Third Sunday in Lent

I preached again this past Sunday. Not to be immodest but I'm pretty happy with how this one came out.

The lectionary as usual: 

http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent3_RCL.html

We have a big one today. A story that can be evoked with a mere two words: burning bush. It is one of the seminal stories of our faith and basic knowledge for all people of the book. This is a tale that everyone knows.

When I hear this passage again the feature that stands out most clearly to me is that of reverence; Moses’ total respect of God, from his outward posture to his very core. This is not a situation of token ritual or well-trod piety, this is a man rightfully shaken as he is confronted by the presence of God. The necessity of deference to the divine is brought up again and again in all religions and cultures; even language shows the marks--my name, Timothy, means ‘fears God’. But what we see in Moses is the appropriate, and perhaps instinctual, response to a brush with God; he removes his shoes and hides his face “for he was afraid to look at GOD”. God is awesome, in the truest sense of the word, and that enormous magnificence requires us let go of our presumptions and self-possession and humble our self before the unfathomable greatness of the LORD.

It is also in this famed passage that the personal name of God is revealed: “I am”. The translation is a subject of much debate but what we do know is that God’s personal name--four letters that are rendered in the Latin alphabet as YHWH--derives from the verb “to be”. Our chosen translation renders this whole famed sentence as “I am who I am” but "I am that I am" "I shall be what I shall be", "I shall be what I am" or "I will become what I choose to become" could all apparently work as well. What matters most is that God is--God is an active, influential force in the world; an essential feature of all being and becoming; the center of what is, was and is to come.

It is worth noting that part of the disagreement surrounding the personal name of God is that by the Babylonian captivity these four letters had become so loaded with sacred meaning that it was forbidden to utter God’s name. In fact, in modern rabbinic Judaism that reverence has seeped into seemingly generic terms like Adonai (which means Lord)--limiting the use of such titles to prayer alone. What we see in Moses and in his descendants is this constant and undeniable instinct to worship God, to place God above all else and embrace the awe that we rightfully feel when faced with the divine. Moses reacts as any on of us might; God is too great to directly observe, too vast to try and grasp, too intimidating to do anything in front of but simply cower and hide.

And yet, in the central glorious contradiction of our faith, God the vast, awesomeness of all that is--the great I AM--comes to live on earth, as one of us, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. God, who we stumble before and hide our faces from, was born to humble circumstance, lived as an itinerant preacher and died on a cross, executed by the state like a common criminal. The story is so familiar that it’s easy to lose sight of just how radically audacious it is.

Today’s gospel passage is a perfect example of what I see as God’s baffling humility. Jesus relates to us a parable about a landowner who has an unproductive fig tree which he is prepared to cut down until his gardener convinces him otherwise. 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'" The gardener staves off judgment for a time and allows the fig tree one final chance to prove its basic worth. As one commentator points out, what matters most is not the inevitable destruction should the tree once again fail to produce but that the gardener cares so much as to intervene for it, staying the ax and spreading manure. It is this last symbol that is particularly loaded because what is the gardener, what is Jesus our divine intercessor, doing mucking about in crap? Why is God stooping to such low standards for our small sakes?

The temptation is to declare that this is simply another example of the “New Testament God”, that this later interpretation and experience of the divine claimed by Christians is a more gentle and approachable deity than that laid out in the Hebrew Bible. There is a tendency to be dismissive of the “Jealous God” of Israel and assume that our spiritual ancestors missed the point. We believe in a God of love and forgiveness unlike those people who stayed devoted to an antiquated notion of the divine. We contrast our seminal stories--the resurrection and the Exodus--and see a new “humble” aspect of divinity because of it. Aside from the dangerous implications this line of thought has had historically it also ignores the most obvious fact about the “Old” Testament: these are our books too. They are a part of our canon and were the stories for the early church, the language all New Testament authors were steeped in, and--most importantly--the sacred texts for Jesus. Try though we might, we cannot ignore or remove ourselves from the current of ancient Hebrew thought that is the foundation of all Christian belief.

But more than that; we shouldn’t. Because despite the seeming differences in approach or interpretation God is and always has been the same God. Yes God is awesome and worthy to be praised, I don’t disagree with Exodus in the slightest, but God is also of us and with us. I AM that I AM. Moses is called as a lowly shepherd and he, like all the reluctant prophets who follow, is scared, confused and incredulous. But God tells him in no uncertain terms "I will be with you”. This is God powerful and mighty and yet also near. 


God is great and it is right for us praise the Lord at all times. But God is also humble: present, personal and knowable in our every day experience. Neither of these thoughts can or should dominate the other but it is my feeling that the greater tendency is to remove God, to set the Most High apart from us through burdensome ritual and teaching. It is our duty as seekers to fight that impulse, to bring God back to earth, back to the concrete messiness of our lives. As psalm 34 tells us: Look upon God and be radiant and let not your faces be ashamed.