Credo: Who Is God? (4th Sunday after Pentecost; Exodus 3:1-15; June 17, 2018)

Credo: Who Is God?

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 3:1-15
June 17, 2018

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

Who is God? Now there's an ambitious question! Maybe I would have been better off to have asked the question next week with everything packed, my car running, ready to hotfoot it out of town before you had a chance to ask any questions.

How to begin...

I can say that my earlier attempts to find an answer to that question mostly involved what we in the "biz" call "doing theology." Part of the reason for requiring a seminary education for clergy is to train clergy as theologians, or at least to make a beginning. We were subjected to various courses in theology that broke it down into its parts: Christology, ecclesiology, soteriology, eschatology, pneumatology, anthropology, and theology proper. Theology also got smuggled into courses on Church history, which was framed as a series of controversies, a series of heresies that were battled and defeated (sometimes in literal battles). We learned the general shape of what is acceptable and what is not in Christian thought. We learned about current schools of theological thinking. We found our favorite authors and stuck with them, defending them against all comers.

My mind and personality are suited to this sort of thing, so you can imagine that I did it pretty well. I still do.

But as comfortable and familiar as this path is to me, it has its limits. One of those limits is that doing theology is a matter of abstraction. We might start with the Bible, or, more accurately a small selection of texts from the Bible, and we make general statements about them. We move from the specific to the general. And this applies to the stuff of our lives as well as the stuff of the Bible. Take Karl Barth, one of the more famous theologians of the last century. You can read all thirty-one volumes of his Church Dogmatics and never discover what sort of a marriage he had or whether he liked children.

Theology may tell us about what God is and what God is not, but surprisingly tells us little about who God is. Theology can satisfy us intellectually and still leave us wanting something else.

So I'm not sure I'm even qualified to ask the question. Moses asked the question. He wanted to know God's name, something more than "the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Moses wants a name to give to the Israelites. He knows they will ask. And I suspect he knows why they will ask. Names are like handles that can be used to gain power. In some places in the world, no one's true name is ever uttered out loud. Instead they goes by a nickname, sometimes obscene, always an insult. In that way they are protected from spirits who would use the knowledge of their name to do them harm. Even we, if we are in a conversation in which someone knows our name, but we do not know theirs, feel ourselves at a disadvantage, as if we have given someone else power over us.

So Moses asked, "What is your name?" And God replied, "אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה," which translates to "I am what I am" or "I am who I am."

Traditionally, philosophically-minded theologians have interpreted this as meaning something like, "the One who has no source of existence beyond itself," or "the One who is not dependent on anyone else," or "the self-existent One." I can't blame theologians for this. Like the rest of us they are just trying to understand. They are just trying to get a handle on God. And that may be the problem, the same problem that the Israelites had. They are trying to get a handle on God, too. But God does not wish to be handled.

And that's why I think God response is something along these lines: "When the Israelites demand to know my name, tell them, 'You think you'll have some sort of leverage over me if you know my name? Well, nevermind what my name is! It's none of your business what my name is!' Tell them Nevermind sent you!"

What if I tried--what if we tried--living into the question of who God is without being motivated by any attempt to get a handle on God, but simply to know even as we are known, as Paul put it.

In the last few years I have found myself more and more wandering along the winding and criss-crossing paths of the Bible itself. There are, I testify, wonders to be seen. And in the dazzling details I glimpse hints, if not of God's name, then at least of who God might be known to be.

There is, of course, the next verse, the one after the one in which God skates around the question of God's name, the one in which God tells Moses God's name: "The Lord [that is, Yahweh], the God of your ancestors, Abraham's God, Isaac's God, and Jacob's God." Yahweh might be related in some way to the Hebrew for "I am." So something odd has happened, which to say the very least, is not at all unusual in the Bible. In one breath God has said in effect, I'm not going to tell you my name. In the very next God says, Oh, by the way, my name is Yahweh. But that isn't where I went in pursuit of an answer to the question of who God is.

Where I went is this: We are used to thinking about God in the declarative sentences and philosophical propositions of the theologians. We don't necessary know the lingo, but we think that this is how it ought to be done. But the Bible doesn't present God very often as the object of theology. Instead the Bible presents God as a character in a story. In fact the Bible presents God as the leading character in the story that it contains.

In the story I've chosen for today's text we have, in a way, God's self-introduction to the Israelites after a considerable period of absence. The absence is not explained. It's just there. Abraham had a God. Isaac had a God. Jacob had a God. Joseph and his brothers had a God, the same God as their father, grandfather, and great grandfather. In that story Joseph and his brothers God arranged for them to settle in Egypt as guests of Pharaoh and so escaped a regional famine.

But then God seems to have disappeared. A different Pharaoh emerges, one who didn't know Joseph or his brothers, one for whom the Israelites were just a subject people the labor of whose bodies could be commodified and exploited. Pharaoh enslaved them. But God is absent. God even disappeared from the memory of the Israelites; they have forgotten. They have become just another band of miserable slaves. When they cry out, they don't even have an address toward which to direct their prayers.

But that doesn't seem to matter to God. Whatever God's absence meant, it had not meant that God had ceased to notice what happened to the Israelites. As God said to Moses, "I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain."

There is more. Not only has God noticed, God is now on the scene to deliver the Israelites. God has not forgotten the covenant that even Israel can no longer remember.

"I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them."

God has seen, God has heard, God knows, God has come down to deliver, God has come to bring them to a good land.

In the story, we know God as one who sees, who hears, who pities, and who comes down to save. It's a story to be sure. We could say that it's just a story, only a story. We could say that, except that, since we are Jesus-followers, we are part of that "just a story." We are on the inside of the story. We are characters in this story in which God is also a character. Inside this story we can never be sure that God will not see. We cannot rule out the possibility that God will hear. We cannot categorically state that God does not pity the oppressed. And so we cannot ignore the possibility that God will come down to save.

Does this answer the question of who God is? Will you accuse me of a sleight of hand if I say, Yes, it does? I haven't proven anything, even that God exists. But if this story is any part of our story, then that changes things.

We don't know that God will act this way in similar circumstances. But God has done it before. So neither can we know that God will not act in these ways again. We hope that God will, because there are people who are being oppressed now, people who have fallen into Pharaoh's hands, people who had fled life-threatening conditions in their home for the hope of refuge in another land and who have been denied that hope. But not simply denied it. They have been arrested and charged with crimes. And if that were not bad enough, their children have been taken from them, two thousand or more of them taken and held hostage. Pharaoh has never dared to be so callous and cruel and cold.

But this is acceptable because Pharaoh has decreed it. Pharaoh imagines that there is no higher authority who can disagree. Pharaoh even imagines that he may invoke God as the authority behind his decree. Pharaoh imagines that he can carry out a cruel and callous policy and claim that he ought to be obeyed because God says so. I don't know what story Pharaoh thinks he's in. But it's not our story.

In our story there is One who notices such things, and who has a record of responding savingly and sometimes savagely. for the sake of two thousand underage hostages. The God of Abraham cannot be counted on to be absent. When the God of Abraham is present, the oppressed go free and the oppressors answer for their crimes. And that's my answer to the question. This is Who God Is.

If Pharaoh is sleeping well these days, it's only because he doesn't understand the situation.

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