Sermon: “Show Me Your Glory”

Text: Exodus 33:12-23

29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

October 19, 2008

Scripture introduction.  In last week’s first reading, Moses had just received the tablets of stone on which the Ten Commandments had been carved with God’s own finger.  Moses had been up on the mountain with God a long time, and while he was gone his brother Aaron led the people to break the commandments, creating an idol in the form of a golden calf.  God became angry and threatened to destroy the people, but Moses successfully pleaded for God to show mercy.  Then Moses came down the mountain and himself became so angry that he destroyed the original stone tablets, throwing them onto the rocks below.  After dealing with the practical problems of destroying the golden calf and punishing the guiltiest among the people, Moses went back to speak to the Lord.

Then God commanded Moses to lead the people away from Sinai and on to the promised land of Canaan.  “However,” God said, “I will not go with you.  It wouldn’t be a good idea because these people are stubborn, and they would only make me angry again.”  As our reading for this morning begins, Moses replies to God: “You have told me to lead this people, and you have said some very complimentary things about me, but you have not said whom you will send with me.”  God replies, “My presence will go, and I will lighten your load.”  Our translation makes God’s promise more explicit than it reads in Hebrew, adding the words “with you” (“My presence will go with you.”)  But in the Hebrew there’s still some ambiguity about just where God’s presence will be.  So Moses tries to nail it down, saying “If your presence will not go with us, then please don’t send us away.”  God agrees, this time removing the ambiguity.

Now Moses, perhaps emboldened by his success arguing with God, asks that he be allowed to see God’s “glory,” a word that in Hebrew also means “honor, weightiness, importance, splendor, fullness.”  Now let’s see how God answers this request.

I’ll be reading from the 33^rd chapter of Exodus, verses 12 through 25.

Sermon.  I’m reading a book called The Shack, by William P. Young.[1]  Some of you are probably reading it, too, because it’s in the number-one position atop the New York Times paperback fiction best-sellers list.  The book is about a guy named “Mackenzie” (“Mack,” for short).  Mack has a seminary education but is not a minister.  He and his wife have three beautiful children, the youngest of whom is named “Missy.”  In the late summer, just before the beginning of the school year, Mack takes his children for one last summer-time fling—a camping trip in the mountains.  They have lots of fun on the trip.  However, on the morning they were planning to depart, Mack’s two older children, who have gone for a canoe ride, turn their canoe over.  Mack sees them capsize and realizes that his son has not surfaced.  Mack dives into the water and swims to save his son, whose life-jacket has become entangled in something under the water.  He arrives just in time, and after Mack pulls him ashore the boy is revived on the beach.  In the excitement of these events, no one noticed that little Missy was gone.  Sequentially more serious searches are undertaken, but she is nowhere to be found.  Finally the FBI is called in, and the federal agent identifies a clue linking Missy’s disappearance with those of many other young girls who were abducted and murdered.  Tragically, it later becomes clear that Missy was the serial killer’s next victim—slain in an abandoned shack way up in a mountain hollow.

All of this sends Mack into a deep depression; he calls it “The Great Sadness.”  His faith, which may never have been particularly strong, almost evaporates as he becomes increasingly bitter and morose in his great grief.  Several years after the murder, snowed in at home by a blizzard and all alone for several days, Mack goes out to his mailbox and finds a note inviting him to come to a meeting at the very shack where his daughter was killed.  The note is signed “Papa,” the name by which his wife often referred to God.  A week or so later, when the rest of the family has gone to visit relatives, Mack, not knowing what to expect, drives to the shack.

Here the book becomes very unusual.  When Mack arrives at the shack, he encounters God, who does go by the name of “Papa,” although God turns out to be a large African-American woman.  A swarthy Middle-Eastern Jesus is there, too, dressed in work-clothes.  Shortly the Holy Spirit appears, as well, a vaguely Asian woman named Sarayu, whose body seems almost transparent.  Throughout the rest of the book this Trinity guides Mack through his grief, helping him understand why it is that bad things happen to good people.  I’m not finished with the book yet, so I can’t give you my final evaluation.  So far I would say that as a work of theology it is flawed.  Nor is it particularly artful—full of stereotypes and syrupy emotions.  However, it has held my interest; and I have appreciated the author’s fresh statements of some very old themes.  I mention the book this morning mainly because of the way Young portrays God as so human.  Just to give one example, Papa (the female God the father) is at home in the kitchen with a mixing bowl in her arms.  Jesus clumsily drops the bowl when it is handed to him.  Sarayu is happy to help clean up the mess.  It seems to help Mack to encounter God in this very human way.  And maybe it can help us, too, feel closer to God if we think of God in human terms. 

In a sense that may be what is going on in our Exodus story, too, where God is presented with many human characteristics.  Unlike the God presented by William Young in The Shack, the God of Exodus gets really angry—in Hebrew, literally, God’s “nose burned hot.”  The God of Exodus has fingers like humans, although God’s fingers are strong enough to carve the Ten Commandments in stone tablets.  And when God promises to pass before Moses, God’s hand will be used as a shield so that Moses will not be harmed.[2]  As I read the Exodus story, there is a strongly human quality to the arguments God enters into with Moses.  In a very human way, God and Moses each attempt to give the other responsibility for the rebellious children of Israel.  God warns Moses, “Look what your people are doing.”  And Moses turns it right back around on God: “You have brought this people up out of Egypt; these are your people; what will the other nations think of you now if you abandon them?”  It’s almost like a reverse tug of war, maybe a hot potato, as Moses and God virtually toss the Israelites back and forth.

I suppose it’s only natural that we humans would think of God in human terms.  After all, that’s the only framework in which we are able to think.  So far, that is what I have found in The Shack, and it is part of what we find in scripture.  Famously, John Calvin wrote that even scripture is God’s accommodation to our humanness.  God knows that it is impossible to convey all of God’s essence in human words, but God nevertheless uses the words of scripture to communicate God’s nature to humans.  Just as adults speak baby-talk to their children, Calvin considered scripture God’s baby-talk to humanity.  God knows, and we should always remember, that scripture, while it is sufficient for our human needs, cannot capture everything that is God.  If we lose sight of this basic fact, we run the risk of turning the Bible itself into an idol—worshipping the words of scripture rather than the Holy God.

As quaint as were their depictions of the humanness of God, the ancients must have understood that this was not the whole story.  Thus, after all the human back and forth between God and Moses, we are suddenly on a different plane when the emboldened Moses asks to see the glory of God in all its fullness.  Earlier in chapter 33 we were told that God spoke to Moses “face-to-face,” but even that phrase probably meant only that the pillar of fire and smoke in which God was hidden would come and hover in front of the Tent of Meeting, where Moses would converse with God.  In asking to see God’s glory, Moses was requesting something altogether different.  God did for Moses what was possible: first God agreed to pass all of God’s goodness in front of Moses.  And we, too, are allowed to see the goodness of God.  We see it in creation.  We see it in the history of God’s dealings with God’s people—God’s forgiving nature and steadfast love, even—and especially—when we do not deserve it.  Once we begin to focus on God’s goodness, we can even begin to see it in each other—surely not in its completeness, but still a goodness in each other that fairly pulses with life, capable of love that can take our breath away.  When we see it like this in each other, we recognize God as the source of that goodness.

But we are not able as humans to see the fullness of God’s nature—the face of God.  Our minds are too small to hold God.  Despite all the bargaining that had gone on before, this is a non-negotiable point.  God warns Moses, “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”  I suppose that Moses’ mind would have burst had he attempted to take in the full weight of God’s holiness.  Throughout Exodus the holiness of God is so intense that sinful humans cannot abide full exposure.  The people were cautioned to stay back a safe distance.  But Moses was special.  God did pass his glory in front of Moses, but God protected Moses with God’s own hand.  And when God had passed by and the hand was removed, Moses was allowed to see not the face, but the backside of God’s glory.  It’s almost humorous the way the biblical writers put Moses—and through Moses, all of us—in our place.  We—even the best of us—are only able to see God’s backside.

But our great joy is that even the backside of God’s glory is more than we can absorb in a lifetime.  Sometimes it may help us to imagine God concretely in human terms—as we see in The Shack and in some parts of scripture.  At other times we will feel the need to think more abstractly.  Poetry and music then will be our guides.  Now and again, we will attempt to understand God through God’s own creation, delving into the mysteries of time and matter and the shape of the universe.  All these things have their place, as long as we never claim to find “the answer.”  There is nobility in the search and in the questioning, but we should never forget that the answer is far beyond us, a goal to which we are striving—a goal that we will reach someday, although not in this life. 

God’s glory is only one of the things we don’t understand.  Ultimately, we don’t understand why children are abducted, or ignored, or hungry, or uneducated, although we suspect that often the systems we create contribute to these problems.  I don’t think even The Shack will answer those questions.  But God’s goodness (which we can see and understand) has the power to move us toward those needs, applying our considerable human gifts to relieve brokenness and suffering.  God goes ahead, and while we labor behind God we will catch glimpses of God’s glory—always from behind.  And that is enough.