The Presence of God

"The Presence of God"

Exodus 33:12-23
October 26, 2008

Moses said to the LORD, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people’; but you
have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by
name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now if I have found favor in your
sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider
too that this nation is your people.” He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will
give you rest.” And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from
here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people,
unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every
people on the face of the earth.” The LORD said to Moses, “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
said, “Show me your glory, I pray.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass
before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The LORD’; and I will be gracious
to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he
said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” And the LORD
continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while
my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand
until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but
my face shall not be seen.”

I was at the home of Kimberly Defields and the kids, visiting with Mr. Defields, who, as
many of you already know passed away Friday, when Maegan told me about something
they found on the bottom of a McDonalds bag, something that Kimberly found kind of
startling—and which I found incredible as well. On the bag, on the bottom, written in a
red lettering are the words K. McLemore! I couldn’t believe it—in fact, I thought maybe
they were playing some weird joke on me—maybe they had stenciled it on the bag, or
something—now why they did it…well, that I couldn’t answer that! But if you look clearly
at it—it’s clearly printed on the bag! I couldn’t believe it! I’ve since looked at other
McDonalds bags, and there are other names on them as well—C. Robinson is one
name, G. Newsome is another…but McLemore is not a common name, and when you
add a K. to it…wow! Hard to believe. I’ve always said I wanted to be published, but I
never knew that it would be on the bottom of a McDonalds bag. So, I had to ask, you
know, was God trying to tell me something? Was I supposed to eat more McDonalds?
Or maybe even eat less McDonalds? Was I supposed to buy McDonalds stock—it’s
cheap food, so they should do well in this terrible economy.

As I was struggling with this difficult and deep question about the will of God, I picked up
the church’s mail at the post office, only to find another possible sign from God, some
possible divine message from the Almighty. Like millions of churches this week, we
received an oddly timed large envelope from a group called the The Judeo-Christian
View out of Vista, California, with the words “Same-Sex Unions And Child Sacrifice:
Obama, McCain, Jihad, and the Judeo-Christian View.” Inside the envelope was a
three-pronged attack on Obama, gay and lesbian marriage, and abortion. It was
attacking Obama on his endorsement of civil unions for gay people and then accusing
him of supporting child-sacrifice, which they equated with his support of a woman’s right
to choose to have an abortion, and then, as a vile bonus, we also received a CD with a
“documentary” attacking Islam as an inherently violent religion, as if we Christians hadn’
t also at various times practiced our own faith through the use of the sword. Whatever
your politics, right or left, McCain or Obama, or somewhere in the middle, this was
pretty sick stuff. But still, was God trying to tell me something this way, through this
mailer sent out to 3.4 million churches at the cost of millions of dollars, right before the
election? I mean, how does God reach out to us, and make God’s presence known to
us? And how we can tell the difference between a weird random thing on the back of a
McDonalds bag, or a multi-million dollar mailing whose purpose is to sway our votes,
and the actual presence of God in our lives, the actual real movement of God in our
lives?

That desire for an authentic presence of God is exactly what our text before us today is
trying to deal with, in this confusing passage in which God and Moses are having a
delicate conversation about just how God was going to be with the people from that
point onward. But you see, you have to know the rest of the story—this conversation
takes place right after the Golden Calf incident—you remember that story, right? The
one about the people’s anxiety being so great when Moses was up on Mount Sinai that
they decided to build an idol made of their own jewelry. Aaron, Moses’ brother, allows
this to happen while Moses is away getting those Ten Commandments we all know
about, though probably we don’t practice as we well as we should. And so the scene
before us is one in which God has promised, despite this deep betrayal, to continue to
be with the people of Israel, though you can sense some deep pain, some deep
hesitation on God’s part. It really is amazing, folks—in our tradition, God actually has a
real personality, God can get hurt by us, and by our actions—it’s a really amazing thing
to read this passage and sense the authentic pain and hesitation in God’s voice and
actions here. In our passage today, we have Moses confronting God, despite God’s
hurt feelings, confronting God with the reality that these people are God’s people, God’
s own people, and that they need to have some sense of God’s presence if they are
going to be able to make it to Promised Land. Earlier, God had been visually present
with them through the use of a tent, an actual tent that Moses went to be with God, and
a pillar of cloud would park itself right outside the entrance of the tent—it was
something they could see with their own eyes: God was there, God was with Moses,
and so God was with them.

But now the guarantee of God’s presence with them has been shattered to some
degree, because God, in an earlier verse (33:3) has said that they need to go forward
into that land full of milk and honey, but that God was not going to be with them,
because if God were to truly and fully God with them, God might actually consume,
destroy them on the way, because they were such a stubborn people—God ‘s
frustration with them might end up destroying them on the journey. So God wants out
of the deal, to some degree, out of the covenant in which they were to be God’s people
and Yahweh was to be their God. You can really sense the pain and betrayal there—
“you go on, though I’m not sure I can go with you, at least not in the same way as I was
before.” But Moses won’t stand for it—“fine, but who are you going to send with us? If
not you, who? Some angel, some spirit, some something? It’s almost as if Moses is
pushing God to get beyond the hurt feelings and betrayal, and there is a moment too
where Moses reminds God that these people, these willful, disobedient people are still
God’s own people, not someone’s else people. Finally, God relents, and says, “I’ll be
there, I’ll be there, and I’ll give you rest as well,” and yet Moses doesn’t relent, almost
as if to make sure that God is going to follow through—“if you don’t mean it God, don’t
send us to the promised Land. The only way people will know that you have sent us
there is if you go with us on the journey.”

And then, eventually, God says “yes, I will go with you,” and God even responds to
Moses’ request to see God’s glory, “God’s awesome, shrouded, magisterial presence,
like an overpowering light.” (NIB, Brueggeman 940) But God will only allow Moses to
see God partially, because the glory would be too much, God’s face would overwhelm
him—and to see God face to face, to see another human face even, is to know them, is
to see them wholly and completely, and the reality is that God can never be known
completely and wholly—God still remains a mystery always, despite our often lame
attempts to define and box God up. In order to protect Moses, God promises to put him
in the cleft of a rock, and to put a divine hand over him until God passes by,
withdrawing that divine hand only at that moment when God is walking away, revealing
only the backside of God. Now, interestingly, this is only a promise to Moses, a promise
that God makes to Moses, but we never actually have a record, so to speak, of such an
event ever taking place—just the promise that God will allow Moses to see at least
some of God’s glory. And of course, this has always been a theme in Jewish thought,
that we humans can never really see God face to face, because that intimacy is too
much for us, too much for us mere humans—to see someone face to face is to allow for
the possibly of complete intimacy and complete knowledge of that person, something
that in this case, of God, is something we certainly will never experience on this side of
eternity.

Now, I want to go back for a second to picture we have before us, this moment when
God lifts that divine hand from Moses and God, in all of that divine glory, is just about to
pass out of the room, out of the picture. There is something powerful about that
moment that just rings true, or at least it rings true for me. I’ll tell you why it rings true
for me: in my experience of how God works in my life, I’ve often found traces of God’s
past presence in my life more often than I have been able to recognize God’s presence
at the moment I am going through something. In another words, in looking back over
my life and though experiences when I was in my own desert times, like the Israelites
were, I have found God most often in those moments when I was sifting through the
wreckage of the past, those painful moments of hurt and betrayal, those moments of
disappointment and pain. In those moments of looking backwards, it was at those times
that I caught a glimpse of God, almost at the moment when God was walking out of the
room, almost as if I was seeing God out of the corner of my eye as God was exiting.
The text says that Moses was only allowed to see the backside of God—yes, the rear
end of God, laugh if you will, because it is funny, and I think the writer of the text means
it be. Something about that idea just amuses me, OK, but more seriously, the idea that
God is usually seen in those moments when God is moving out of a particular part of
our lives, when what has been done has been done, and now we have time to think
about what happened and could have happened. Usually, most of us are so caught up
in our moments and years in the desert that it’s impossible to see the hand and glory of
God during those times. It’s only when life rolls on to another place that we can look
back and see God’s presence in this or that part of our lives—its only when we see
God walking out of the room, out of the corner of our eyes, that we are reminded that
we were never alone in that desert, in that time of great pain.

And maybe the reason why most of us never actually see God working in our lives in
those very moments we are experiencing our difficult times, in the actual moments when
we are in our own deserts, is because it would be too much for us to be witnesses to it—
it would be the same thing that Moses is being protected from when the glory of God
passes by him—it would consume us, overwhelm us, stop us in our tracks just in that
moment when we need to keep going on, keep on going, so we can get through that
personal desert we are in. Maybe that it’s as well—if we always were aware of the ways
God was continually present with us, we wouldn’t and couldn’t do the things that we
needed to do to get to our Promised Land—there are some things we humans must do
ourselves in order to get from point A to point B in our lives. Even the Israelites weren’t
going to be whisked away to Canaan and plopped down in the land of milk and honey—
they still had to get up and get going out of Egypt, like we all have to do in this life,
when we have to get out of those times of our personal captivities. I don’t know, I don’t
know for sure why most of us can’t see God’s glory and presence fully in our lives in the
actual moments when we wish we could see that presence, but I do think that there is a
reason for it somehow, a reason that is connected to our inability to actually fully
handle the ways that God moves in our lives, the ways God moves in our lives right
here and right now.

Still, was God trying to tell me something in that bag from McDonalds—again, I just
have to say that McLemore is not the most common name out there and you add the
K….hmmmmm. And yet, I don’t know, but I really doubt it, and I suspect if there is a
message there, it will be something figured out in the days and years ahead. And if
McDonalds stock goes through the roof, I will be especially angry that I didn’t note the
message!   And is God trying to tell me (or us) something through that hateful mailer we
received from some well-funded but hateful organization? I really doubt it, especially
considering that such a tone and meanness is simply not very Christ-like, nor very God-
like—it certainly does not speak of the goodness and glory of God. I actually think that
most of us spend our lives actually walking backwards, walking backward into the
future, because its only by looking backwards, by looking for a glimpse of God out of
the corner of our eyes, that we can do what we need to get through the rough times.
Moses knew that he and the people of Israel couldn’t go forward without the presence
of God, without God being by their side, and he begged God to be there, to not walk
away because of the people’s unfaithfulness. And God gave him what he needed, a
promise of that glimpse of God’s full presence, if only in a brief moment when God
walked out the room, after being beside Moses in all of the divine splendor. The best
we get in this life is a glimpse of God, out of the corner of our eye—it’s all we can really
take, actually—and what we’re asked to do is go forward, to go through that desert,
going forward, but at least looking backwards, looking over shoulders, if not walking
backwards, so that we can how God has been there, even in those times when it didn’t
seem as if God was even in the room, even in our lives. Even then, after sifting
through the wreckage of those times, we only get to see the back end of God, as God
moves out of the picture, so that we can at least see how God was present there, right
there, when we felt most alone in that desert. Now, I have to say, and forgive me for
saying it—and you can groan if you wish—that’s awfully cheeky of God…but I must
admit that it fits the way I have traced out the presence of God working in my life. We
can often see what God did in our lives, in the past, better than we can see what God is
actually doing, right now, right here, in our lives at this very moment. It’s not perfect,
but still, it’s good to see that God was in the room, has been there in our lives, in your
life and in my life, in every moment, good times and bad times. Amen.