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October 19, 2008
St. Dunstan’s
The Rev. Patricia Templeton
Just a Glimpse
Today’s reading from the Book of Exodus is like the second half of a very complex TV mini series. If you don’t have some idea of what happened earlier, it’s not going to make much sense.
So here is a quick recap of what leads up to today’s story. The people of Israel are in the wilderness with their leader Moses. God has liberated them from slavery in Egypt, and delivered a crushing defeat to the Egyptian army that pursues them.
God has sustained them in the wilderness, making water spring from rocks and manna magically appear each morning. God has actually even been their tour guide, leading them through the wilderness in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
By this time, one would think that God, and God’s servant Moses, would have earned the people’s trust. But when Moses goes atop Mt. Sinai to converse with God and receive God’s laws under which the people will live, things go terribly wrong.
The people become convinced that Moses has been gone too long, and that he and God have abandoned them. What they need is a new god, they say, and so they make the image of a calf from the collected gold of the community, and they build an altar and bow down and worship it.
To say that this does not sit well with God is an understatement. Committing oneself to the service of wealth is a sure way to earn God’s wrath.
“Get down there at once!” God says to Moses. “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, are acting perversely.”
God wants nothing more to do with these difficult, ungrateful people. “Leave me alone,” God says to Moses, “so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”
God is ready to do away with the people who were so quick to switch their allegiance to the idolatry of wealth, and to start over again with Moses alone.
But Moses, whose job as prophet is to mediate between God and God’s people, begs God to reconsider. Think how this will look, he tells God. What will the Egyptians think and say about you when they hear what you’ve done?
Think about Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the promises you made to them. Yes, these people are difficult and they have done a horrible thing. But don’t destroy them. You’re God, you’re better than that.
This appeal works. God changes God’s mind, and the people are spared.
But things aren’t the same.
God will let the people continue to the Promised Land, but God will no longer accompany them on the journey. Instead, an angel will guide them.
Give the people this message for me, God tells Moses, “You are a stiff-necked people; if for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you.”
That’s where today’s story begins. Moses is distraught at God’s insistence that the divine days as tour guide are over. He realizes that Israel’s very identity is at stake here.
Only in God’s presence does Israel have any claims of distinction among the nations.
Moses is a prophet of great courage and daring. He has no problem expressing God’s wishes and demands to the people. But he is equally bold in speaking on behalf of the people to God.
“This nation is your people,” Moses reminds God.
God replies, “My presence will go with you,” but this “you” in Hebrew is the singular “you.” God will be present with Moses, but not with the rest of the people of Israel.
Moses will have none of it.
“If you don’t go with us, all of us, then forget the whole thing,” Moses in effect says to God. “Don’t even try to get us to the Promised Land. Without you, we are nothing.”
God relents, saying to Moses, “I will do the very thing that you ask.”
But Moses is still not satisfied. He needs a sign from God that he is in God’s favor. And so he makes one more demand.
“Show me your glory,” he says.
It is an audacious request, demanding to see the fullness of God’s awesome, shrouded, magisterial, magnificent presence, demanding to be allowed into the very core of God’s self.
And amazingly, God agrees. To a point.
“I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘the Lord,’” God says. “But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.
“See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”
Not even Moses, the most faithful of prophets, can withstand being in the full presence of God. Even at the moment when Moses is closest to the divine, he is reminded of the distance between the Creator and the created.
Moses’ desire to see God, to be assured of God’s presence reminds me of a story about a young child whose mother asked him to go outside one night and put his toys away.
The child went outside, but soon reappeared. “It’s dark out there and I’m scared,” he said. “Won’t you come with me?”
The mother reminded the boy that he was not really alone, that God was with him.
Reluctantly, the child went out again, but quickly was back inside. “I know that God is always with me,” he said, “but sometimes I need somebody with skin on.”
Moses was looking for the same kind of reassurance that the young boy needed. Moses, too, needed somebody “with skin on,” some tangible proof of God’s presence with him and the people of Israel.
Moses’ experience is extraordinary; he comes closer to experiencing the fullness of God than any human.
But his experience is also one that parallels that of many people of faith. We long for God’s presence, for reassurance that God is with us.
We yearn for somebody “with skin on” to be with us, to guide us through our wilderness.
We want some tangible proof of the promise God makes in the book of Hebrews, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” Or that Jesus makes to his disciples before he ascends to heaven, “I will be with you always.”
Those promises are still with us. We do not have pillars of clouds and fire; we have not been invited to catch a fleeting glimpse of God’s back passing by. We cannot see the face of God.
By God does still promise to be with us. Sometimes in a thought or dream, or unexplained occurrence. Sometimes in a gentle nudge in a direction we had not planned to take. Sometimes in the majesty of nature.
And sometimes with skin on, in the presence of a person who sits with us through our anxiety and fears and despair, who holds our hand in the dark and rejoices with us in the light.
None of us can fully know God. But we can get glimpses.
And just a glimpse of God’s presence and glory can be enough.
Amen.
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