October 19, 2008 + The Absent-Present God + Frank Alton

Exodus 32:1, 2, 4-5, 7, 10-11, 13-15, 19-20; 33:1a, 3, 12-23

A lot has happened since I last stood here two Sundays ago. We went from debating whether we were in a recession to comparing the financial crisis to the Great Depression. It appears the presidential election has been all but decided. All of that takes place against the backdrop of ever increasing awareness of global warming, the roller coaster of Middle East violence, and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation.

Many say the world is in the midst of a major transition. Every time any part of the world faces the end of an age or stage of life, it faces a question: Is this a moment of shedding & breaking down old forms so a threshold can be crossed into another stage of culture or of life? Or is this the final curtain? How we answer may be a matter of temperament, but we all feel a certain level of anxiety about what next. One of my new mentors, Michael Meade, describes some of ways anxiety gets played out: “On the threshold of an age old battlefields are revisited. Money changes value faster than it changes hands. Once again the great question of a woman’s right to choose abortion lies on the campaign trail. Once again the death penalty is in question. Once again the demand for civil rights flares up. Question of racism demand renewed attention. The questions that divide the genders rattle within houses and institutions.”

The Hebrew people gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai were at one such critical juncture. Their roots went back to a single family in their founding stories about Abraham & Sarah, Isaac & Rebecca, Jacob, Leah & Rachel. The experience of Egypt had transformed them into something larger than a clan but less than a distinct community. They eventually became slaves in Egypt, until God liberated them by the hand of Moses. They quickly arrived at Mount Sinai. Back in Chap 19, when they arrived at the desert around Mount Sinai, right before giving Moses the 10 commandments and the law, God had said to Moses: “Say to the house of Jacob…if you obey my voice and keep my covenant you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” Did you catch that? No longer would they be a clan; they would be a kingdom of priests. The Hebrews were actually born as a people at Sinai. Everything before that had been a gestation period. When they set out from Sinai, everything would be different.

The story we read this morning takes place while they’re still at Sinai. The people didn’t know they were to be a priestly kingdom and holy nation. Only Moses had been told that, and who knows what he understood those words to mean. He had some sense that, in spite of how dramatic the Exodus was, they “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Or as Dorothy put it in The Wizard of Oz, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

Cataclysmic transitions generate anxiety in both leaders & people. What is going to happen when the things I’ve always depended on are no longer certain? People were in a panic because they knew something was ending. They demanded that Aaron do something about it. He placated their panic by making a golden calf to worship. They had no idea what was coming down; that is not comforting. They weren’t thinking about the new, they were scared about losing the old.

Moses knew more. He also knew something new was coming. He may not have understood the nature of the new or its implications for their lives, but he had enough information to be more focused on the future. He had heard God tell him that this rabble of liberated slaves was going to become a nation, God’s treasured possession out of all the peoples. The passage we read today addresses God’s spiritual preparation of Moses.

The first step in that preparation was to show Moses that being a kingdom of priests was not primarily about being distinct from other nations because they’d been chosen by God to be special and unique. It was more about being people who learned not to be anxious about the things that made other people anxious. I was reminded of this truth at the Yom Kippur service held here at IPC when the rabbi invited all the non-Jews forward to receive a special blessing. She reminded the congregation that the Hebrew slaves were not the only slaves in Egypt and that the exodus was not only for the Jews but for all the slaves. The distinctiveness that God wanted to build into the people who became the Jews has to do not so much with chosenness but with a quality of life that one rabbi has called “a non anxious presence.” (Ed Friedman)

To expect no anxiety may be a bit much. It’s more about keeping anxiety at a low enough level to be able to act. I saw the impact of that quality of life yesterday at the funeral of John Robert McGraham, the homeless man who was torched to death last weekend. The people of this community set up a memorial altar after John’s death and responded with powerful expressions of grief and anger to the atrocity. They had some anxiety, but they were able to act. That was enough for John’s siblings. Yesterday at the funeral, John’s brother, David, confessed his cynicism about the world. He told us that his sister had what he called “the fantasy” that hundreds of people would show up for the funeral. He didn’t know how to let her down easily about what he considered a fact: that no more than 50 would show up. As he stood before the 250 people gathered, he barely got words out through his tears. He shared how the outpouring of love for his brother had begun to change his cynical heart. He obviously was not over the shock of having been wrong; but he said he was glad to be wrong. This particular wrongness was powerful in his life.

Then his sister, Suzanne, got up to speak. On Wednesday when I met with Suzanne and David, she was mostly concerned that I wouldn’t be too religious during the service. But what she said to the gathered congregation topped anything I could have said. She said that she believed that the perpetrators had accomplished a good thing in spite of their evil intent. I thought I was hearing the patriarch Joseph speaking to his 11 brothers. This woman, who took a certain pride in not having faith, was bearing witness to God’s providence in her brother’s horrible death only a week after he had been murdered in one of the worst atrocities that can be inflicted on a human being. I was blown away. But that is the impact of a community that can overcome at least enough anxiety to act in ways that are seen as beautiful by others. In one sense, the people were just expressing their grief in the only way they knew how. But the family experienced it as loving solidarity that transformed them in significant ways.

The question I want to raise this morning is, “What is involved in the spiritual preparation for being able to act in loving solidarity in the midst of crisis so that others can be transformed?” For Moses it involved nothing less than a new way of experiencing God. Up until this point, Moses had been treated to face to face conversations with God. Now God was preparing him for a stage of the journey in which Moses would experience God’s presence as absence. I believe that the capacity to draw on God’s presence when we experience God as absent is the foundation for the capacity to express loving solidarity. Loving solidarity is a way to be close yet separate; to be in the world so deeply that one is tempted to be anxious, but to not allow the anxiety to keep us from loving those around us, even if they’re frozen by fear. To know God’s absent presence is the spiritual foundation of the practice of compassion.

God said to Moses, “I will not go up among you.” Moses argued with God and seemed to win the argument. God replied, “I will do the very thing that you have asked.” But did God do what Moses asked? Moses asked to see God’s glory. God responded, “I will make all my goodness pass before you & will proclaim before you the name, Yahweh. But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” Now that may sound fine to you, but Moses is the guy had spoken to God face to face time and again. This must have felt like a major demotion to Moses.

Actually, it wasn’t so much a demotion as a protection from turning one way of relating to God into an idol. We have to move out of habitual ways of relating to God in order to explore new dimensions of God we haven’t known before. We never have all the answers. If we did God knows we would try to manipulate God. Ann LaMott says, “I hate it that I can’t prove the beliefs of my faith. If I were God, I would have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check as you went along, to see if you’re on the right track. But nooooo.” (Plan B, pp. 274-75)

The appearance of God’s glory would be the answer in the back of the workbook for Moses. God said, “I will make my glory pass in front of you. Then I will whisper to you my name.” How odd. God had already whispered the divine name to Moses, back in chapter 3. What’s this about? Remember what the name, Yahweh, meant? “I Am Who I Am.” Or maybe, “I Will Be Who I Will Be.” In other words, you could know God’s name, and still not know anything about God. You still would not be able to control God, or even manage your life in such a way as to avoid God. God was reminding Moses, “Just because I cause my glory to pass in front of you, don’t think you’ve got me figured out. I Am Who I Am.”

God was inviting Moses to go deeper in their relationship. When Moses saw only God’s hand and then the back of God, he sees God leaving. But it wasn’t a sign of departure. He sees a God who disappears in appearing. It was the same experience the two disciples had at Emmaus: as soon as they recognized Jesus, he disappeared. We could say it another way: God gets closer as God retreats. Wasn’t this what happened to the Apostle Paul on the Road to Damascus? Or we could say that God is more deeply united with us as we allow God to be more separate from us. That’s what Mary experienced in the garden when Jesus said to her, “Don’t cling to me.”

Whenever we’re invited to go deeper with God it involves darkness. Deep places tend to be dark places. In Christian history this experience has come to be called the Dark Night of the Soul. Dark nights of the soul are provoked by different circumstances. Sometimes they come as something interrupts the forward movement after a success. It’s necessary because otherwise success will become an idol. Or when they experience the losses that accompany bold changes in their lives, changes that are part of God’s call, but which are unfamiliar and therefore unsettling. They also happen when we simply need to access other parts of God, to get a larger taste of God.

Whatever provokes it, it’s frightening to experience God’s hand covering our faces so we can’t see the familiar – we can’t see reality as we are used to seeing it. When all the old securities are called into question, when everyone seems to have lost their way, the way must be found in the darkness and unconsciousness that waits just at the edge of the bright lights of the anxious daily world. It is tempting for every culture that goes through such a time to return to old ways, old idolatries.

As people of faith and as a community of faith we’re subject to the anxiety & temptations, and we’re called to be priests and prophets in the world. We need to develop the capacity to be fully in the world with all its anxiety, & subject to all its temptations. That’s not difficult for most of us – it comes quite naturally to feel the anxiety of an economic depression, the threat of global warming, and the grasping at straws that tries to hang on to old certainties that are already debunked. It’s tempting to insist on old ways. People wanted the old idols back. Aaron gave them to them. Moses wanted to relate to God and God’s glory in the same old way. That wasn’t God’s agenda for the next stage. Some aspects of returning to the old ways are necessary. But returning is never enough.

As followers of Jesus and Moses we’re called to be in solidarity with those who are under the anxiety. Solidarity represents distance within proximity akin to God’s absence within God’s presence. We need to be able to step back and see ourselves and others in that situation at the same time we access the wisdom to lead through it. It’s quite a challenge. But it is our challenge.