Meherrin Presbyterian Church
October 19, 2014, Ordinary 29A
Exodus 33:12-23; I Corinthians 13:9-12
Glory and Uncertainty
In the movie When Harry Met Sally, there are over the
course of the film a number of scenes, separate from the plot, in which
couples, mostly couples who have apparently been married for some time, tell
the stories of how they came together and fell in love. One of the stories stands out from the
others because this couple, unlike the others, was brought together in an
arranged marriage.
In telling their
story, he (she never spoke) described how he had never seen his future bride at
the time their marriage was arranged.
He did not complain about a marriage being forced upon him (it was part
of his culture), but he was distressed at not knowing what his bride looked
like. Finally he describes how he
snuck out one evening and made his way to her village to see her; once he had,
he was very happy to go through the wedding. But his earnest insistence – “I had to know;” “I had to see her”
– stood out among those happy couples.
Silly as it might
seem, that movie clip is a pretty good summation of how we human beings react
in the face of uncertainty, the stressful and unpleasant business of not
knowing. It’s the unknowability
and unpredictability that gives a sporting event its particular tension; can my
team score one more run, sink one more basket? In other situations it’s not such a
benefit to our enjoyment of life.
It’s one thing in
a movie. In real life, I have to
admit I’d have been pretty stressed if I had never met my wife before our
wedding day. There are situations,
though, in which our human urgency to know,
to be sure, leads us astray. We feel compelled – we feel entitled,
even – to know exactly how things are, what they mean, or what comes next.
In today’s lesson
from Exodus we see one example of how that urge for certainty works, and
sometimes causes us humans to ask things of God that simply are not ours to
have. The story at this point
follows one of the lowest points of the whole Exodus narrative: when Moses took
longer than expected to come down from the mountain, the people prevailed upon
Aaron to gather up all the gold from among the Israelites and fashion a golden
calf, a tangible image to stand in for the God who always remained just out of
sight. You might remember that one
of those commandments God had given to Moses forbade exactly that kind of thing
– no graven images, remember?
The fearfulness of
the people – their uncertainty in the absence of Moses and the unknowability of
God – led them to demand an image they could see and touch. No longer able or willing to maintain
faith in God, they resort to the kind of idols and statues they had no doubt
seen many times back in Egypt.
Fear. Fear is a powerful force against
faith. In fact, fear and faith,
some say, don’t really coexist well together; the former tends to drive out the
latter when it is not addressed.
In the case of the Israelites it certainly seems to have overcome their
trust in God and Moses.
Given the horrific
sin of the golden calf, God (who does this kind of thing in Exodus) is ready to
be done with the Israelites once and for all, to wipe them away and start over,
making a new nation from Moses as God had done with Abraham many generations
before. It is left to Moses to
intercede for the Israelites, and he does so forcefully. First he demands to know that God will
go with the Israelites, not only not wiping them out but continuing to be with
them directly as God has done so far.
Moses and God engage in some hair-splitting as to whether it is
sufficient for God to be with Moses, or if God must be with all the Israelites. Even when God seems to acquiesce in
Moses’s demands, Moses keeps pressing for more, and God keeps consenting
more.
To be fair, Moses
is in a difficult position. He can
no longer trust the people. Not
only have they committed the grave sin of the golden calf, they have shown themselves
to be profoundly unreliable and willing to turn against Moses at the drop of a
hat. However, he also knows that
if God disposes of the Israelites, or if God abandons them on their journey,
they don’t stand a chance. Moses
pleads with God, not just for his own sake, but also for the sake of the
people. But again, there is fear
involved. Moses fears for the
people, but Moses also fears for himself and even for God.
And again, fear
provokes Moses to go too far.
Earlier in Exodus
Moses is described as speaking to God face-to-face, but this seems not to line
up properly with how other parts of the book describe their encounters. In most cases, such as in the delivery
of the Ten Commandments, God is described as speaking to Moses directly, but
not visibly—God is usually obscured in clouds or otherwise concealed from
Moses. For Moses to ask God
directly to “show me your glory” as
in verse 18 is to ask for the clouds and obscuring to be wiped away, and to see
God in a literal face-to-face way.
God’s response to
Moses is instructive, in a way that Christians of all times have tended to
forget or ignore.
Think for a moment
of how one sees God portrayed in, say, paintings or movies. Dazzling, even blinding light; all in
white, of course, perhaps with a halo or aura of some sort. And in a movie, God is given a deep,
commanding voice, like Morgan Freeman’s for example.
Now think of
visual portrayals of Jesus. Even
paintings of Jesus’s earthly time tend to want to “glorify” him in some
way. A halo again, possibly, or
impossibly white robes despite being out on a dusty Judean highway. The oh-so-perfect face, dazzling hair, the
bluest possible eyes (despite the fact that for a citizen of that region of the
Mediterranean is pretty severely unlikely to have blue eyes!). The image is “glorified.”
Despite it being a
basic tenet of our theology, we aren’t always comfortable with the idea of a
human Jesus, doing human things.
It’s as if we have this subconscious notion that a human Jesus is not a
holy Jesus. A Jesus who eats or
spits or scratches his head or any number of other peculiar human things
somehow seems irreconcilable with the Son of God. We tend to want to keep Jesus obviously holy, even distantly
holy, in our visualizations.
Moses is pushing
for something similar here, in a way.
By asking to see God’s glory (the word for “glory” is excruciatingly
similar to the word for “face” in Hebrew, by the way), Moses is asking for the
privilege of seeing God in the most God-like way possible. Dazzling, glorious, unmistakably
God.
And God says no.
God will not show
Moses glory; God will only show Moses goodness.
God will show
goodness. God will show Moses that
God is the Lord. God will show
Moses what it is to show mercy and to be gracious. But God will not show Moses that face, that elusive glory.
You would think we
would have gotten the message somewhere along the way. What God wants us to see, what God
wants to know of God, is goodness, mercy, grace. These are the things God wanted Moses to see. Those are the traits Jesus showed in
his ministry on earth. Goodness,
mercy, grace.
And yet we keep
asking for glory.
How best to put
this? It is not our calling to
bask in the glory of God, direct or reflected or any other way. Our calling is to live out God’s goodness
towards one another and to God’s good world. Our calling is to extend God’s mercy to those who – like us
– fall short, who keep ending up in sin no matter how much we claim God’s
redemption. Our calling is to
abide in God’s grace, and to extend that grace to the people and the world
around us.
And yet we keep
asking for glory.
While putting up
roadblocks to God’s grace, and being as unmerciful as we can to those we
disdain or disagree with, while living as far away from God’s goodness as we
can, we dare to presume upon God’s glory.
At least the
Israelites had the decency to be afraid after they built their golden
calf. We prop up all manner of
images and idols for our adoration and don’t even bat an eye about it. I don’t need to run through the list,
do I? Wealth, fame, power, youth –
that just scratches the surface of the ways we practice forms of idolatry in
routine, everyday ways. And even
in the midst of our adoration of these graven images, we dare to presume upon
God’s glory.
What God wants
from God’s people, primarily, has been framed many different ways. “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly
with God,” says the prophet Micah.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,
and love your neighbor as yourself,” says Jesus in the gospels. “Be transformed by the renewing of your
minds,” says Paul, “so that you may know the will of God.”
This is what God
wants fearful, angry Moses to see.
This is what God wants the mistrustful, weak Israelites to see. This is what God wants us to see: what
it looks like to live in God, what it is to live in the way that God calls us
to live. While we keep demanding
glorious dazzling light and constant stroking of our fearful egos, God wants us
out there living grace and mercy to one another and to the world.
For a God who
shows us goodness when we ask for glory, Thanks
be to God.
Just go ahead and chomp.
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