Lent 3C Exodus 3:1-15

I suppose that like most people I have had mountaintop experiences on numerous mountaintops around the world. Or at least high up on mountainsides. From the window of my bedroom in the farmhouse in which I grew up I could look across ordinary fields of cotton, corn, and wheat and see, on a clear day, the Great Smoky mountains of the southern Appalachian chain as they turned toward the west and north Georgia and Alabama where they ended. And my earliest memories involved time spent in those hills and mountains.

Actual mountaintop experiences in those days involved two particular mountains in North Carolina: Mount Mitchell, supposedly the highest point on the eastern seaboard, and Mount Montreat, rising high above a church retreat center. Psychologists might well assert that I wa influenced by the strong Old Testament orientation and religiosity of a Presbyterian Church in a small rural town in the deep and highly religious South Carolina in the 1940s and 50s. They could very well be right. After all, no less an authority than Albert Schweitzer a century ago concluded that God comes to each of us in a very personal way and different way in the midst of the mystery of faith.

I found an ancient Jewish legend about this Exodus passage that relates to this sort of thing: “A young man asked his Rabbi "Why does your daily prayer say, ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob? Why does it not simply say, ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?’ " The Rabbi replied, "because, my son, Abraham’s God and Isaac’s God may not have been Jacob’s. Each generation must find God for itself, indeed, each person must find his own God."” (1)

There have been other mountain tops in my life: the rockbound hills and mountains of the Hudson Highlands around West point, New York, Mount Rainier in Washington state near my graduate school, and Nui Ba Den, rising abruptly from the lush green rice plains of the Saigon River basin in South Vietnam.

I always felt closer to God standing on a mountaintop than almost any other place except right here. And so when on of my favorite Seminary Professors, Murray Newman, legendary for his basic Old Testament required course, spoke of events in the Old Testament that involved mountain tops and high places on mountainsides, he had my rapt attention. It was not hard for me to be there in my imagination and see it happening through the eyes of faith.

Two of the most important events -- and the earliest two – in the salvation history of ancient Israel and also of those who call themselves Christians were two theophanies high up on mountains. Theophany comes from two combined Greek words, theos – God — and phainesthai – to appear. The dictionary defines a theophany as a supposedly visible appearance of God or a god to a human or humans. The first of those theophanies was the one which we read in our Exodus Old Testament lesson for today: the self revelation of God’s name by God high up on Mount Horeb and the instructions to Moses to set God’s people free. The second was the Sinai Event and the presentation of the Ten Commandments – a story for another time.

I have always loved the story as it was portrayed by Charlton Heston in Cecil B. deMille’s “The Ten Commandments” movie. I have always preferred a stalwart, rugged Moses to the weak and whiny Moses portrayed in the Walt Disney production of “Moses”. Alas, the Moses portrayed in Scripture is more lie the Disney Moses – always whining about his God-given task, always trying to argue with God and escape his mission, fearful of the consequences of obedience. No wonder God didn’t let Moses enter the Promised Land forty years later.

But the story isn’t so much about Moses as it is about God. The choice of Moses to deliver God’s Chosen people from Egypt and pharaoh simply reinforces hat we already know from ancient and recent experience: God often chooses people to be his instruments of deliverance, freedom, and justice that we humans would not likely chose even in our most reckless moments. God takes the weak willed whiny Moses and makes him an instrument of mighty acts of God. It really isn’t a good idea to argue with God – we won’t win in the end.

But what really makes the Horeb event about God is that God chose this moment in salvation history to reveal something more about God’s self: his name, a simple sounding name, but one filled with mystery and power. It’s called the Great I AM. “I AM Who I AM. It seems so simple. A better translation is I AM who, what, that which IAM; I will be who, what, that which I will be.” But I’m not sure it helps us much except to reinforce the ineffable mystery at the heart of what we understand about God. Again Webster: “Ineffable: too overwhelming to be expressed or described in words; too awesome or sacred to be spoken, as in God’s ineffable name.” Indeed, traditional Judaism does not speak the name of God.

In a high and holy place, God began to tell us about God’s self. And God still is.

AMEN
1. Found in a sermon by John W. Cobb “Remembering the Name of God”, at eSermons for Lent 3C.