THREE STORIES

There are three great stories in the Hebrew Bible that tell about God’s relationship with human beings. These stories are important, first, because they provided Israel with its identity and mission; and second, these stories are important because they became the models that Christians used to proclaim the meaning of Jesus.

The first story is the story of the Exodus from Egypt , the liberation of Israel from slavery to freedom. That story became the primary foundational story for the Jews. They understood God as the God who is a liberator from bondage and also opposed to any form of oppression.

The second story was the story of Exile and Return. It was a story composed after the children of Israel were taken into exile in Babylonia in the sixth century BCE. It was a story that talked about being in a land not your own, of facing the risk of losing your identity as a people by being assimilated into a foreign people and culture. But the story had a happy ending – a story that ended by going back home again.

The third story is the priestly story of the Temple and sacrifices. The Temple became the special place of God’s presence among his people – the place where sacrifices were made to ensure God’s continued blessing of His people.

Since the earliest followers of Jesus were Jews it is no surprise that, when they began to explain the meaning and significance of Jesus, they would use as models the three great stories that meant so much to Israel . In the various writings of the earliest Christians Jesus is proclaimed as the one who liberates people from the bondage of sin and death or as the one who redeems them from their exile to return to their true home with God, or still others, like St. Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, proclaimed Jesus as a sacrifice whose death on the cross resulted in overcoming the alienation between God and human beings.

One look at the liturgies in the Book of Common Prayer will tell you which one of these stories came to predominate in the history of Christianity – the priestly story of sacrifice. By the Middle Ages the Exodus story [so prominent in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew] and the Exile and Return story [so prominent in the Gospel of Mark] had virtually disappeared and only the sacrificial story remained. Thank goodness that newer liturgies are giving more attention to the stories of liberation and return from exile.

That historical neglect is why I decided to preach about the Exodus story today. The first reading for today, [the call of Moses], serves as the introduction to the Exodus story. I think this lesson and the entire Exodus story has some lessons that are as important for us today as they were centuries ago.

First Lesson: God is mystery beyond human understanding and human manipulation. Moses wants to know how to answer the people who will want to know the Name of the God that has sent him. The answer he gets, in Hebrew, is ehyeh asher ehyeh. There are just three words in that sentence, yet I can tell you that no scholar or commentator knows for sure what that sentence means. The translation read to you is as good as any: I AM WHO I AM. The problem is that it can also be translated in a number of different ways. E.g.: I will be who I will be; I cause to be what I cause to be; even “I am beingness.” Some even suggest that God was resisting Moses’ request for a name. The Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, suggests that God is saying, “I am active being.” I like that suggestion. The point remains that God is beyond any feeble human attempts to capture God in any definition.

And God is beyond manipulation. I am amazed at the people, like Pat Robertson, who call on God to fulfill their own political objectives. I listened as Pat prayed for God to create more vacancies on the Supreme Court so that more conservatives could be appointed. Nobody manipulates God to fulfill their own political agendas.

 Second lesson: God loves people and cares about them, particularly those who are made poor by oppression. Just listen to those verbs in verses seven and eight: “I have seen…. I have heard…. I have come to know…. I have come down….”  God cares about people and God is aware of their suffering.

Third lesson: God desires the worship of free, liberated people. Moses is instructed by God to bring the people to this mountain where he has seen the sign – the sign of the burning bush – in order to worship God. Of course, the people could worship God in Egypt too, but the worship of free and liberated people is different. How blessed are we in this country that we can worship when, where and in what manner we desire.

Like ancient Israel , we have a God who is a mystery, who loves and cares about us and who desires our worship. Amen.