SERMONS
Sean Gilbert – 31/8/08
Christ Church 31/8/08 Exodus
3:1-1
It was 25 years ago. My first semester of a Bachelor of Theology degree and my
very first tutorial paper. The subject was Introduction to the Old Testament,
the passage or text in question, Exodus 3:1-15, that which we’ve heard
today. Here was my first chance to exegete, or in other words, to read a lot
of commentaries about the text and arrive at my own tentative conclusions!
Well, to be honest, I don’t remember too much about those (profound as
they must have been), but what I do recall is the curious expression, Tetragrammaton
or tetragram which describes the vowel-less designation for God used here in
the Hebrew – a deliberately veiled, cum mysterious definition of God that
is always worth re-exploring, given our human need over the generations to name,
pin down, if not control such things.
Give me your name says Moses, so I can say who sent me, to which the hidden voice
says, Tell them “I am” has sent you. Or it could be equally well
translated, the One who is, the One who will be. A quite ‘verbish’ or
actional experience of God rather than a proper noun which would be a distinct
and concrete sense of person, quite separate to Moses and above the creation
itself.
“I am who I am, tell them I am has sent you.” Now, one would have
thought Moses is already behind the 8 ball with his speech impediment, this less
than clear greeting card making his task all the more difficult!
To try and put it succinctly, this pivotal revelation of the divine, of the holy,
of God (if we must use that overworked term), places it not only in the present
moment, but in all things and therefore in material reality itself. God is, God
will continue to be... The “isness” of God as some have put it, Marcus
Borg one of them:
“The
word ‘God’ does not (here) refer to a particular existing being (that
is the God of supernatural theism). Rather the word’ God’ is the
most common Western name for ‘what is’ for ultimate reality, for
the ground of our Being, for Being itself, for isness...”
In other words, taking our understanding or perception of God out
of the clouds, out of the supernatural realm of impossibility
or wistful thinking, and earthing (planting maybe) our experience of the divine
in our experience, in our daily encounter with created life.
Parker Palmer says it so well when he writes:
“I had always imagined God to be in the same general direction as everything
else I valued, up. I had failed to appreciate the meaning of some of the words
that had intrigued me since I first heard them in seminary . Paul Tillich’s
description of God as the “ground of being”. I had to be forced underground
before I could understand that way to God is not up but down.”
Parker Palmer
is here personally referring to a 4 year period of depression, but my feeling
and lived experience would also suggest that the principle he enunciates stands
on its own, the way to God is not up, but it is down. It
is the rude shock, the unnerving discovery, that we can no longer
afford to project our need and longing for a God into Cathedral spires, or sovereign
notions of an Almighty in heaven, or a pristine and soul-less Christ, nor a working
understanding of the Christian life as being pure and totally unaffected with
common human realities. To withdraw those projections is to see and name the
divine aglow in the thorn bush, alive in the ordinary, at home (and well) in
the human community. God in you, God in me. God being you, God being me. It is
a somewhat radical thought isn’t it? But I also suspect our hearts leap
a little when we hear it; A sigh of relief, an inspiration for the living. No
more steep ladders to climb, no more religious hoops to struggle our way through,
trying to find, trying to touch this elusive reality.
Rumi, the
Sufi poet I have quoted of late writes this in relation to the all-encompassing
reality of God.
“I
am dust particles in sunlight
I am the round sun
I am morning mist
And the breathing of evening
I am wind in the top of the grove
And surf on the cliff,
Mast, rudder, helmsman and keel, I am also the coral reef they founder on
I am both candle
And the moth crazy around it
Rose and the nightingale lost in the fragrance
You are what is and what isn’t
You who know, You the one
In all, say who I am. Say I
Am You.”
The longing of every human heart is to be loved and held by that love. It occurs
to me that we all have much growing to do in our appreciation and experience
of the one we call God, the Ground of our Being, the heart of our soul; An all-encompassing
gift of life and grace, holding us, sustaining us, encouraging us in the journey
of being. For Parker Palmer and certainly myself of late, a firm, hidden hand
pushing me down to the ground (past the sub-soil at times), so as to reconnect,
to re-earth, to return to this our common, always available, grounded love which
finds us as we are – broken as we may be – and beckons us to be who
we truly are, and not just for our own sake but for the integrity and well being
of the whole.
I guess in many ways this doesn’t sound much like the heady and exciting
notions of conversion and conversion growth. But truly converting the
experience of God, it is. And as we have been sharing in the last month, this
community has come over time, to appreciate more and more, the invitation to
be found at home in God, to find our common life and vocation arising out of
this holy meeting and not out of a religious expectation.
In the words of another good writer,
“The spiritual life is not a matter of obeying or breaking rules. It’s
about breathing into and being broken open by a way
of transformation.”
So, not unlike seed placed in the ground in mid-late winter, our journey into
the God who is and who will be the very ground of our being, finds us shedding
what is no longer real and true, a stripping back, indeed a simplifying of soul,
all for the sake of the rising; the coming to life in authentic, new and surprising
ways, the sharing of this grace and goodness with all...
And so let us take a few moments for our own reflection and prayer….
