Good morning everyone – It’s so great to be back at St. Paul’s for a Sunday service. We’ve really missed all of you this past year. Being away for so long has made me realize what a special role St. Paul’s played in the life of my family, and what a unique church community this is. I’m really grateful to all of you for the contribution you made to my spiritual formation, and for your continued support of my family in seminary. I couldn’t imagine a better place to call my home parish. So – thank you… all of you: our lives wouldn’t be the same without St. Paul’s.
I’m also really glad that we made it back to Bellingham just in time for summer to start! In Austin we’ve been having summer since about November or so. We all got into town late on Tuesday night, and we have been trying to cram in all the things we love about this town for the last few days. Let me tell you: I love way too many things about Bellingham! We’ve been up early and out late every day, and it’s been a great time for all of us so far.
Unfortunately I have to leave again soon, and I miss this weather already. Back in Texas everything is hot to the touch – even the tap water comes out warm! I’ve had a good summer, though. As part of my curriculum for seminary, I had to complete a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, so I spent the last three months as a chaplain in the Intensive Care Unit at Seton Hospital – which is one of the three main hospitals in Austin. It was quite an experience for me, and I learned a lot about myself and about how God meets us in times of crisis and suffering. Almost everyone who comes through the ICU is in a time of major transition in their life, and it was my job to come alongside my patients and their families in their suffering and to help them to cope with their experience. The stories I bring away from this summer have changed me as a person, and I will carry them with me for a lifetime… which brings me to my message for today. I want to talk about the story from Exodus this morning, specifically the part where Moses is trying to cope with the tremendous news God has just given him:
… come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you…
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM Who I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations.”
It’s a sobering experience to stand outside of a hospital room and try to work up an idea of how to minister to the stranger you’re about to meet. Everybody has a different story, and everyone is in a different place with their understanding of who or what God is and how God figures into their unique situation. As a chaplain, I had to delicately balance my own ideas about faith and spirituality with the needs and beliefs of my patients. So when I saw today’s reading from Exodus, I really could identify with Moses’ question: and who am I supposed to say sent me? Every time I went into a hospital room, I was tasked with helping to make God’s presence known, but this presence had to be in a form that each unique person could identify – based on their own religious experience and ideas. I had to learn quickly how to pick up on the barest of signals and comments to connect with others’ spirituality. What I learned is that God is bigger and far more capable than I ever imagined of meeting each person where they are in life.
I met a man one day who, when he saw that I was a chaplain, stopped me mid-sentence to explain that he was a “stone-cold atheist.” He was waiting on exploratory heart surgery while the nurses worked frantically to bring down his blood pressure. This man didn’t really need to hear “A prayer for those about to undergo surgery” from my prayer book! I came into the room not as an Episcopal seminarian ready to help him find my God, but as a fellow human with a mysterious and often fallible body, a human who finds my greatest spiritual help not in particular words or ideas, but in the healing presence of another who cares to hear my story. We talked at length about his history of epilepsy and the connection he feels with transcendent reality in the wake of his seizures, and the peace and calm he felt that day as he prepared to accept the truth of whatever his condition turned out to be. A stone-cold atheist living in Texas has probably had more than his share of chances to debate Christians about the practicality of their faith, but I wonder how often he got to tell them about how his health conditions would strain his family life, and how he worried about the people he loved who would have to take care of him. While the God who sent me into that room is certainly the God of deathbed conversions, miraculous healings, and fervent religious debate, on that day I was sent to minister by the God of compassion and kindness.
So Moses, like anyone in his shoes might do, was trying to figure out exactly what he might expect from God, or perhaps how he could use this experience to connect with the people he was being sent to rescue. He certainly was wise enough to know that he couldn’t just walk right into the midst of Egypt and proclaim that a fiery shrub had sent him to lead his Israelite brethren to freedom. Moses had to ask: “Who is this God who would send me on such an errand?” God’s reaction to Moses’ question has been a profound theological puzzle in every age since. There as many ideas of how to translate “I AM who I AM” as there are biblical scholars – perhaps as many as there are people! G.H. Davies put it well: “I AM who and what, and where and when, and how and even why you will discover I AM”, and Joe Pug, an Austin musician, put it even better:
I am the day, I am the dawn I am the darkness coming on
And I am once, and I am twice
I am the whole, I’m just a slice
I am the disappointed kiss
I am the unexpected harvest
I am the old Kentucky home
I am the son who runs the farthest
I am the brush, I am the strokes
I am sickness come to the best of folks
I am renewed, I am just made, I am unchanging
I am a pasture fenced about the edge
I am Dakota thunder raging
Some call me gone, some call me here
None are wrong, none are near
I am right now, I am back then
I will return, don’t ask me when
So, in other words, God didn’t have an easy answer for Moses that day. No matter how many names we come up with to describe God – Mighty One, El Shaddai, Prince of Peace, Yahweh – God will always be not wholly contained by them.
And yet… yet it’s easy to forget that God didn’t give just the one answer to Moses. God gave two. After defining himself as indefinable, God at least consents to identify as one with the God of history, the God of Israel’s patriarchs. So we have a God, then, who, while he maintains the sovereignty of transcending mere names, gives us at the very least the comfort of knowing that we’re still dealing with the same divine presence our parents had to wrestle with, and the same one our kids already know better than we do. This is a powerful reality: if God transcends time and space and matter and definition yet preserves a unique and consistent identity, then our task is not so much to define what is or isn’t from God, but instead to learn to recognize God’s work when we see it and to be on familiar terms with God’s voice when we hear it. When we see someone working to bring us all into a land of blessing, or when we hear someone calling for freedom from captivity, our job is to come alongside, not worry about who is getting the credit. It’s easy to use our particular name for God to avoid doing what needs to be done, or worse, to lull is into doing things we otherwise wouldn’t. Conversely, it’s hard not to let others’ names for God get in the way of our working together for God’s glory. I won’t easily jump in line to follow the dictates of a fiery shrub, but when the shrub is telling everyone to give alms to the needy and visit the prisoners, I have to step back and realize how recognizable that sounds. On the other hand, when someone comes to me in God’s name with an agenda to exploit orphans and widows, I have to be ready to stand up for the honor of God’s name. So the God who sent Moses is the God who transcends understanding and yet inhabits familiarity; the God who we can never fully know, and the God who we have always known; our God is the God who answers to many names, even the one that the sparrows give to him.
I think that each of us has a fiery shrub hidden away in our history, if not a whole forest of them. The beauty of the burning bush is the confirmation that God will meet us in the wilderness of our daily lives in fresh, unexpected, and sometimes truly weird forms. And God has a message, a calling unique to each of us, to set his people free from slavery. I heard my calling over the course of many years: in the daily grind of showing up on time and cutting square corners in the rain, while I contemplated the vast beauty of the desert hanging hundreds of feet in the air from ropes, and in introducing my children to the joys and pains of walking and of falling down. As I look back over all of it, I have found that the major themes in my life are leadership and spirituality: I have cheerfully reversed course through a dark muddy cave passage to help someone re-tie a knot, and I have read theology over lukewarm left-overs on construction sites. These are my quirks and my gifts, and – taken together with much discernment and prayer – they are my calling.
So my message for all of you today is to keep your heads up and always be scanning the horizon for your own burning bush. Look back on your own story, reflect on the things that bring you life and the sacred stories that most inspire you. Where do they lead you? For what great work have you been prepared? And when you show up, who are you going to tell them sent you?
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