“The God of Possibility and the Possibility of God”
A Sermon by the Rev. Robert M. Hardies
All Souls Church, Unitarian
Washington, D.C.
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Did you notice that we tucked this morning’s reading into your order of service, a practice we don’t always do. I had the ushers working overtime at 8:30 this morning, making sure that they got in there for you because as I share our reading this morning, I want you to read along with me. We’re going to spend a little time with this text this morning. We’re going to do something a little bit different and we’re going to spend a bit of time with this reading from Scripture, this reading from the beginning of one of the greatest stories of liberation of all time, the story of Exodus. This is a part of the story that you’ve probably all heard before, that you all at least know somewhere back in your mind, the story of the burning bush. But perhaps this morning, we will come to hear it with new words, with a new sense of what it might mean for us and what it means in this season. So feel free to follow along with me then on your insert. Exodus, Chapter 3, Verses 1 through 15. Incidentally, I have taken out a little bit of the text. I’ve edited it for clarity, mostly taking out very obscure and hard-to-pronounce tribes from the ancient Near East. [Laughter] But basically, the text is complete and all the important stuff is there.
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that, though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So Moses thought “I will go over and see this strange sight, why the bush does not burn up.” When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush. “Moses, Moses.” Moses said, “Here I am.” “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham and of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers and I am concerned about their suffering, so I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and a spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. The cry of the Israelites has reached me. I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them, so now go; I am sending 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?” And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God; you will worship me, on this mountain.” Moses said to God, “Well, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you’ and they ask me, ‘Well, what is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses – and here I’ve left the words in the original Hebrew, because I’m going to come back to them a little bit later; there’s a little bit of controversy about exactly what God says to Moses when Moses asks him his name – “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. Ehyeh has sent me to you. This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.”
Here ends our reading. Now you can just tuck it away for a little while; we’re going to come back to it a little bit later in the sermon. So keep it handy.
I think it is good, sometimes, especially in this holiday season, when religious belief so permeates our culture, just to acknowledge that not all of us are believers. Not everyone in this world and even in this church believes in God. Sometimes during the holiday season it’s good to just get that out there a little bit and create a little bit of breathing space. You know, sometimes for non-believers it gets a little claustrophobic during the holiday season. Here at All Souls, of course, we have our share of unbelievers. No doubt about it. We also have our share of believers. And then we have what I call a third category. It reminds me: Al Gore used to say in the wake of the 2000 election, “You know, you win some and you lose some. And then there’s that rare, third category.” [Laughter] And we have that rare third category here at All Souls. It may be, in fact, the largest group among us, a group that I would count myself among. They’re neither believers nor non-believers. I might call them, for lack of a better word, half-believers. Believers with an asterisk, folks who’ve got some but not all of the answers, folks who’ve been around long enough to know that there’s still a lot of mystery out there to explore. So they’re seekers, they’re still finding their way. One friend recently described his particular brand of half-belief to me this way: He said “Rob, I’m an atheist with a soft spot for God.” [Laughter]
This is all to say that none of us fits into any neat and tidy categories when it comes to faith, but also to say, and I want to say today, please know that wherever you fall on the spectrum of belief and disbelief, of certainty and uncertainty, you are welcome at All Souls Church this Sunday and on every Sunday.
Now as a pastor I often have people come to me and say, “Rob, I don’t believe in God.” And if I have time to engage with them I like to respond by saying, “Well tell me a little bit about the God that you don’t believe in.” And when they do I almost always find myself nodding vigorously and saying, “Friend, we are in agreement; I don’t believe in that God either.” And let’s face it, there are lots of good reasons for us not to believe in God these days, aren’t there? Not least of them is the behavior of some of the most outspoken believers in our culture today. There are lots of believers out there giving belief a bad name.
But our cause for doubt runs even deeper than that. I mean, look around us at our world today. How do we square a belief in a loving God with genocide in Darfur? How do we explain how an all-powerful God would let so many people suffer in Iraq? Or Columbia Heights? Or anywhere else in the world? How do we keep faith in a just God when our own loved ones are taken from us too soon? Or when sometimes life heaps on us indignity upon indignity? At the crux of our doubt is the age-old question, “If God is powerful and God is good, then why do the good and the innocent suffer?” There are only a few ways out of that question, only a few ways to go. One is to say, “God doesn’t exist.” Another way out of the problem is to deny the reality of evil, to say, in effect, “Well sure, people suffer and there’s lots of injustice out there, but if we only knew God’s larger plan we’d see that it’s all part of his great scheme; it’s all part of the plan. All works out for the best.” People who share this belief often sprinkle their theological musings with one of my least favorite expressions. They like to say, “Hey, it’s all good.”
No, it’s not! It’s not all good. Suffering is suffering and injustice is injustice and it’s not all good! After you get past these two options, the problem of how to reconcile a good God with the not-always-good world becomes a little more complicated, a little more messy. This morning, I’d like us to wade right into that messiness, to wade right into those troubled waters. This morning, I want to ask all of us – believer, non-believer, half-believer – to set aside, for a moment, all the preconceived ideas that we have about the God that we do, don’t or half-believe in. I want us to set it all aside for a moment and to entertain, for just this morning, a totally new understanding of who God might be and how God is or isn’t present in the world. And let me be clear as we do this, that I am not going to try to convince anyone of anything this morning. You know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Unitarians over the years is that we can be a very open-minded people, and a people very willing to try out new ideas, until we get a sense that someone’s trying to convince us of their new idea, in which case, we become a close-minded people and shut them out. So I’m not going to try to convince anyone of anything this morning. I want us to explore together. And I want us to do that by going back to our text this morning, because somewhere hidden in that text is an understanding of God that I’d like us to wrestle with today.
So go ahead, if you want and take out that text and read along with me. We’re going to have a Bible study here this morning, a little Torah study. I’m going to kind of set the stage here. If you’ll remember, we find Moses in our reading, and his people, caught in a situation not unlike the one I’ve been describing. They are suffering. They’ve been exiled from their country and enslaved in the land of Egypt. And we can only imagine that they’re asking that question: “How could God have done this to us? How could our God let this happen?” Well, one day Moses is out in the fields, tending to his land, when a crazy thing happens. This is what I love about the Bible: crazy things happen in the Bible. You know, we know this story so it doesn’t sound crazy to us, but listen to this. He looks over and he sees a bush that is on fire. But it’s not just on fire; it’s burning and, for some strange reason, it’s not being consumed. It’s keeping its form and shape and mass. But the burning isn’t the only strange thing about this bush. Considerably more strange is the fact that it is talking to Moses, speaking directly to him. And not only that, but it slowly dawns on Moses in Verses 4 through 6, that the voice speaking to him from the bush is none other than the voice of God.
Listen to what the voice of God says to Moses in Verses 7 and 8 because it reveals something important, I think, about God’s character. God says to Moses, a slave, “I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them out of that land into a good and a spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” This is one of the most important passages in the Bible, I think, testimony to a compassionate and a liberating God, a God who exercises a preferential option for the suffering and the oppressed.
So right about now, I mean, Moses has got to be feeling pretty good. His people are going to be set free; God is going to come down and rescue them. But then, just then, God throws Moses a curve ball. He says in Verse 10, “look, I can’t liberate the people on my own. The most I can do is help. So I’m going to send you, Moses. You go back to the people, you organize them, you take them to Pharaoh and say to Pharaoh ‘Let my people go.’ I’ll lend you a hand here and there, but it’s up to you.” You can almost see in the text, Moses go “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. I should go to my people, tell them that I’ve gotten instructions from a burning bush, who was God, and the bush said to me that I should lead you in a revolt against Pharaoh and, you know, God, I just don’t think that’s going to work,” is what Moses is wrestling with here. He’s just not buying it. So he has an idea, though, and in Verse 13 he says “God, at least you’ve got to give me a sign; you know, you’ve got to give me some kind of credential so that the people will believe me. At least give me your name.”
Now this is actually the dramatic high point of the story, right here. If you were listening to this story back in 1000 B.C., or 1300 A.D., or even in 1750, you would have gasped when Moses asked that question: “God, tell me your name.” Because you just don’t ask God God’s name; that’s not something that mortals are supposed to do. It’s considered impertinent and impolite, kind of like asking a woman her age. Except worse. [Laughter] So people are now hanging on every breath; they’re saying well what’s going to happen here? Is God going to smite Moses for his impertinence? Is he going to dodge the question like a presidential candidate? God answers him. God says to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘Ehyeh has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation o generation.”
Now, the meaning of those three Hebrew words is one of the most contested mysteries in the entire Bible. Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. In almost every authorized translation, those words read “I am who I am.” Ehyeh is the first-person singular of the verb “to be.” Asher is the relative pronoun that can mean “that,” “who” or “which.” But there is a complicating factor here. In Biblical Hebrew there are only two verb tenses that you can have: the perfect tense which refers to actions that are already completed, and the imperfect tense that refers to actions that have not yet been completed. It refers to actions in the future. “Ehyeh” is the imperfect form of the verb “to be.” Almost everywhere else in the Bible, when “ehyeh” appears, it is translated not “I am,” but “I will be,” which means that the most plausible name for God is not “I am who I am,” but “I will be who I will be.”
Sometimes church is just like the Da Vinci Code; we get to unwrap the mysteries of the Bible [Laughter], and it’s exciting! [Laughter] It’s kind of radical for God to name God’s self, think about it, in the imperfect tense. It upends all the things that we were supposed to believe about God, that God was eternal and unchanging and the all-powerful cause. “I will be who I will be” suggests that God is somehow not complete, not yet fully formed. It suggests that God is still becoming, that God is a God of potential and possibility. God is saying to Moses, “Don’t think of me as the all-powerful cause of your suffering or of your liberation, but as the ever-present possibility, even in your darkest hour. The liberating possibility, your co-conspirator in your journey to the land of milk, to the land of honey.”
What if we were to see God, what if we were to imagine God, as present in the world not as the all-powerful cause of all things, but as the ever-present possibility within all things? The spirit that seeks to lure out of each moment it’s greatest possible outcome, the greatest possible love, the greatest possible justice, the greatest possible beauty and truth. To be real concrete about it, what if we thought of God as not the force that pre-ordained that all of us would come to this place on this day to gather here together, not the God who forced us to do that, but rather as the God who is dwelling within us and amongst us, in this very moment, luring us, helping us imagine what is the greatest possible outcome of this moment, of this hour, right now? What is the next step in our lives, the next step toward justice, or love, or truth?
What if we saw our times of prayer and meditation as time to ask ourselves “Where is this God of possibility, this spirit of possibility, leading me now? Where is the potential good, the possible justice, the future love, that I am being called to in this very moment? Where is the land of milk and honey for me, for us? What does my future look like?” These are prayers to a God of possibility. And these are also Advent prayers. Think about it. Advent is a season of hope; it’s a season of expectation. Our images for God in Advent, what are they? They are a pregnant woman. They are a child in a womb, God, not yet fully formed, not yet fully born, still becoming. A God of the future tense, a God of the maybes, of the might bes, of the I-wish-it-were-so. Perhaps in this season of possibility, perhaps we – believers, non-believers, half-believers – perhaps we can, once again, entertain the possibility of God by reimagining God as the God of possibility. Amen.