“Here I Am! Who Am I?”
Exodus 3:1-15
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
9/10/23
In the book of Exodus, Pharaoh is more than one particular Egyptian ruler. Like Jezebel, Herod, and Caesar, he’s a metaphor for every proud autocrat obsessed with himself and with power. When feeling personally and politically threatened, Pharaoh gives an order to kill all new-born, Hebrew males.
During this holocaust, Pharaoh’s daughter goes to the river to bathe. She finds a Hebrew baby boy in a basket floating in the reeds. In an act of grace that mirrors God’s adoption of the Hebrew people in the first place, she embraces this vulnerable baby and claims him as her own. Then she finds a Hebrew nursemaid who “just happens” to be the baby’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter doesn’t know about this relationship, but Moses’ mother, his sister, and we do. Working through three women, God’s subversive love works against Pharaoh to create a bond between the child and his true identity.
One can imagine that growing up in Pharaoh’s home, Moses feels increasing tension between who he appears to be and who he feels like. Eventually, he claims and commits himself to a particular identity. When witnessing an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, Moses picks up a brick and kills the Egyptian.
After that, the Egyptians want Moses dead, and the Hebrews want nothing to do with him. So, Moses flees to the Midianite wilderness, and there he rescues some women from some thugs who are trying to run the women away from a watering hole. This good deed lands Moses in the good graces of the women’s father, a landowner named Jethro. And the grateful Jethro offers one of his daughters to Moses as a wife. Married, familied, and employed, Moses’ life finally has purpose and stability.
Then, years later:
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”
4When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
And [Moses] said, “Here I am.”
5Then [God] said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
6[God] said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
11But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
12[God] said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
13But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
14God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’’’
15God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.” (NRSV)
In the conversation, God says, Moses, I have seen my people’s misery…I have heard their cries…I feel their sufferings…I will deliver them.
Then God says, Moses, You go to Egypt. You face Pharaoh. You deliver my people.
At first, Moses had said, “Here I am!” Now, overwhelmed, he asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”
Who am I? Whether that’s modesty or fear, I have to imagine Moses asking that question as one who has struggled all his life with identity and belonging. He was born a Hebrew slave, raised as a privileged Egyptian, escaped as a murderer. And now he’s living as an ordinary husband, father, son-in-law, and shepherd.
“Here I am!” Who am I?
It’s powerfully instructive that when Moses asks what he should say when the Hebrews ask who sent him, God says, Tell them, I AM WHO I AM sent you. While that may seem like an unsatisfying answer, as people of God, our understanding of the essential being of God—the is-ness of God—shapes who we are.
If we believe God is legalistic and vengeful, we will be legalistic and vengeful.
If we believe God is creative and loving, we will be creative and loving.
If we believe God is jealous and exclusive, we will be jealous and exclusive.
If we believe God advocates for the poor and the oppressed, we will advocate for the poor and the oppressed.
If we believe God requires violence and suffering to be “satisfied,” we will commit violence and inflict suffering trying to please God.
If we believe God redeems human suffering by entering it, we will enter the lives of those who suffer and help to bear their burdens.
As people of faith, our understanding of who God is has everything to do with our understanding of who we are. And God knows our essential being, as well. God knows who Moses is. God knows that Moses does not tolerate injustice, and he shows no hesitation in confronting it. God trusts Moses to act on behalf of those who are exploited. Without even having a term for it yet, Moses already sees and lives toward God’s “promised land.” And isn’t that the very nature of faith? Living into a future we cannot see, while trusting that God is already holding us within it?
“And this shall be the sign…that it is I who sent you,” says God, “when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
That declaration is as dangerous as it is hopeful. It’s dangerous because it can easily be twisted into the horrific, Machiavellian fallacy of ends justifying means. From the wider witness of scripture, we learn that means and ends are intimately intertwined. The journey is the gift, so, the means of the journey are essential to the outcome, even when it includes wandering the wilderness. To know God’s deliverance means to live each moment as if God’s promises were already fulfilled—even when fulfillment is so obviously incomplete.
For Christians, every Sunday is an Easter celebration. We declare that God creates new life out of death, new hope out of despair, a new future out of a past riddled with pain and bitterness. And every journey from death to resurrection involves some kind of Exodus which begins with a call to which we often say, Here I am, and then, Wait, who am I to do that? Saying Yes to God’s call means saying Yes to some kind of death on the way to new life.
Think again about Moses: To lead the Hebrews out of Egypt, it takes someone who is familiar with the house of Israel and the house of Pharaoh, and who is sufficiently distant from both.
It takes someone who has already journeyed through all manner of adversity.
It takes someone who’s had a transforming experience of God.
It takes someone who has died to his ego enough to say, I am going to need help. And it takes that kind of death to learn to trust a challenging call from I AM WHO I AM.
So, at God’s call, Moses dies a revitalizing death so that he, and his brother, Aaron, might lead a protracted, two-person protest march against the systemic evils of Pharaoh’s Egypt. And as is always—eventually—the case in human societies, when Pharaoh refuses to humble himself, to listen, and to do justice, his own people suffer the most.
One of the liturgical terms for the Lord’s Supper is The Feast of Victory; and the elements of this feast are symbols associated with Friday, the day of apparent defeat. The bread and the cup remind us that God is not satisfied by Jesus’ death. Only human-imaged idols demand revenge. Friday is what we give God to work with. And God, being I AM WHO I AM from beginning to end, redeems Friday. On Friday, the immutable energy of love and restorative justice we call God transforms Jesus into another bush that burns without being consumed.
On Sunday, God declares that a new deliverance has begun.
On Sunday God announces, and calls us to share, that Pharaoh-defying, Creation-transforming promise called Resurrection.
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