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Last week I was sitting at my desk working away when my cellphone rang. It was a local number so I figured I’d better answer. The voice on the other end said, “What do you want?” I said, “Excuse me.” He said, “I just had a call on my phone from your number.” I said, “I haven’t called anybody this morning.” He said, “You had to of.” I said, “But I didn’t. Who is this?” He said, “Matthew.” I said, “I don’t know a Matthew.” Then I gave him a jumbled up version of my cell number and asked him if that was the number he called. He took a few moments and then said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, I didn’t call you. That’s weird.” Matthew said, “Yeah, it is.” I said, “Well, you have a good one.” Matthew said, “Yeah, you too.” The call ended.
It is strange when somebody calls you out of the blue like that. In these days of identity theft we need to be really careful how much information we give to anybody particularly over the phone. We live in an Age of Suspicion I would call it. For all I knew, Matthew could have been a scammer trying to phish information out of me. Yet, I find it interesting that he gave me his name. In the world of conversation dynamics, that put the ball in my court. Getting his name now meant that I knew more about him than he knew about me. It put me in control. In fact, if you want to get under the skin of a telemarketer, start asking for personal information. If he gets grumpy, just explain you need to know information about him to help you decide whether you can trust him enough to buy something from him over the phone. When you get people to give you personal information, you start gaining control over them. Some people might call it familiarity or gaining trust, but it’s still control. That’s why you never give personal information to someone you don’t know over the phone, especially your name and never use the words “yes” or “okay”, anything that would indicate you’re giving permission for something.
Well, looking here at the conversation that Moses and God had and pretend it's like one of those out-of-the-blue phone calls like what I described a moment ago. In essence God cold-called Moses by means of a bush that was on fire but wasn’t being consumed and Moses couldn’t resist answering, so to speak. Moses turned aside and went to see what this spectacle was. When he drew near, a voice called him by name, “Moses. Moses.” The caller already knew who he was – not good. Moses responds, “Here I am, Lord. It is I Lord. I have heard you calling from the bush.” God says, “Stop right there. Take off your shoes. You’re on holy ground.” Then, God tells him what company he’s working for, so to speak. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (I’ve always wondered why Joseph wasn’t on that list.) Moses is face down on the ground in fear now. I had a recorded message phone call the other day saying someone had suspiciously used my credit card at 5:00 that morning. I didn’t call them back at that number. I checked my account online. Scary. So also, God had sufficiently freaked out Moses.
Well, God is pretty straightforward with telling Moses what he wanted him to do: Go to Egypt and tell ole Pharaoh “Let my people go.” Notice how Moses initial response to God of willingness to serve, “Here I am” changes to self-doubt, “who am I that you would send me?” Well, Moses was a Hebrew boy who had miraculously escaped Pharaoh’s command to kill all Hebrew boys. In a strange turn of events he wound up being adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in Pharaoh’s house as an Egyptian prince. At present, he was on the lam because he had killed two Egyptian taskmasters who were beating his fellow Hebrews. Moses didn’t want to go back and face Pharaoh, who was likely his adopted uncle. When Moses questions God saying “Who am I”, I don’t think he’s trying to say, “I’m not worthy.” I very well may be that Moses is saying, “I’m not your guy. Going back there is a death sentence.”
God tried to calm Moses’s doubts and fears by promising to be with him. But apparently, God having his back wasn’t assurance enough. So, Moses starts to phish God for some of God’s personal information. He creates the scenario that when he goes back to his people to tell them the God of their ancestors has heard their cries and was now going to deliver them out of Egypt they will ask him for the name of this God. After all, the Egyptian gods had names. Why shouldn’t the God of their ancestors? In a world of many gods which one was their God?
The professor of my Old Testament I class in seminary gave us a good explanation as to what was going on in this conversation. He seemed to think that Moses was just trying to cook up a story to get God to tell him God’s name. Back then they believed that if you could get a god or a spirit to reveal its name, then by having their name you gained the power to invoke their power on your own behalf. It seems it wasn’t enough that God promised to go with Moses. Moses also wanted to be able to invoke God’s power on his own behalf.
I want you to keep something in mind here. God was acting totally out of character for a god. Gods did not just up and decide to do good for humans what God was promising to do for his people. Gods didn’t just typically up and decide to be compassionate or promise to be with you. Gods kept their distance and did what they wanted and couldn’t readily be relied upon. Humans were at the whims of the gods. The idea of a god being steadfastly loving and faithful to human beings was preposterous in the least. No wonder Moses would try to get God’s name. He needed it, he believed, to get this uncharacteristic God to keep his word.
God totally outsmarted Moses and answered him in an absolutely brilliant way. God gave him the name “I am who I am. You tell them ‘I am sent me to you.’” God said his name was “I am who I am”. In Hebrew that’s just one word, the first person form of the verb “to be”. It’s pronounced “Yahweh”. In most translations wherever you see the word LORD with all capital letters, that’s how they translate “Yahweh”. They don’t write the name out of respect for the branches of the Jewish faith who believe the name should not be pronounced.
(Also, just for the sake of your knowing it. In John’s Gospel there are several places where Jesus makes “I am” statements. “I am the Way, Truth, and the Life.” “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” “I am the Bread of Life.” Jesus was very much calling himself God by doing that. Just thought you would like to know.)
As God’s wiliness demonstrates, God does not play the name game and will not be controlled by ritualistic magic. God does not want to be known by name. Rather, it is more accurate that God wants to be known by his actions. God is as he does. Yet, as names often have deeper meanings implied, the name God gives here “I am who I am” does say something about him: God is free to be and do as God pleases. Actually, what God chooses to be for his people is remarkably revealed in Moses’s name. The name “Moses” means “to draw out and save”. It was Pharaoh’s daughter who named him that because she drew him out of the Nile and saved him. Thusly, by means of Moses God will draw his people out of Egypt and save them from slavery. God then also told Moses that he would know who God is when the day comes that Moses and God’s people worship God on that very mountain where they were having this conversation. When that day finally did come, God introduced himself to his people by saying what he did for them, “I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
God is known by his actions, by what he does. Walter Brueggemann is probably the foremost Old Testament scholar of the last 50 years. In his great big book on Old Testament theology he makes the point of saying that when the Israelite people talked about God they didn’t start with nouns and adjectives like God is love or God is all-knowing. They started with verbs – the action words. God creates. God saves. Our passage this morning, this conversation between God and Moses, is a wonderful bit of ancient Israelite theology about who God is. There are a lot of verbs. God sees the misery of his people. God hears their cries. God knows their sufferings. God comes down to deliver them, to set them free. God leads his people out to safety. God sends people to lead. God is with his people. The most wonderful bit of God’s self-revelation in this passage isn’t so much that God gave himself a name, Yahweh – I am who I am. It’s all the things he says he will do for his people. We know God by what he does for us.
So also we can say these same things about who God is for us, his people today. Our God sees the realities of our lives. God hears our crying out to him. God knows how we feel. God gets up off his duff and comes to be with us in order to do something about setting us free to live the fullness of life that God has promised us. We don’t need to do things like bargain with God to get him to help us. Come what may he is already with us. He knows, he feels what we’re going through. He sees. He hears our cries our prayers. These verbs paint a picture of God as being very compassionate and hands on. God is for us. No matter what we do or don’t do, God never stops being who he is towards us. God is as he does – He sees our hurts, hears our cries, and feels what we feel. He gets up and comes to be with us. He sets us free of what oppresses us. He leads us to the green pastures and still waters. God is as he does – just a little something for us to keep in mind. Amen.
