2023-10-23
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
October 22, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Exodus 33:12-23 The Federated Church, UCC
Before we hear this morning’s reading, let’s set the stage a little bit. In the Hebrew scriptures, the story of Israel’s relationship with God is fraught. God has promised them land and blessing, and leads them through the wilderness toward the Promised Land. The people, though, are not at all happy with their spartan existence as they wander in the wilderness. Far from glamping, this is a stark and demanding and frankly unrewarding time with almost no creaturely comforts. So in their distress and frustration, they turn away from God and create a golden calf to worship. ‘Enough of this God who shows no real results,’ they seem to say, ‘this God who seems oblivious to prayer, this God who evidently has no clue about how to give us a sense of happiness.’
Then when the people turn away from God, God has had enough, and tells them they can go on their journey alone, because the golden calf is just a step too far. God is not going to go with them. And all of that sets the stage for the story we’ll hear now. [READ SCRIPTURE]
Among the many things I love about Hebrew scripture is how realistic it is. It’s not a prettified, antiseptic language with all the rough edges smoothed out. It’s gritty and authentic and often bracing.
Our story today is a perfect example. The people have turned away from God, and God, much to the surprise of our contemporary ears, has turned away from the people. The people and God are very much at odds. And into this fray, as he so often does, steps Moses. Moses pleads with God on the people’s behalf: ‘Don’t leave us alone. Stay with us. Be the God you assured us you’d be. Honor your word to lead us into a new land full of hope and promise.’ Moses’ prayer is stark and honest and raw. There’s no holding back.
Jews may be more comfortable having such unvarnished conversations with God than Christians. You may know the story of the Jewish woman who takes her grandson to the shore one day. She watches him playing on the beach when suddenly a huge wave comes and washes the boy out to sea. So she starts pleading: “Please God, save my only grandson, I beg of you—bring him back!” Just then a second huge wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, good as new. And the woman looks up at heaven and says, “He had a hat, you know!”
This is a woman who knows what she wants, what she feels she’s due, and she’s not shy about letting God know. This is the way Moses is in the book of Exodus. When God throws the divine hands up in the air and says essentially, ‘I’ve had it,’ Moses gets right up in God’s grill and says, ‘Oh, no you don’t. You don’t get to back out now. You stay with us.’
It’s a vivid and remarkable exchange between God and Moses, and different from what are so often our dainty prayers, our polite prayers in which we say what we think we’re supposed to say. Not for Moses (or for our proverbial grandmother)! No, they say exactly what’s on their mind and make sure God knows, in no uncertain terms, what they want.
What Moses wants is pretty simple. “Please,” says Moses to God, “Let me see your glory” (Exodus 33:18, The Message). The Israelites have messed up big time and you can hardly blame God for withdrawing from the relationship. Moses, though, knows they are nothing without God, so he issues this plea for God to stick with them.
Marvel of marvels, God then gives up holding the people’s unfaithfulness against them and promises to travel with them on their journey. God’s promises are rich and expansive: “I will make my Goodness pass right in front of you; I’ll call out the name, God, right before you. I’ll treat well whomever I want to treat well and I’ll be kind to whomever I want to be kind” (33:19, The Message).
And then, after all this positivity, all this encouragement, all this generosity, what does God do but have one more thing to say: “But you may not see my face. No one can see me and live” (33:20, The Message). It’s like God slamming the door in Moses’ face. ‘I’ll be there, sort of. I’ll let you know me, a little bit. But don’t try to get too close.’
In one of the strangest and most vivid scenes in the Bible, God then says, “I’ll let you see my back. But I will not let you see my face” (33:23). And the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says this scene beautifully conveys one of the great paradoxes of faith: that we are given hints of God, we’re given fleeting glimpses of God, but that we can never see all of God.
All of us know this at one level or another. We get hints of God, but never a 4K iMax vision of God. We get wisps of God blowing in when we sometimes least expect it, but we never get a totally incontrovertible proof of God’s presence.
Brueggemann says essentially that this is the nature of the dance we have with God. That dance is both intimate and distant. It is both intensely close and inevitably detached. We are both always reassured of God’s presence, God’s “passing by,” and, at the same time, never able to grasp the entire core of God. Brueggemann frames it succinctly this way: God holds in unending tension “self-giving and the self-reserve that makes self-giving possible” (The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1, p. 942). Or, as a long-ago book title by Hebrew scripture scholar Samuel Terrien put it, God is always “The Elusive Presence.”
That describes the God we both know and don’t know. It also, of course, lays out what it is to be human. We both keep our self and give our self. Back once more to Brueggemann: “Too much traditional Christianity has one-sidedly urged self-giving. As a counterpart, secular ideology urges the complete keeping of self. This text suggests that neither posture by itself will bring us to full humanness. We are called to imitate the God who . . . both holds and gives away” (p. 942).
With so many dimensions of life, this is the dynamic we have to navigate: how much do we hold back, and how much do we give away? How much of ourselves do we guard, and how much do we offer to others. It’s true with our stuff, of course. As we approach this church season in which we make financial decisions about our intentions to give for the coming year, we weigh that very issue. We live on and depend on our stuff. We need food and clothing and a home. We pay for cars and medical care and health insurance. Some of our resources go to fun—to travel and pickleball racquets and greens fees. There is an extent to which we keep what has come to us. At the same time, though, if all we do is hoard what we have, we’re “rich in things [but] poor in soul” (“God of Grace and God of Glory,” v. 3). Giving away a meaningful chunk of what we have is liberating. That giving is a tangible sign of our gratitude and also of our desire to contribute to something larger than ourselves. A full life both withholds something, and, at the same time, extravagantly gives away.
The same dynamic is true with our relationships, just as it is with God and Moses. In all our relationships, we both withhold and give away. I tell you something about who I am, but I don’t tell you everything. And we’re invited by this biblical story to reflect on how much of each we do in every relationship. How much do I tell you, and how much do I keep to myself? How much do I share, and how much do I withhold?
When I was growing up, my mother used to tell us lots of stories about her childhood, her parents, her college experiences. I knew that she treasured her parents, that her first boyfriend was a guy named Dick Goodwilly, that a cousin of hers used to drive a truck delivering the explosive nitroglycerin, and that, because it was so volatile, when he went through the Sumner Tunnel in Boston, authorities would shut down the entire tunnel so he could drive through it by himself. My mother shared with my brother and me lots of herself. And I treasured that.
My father, with an entirely different constitution, shared very little of himself. His family lost nearly everything in the Great Depression. When he was a teenager, he danced with his sister in a musical revue on Broadway that included Shirley Booth, Buddy Ebsen, and Van Johnson. And right at that same time in his life, in his mid-teens, his mother died of cancer at thirty-four. I know none of this from him, but only from his sister, my aunt, and from my mother. For my father, it was evidently too difficult for him to share many of the central events of his life. He was like the proverbial father who never talks about his experiences in war. While my mother shared, my father tended mostly to withhold. I remember, when I was in my early thirties, saying to him with sadness one day that I knew so much about my mother, and so little about him. And he spent several hours that evening telling me stories of his life that I had never heard before. And it was the only time he ever did that.
The decision about how much to share and how much to withhold can come in all sorts of ways. In my first church, I was part of a men’s lunch that met once a month. At one of these lunches, I mentioned that I happened to find a certain public figure attractive—I can’t remember now who it was—and that I had told Mary this. There was a man at that lunch whose draw dropped and who looked at me as though I had three heads. “I can’t believe you told Mary that!” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of telling my wife that I had found another woman attractive!” He and I had entirely different ways of dealing with this unavoidable part of ourselves. For him, it was important to keep his own counsel and not to do something he thought might hurt his wife. For me, it was and is important to demystify that sort of attraction. Talking openly about it has a way of lessening the potentially sinister power of such attractions. Very different ways of dealing with the same issue.
There’s no right way, of course, to make the judgment about what to share and what to withhold. We all will certainly share more with some people than we will with others. For all of us, though, this story of Moses and God may be an invitation to weigh how much sharing we do and how much withholding we do.
One of the occupational characteristics of clergy is that we tend to do a lot of listening. One of the things that gives me enormous joy is hearing your stories. We ministers get to make a connection with you when you trust us with the dynamics of your life.
The danger, though, is that we can do so much listening that we never really share our lives with you. Fairly early in my ministry, a man in the church I was serving said to me one day, with a modicum of irritation, something like, “You listen to us, but you don’t share much of yourself. It would really deepen our relationship if you’d let us in on more of who you are.”
I’ve tried to take that man’s advice to heart. My role with you is both to listen to you, and to let you in on some of who I am. I am aware of seeking to do that both conversationally and in my public role as preacher. And in my personal life, I’ve been aware, with our own children, of wanting them to know both the things I hold dear, and the things with which I struggle. My own father came across as having few if any weaknesses and, for all I knew, having little in the way of doubt or sorrow or despair. Having experienced him as guarded, I have been aware that I don’t want our children remembering me that way. And it’s easily possible that, when our children remember me after I’m gone, they’ll be saying, “Ooh, he shared way too much!”
None of us is ever going to share everything. Even the most loving marriage doesn’t share every quirk and fantasy and idiosyncrasy. And if it did, my sense is that something of the distinctiveness of each partner would be lost. I love Mary partly for the mystery of what I don’t know about her.
On the other hand, though, if we don’t take a chance with each other and share what may seem risky, then there will forever be a gulf between us. If we don’t share with each other some of our vulnerabilities, if we don’t say to each other, “I’m scared of getting old; I’m frightened of the results of my biopsy; even after all these years, I still grieve the loss of my spouse; much as I wish it weren’t so, I made some ghastly mistakes in my youth, and I still make them now; fighting in the war was hell; I kick myself for letting the love of my life get away”—if we don’t say such things, we’ll be little more than apparitions to each other.
And lest we think this is just an interpersonal issue, it’s also a public issue. Braver Angels, the theme of Federated’s Wondrous Wednesday discussion this past week, reminds us that for reds and blues to really understand each other, among other things, there’s a need for us to share with each other, not in an argumentative way, but in a way that conveys our deepest values and what we hold most dear. It’s vital, if we’re ever to break down barriers, that we share with each other not just our hardened and brittle opinions and positions, but the interests and values that come from our hearts. It’s fairly easy to say, “I think we should build a wall on our southern border,” or “I think we shouldn’t build such a wall.” Those are opinions that are anchored in our heads. It’s riskier and more vulnerable and more productive to say, “This is what matters to me—safety and security” (for those who might want a wall), or “This is what I value—an extravagant welcome to those whose homelands may be imploding” (for those who may not want a wall). If we talk together about our interests and our values, it may help us move past the intransigent positions we sometimes take and find instead some common ground. And that entails sharing not just facile opinions, but something of our core, something of what really matters to us.
For all of us, some reflection on how much sharing we do and how much withholding we do may prove fruitful. Do we share so much of who we are that little is left to the imagination? Do we withhold so much of who we are that we’re little more than spectral to the people who know us? What’s the appropriate balance? How do we maintain both an internal sense of our own inviolable identity and, at the same time, a willingness to take risks so that others can know us? And with more public matters, are we able to share from tender, sometimes aching hearts and not just from opinionated and sometimes acerbic heads? As with God’s conversation with Moses, may we find a balance that doesn’t necessarily share everything, but that also gives ourself away in love. Since God does it, maybe it’s something we might do, as well.