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One thing that I have learned in my 20-some years of ministry is that every congregation is different. Just as every church building has its distinct feature or features, so every congregation has its own distinct personality. It shows itself in how the people relate to one another and newcomers and in what sort of ministry they do together.
Sometimes you can say that it is the personality of the minister that forms the distinct personality of a congregation. This is certainly the case in larger congregations and particularly if the minister has been there awhile. At my first church in West Virginia I followed a minister who had been there for 23 years. He had seen the congregation through three major floods in which his house got flooded too. Any given minister will go through one crisis like that once in a career. He did it three times in ten years. He was feeling old, tired, burned out, slightly depressed when he retired; the congregation mirrored that. In the five years that I was there, the personality of the congregation changed. The depression and fatigue lifted. They became known as the fun, fellowshipping church in town, and they started to grow and even continued to grow after I left.
Small congregations are a different matter. It is rare to be able to say that a particular minister has had any effect on a congregation that has been small for a long time. Ministers don’t tend to stay long enough in multi-point, small church charges to have an effect on a congregation’s distinct personality. In small congregations it’s typically lay leaders who give a congregation its distinct personality. These leaders are either the matriarch or patriarch of the church or at least have the blessing of the matriarch or patriarch. It’s these lay leaders who determine whether the distinct personality of a congregation will have a sense of humour, or be friendly and hospitable, or be generous, or active in the community, or studious about the Bible, or devoted to prayer. It can go the other way too. Lay leaders can make a congregation conflicted, cold, oppressing, lackadaisical, or even lazy or the dreaded one from the Book of Revelation – lukewarm.
It is amazing the effect that the personalities of ministers and key lay leaders have on the distinct personality of a congregation. This is why Jesus chose twelve leaders and discipled them intensively for three years rather than trying to get to know and form a personal friendship with everybody that followed him. He needed his distinct personality to rub off on and become part of the distinct personality of those who would lead his followers in his name after he returned to the Father.
Looking at our Exodus reading, the relationship between God and Moses is an interesting study in the formation of a distinct personality in groups of people. Of all the people of Israel, it is Moses only that God chose to bring into his presence and speak directly to and then through to the people. Very rarely would God speak to anybody else or to all the people. And though God is visibly present with the people, (you know, the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night) and they know God is with them, it’s Moses whom God deals directly with. This passage we look at today is actually God’s fullest self-revelation to anybody in the Old Testament and it is Moses who hears and sees this. Therefore, we are correct to assume that Moses will be the Israelite leader who will bear the brunt of the responsibility of resembling the distinct personality of God to the people of Israel so that it will shine forth in their distinct personality as a people. The question we might want to ask is whether Moses was able more to reflect God’s distinct personality or his own or was it a mixture of both?
This passage picks up after the Golden Calf incident where the people of Israel made an idol to be an image of God that looked like a golden calf and then worshipped it in a very unbecoming Pagan fertility cult kind of way. Both God and Moses were incensed about it. At first God wanted to destroy the people and start over at making a people with Moses like God did with Abraham. But in response to God’s desire to be wrathful, Moses actually acts more like God than God himself was acting. Moses talked God out of destroying his people by basically saying, “What would the Egyptians say about you if you simply delivered your people from them only to destroy them in the dessert? What kind of a God would you look like in the eyes of the nations?” With his ego sufficiently adjusted, God changed his mind about destroying the Israelites, but God is still very upset. God then decided that he would just not accompany his people into the Promised Land for fear of getting so angry with them that he really would just go ahead and destroy them. God said he would send an angel to go before them. Moses in turn reminded God that the people were God’s people, not his, and convinced God that he still needed to go with his people because it was God’s presence with them that made them distinct among the nations. God’s presence among his people is what should form their distinct personality – not Moses’s personality, not an angel.
This conversation between Moses and God healed the rift between God and his people and it was like a spiritual mountaintop experience for Moses. And as I said, Moses acted more according to the nature of God than God was acting. At the apex of the conversation Moses asked God to show him God’s glory and God was glad to do it. God passed before Moses showing all him his goodness all the while proclaiming the name “Yahweh” which means “I am who I am, I will be who I will be” and adding “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy to who whom I will show mercy.” As he passed in front of Moses, God protected Moses with his hand and kept him from seeing his face as he passed by, but let him see his back (and we have to appreciate the Hebrew humour here of God showing Moses not his face but his backside).
Well, grace and mercy are two words that deserve a moment of thought. In my opinion, they are no longer good English words for translating the Hebrew here. They are theologically loaded words that have come to mean something to our ears that is not in text. We tend to hear the words “grace” and “mercy” with ears tempered by a theological tradition that focuses on human sinfulness as a first thought when thinking about God, if that makes sense. For centuries the Western church has taught we are sinful worms that deserve to die and go to hell and that God is holy, which we define as morally upright and pure, and because God is holy we believe he is thoroughly disgusted with us and our sinful deeds and is therefore going to get us. Because our theological tradition is predisposed to think of God primarily through the eyes of humanity’s sinfulness we tend to believe that grace and mercy are defined as God’s response to our sinfulness rather than qualities of his personality. We say if we believe in Jesus God will be gracious to us – show us unmerited favour – and show us mercy – God will acquit us of our sins.
Well, that sinful worm, courtroom acquittal stuff isn’t what is at play here in the Hebrew language. It is certainly in the theological bias of the translators, but it’s not in the Hebrew. The Hebrew word here for “to show grace” carries the meaning of being moved compassionately by the need of a person and acting to meet it. “To show mercy” in the Hebrew means to show compassion to someone for whom you feel a deep, tender bond of love, like parents and children. We should rather translate this verse of God’s self revelation as “I am who I am and I will be who I will be and I will act with compassion for whomever I feel compassion and I will form a bond of deep tender love for whomever I feel a bond of deep tender love. That sounds a lot different from “I am a sinful worm deserving death but God acts towards me with unmerited favour and acquits me.”
But anyway, I don’t won’t to ride that horse for too long here. What I really want you to get is that in God’s self-revelation here to Moses, Moses got caught up in a sense that God is as God is and God does as God does and what God is and does is that God responds compassionately to us in our deepest needs because God feels a bond of deep, tender love for us. This incomprehensibly deep love is God’s distinct trait of personality. It is this distinct trait that Moses is to model to the people and especially to the leaders of the people. Moreover, it is this distinct trait that God’s people are to pick up by osmosis simply God being present among them. As I said, Jesus formed this distinct personality, his distinct personality, among the twelve disciples by focusing intensively on his relationship with them. Moreover, after Jesus ascended, the Father poured the Holy Spirit upon his people so that everyone could taste of the deep bond of tender love that is his distinct personality and can spend intensive time with Jesus especially when we are together.
It is a good exercise for a congregation and its leadership to spend some time asking what is the distinct personality of this congregation and what is the role that I play in forming that? Is it the compassion and bond of deep tender love that is God or is it something else? Is compassion and the bond of deep tender love the distinct personality that people sense when we pass by as we as individuals go about our daily lives and as we as congregations interact with our respective communities. We would think that all we need do is put our own personalities aside and let God’s shine through, but it’s not that easy. It takes prayer, personal devotion, and speaking the truth to one another in love. It takes us as congregations committing to be compassionate with one another even with our warts and wrinkles. It takes us committing to strive together to foster a bond of deep tender love in our midst. I guess the word for all this is maturity, maturity in Christ. Growing to the full stature of the presence of Christ Jesus who is in our midst in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
Winding down, in these last few months if anything, COVID has given us a break from the habits of church as we’ve always done it. Even when we are able to gather for worship the physical distancing protocols in a way blatantly make the point of how important fellowship, how important relationship is in who we are as congregations. We aren’t here simply for personal spiritual edification or because it’s our duty to worship God. We are here because God has planted a seed of himself among us, a seed of a bond of deep tender love which beckons us and so we come to partake of God’s deep tender love. So, let us strive to nurture and be nurtured by God’s distinct personality and may it grow and become even more so the distinct personality of who we are. Amen.
