Sermon 10/16/05
God with Us - Exodus 33:12-23
(view lectionary notes for this text)
Tsunamis, and floods, and mudslides, and hurricanes, and earthquakes. So much happening, in such a short time on our globe, that, like Margot mentioned earlier this week, it is so easy to become overwhelmed, and unable to respond and act. Following last week’s earthquake, where latest reports estimate 20 to 30 thousand people killed, I’ve been noticing how little I’ve heard about this disaster. Already on cnn.com, I can find no news of the earthquake without digging in to the website. It is no longer front page news, apparently. So I’ve been wondering, do we have a saturation point? And what is it? When have we reached our capacity for extending grace, love, relief and aid? We are overwhelmed. Already in my own community we have found social service agencies worrying that support for local concerns, local social justice issues, will suffer because of the attention given to Katrina, something happening further away from our own home.
Wednesday, at our Social Principles training, Neal Christie and Clayton Childers talked with us about definitions and relationship between mercy and justice. Mercy, or charity, is optional – we can choose to extend it or withdraw it. We can choose, as individuals, how and how much to help with relief efforts. We can choose to give extra, or choose to say we have done enough, or at least all that we can do. But justice is different. Justice is a right – it is not meant to be within human hands to give or take away. It is not optional, but required. We may reach our point of saturation, but thanks be that God has no saturation point. God always extends grace and mercy, and God always delivers justice to the oppressed, even when we do not help facilitate the extending of justice.
This is where we find ourselves in this text from Exodus. Moses wants to know if God has a saturation point. Perhaps he has good reason to wonder. Our passage is from chapter 33, and for chapters 1-32, God has been with the Israelites as they traveled from Egypt, and wandered in the desert. God enabled the people to leave a place of captivity. God led them through the Red Sea. God provided food for them from heaven and water for them from a rock. God has been traveling before them as a pillar, guiding their way. And even when the people abandoned God and made a golden calf to worship in God’s place, God continued to extend grace to the people. For 33 chapters, God has put up with angry and whining and unfaithful Israelites. And for 33 chapters they have been ready to ditch God at any sign of trouble. No wonder Moses sounds anxious when he comes to talk to God before their final push into the land God has promised them. Moses says to God, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people.’ But you have not let me know whom you will send with me.” God responds, “My presence will go with you.” But again Moses pleads: “God, if your presence will not go, do not carry us up from hear.” And God says, I will do the very thing that you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” Moses wants to know if God has reached God’s limits of grace and mercy and justice. Moses has a fear of abandonment. He fears that after all the people have put God through, God will finally realize that investing in the people of Israel is just not worth the effort and energy.
I think we, too, are afraid of being abandoned by God, because we are so good at abandoning one another. We always have the best of intentions in our work for God, but we don’t always finish what we start, and we don’t always have as much energy at the end of our work as at the beginning, and we get discouraged and frustrated and overwhelmed and we reach our limits and we’ve had enough and we just can’t do it anymore. And our fear is that God will do the same, feel the same way.
And so, I think that that’s why our scriptures are filled with stories of God trying to just convince us of God’s presence. We don’t or won’t believe how close God is. We can’t believe that God can work through all of the obstacles we place in God’s way. We doubt that God can find ways to reach us and reach others with all that we put between us, we of little faith.
And so, to convince us of God’s presence, God came to us in Christ Jesus - God with us, Emmanuel, and was one of us, and walked with us, and lived as one of us. But even the disciples couldn’t be convinced, and we read in the gospels of their doubts and fears of being left alone. And so, to convince us of God’s presence, God filled us with the Holy Spirit, God’s very breath coming to rest upon us, inside us, breathed out through us. To convince us of God’s presence, God has come to dwell within us. God’s creations, made in God’s image, we find that we are living reflections of God’s presence in the world.
Our work, then, as a board, is to work to show others God within us and to help them find God within themselves. How do you recognize God’s presence within yourself? And what keeps you from seeing yourself as made in God’s image?
When we work for justice, then, we work, in essence, for all people to have access to full humanity, to fully see God’s presence within them, to see themselves as God’s creations, reflections of God. How can people recognize God within them if they are instead filled with the pain of addictions that work destruction in their lives? How can people feel God fully within them, if their lands are torn by wars that claim thousands of their lives? How can people feel God fully within them if their bodies are wreaked by diseases that give them a life expectancy of 20 or 30? How can people be convinced God is with them if they live in communities where no one wants to go but where everyone wants to send their garbage and pollution and waste? How can people believe that God’s presence surrounds them, always, always?
There is so much pain and hurt that surrounds us, but there is so much more love that we have to share. Who will go with us? We are not abandoned. God knows our names. And God will go before us to guide us when we would stray, and behind us to prod us on when we would quit, and surround us when we would feel abandoned, and dwell within us always.
Would you pray with me? O God of grace, God of mercy, God of justice - Fill our hearts with the peace of your presence. Let us be reflections of your love as we work and serve in your name. Amen.