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The God Who Says “Go”: On Going To
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis October 26, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 12:1-4; Exodus 3:7-14 Matthew 28:16-20
Much had happened between the twelfth of Genesis where we left off last week and the third of Exodus. “The God of Abraham” has become “the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac,” and finally has been made known as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Jacob, you will remember, was the one to beget the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel, though Jacob had--among the twelve--a favorite. One thing you do not want to be in the biblical narrative is a first-born or a favorite son! Despised by his brothers for this fact, Joseph was sold as a slave to the Ishmaelites [the Arabs, in other words] and taken to Egypt. There, through a series of twists and turns in the plot, he becomes a member of Pharaoh’s household and is made second in command over all of Egypt. Reenter the eleven brothers by way of a famine that Joseph understands to be God’s providential occasion for a fearful reunion. Ultimately, Joseph forgives his brothers and feeds his own people from the largess that Egypt had saved under his leadership. The twelve tribes of Israel then settle in Egypt where they are “fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong,” begins the book of Exodus, “so that the land was filled with them.” Now the one who has been telling us most of this tale from the beginning in the garden is a writer known to biblical scholars as “J”. J is writing down these stories during the end of the reign of Solomon—the king who built the temple in Jerusalem as the dwelling place for God on earth. Religion in J’s time, in other words, had settled down to a comfortable and elaborate routine sanctioned by the royal consciousness. One could liken it to the time when Christianity became the religion of Constantine’s empire, or to the period of the Roman church just before Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, or one could even liken it to what many still long to effect between the church and the nation in these days. The point is that we have God where we want God: defined theologically, contained ecclesially, co-opted politically. Noting not only the historical context but also the ironic tone of J’s narrative, one literary critic characterizes J’s stance toward God as “appreciative, wryly apprehensive, intensely interested and above all alert.” Moreover, this critic notes, J is “perhaps a touch wary” of God himself, “always prepared to be surprised.” Again, imagine him writing these stories of Bedouin tribes and their itinerant God in a time when the power arrangements seemed to be set, the law written in stone, and the future of God’s people secured in the land God had promised. His description of the Israelites in Egypt, fruitful and prolific, multiplying and growing strong, must have been written to ring bells with the self-satisfied subjects of Solomon…written to ring bells with any and every religious community, throughout human history, intent upon staying put and continuing things as they are. So too, J’s ominous announcement of a new king to rule over Egypt, on the heels of Joseph’s death, foreshadows a dark turn not only in the tale he was telling, but in the history he was living. The new king “knew not Joseph,” by which J means to say, knew not the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Hence the power that once upheld the lives of the Israelites in Egypt, once secured them by way of a ruler who had come to tremble before the power of Israel’s God, now is replaced by one who knows only his own power: the power not of life but of death. When read through the lens of 922 B.C. and Solomon’s crumbling court, this story of Israel’s impending exodus from the fleshpots of Egypt reverberates with the reality of the unified kingdom’s division! Peace, unity and purity were soon to be a faint memory. Moses is born into this situation as a creature caught in the middle. Saved from Pharaoh’s murderous order to kill every boy born to a Hebrew woman, he is fetched from the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter, raised by a random, nameless Hebrew nurse, then turned back to the king’s daughter who adopts him as her own. Blood, however, shows itself to be more decisive than adoption for Moses’ identity. Seeing the Hebrew people bending under the yoke of slavery, and witnessing one of his own being beaten, he kills the offending Egyptian, an action that only compounds the situation. “When the actual situation becomes deathly oppressive,” asks Gerald Janzen, “is the actual the limit of the possible? Does the actual present strictly define and determine what the future shall be?” For Moses in Egypt, it seems that the future had been fatefully defined by this deadly and oppressive present. All he thought he could do in the situation was split and run for his life. In the meantime, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob had heard the groaning of the Israelites under slavery and remembered the covenant. Not by chance given J’s stance toward God, we next meet Moses in the wilderness, in the place according to the biblical narrative, “where present reality is suspended such the future no longer depends upon the rigid determination of the actual.” J has set the stage for the new thing this surprising God is about to do. The story of the burning bush is called a theophany-a story of an appearance of God. Moses turns to see and from out of the bush, God first identifies himself to Moses as the God of his father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. God tells Moses what Moses knows all too well and then repeats to Moses the promise made to Abraham, with one astounding addition: God intends to keep this promise by sending Moses to Pharaoh. In a sense, Moses has already been there, done that! “He knows the actual situation: he knows himself, he knows the Israelites, and he knows the power of Egypt.” So he counters with a doubting question: “Who am I…?” It may be a dodge, but it also may be the kind of doubt that seeks a new self-definition, a doubt opening out toward the God who says “Go,” as settled reality and budding possibility “vie within him.” God moves into the space created by Moses’ self-doubt saying, “I will be with you.” In other words, Moses’ question is answered by God’s redefinition of who Moses is. “Who he is can no longer be defined merely in terms of who he had…taken himself to be, or in terms merely of the actual situation” from which he is running. Rather from this encounter on, who Moses is can be understood only in relation to the God who is with him. But then there is the matter of the God who says “Go” to the place where present realities oppress and to the people for whom trust in the living God has become all but impossible. What can Moses say of the God who is with him that will be heard and believed, not first by Pharaoh, but by the Israelites? I think this is J’s question asked in the midst of the sedimented religion of Solomon’s temple and in anticipation of the divided kingdom; it was Luther’s question in the face of Roman authority and on the cusp of the Reformation; it is our question at the end of 150 years of inertia (in both senses of the term) and before a post-modern world of subjective spirituality. God is surely still the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Yet the God who promised Abraham his presence must have seemed strangely absent in the land of Egypt. “What shall I say to them?” Moses asks, pressing God for more. What shall we say both to a generation and as a generation neither knowing the biblical witness nor claimed by the God proclaimed in ages past? God’s answer to Moses begins, “I will be….” It is a blank religion rushes to fill in with marketable human hopes: God will be the victor in our every battle, the healer of our every disease, the fulfiller of our highest hope, the assurance of our deepest desire. But this God of whom J is wary and by whom he is ready to be surprised says, “I will be who I will be.” That is to say, take heart: I am not in your control! The future of those with whom this God is, is held in the mystery of God’s intention, the limitless possibility of God’s promise fulfilled no matter the actual limits of the present situation. Moses, and so too Israel, must remain open to possibilities that will unfold only as they risk the limits of the actual for the future of the God who says simply, “Go”: Go to the place I will lead you. So Moses returns to Egypt as bearer of a new possibility. Israel ultimately hears and almost believes, with the help of a few signs, but Pharaoh resists the power of the Living God in favor of his own. “Egypt learns to its grief,” says Janzen, “that where the actual seeks to continue as an unchanging definition of the possible, that equation spells death, not for the oppressed, but for the oppressor; and this is not solely by an arbitrary…judgment,” but by its rigidity, which is its own form of rigor mortis.” And what of this community of faith these thousands of years hence? In as sense, we are as content as the Israelites in Egypt before the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph; we are as comfortable as the congregation gathered in the opulence of Solomon’s temple; we are as caught betwixt and between as Moses, a community running for our lives in the wilderness of this culture. “We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it,” we complain. “We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.” But listen again. For this story before us is as a burning bush. In its details, the Living God has led us out to the place where present reality is suspended such the future no longer depends upon the rigid determination of the actual. The God who says, “Go,” addresses in these pages and sends us still to speak truth to power, be that power civil or ecclesial. We tremble at the prospect, our arrogance withers, doubt rises. We ask, “Who are we…” “I will be with you,” says the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, “in Jesus Christ.” Who we are, my friends, can no longer be defined merely in terms of who we have taken ourselves to be, nor by way of the limited possibilities our minds can entertain to kill a Sunday morning. We are only in relation to the God who is with us in Him, even now making all things new. “I will be who I will be,” says God to us in him, “Follow me.” |