask, then why is it that people are so relieved when they are able to give a name to a bundle of symptoms, even if the disorder that is named is both incurable and fatal? Names give us a sense of power over things.

This might be true for gods as well, as ancient magical texts attest. These spells are full of the names of various gods on the assumptions that (1) knowing the names of gods gives you some leverage over them and (2) the more gods the better.

Moses wanted to know God's name. Moses was smart. God was smarter.

Here's what God said to Moses: "I Am Who I Am." You know if I had a nickel for every bottle of ink that has been wasted trying to figure out what God meant, I'd be rich. Theologians have zeroed in on what seems to them to be the self-existence of God. God isn't one example of a class of things, like I am an example of the class of things called human beings. God just is.

Which is true enough, but I think the context can take us deeper. Moses asked for God's name. And God, in effect, refuses to give it: "I Am Who I Am. Tell Israel "I Am" sent you." I think that what God is saying is that God is about to liberate the Israelites from slavery, not out of any sense of compulsion, nor because someone has gained power over God, but simply because God has decided to do it. Neither Moses nor the Israelites need to know God's name, so God says, in effect: "None of your business what my name is."

But then the text immediately goes on to name God anyway. "God continued," it says, as if God had stopped and then started again. "Say to the Israelites, 'Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, Abraham's God, Isaac's God, and Jacob's God, has sent me to you.' This is my name forever."

It is as if the text were uncomfortable with God as radically other, unnamed, uncontrolled, answering to no one, and who, because of that, is over all things and all people, a God who is beyond anyone's ability to know or to name, certainly a God who is impossible to own. So the text went on to bind God to a particular name for a particular God who has been part of the particular history of a particular people.

The Israelites cannot know God this radically other, unnamed One. The Israelites can only know Yahweh who hears their cries, sees their misery, and comes down to deliver them from their distress. In a sense, Yahweh is the one through whom the Israelites come to know God-who-has-no-name. Their temptation will lie in one of two directions. In ancient times they often felt that they could not rely on Yahweh, that there must be some God left over that they might be able to get a grip on by relying on other gods in addition to Yahweh. This is the temptation to which they gave in time and time again through the Hebrew Bible.

The other temptation is, if anything, even more dangerous: to imagine that having the name of Yahweh, the God of their ancestors, meant that they had a handle on God, that their particular way of knowing God was the only possible true way, and that God was available to them to grant them their own desires, even at the expense of other peoples. This is the temptation into which Israel has fallen today.

Words fail me, I'm afraid. I don't know how to say what I think I'm seeing in this story. Wouldn't I have to say that for us Christians this means that, on the one hand, God is unnamed and unnameable, but on the other hand, we see Jesus who shows us what God is like so that we know God's character? Through history we have fallen into the temptation of acting as if Jesus were the only way to know anything about God and to believe that we are therefore required to impose our notion of Jesus on our fellow-citizens and our world neighbors. And we have fallen into the temptation of believing that we own God somehow because we see and follow Jesus. Shouldn't we be both more grateful for what we know of God in Jesus and more humble about how little we know and can know of the God who cannot be named? Shouldn't we be taking off our shoes?

This being called stuff is tricky. It's no wonder Moses reacted the way he did. I know how he felt. "Please, my Lord, just send someone else. Well, okay, if I have to. I guess."

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.