Speaker 1: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.
Speaker 2: Last week, we set out on our journey in Exodus, and these stories in the Hebrew scriptures are both familiar and foreign, and I am here for them. As someone committed to reading the scriptures with a feminist lens, I'm drawn to Exodus as a liberation text, but it is not tidy. Men rage with power and find new ways to oppress. Women subvert the rules. Men get confused about what they're meant to do.
Women fade away into the background. And through it all, the divine directs a story of freedom from a baby born as a Hebrew raised as an Egyptian and chosen to be the spokesperson of God to plagues and getting lost in the desert and building a tabernacle for God's holiness to rituals and statements of identity and signs and wonders. We will find ourselves in this story through life patterns like injustice and oppression and confusion and mistake making and arguing with God and finding our way home. So we will be in Exodus three and four today, but before we set out, let us pray. As we settle into a bit of stillness, we turn our attention to spirit's presence And we draw a little bit of that attention to our feet.
Yes. Our feet. In the text today, Moses is told to remove his shoes because he stands on holy ground. There is reverence here. So as we breathe in and out, We notice what it feels like to have our feet on this floor.
We feel our toes, balls of our feet, our heels connected to the earth, and we repeat this prayer in our own minds. I stand on holy ground. I stand on holy ground everywhere. Holy ground. Christ as a light, illumine and guide us.
Amen. So we're in Exodus three and four today, and we're going to talk about the sublime, excuses, excuses, going home, and spokespersons. To begin, what you need to know is that in Exodus two, Moses killed a man. Gasp. That was a gasp.
Gasp. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and took matters into his own hands and murdered the perpetrator. And that mess drove Moses to Midian where he laid low, married a priest daughter named Zipporah, and took to the fields as a shepherd. And at the end of chapter two, we find a meanwhile moment, as in while Moses hung out with sheep in Midian, the king of Egypt died. Meanwhile, the Israelites cried out in their slavery, and God heard them and remembered the covenant.
Exodus three. Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So Moses thought, I will go over and see this strange sight, why the bush does not burn up.
Neat story. Years ago, I was on a walk at the edge of Vancouver down by Jericho Beach, and I ran into my good friend Maggie with her kids. And it was an ordinary conversation until Maggie said something I have never forgotten. She mentioned how important the edges of things are, The wild spaces, the shorelines, the last bit of dark before the dawn. And I have thought about edges in new ways ever since.
Like, there is a spirituality to edges. Moses is in the far side of the wilderness, edge. When he stumbles up to the base of the mountain of God, edge. And Moses has this brush with a tree that does not burn up, edge of what is real. Is it an angel dressed as God?
Is it God dressed as an angel? Whatever it is, Moses moves toward it. Later on, won't get everything right, but I think he gets this right. This turn toward what is curious, what is unusual, what is unreal. Maybe it's nothing, but maybe it's everything.
So the Lord calls Moses by name twice, Moses, Moses. And Moses says, here I am. And God says, don't come any closer. Take off your sandals, as in show some respect, my boy. You're on holy ground.
I am the God of your father and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, which I imagine means something to Moses who doesn't always know where his loyalties lie, to his Hebrew mother who nursed him, to his Egyptian mother who raised him, to the Midianite father-in-law who took him in, God says, in all of your storied past, you're mine. And there's more. The Lord said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. God says, I've come down.
This is where heaven and earth meet. I am going to rescue my people from the hand of the Egyptians and take them to a land where they can flourish. So go Moses, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people out of Egypt. And then we get the first of Moses's excuses. Now I don't know what you would do if God handed you a plan for your life that was nothing like your plans, but Moses resists.
Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? And God replies, I will be with you. And Moses goes on, sure. Fine. But if I do all this, the people will certainly ask who sent me as in what and so what am I to tell them?
God said to Moses, I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites, I am has sent me to you. Everything in Exodus is there to make sure people know who God is. So you might be surprised to know that God doesn't actually give up God's name. Not really.
If you look in the footnotes of your bible, you'll see that I am who I am can be translated in the future tense, I will be who I will be. So it's cryptic. I am who I am becomes Yahweh by verse 16. And in Hebrew, Yahweh is just four letters known as the tetragrammaton, like a superhero. And that fancy word comes from the Greek word for four.
And the four Hebrew letters are yod, hei, vav, hei. And yod, hei, vav, hei is used 6,823 times in the Hebrew scriptures. And ancient Hebrew doesn't contain vowels, and the true pronunciation of the name has been a mystery for centuries, so let that sink in. Though more recent scholarship does suggest Yahweh is correct. Now you may know this, but in the history of Judaism, it is believed that God's name is just too holy to pronounce.
So medieval Jewish scholars, the Masorites, read God's name aloud as Adonai, meaning Lord. And that's how we get to the English translation of Yahweh as capital l, capital o, capital r, capital d in your bibles. It's a substitution. It's quite a ride. Right?
Pete Enns cracks this open when he says that Yahweh is a non answer name. And I like that because I am who I am is a verbal phrase. It's an expression of the nature of Israel's God. And in its context, that would stand out. The non name doesn't link to a specific cosmological or natural phenomena like, say, the Egyptian sun god Ra.
I am who I am is more than a title. It's luminous. It's self sustaining. It exists every which way. As verse 15 reads, forever, from generation to generation.
So you try to put a name to that. Whatever we make of divine identity here, it's sublime. It puts you in your place. It scares and delights. This mystery is asking Moses to work with the source of life, and people get pretty judgy about Moses' many excuses to shirk from the call, but an encounter with the sublime should make you feel small.
What do you do on the other side of that? Well, that's another story. Now I'm gonna rattle off all of Moses' excuses. Moses says he is unworthy, and God says, it's fine. I'll be with you.
Moses says he doesn't know God's name, and God says, I'll give you a version of a name. And Moses says, the people won't listen to him. And God says, I'll give you a sign, and they'll believe. And Moses says, he's bad at speaking. And God says, bro, I got you.
I'll tell you what to say. And Moses finally gets to his point, which is just send someone else. And God says, okay, kind of. Your brother Aaron, he can do all the talking. Moses objects, and God fires back every time.
But why is Moses so self limiting? We will get to that by way of a story. Many of you know I lived in Vancouver for twelve years before coming to this great city of Calgary. And those were good years for me, but they were hard too. I felt like I had to fight for everything.
Like, fight to be heard in my work, fight to find an affordable place to live, no surprise there, fight to find love, and that didn't work, by the way, so I found myself a good Albertan lover, and we could say the rest is history. But back to BC, I finished my time in Vancouver in one of my favorite, if strange, living configurations. My friends, Meggy and Jacob, Saint Maggie is from my story earlier, were working on an old house in East Vancouver. And they asked if I wanted to live on the 3rd Floor in a completely contained apartment. There was a catch, though.
I would have to get to my place through their family home. I said, sure. Yeah. Let's do this. So we lived like that for four years, me coming and going at all times of the day and night in their front door, up through the 2nd Floor, past their kids' bedrooms, into my place on top of it all.
I loved it. But years in, when I was thinking about what my life was gonna look like down the road, I said to a friend, you know, it's fine. I'll stay single and live up here in Maggie and Jacob's attic forever. And my friend shot back, the hell you will. Direct quote.
She was right, by the way. Living there was a sweet chapter. But for my future, I was limiting myself, thinking so small, really giving up on future flourishing. The story of Moses' life is full of symbolism. We're meant to read more meaning into the details.
He's this new Noah put in an ark to be saved. He's the snake handler sent to handle pharaoh. He's the wand in the hand of an eternal magician. You see, it's magic that counters Moses' excuses, signs and wonders. And that is strange for us to imagine God performing magic.
Isn't that evil? Bad? The stuff of You fiction? Not here. We have to read these stories with ancient sensibilities.
And in the ancient Near Eastern world, the gods perform magic. They just do. So the point is to get ready for a showdown, the magic of the God of Moses versus the magic of Pharaoh. But I think there's something important before all the magic takes center stage. There's something so special about this dialogue between God and Moses alone in the wild.
Moses tries to limit his life. He says, it's fine. I'll just live here forever. I'll take up residence with a family that's not my own. And God says, the heck, you will.
Think bigger Moses. Think signs and wonders, like walking sticks turned into snakes, body parts sick, then poof, healed. Think freedom and possibility. Think empowerment and getting a little bit of your fraught story back for yourself. And there's more.
Think about everyone else who needs freedom too. The thing is Moses isn't the liberator. He makes up all these excuses because he needs to be set free too. And Judy Fentress Williams, in commentary she wrote for the Africana bible, says, we often neglect the parts of the story that depict Moses as the recipient of liberation. You see, when we limit ourselves, we limit other people too.
Once his people are free, Moses will be free. And we do well to remember our freedom is tied up in the freedom of others. So Moses packs up his camel and goes home. J k j k, there's no camel. There is a donkey, though.
Moses gets his father in law's blessing to leave Midian. Then God reminds Moses of the plan, and Moses packs his wife and sons on a donkey, singular, and together they leave for Egypt. The next part of the story is one of the weirdest in the Bible. Are you glad you stuck around in town for the long weekend? At a lodging place along the way, we're told that the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him, so that took a turn.
Now is the him here Moses or one of his sons? We are not sure. And you might even think, oh, this is like the ancestor Jacob and God wrestling by a stream. Maybe. Or you might think, oh, this is like the ancestor Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac also.
Maybe. But wait for the next part. In the tussle, Zipporah takes a flint knife, cuts off her son's foreskin, and touches Moses' feet. Feet is, of course, a euphemism for genitals, so that's just like cool, cool, cool. As Zipporah does this, she declares, surely, you are the bridegroom of blood to me.
And with that, the Lord let Moses be. Moses carries on to Egypt. Zipporah goes home to Midian. Okay. For one thing, the significance of this story is mostly lost on us.
It's true. Rabbis and scholars have all kinds of theories, but we don't know why the story was added in the first place and preserved for centuries, which in itself is amazing. These stories don't have to mean everything to everyone. It's enough that they mattered to someone and preserving them, letting them contradict what we know, circling them to find meaning, that's a part of what it means to respect the text. And still, there are a few things to consider.
First, some scholars posit that Moses had not circumcised his son, and this left that poor boy outside God's covenant. But also, in picking up his family and facing danger in Egypt, the boy was more vulnerable than ever. Ancient practices like circumcision were rituals of protection in a world where infant mortality was so high. And speaking of rituals of protection in a more recent political interpretation, Moses was not meant to drag his family along on this mission to face down Pharaoh. And in turning this political mission into a bit of a family outing, God shows up to spook Moses, and Zipporah, with her passed down priestly knowledge, thanks to her dad, jumps in to save her boys.
Finally, it's curious that a woman saves Moses again. Moses owes a lot to the women in his life, from Hebrew midwives sister to Pharaoh's own daughter. In such an ancient and patriarchal context, these scenes, they snap to get our attention. So I hover over Zipporah's story today because I have learned from feminist liberation theologians that it's important to look for those characters on the margins like Jesus did. The people who play a very small part maybe just have one line and then fade away.
It's important to wrestle with their stories as we wrestle with our own and to insist that their presence in the text welcomes you to the sacred story, all of you, with your quirks and your questions, your sense of yourself, and what you will no longer allow with every part of you that needs to be set free to finally feel at home. Bring your lived experience with you to the text. You can bring what a friend said to you on a walk or a story about an attic apartment that meant a lot in your life but became a place you eventually needed to leave so you could keep evolving. And sure, those are my stories, but walking with Zipporah and Moses this week helped me pay close attention to my life. That's the power of these stories.
They live in our stories. We know ourselves in stories. So for you, reading your story into the text might be your own return to a place that used to mean something to you, good, bad, or both. Or it could mean needing to take on new responsibilities even though you did not sign up for that. Or letting the people around you, like your partner or friend or colleague or sibling step in and support you.
And it's that support we'll end with today. Moses finally gets to Egypt now with his brother Aaron. It's been decades. There's a new pharaoh and life is still hard for the Hebrew people. But before they go to pharaoh, before they demand freedom, before they throw down the plagues of Yahweh, they stop to worship.
Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, and Aaron told them everything the Lord had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, and they believed. And when they heard that the Lord was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped. I love this little oasis of awe. One of the core teachings of the Torah is that human freedom hinges on the knowledge of the Lord.
Put another way, awe is at the core of what it means to be in relationship with the fullness of life. And the science of psychology defines awe as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the word, like standing on holy ground. Awe increases our well-being. Awe steadies our journey through hard times. Awe leads to greater humility and kindness.
So I love that before we ride through the highs and the lows of Exodus, we pause with this small gathered community to stand in awe. Everyone on the side of God in Exodus is a mixed character. Zipporah, Moses, Aaron, elders, all a combination of right and wrong and union and separation and loving and feuding. And still they are called to play a part in the story of making God's name known and freeing God's people. They are all God's spokespeople.
I don't know how God will call you to take on some matter of injustice, but it's likely you're already doing it, Freeing yourself with therapy, trying to be a better dad, asking for a raise at work, listening to someone who doesn't see the world like you do, paying attention paying attention to the atrocities in the news and knowing that there's likely nothing you can do about it, and still choosing to give something of yourself for others. Whatever part you play and you do play a part, see your place as holy. Listen for God when other people speak and read sacred stories with your story in mind too. Let us pray. Loving God, we take a moment to imagine ourselves encountering your presence in something sublime, A fire, a thunderstorm, the bravery of someone we love.
Maybe today we're inspired by Moses' open conversation with you. Maybe we're hoping to connect our small stories to your big story. Maybe we're eager to take steps toward freedom, but we don't really know the way and we do not know where the energy will come from. So we ask for blessing. May the peace of Christ go with you wherever God may send you.
May God guide you through the wilderness, protect you through the storm. May God bring you home rejoicing at the wonder God has shown you. May God bring you home rejoicing once again through our doors. Amen.