Lent III                                                         Dr. Paul Jacobson Exodus 3:1-15                                              March 11 2007

Psalm 103:1-11                                            9:00 Holy Eucharist

Luke 13:1-9

 

In the name of God, the great I AM, whom we worship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

When Moses has his first conversation with God through the burning bush (it's hard not to imagine the God of Bill Cosby calling "Moses"), and God tells Moses there's a job for him in Egypt , he balks. But God assures him, "Don't worry, I'll be there with you." Not convinced, Moses presses, "but if I'm going to go back to Egypt where, by the way, I'm wanted for murder, to bring the Israelites out, why in the world should they listen to me? Who am I that you should send me? And, by the way, just exactly who are you, and what do I tell them your name is?" Now God already said "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Shouldn't that be enough? Apparently, not for Moses, and in a striking and unique revelation, God says, "I AM THAT I AM." God mentions nothing about being the creator of the universe, or about being the God any particular acreage, or about possessing any specific attribute or accomplishment. What God gives to Moses, and to us, is simply a statement of being. I AM. Full stop.

 

But the scriptures are packed with stories of how we don't trust that God is who God is. In the hurly-burly of daily life, a God who simply IS is simply not enough. We demand more from our God. We want a God who's a little less spiritual, and a lot more action-packed. We want to watch those gruesome plagues beset the Egyptians. We want to see water from the rock and taste manna from heaven. We want a God who DOES. And often as not, we want a God who does for us and against those we don't much care for; maybe some of those Galileans, or those unlucky folks killed in a construction accident.

 

In the part of Luke's gospel we hear this morning, Jesus is surrounded by crowds, and the din of questions about the future grows deafening as Jesus draws nearer to the wilderness of Golgotha . "What will God do?" "What will God do for us?" "What will God do to us?" In last week's Gospel, Jesus was asked, "Lord, will only a few be saved?" This week Jesus asks the not-quite rhetorical questions - "do you think that the Galileans Pilate killed were worse sinners?" or "what about the 18 who were killed when that tower fell on them at Siloam? What about them? What did they do? What did God do?"

Biblical commentators often take this occasion to mention how Jesus tackles the so-called "simplistic conventions" of the time - that catastrophic events were God's judgment on the sins of the victims. But these "simplistic conventions" don't belong exclusively to antiquity. They are part of our everyday experience. How easily we remember September 11 th , tsunamis and hurricanes followed swiftly by the proclamations of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps. While it is tempting to label these folks and their ilk as simplistic, if not malevolent, we ought to avoid the wilderness of smugness, for what they do is what we all do.

 

We all look for a God who DOES. And we all look for a cause, for someone to blame. WE need a THEM. We need to know that they got what was coming to them so that we feel more righteous, more virtuous, more secure. It's like whistling in the graveyard. It makes us think that we're in control, the control that humanity has been trying to wrest from God since Adam and Eve believed the serpent's big lie.

 

We all face calamity to some degree. We all die. The repentance to which Jesus calls us today is not what we read on bumper stickers - "Jesus is coming. Look busy!" Our repentance, our turning away from sin is not to become busier, not to spend our time and resources trying to control God, to avoid death. Our repentance, our turning away from sin is, simply, to BE. Be still. Know that God is God.

 

On that day in the wilderness at Horeb, God stepped through boundaries of the natural order into a bush that burned but was not consumed to reveal I AM to Moses. When unable to convince us through the Law and the Prophets of the futility of trying to be God, God again stepped through the natural order to become fully human - to become like us in everything except sin. And, not counting equality with God as something to be grasped at (Phil 2), Jesus stepped into the very wilderness we fear most - death - and ransomed us forever from its power.

 

My brothers and sisters, we have not one iota of control over death as the inexorable fate of us all, in spite of our quixotic quest for accomplishment or glory or better cholesterol levels. Like the collect says, "we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves." At the same time, there is not a single thing that we can do that will make God love us any more. Not a single thing. Our repentance needs to be learning to trust God's promise and to relax into that love. As the ever pithy Robert Farrar Capon reminds us, "in Baptism and Eucharist, in Confession and Absolution, and in all the priestly acts of the Church, we're celebrating what Jesus has already done, not negotiating with God to get him to do it." ( The Foolishness of Preaching , 37)

 

So, I invite you, at least for the rest of Lent, to stop being busy! It just won't do you any good. Instead, tune your ears to hear the voice of God who calls to each of us every day - sometimes out of a burning bush, sometimes out of a seemingly lifeless fig tree. And when you hear God's voice, just take off your shoes. Do less. Be more. Amen.

 

Soli Deo Gloria.