Sunday School! We are standing on holy ground
Good morning! This is our Old Testament reading for today. Enjoy! It's an all time favorite, and I have some comments.
Exodus 3:1-15. Moses & the Burning Bush
3:1 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
The Divine Name Revealed
13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.
+++++++++++
We are standing on holy ground
In the early to mid 1960s we lived in Japan, where a custom we learned early was to remove our shoes in the entryway before entering a Japanese house. Not to do so would be rude, offensive, discourteous, disrepectful, dishonor your host, not to mention marking you as a buffoon! A home is deeply personal and private, a shelter, refuge, set aside from the world. Its floors are costly tatami mats of delicate woven bamboo in frames. They are not walked on with shoes, tracking in filth, mud, sand and dirt from the street and the outside world. Transitioning from profane to serene, you may be given soft slippers. You may take off your coat and be given a kimono, a soft robe to don and be comfortable.
Moses! Take off your shoes: you are standing on holy ground. We visualize an affronted even offended God fiercely confronting Moses that he has trespassed into a place too holy for human presence, much less dirty shoes. But in rabbinic discussion there is a tradition that Adonai the Lord is hospitable, with open arms he graciously welcomes Moses into his sanctuary, “Moshe, Moshe! Welcome! Take off your shoes and make yourself comfortable”. And perhaps adds or thinks, “I’ve been waiting for you! (heh heh).”
The rabbis' notion of a warm, kind welcome sounds very much like the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who came to bring the light and love of God into the world, who welcomes us into his house, and to his holy table to share his Bread, the Body of Christ.
Why the burning bush? All things bright and beautiful! Everyone is attracted by color and brightness. Red, orange and yellow fall colors in New England. Magnificent sunrises and sunsets over St Andrews Bay. The emerald green sea and billowing white Cuban clouds that Carlos Eire recalls in “Waiting for Snow in Havana”. A plain female cardinal attracted and aroused to mating by her bright red male. The female peahen attracted to the peacock as he spreads his magnificent fan. Having lunch at a window table at Sweet Magnolia restaurant some years ago, Linda and I watched a male lizard puff and puff and puff to swell out his bright red throat for another lizard: within a minute or two they were together, immodestly mating. He had attracted and seduced her.
Reading John 14 and Jesus' promise of a mansion in his father's house, comes to mind my fantasy of the red Coupe DeVille parked and waiting out front! Or I may ride with John Prine.
Just so, in the desert, Moses is fascinated, attracted: Holy smoke, look at that bush! Why is it blazing in flames but not being consumed?
Why indeed! Because the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has a brilliant imagination. He wants a leader to save his people Israel from slavery in Egypt. On a lovely morning, he sees, wandering into his yard, just the man for the job: Moses, who not only is an Israelite, but speaks Egyptian fluently and even is known by Egypt's royal family! Perfect! Shazam, the Creator bursts into flame and Moses is fascinated, attracted, enticed, lured into the web, ensnared.
This is a good old time favorite Sunday School bible story. In scripture, it’s a Call Story. Nearly every prophet is called, has a call story to tell. As well as a natural born leader raised in the royal house of Egypt, Moses is a prophet. The story of “Moses and the Burning Bush” is the call story of Moses as well as God’s call of Israel to be his people, whom he has lost and have lost him after the creation stories in Genesis: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and Joseph, a prince of Egypt long generations ago. Now Moses, a new beginning.
Born into slavery, rescued from the bullrushes by a daughter of Pharaoh, Moses is raised as a royal prince, but is seen murdering an Egyptian soldier and has to flee. Escaping Egypt into the countryside, Moses finds peace and a beautiful girl, marries and settles into life as a quiet shepherd, unaware that God waits impatiently, crouching like a lion! The day comes and now is when Moses wanders onto God’s mountain, into God’s presence, and is conscripted. Not at all like Isaiah surprised by God and saying “Here am I, send me”, Moses resists, but his excuse is dismissed by a fast-talking Being in a burning bush. Moses is pressed into service, given no choice but to obey.
Life in God’s service may be gratifying but not easy, and people in any vocation may relate and identify with the call and life of Moses. I certainly do, except that in my life, instead of a burning bush, at every bright future leading me further away, God burned the bridge in front of me so that I had to stop and chose another road! Think about it: perhaps in retrospect of Moses and the Burning Bush, maybe you also can see the hand and fire of God in your life. And if you aren’t as far along in life as I am, be alert to God, regard today's bible story as a wake-up call, you may find out that God is real, and alive, and has a dream for you.
Now, if we hang this story up on the wall to look at and pick apart, it’s rich and full of things to discover, like a tapestry. Let’s do a little of that before posting this and closing down. It's about God's name.
+++++++++++
I have gone back into the OT reading for today and, using BibleGateway, Bible Hub, and the Mechon-Mamre Hebrew English interlinear, have copy-and-pasted-in the Hebrew words for god and God(s) and Yahweh and Moses. When you come to the Hebrew, let your eye skip to the right end of the word and scan it "backwards" from right to left.
Exodus 3:1-15. 1 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain הָאֱלֹהִ֖ים (ha-Elohim) of God. 2 There the angel of יְהוָה (y'Vah) the Lord (the reader would say "Adonai" or "ha-Shem" the Name) appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush. He looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When יְהוָה (y'Vah) the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) God called to him out of the bush, מֹשֶׁה מֹשֶׁה (MoSheh, MoSheh) “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I am אֱלֹהֵי (elohe, singular for god) the God of your father, אֱלֹהֵי the God of Abraham, אֱלֹהֵי the God of Isaac, and אֱלֹהֵי the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at הָאֱלֹהִים (ha-Elohim) God. (God himself is generally given in plural form, like an imperial we)
7 Then יְהוָה (y'Vah) the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
11 But Moses said to הָאֱלֹהִים (ha-Elohim) God (BTW, take הָ "ha" as an adjective like "the"), “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship הָאֱלֹהִים (ha-Elohim) God on this mountain.”
13 But Moses said to הָֽאֱלֹהִ֗ים (ha-Elohim) God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, אֱלֹהֵי (elohe) ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) God said to Moses, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (ehYeh ahSher ehYeh) “I am who I am" (or I AM that I AM or I will be what I will be). He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, אֶהְיֶה (eh-Yeh) ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15 אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵי y'Vah Elohe) ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, אֱלֹהֵי (Elohe) the God of Abraham, אֱלֹהֵי (Elohe) the God of Isaac, and אֱלֹהֵי (Elohe) the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.
Exodus 3:1-15 is the Bible passage where God inducts Moses into his service, tells Moses (and us forever) what His Name is and always will be. Arguably, depending on the verse, it's either y'Vah or eh-Yeh. In my view, if we take the Bible seriously, we cannot change God's name (as a feminist group whom I observed three or four decades ago tried changing it to Sophia, Wisdom - - which is limiting). Interesting, fascinating. Furthermore, pondering y'vah's pronunciation has puzzled and delighted scholars for centuries, millennia.
Quite intriguing is the fact that nobody really knows for absolute certain how to pronounce the Name. How to say it has been lost in history as (1) very much like Latin the "dead language", Hebrew faded and disappeared from use until fairly recently, and (2) pronouncing God's Name was forbidden anyway as too sacred to speak aloud, so one must substitute "Adonai" or "haShem" (which means The Name), and especially (3) the original and unimaginably ancient Hebrew text had no vowels and no pronunciation markings: only in the recent era have the little dots and squiggles been added to Hebrew writing as "vowel marking sounds" to show how words are to be pronounced; so even the best authorities do not really know how originally and "correctly" to pronounce what's called the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters יְהוָה YHVH.
I'm certainly no Hebrew scholar, can hardly remember the alefbet letter symbols overnight until the next morning, but from what little I've tried to teach myself studying Ethelyn Simon & Joseph Anderson's little book "Teach Yourself to Read Hebrew" and taking Rabbi Jeff's little online Hebrew course on "Shalom Adventures" (it's fun, you might enjoy it as much as I did), and looking at the vowel markings on the modern text, I've settled on y'VAH, saying "yeh-VAH". Most people seem to prefer YahVeh or YahWay. You may pronounce it any way you wish and I won't try to "correct" you!
Going to stop there, although there is much more to explore in the story, including noticing that sometimes in the OT the angel of God morphs into being God's own self.
And that when God is spoken of, the noun Elohim is usually plural (gods or specifically Gods).
And my personal view that God here tells us His name forever, and nobody has any business trying to change it - - not even that feminist group calling God Sophia and saying "Her" and serving milk and honey as Eucharist instead of bread and wine, covenantal body and blood. I don't mind "Her" but it's yVah, folks, see, it says so right here!
I think it's interesting how the OT moves smoothly from Genesis where Joseph the Hebrew commoner becomes prince of Egypt and saves the Hebrews from starvation, to Exodus where Moses the Hebrew commoner becomes a prince of Egypt and saves the Hebrews from slavery.
It's also interesting, important to me to know, that Exodus 3:1-15 is not when and where God GETS his name. If you go back and read through Genesis, you'll see that God's name has been y'VAH from the very beginning. Genesis 2:4b
בְּי֗וֹם עֲשׂ֛וֹת יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶ֥רֶץ וְשָׁמָֽיִם
in the day that y'Vah Elohim made the earth and the heavens ...
Tom+
stain glass pinched online
"The Burning Bush"
Christ Episcopal Church Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
Glen Ridge, NJ
apology that I'm still having trouble getting Blogger to comply with my font size direction, so text may suddenly shift to tiny or huge. TW