Prayer of Opening We long, Holy One, to see your glory: to see beneath the material into the fathomless depths of Mystery; to see within the created, the Source of Creativity; to see, within acts of love, the Lover; to see, in compassionate acts, the Heart of Reality; to see into all perspectives with the eyes of the Witness. Radiant One, Holy Oneness, our eyes open. Amen
Let’s take a walk through the reading.
33:12 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.'
33:13 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."
This is Moses’ opening gambit. He’s saying, “Ok, you’ve asked me to “bring up” these people, and you claim that I’ve “found favour” with you. But he asks to know God’s ways. In other words, what kind of a God are you? How will he know what God’s distinctive presence is like, and therefore when God is with them? Show me your ways. What’s this going to look like, when the people ask me, “Where’s God?”
33:14 He said, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest."
Here God responds that Moses doesn’t have to worry. God’s very “presence” will go with him. In fact, Moses can “rest” in this presence, lean into it, trust it.
33:15 And Moses said to him, "If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here.
33:16 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."
In other words, umm.., your presence had “better go”. Otherwise this is a non-starter. But this isn’t good enough for Moses, and it’s not good enough for most of us. If we’re going to respond to God’s call, we want to know in more precise terms, how that divine presence actually is apparent. How will we know that we’re being “carried” by God? Notice the words that are used to convey how God’s presence is known. God’s presence gives us “rest”. We are “carried”. Both God and Moses know that Moses can’t do this on his own, and neither can we. If we try to do respond to the call trusting in the power of the ego to realize the vision, we’re sunk. Moses presses God to be a little more concrete. What are the actual signs that God is with him, and that’s he’s not carrying the load alone? How is the divine character made known in such a way that you can recognize it as such, and rest in the assurance that God is with you?
33:17 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."
33:18 Moses said, "Show me your glory, I pray."
Moses moves in to close the deal. He’s direct with his final condition. “Show me your glory”, I pray. “Glory” is another word for divine presence. It is the light of divine presence shining upon the world in an unmistakable way.
33:19 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.
33:20 But," he said, "you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live."
This is where it gets interesting. In effect, God responds by telling Moses that the way he will know that God’s glory is with him is to be on the look out for goodness, graciousness, and mercy (or compassion). This may be an early tribal attempt to make sense of the question, “If God is real, why can’t you see God?” The ancient answer to the question is that if we actually saw the face of God we’d die. So God remains invisible for our sake.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t see God’s invisible glory in visible acts. God tells Moses that he can see God’s glory in acts of goodness, mercy (or compassion), and graciousness. It reminds us of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats. A King thanks his people saying, I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was naked and you clothed me; I was in prison and you visited me. The servants are puzzled because their King had never literally been in these conditions. The King says, “whatever you’ve done for the most vulnerable of my brothers and sisters, you did for me” (Matthew 25:21-36).
Goodness, compassion and graciousness are expressions of the glory of God, the invisible One made radiantly present in these acts of love. So, when you good people make food for our friends in the downtown Eastside, serve them a meal, and take the time to be in conversation with them, you were in service to the One who is known in acts of love.
33:21 And the LORD continued, "See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock;
33:22 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;
33:23 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen."
This pretty much describes the practice that the King teaches his servants in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. It is the practice of carefully noticing one’s life experience with a view to seeing how God may have been indirectly present. In our Connection Circles we begin each circle asking people to reflect back over the week for times when they felt connected to Spirit. In terms of this morning’s reading, the question might be, “When did you experience God’s glory, the divine goodness and compassion brush up against you?” The story of God putting Moses in the cleft of a rock, so that he is spared seeing God’s face directly, but allowed to see God’s back—after the fact—is a delightful way of depicting this practice of witnessing our lives. We detect God’s glory in the simplest of acts, but often times it’s a retrospective exercise. We may even look back over the full course of our life, and detect a mysterious pattern that has brought us through the wilderness of life, and into the promised land of abundant life. In this way we see the “back” of God, after the fact, but still unmistakable in its glory. We see the invisible One made visible.
Up until this point, we have been imagining God through the lens of the pre-modern writer of Exodus—as a Being out there who does things for us. This is a legitimate way of imagining God. But there may also come a point in one’s spiritual evolution, as it did for St. Paul and other mystics, that we come to see our own lives as manifestations of God’s glory. If the universe emerged out of God’s womb, it implies that a purpose of the evolutionary process, is for us to mature in assuming responsibility for our divine origins and nature. We are growing as “godlings”.
We all “come from the glory”, and are God’s glory made manifest in human form. We may choose to become expressions of goodness, compassion, and grace. At the core of St. Paul’s writings in the New Testament is that he had found the secret of actually being God’s glory. The same mind and heart that was in Jesus was now lighting him up. He believed that this was the destiny of the church as well. He no longer had to try to be good, compassionate, and gracious. The love of God, known in Jesus, was now in him. And in this new age that had been inaugurated by Jesus’ death and resurrection, it was available to all. The church was to be the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace—God’s glory. We are to be God’s sacraments.
This understandably frightens some of us. We’d prefer rather to just keeping on trying to be good, and when we get it wrong, ask forgiveness and carry on. After all, we’re only human. This is pretty much how we’ve done Christianity for the past 2000 years. But after studying Paul in some depth recently[1], this is precisely the arrangement that was over in his mind. There was the life “in the flesh” and life of the Spirit, and life in Spirit was a life transformed by Love. Life “in the flesh” simply meant a self that we construct from the illusion of separation, an identification of our self with flesh and blood, and the cultural definitions of self that don’t take into account the realm of Spirit.
To say, we’re only human, is to underestimate the cosmic achievement of personhood. We are the part of the universe that is able to honour flesh and blood, to honour the realm of the material, and at the same liberate Spirit, or the glory of God, from bondage to, and identification with, the material. We can, through conscious consent, become a habitat in which the presence of God, hidden in the heart of the material realm, becomes manifest. This is an astonishing development that has taken nearly 14 billion years to accomplish. When Spirit is released in us, the glory of God shines out as our lives are reoriented in Spirit.
And now on Earth, Spirit is surging forth in another elect or holy tribe. Remember, to be a holy people, simply means to be set aside to do God’s work. It confers a distinctive identity, not for privilege, but for service. These are the ones who are letting Love have its way with them in an absolute fashion. They are falling in love with Love. This resurgence of Spirit is not connected to any religious lineage, although it is available to all lineages. This new tribe consists of economists, architects, engineers, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, farmers, accountants, business owners, artists, students, and even the odd politician, who are focused on reorienting the human species to love.
I believe that Occupy Wall Street is one expression of the yearning for the emergence of a new humanity and a thriving Earth community. Doug Saunders writes in his column yesterday that all the political leaders of the world are looking for approximately a trillion dollars to solve our economic crisis. That’s an unimaginable amount of money. But he points out that we have it. It’s in the tax free, offshore accounts of the very wealthy. There is over $9-trillion stashed in these accounts. Tax this money at a modest 11% (a fraction of the tax that is actually owed on it) and you have your trillion. The U.S. Congress revealed this past week that there are 94,000 people with earnings over $1-million a year who pay lower taxes than their secretaries. [2] This is no way to run an Earth community.
This holy tribe understands that Love is not merely a feeling. It is expressed as well in the economic and political systems we construct. These systems are the way love shows up as justice. To return to my point, the holy or distinct tribe (and that includes us) are realizing that the glory of God is not other than them. Some people hold on to the belief that only Jesus was love incarnate. If Jesus was here, he might consent to be thought of as love incarnate. But he wouldn’t let us off the hook. He would look back at us and say “alright, I’ll be love incarnate on the condition that you be that too.”
Let’s accompany one another through the wilderness of these somewhat tumultuous days on Earth, as the very presence of Spirit, encouraging, supporting, and nurturing each other as we collectively give birth to the new thing Spirit is doing. Let’s see one another as we come to the table as the presence of divine glory—as goodness, compassion, and grace—coming to the table to be nourished for this sacred vocation of giving birth to a blessed future.
