To Be or Not to Be

Delivered September 2, 2012

Exodus 3:1-14; John 8:48-59

This is the last Sunday of August and I am still preaching on the Summer Sermon Suggestions that I have received from you. Someone asked me to speak on the famous words that God spoke to Moses at the burning bush: “I am who I am.” The scene is normally understood as Moses’ call to ministry. It is his own personal encounter with God on the side of Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. Moses had fled from Egypt decades earlier and made a life for himself in Midian. He had gotten married and had a son. He had settled down into the life of a shepherd. He was not looking for a change in his life. He was not even looking for God. But God was looking for him.

One day when Moses was minding his own business, tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro in the “backside of the wilderness,” (which is a great phrase) our text says, “² And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. ³ Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.” As he approached the burning bush, God spoke to him from the midst of it. A conversation ensued. God instructed Moses to return to Egypt to lead the Hebrew people out of bondage. Moses was not interested. His life was fine just the way it was. They argued back and forth for a while. Moses had several reasons why this was not a good idea and why he was not the right person for the job. One of his objections is that he did not even know God’s name. He couldn’t very well go to the Hebrews and say that their God had called him to lead them to the Promised Land if he could not even tell them God’s name. “And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” I want to explore this verse today under three headings.

I. The first is Who God is. Why did God use these words to identify himself? The OT was not lacking in names for God. There are many names for God in the Hebrew Scriptures. There were the basic names like El and Elohim. There was El Shaddai (God Almighty) and El Elyon (God Most high) and many others. God was known as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Yet here in this passage replies cryptically “I am Who I am.” What was God trying to say to Moses? I think that God was trying to say that he was beyond a name. The names of deities in the ancient world were treated like handles for God. If you knew a god’s name then you had a handle on him or her; you had certain amount of control over that god or goddess. You could invoke that god’s name, and he or she would be obligated to appear. Names were used like a magical incantations. Here the true God was not giving Moses a regular name and therefore not giving Moses any control over him. It was God’s way of saying to Moses, “You are not in control. I am in control. You want my name? Sorry, I am not giving you my name.” People have tried to take God’s words here and turn them into a name – Yahweh or Jehovah, but I think that approach misses the point.

What God’s answer to Moses means for us today is that God cannot be labeled. We love to label things, and we think that if we have a name for something then we know it. But do we really? I don’t think so. We can’t label God. The label will not stick. It is like those decals that garages put on your windshield to tell you when your next oil change is. I don’t know about yours, but mine won’t stick; they keep coming off. The same with our labels for God. Labels don’t stick to God. You can’t define God.

Muslims say there are 99 names for God. They think that they and only they know the real God Allah and others don’t. They think we Christians are idolaters and heretics. Jews think that they know God and that they alone are God’s chosen people and understand the Torah correctly. We Christians think the same thing, don’t we? That we know God and others don’t – at least not as well as we do - because we know the name of His Son: Jesus. We label God with a brand name, and we think that is all there is to it - we have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But do we? Maybe God is more than a Christian label. I have to be careful here when making this point. As Christians we believe that Jesus is the name of God’s only begotten Son. But that does not mean that we have a handle on God - the magic words, “in Jesus’ name, Amen” that gives us control of God or a monopoly on the knowledge of God.

Hindus have thousands of names for God and believe that they are all valid avenues to God. Are they? Then there are those tolerant, inclusive open-minded folks who say that all names for God in all religions are equally valid. All roads lead up the same mountain. Do they? Is that not just another way of labeling God? I think that when God spoke these words to Moses, God was saying that he cannot be labeled, he will not be labeled, even by his people, even by the greatest prophet of Israel Moses. God is beyond labels.

That means that God is beyond our understandings of God. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts,” says the book of the prophet Isaiah. This does not bode well for people like me who spend our lives trying to communicate thoughts about God to people. The Christian gospel is all about the good news, proclaiming truths about God. I spend my life saying things like “God is our Father and Jesus is his Son.’ Are those thoughts meaningless? No, they are not meaningless. I believe that they are true. But I also know that I can turn those ideas into idols. I can turn Christian theology into a cage in which I try to confine God in my system of doctrines about God. At the most our labels, names, ideas and words for God are no more than signs pointing to the Divine Reality who is above all names and beyond all labels – a God who cannot be conceived with our minds much less contained in our words.

When God says, “I am who I am” God is saying that he is beyond the confines and categories of existence. God is not an object that exists alongside of other objects in the universe, which can be proven or disproven with the scientific method. That is why the current debate about whether or not God exists is beside the point. God is. “I am who I am,” God says. That is what the New Atheists of this past decade with all their bestselling books, don’t get. God does not exist in that objective sense. God is more fundamental than existence. God is what makes existence of everything possible. God is the Ground from which existence springs. Christian philosopher Paul Tillich spoke about God as the Ground of Being or Being Itself. That is the best I can do about who God is.

II. My second point this morning is about who we are. That profound phrase “I am who I am” says something about us as well as about God. Only when we know who God is as the great “I am” can we know who we are. God did not speak these words into a vacuum. God spoke these words “I am who I am” to a person – to Moses. And it changed his life. And knowing God changes our lives. It changes our understanding of who we are. For one thing, it reminds us that we are more than our physical existence. In other words, we are more than our bodies. We all know that these physical bodies are temporary. We only this flesh and blood form for a few decades. What were we before we were our bodies? What are we after our bodies have returned to dust or ashes? The answer is found in the One who is I AM.

In the New Testament reading for today, Jesus got into an argument with the Pharisees. They ask him “Who do You make Yourself out to be?” He answered, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” Then the Jews said to Him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” Jesus was echoing the words from the burning bush. He was identifying himself with the God of Moses. This might not be so clear to us modern readers, but these Jewish teachers knew exactly what Jesus was saying, for it says in the next verse, “Then they took up stones to throw at Him.”  They saw his words about himself as blasphemous.

Jesus clearly understood himself and proclaimed himself as God – “I am who I am.” This comes across clearly in the Gospel of John in a whole series of  “I am” sayings. I am the Bread of Life; I am the Good Shepherd; I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. What about us? Who are we? Some spiritual teachers these days say that we are divine like Christ was divine – that we are by nature God and that we just have to wake up to that reality. But that is not the Christian or biblical understanding of human nature. We are not God in the way that Jesus was God; we are not divine. But through faith in God we can be united with God. Through faith in Christ we share in Christ’s eternal life. We are not God, but we are united with God through Christ. This is who we are. Who we are spiritually is much more than who we are physically. We are not our bodies. We are not our minds. Our minds are nothing more than the products of our brains, which are simply a part of our bodies which will pass away.

What we really are is spirit. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” We cannot even conceive of who we really are and who we will be once we have set aside this mortal frame. As the apostle John wrote: “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” Those words of Scripture are the closest I can come to communicate who we are as children of God united by faith in Jesus Christ, who is the I Am.

III. There is a third point I want to make this morning. My first point dealt with who God is. The second point dealt with who we are. The third point is that we are to live who we really are. We are to be in our lives who we really are in God. In his book "The Hero’s Journey” Joseph Campbell quotes an epitaph on an unmarked grave in a Kansas cemetery. It reads: “Be who you is, cuz if you be what you ain't, then you ain't what you is."  Dr. Suess said, “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”  That may also be the meaning of Shakespeare’s line, from which I have borrowed the title of this message: “To be or not to be.” I am not a Shakespeare scholar. In fact I admit I have a hard time undertstanding Shakespeare. I do not pretend to know the meaning of Hamlet’s soliloquy which starts off with these famous words. One thing for sure: it is about life and death, which he calls “The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn No Traveller returns.” 

It seems to me that for those of us who spend time thinking about our human condition, then life is a process of trying to become who we truly are. I believe that we find out who we truly are in relationship to Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ, who is the I am, connects us to God who is “I am who I am.” Union with Christ through faith connects us to God. We are caught up into his divine life. This is salvation. This is eternal life. This is the kingdom of God. This is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of the spiritual search and the spiritual life.

The Christian life is a faithful, courageous living out of that reality for as many years as God gives us. One of the earliest spiritual books I read when I about 19 years old was “The Courage To Be” by Christian philosopher Paul Tillich. It is the book I keep coming back to throughout my life. You know how you have some books that resonate with your soul and you read and reread throughout your life? This is one of those books for me. It has a depth that I have found in few other Christian works. It is not an easy read, but it speaks to my soul. His basic message is that the spiritual life is having the courage to be. For Tillich as a Christian philosopher that means to be in Christ, who is the incarnation of Being Itself. Christ was the embodiment of God’s words to Moses “I am who I am.” Christ was and is that Truth and lived that Truth. And when we live in Christ, we live in that same Reality. We live in this truth “I am who I am.” The Christian life is having the courage to be faithful to Christ in the face of death and anxiety and worry and doubt.  To have the courage to be. To be or not to be is the question and the answer is to be – in Christ.