Sunday, July 30th: "Along the Way: Holy Ground"
First United Presbyterian Church
“Along the Way: Holy Ground”
Rev. Amy Morgan
July 30, 2023
Exodus 2:23-3:15
23 After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out. Their cry for help rose up to God from their slavery. 24 God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 25 God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.3 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 Mount Horeb,[a] the mountain of God. 2 There 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. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He 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.
7 Then 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, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He 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 serve God on this mountain.”
13 But 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?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”[b] He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” 15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord,[c] 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.
In 1978, the year I was born, the name Amy was the 4th most popular name for girls in the United States. I’ve never been in a class or church or other group of more than ten people my age and found myself to be the only Amy. In the second grade, I was in a class of 16 students with three other Amys. Whenever my name was called, a full quarter of the student body responded. Amy Edwards feels my pain.
But the thing I love about my name is what it means. Amy means “beloved” in French, and who doesn’t want their name, their very identity, to be “beloved”? It’s great for self-esteem. In that sense, I wish everyone could be named Amy.
Now, at first glance, it would seem like Moses, the Moses of the Bible, anyway, did not have the same challenge as the Amys of my generation. When talking about Saul, we have to distinguish between the Old Testament and New Testament characters. There’s Simon Peter and Simon the Zealot, James the son of Zebedee and James the brother of Jesus and James who wrote the book of James. Glad I wasn’t named James in the first century. But Moses seems to be unique. He’s the only Moses we hear about.
And in the Exodus narrative, the daughter of Pharoah explains that she gave Moses his name because she drew him out of the water. The Hebrew word moshe means “to draw out,” so this all seems perfectly reasonable. But the problem is, it’s highly unlikely that the Egyptian daughter of Pharoah spoke Hebrew. So scholars have proposed other possibilities for the meaning of this name, including that Moses is really an Egyptian name that comes from the words for “water” and “salvation,” implying both that Moses was saved from the water and would be a savior through the waters of the Red Sea.
But there may be an even simpler answer. Because the word “mose” in Egyptian, the word that sounds most like the name Moses of any of the proposed alternatives, just means “son.” This son of nobody turns up on Pharoah’s doorstep, and his daughter claims him, but in the most generic of terms. To name this child “son,” is like calling him “boy,” or “junior,” or “hey, you!”
Later Hebrew interpreters clearly didn’t dig on the idea that Moses’s name was so un-special. They couldn’t tolerate their mythic hero being named “guy.” They didn’t agree that the only thing that defined Moses at the time of his naming was that he’d been born. There had to be something more to it. So the explanation of Pharoah’s daughter, which makes the name Hebrew instead of Egyptian and foreshadows Moses’s saving work of drawing the people out through water, is added to the story as it is passed down through the generations.
But what if Moses really just means “son”? What if Moses isn’t so special? What if he’s just an ordinary person, trying to make his way in the world, messing up and running away, eking out a living doing a totally normal job that has no particular purpose other than making sure goats don’t get eaten by wild animals? I get why this idea might not have sat well with the Israelites of later generations when they committed their ancient tales to papyrus. But, to me, Moses being named “Sonny” kinda works.
And it works with the story. Moses isn’t doing anything special when he encounters God. He’s just doing his job. He almost misses the burning bush on the side of the road. He isn’t drawn to the holy or even seeking it. He stumbles upon it by accident.
And then, God calls his name: Moses, Moses. Maybe God called to the one who was drawn up from the water to save God’s people through the water. But maybe God was just calling, “hey you! Human!”
This more generic interpretation of the name Moses opens up the possibility that we don’t have to have a special name that means special things to be called by God. It helps us hear God’s call to all the children who don’t belong, who don’t feel special to anyone. It helps us trust that God might call even us, in our ordinary lives just doing our ordinary jobs. And it helps us trust that God can show up in our lives even when we’re not looking for the holy. We can stumble upon it by accident.
Now, when God calls to Moses, the words Moses answers with is one of my favorite Hebrew phrases. First, because of what it means. But second, because the way it sounds makes me giggle. The word translated as “Here I am,” is the Hebrew word “hinani.” And hinani turns up all over the Hebrew scriptures, from Genesis to the history books to the major and minor prophets. It can also be translated as “behold!” but it sort of always feels like this “ta-da!” pronouncement, like you’ve been playing hide-and-seek and “here I am!” And it’s very often a response to God, which I also find funny because, does God not know where these people are?
Anyway, so we’ve got this Hebrew word, hinani, which I am parsing for you, not because I am a serious Hebrew nerd, but because it is closely related to another important word that comes up in this text: the name of God.
This is where I nerd out about Hebrew, so hear me out. Moses is pretty sure no one is going to listen to a guy named “son” when he tries to deliver a message from the Almighty. So he asks, “who shall I say has sent me?” And the name God gives him is pronounced ehyeh a form of the Hebrew word heyeh, which looks incredibly similar to the word hinani. Heyeh is the Hebrew verb for being, but not in the existential sense. This was more than a declaration that God exists, somewhere, for real. This meant manifest existence, it meant showing up in the world. It’s the word used “in the beginning” of Genesis, when it says heyeh, “there was light.” It didn’t mean light existed. It meant light was manifest, it showed up. It said, “here I am.”
God’s first name, God’s very identity, is the God made manifest in the world. Not just the God who exists. The God who shows up, says, “here I am,” and proves it.
God is the God who sees, hears, notices, and knows the oppression of the Israelites in slavery. And God does not plan to sit around in heaven and not do anything about it. There’s all this up and down language in this passage: the cry of the Israelites “rose up” to God; God announces that God has “come down” to deliver them and “bring them up” to a land flowing with milk and honey. God isn’t absent in their suffering. God doesn’t just want the Israelites to know God exists. God wants them to know that God’s very name identifies this deity as the one who shows up in the world and sets things right.
The name that God reveals to Moses at the end of this passage is so holy that many Jews will refrain from pronouncing it. In English translations of the Hebrew scriptures, it is often translated as LORD, usually in capital letters. You may have heard this name pronounced Yahweh. And guess what? It has a very similar root to hinani and heyeh. The name of God, whether you pronounce it or not, reminds us that God is manifest, God is here, God is showing up in the world.
God shows up, for ordinary people, for Moseses. For all the beloved Amys, too. And for the Davids and Kathryns and Marks and Sarahs. God is the God who shows up for all the children who are suffering, whose cries rise up like smoke and seem to dissipate and get lost in the vastness of the universe. God shows up for those who have been waiting generations for deliverance and thought it would never come. God is the God who shows up.
But God is going do to this through a very ordinary person who answers God’s call by saying, hinani. God shows up for the Israelites through Moses, son of a Hebrew woman, son of Pharoah’s household, son of nobody, really. Son of God, really. Moses doesn’t have to be special or have a special name. He just needs to show up, to say, “here I am.”
And as we stumble along through our ordinary lives, God shows up in spectacles that we might just miss if we’re looking too hard at the ground under our feet and wondering if it’s holy or not. Or if we’re too busy fretting about the dangers lurking around us. Or if we’re too bored with our lives to catch a glimpse of fire out of the corner of our eye. We don’t have to be on the lookout for the divine presence. God will make God’s self known. God will show up and be made manifest. But we can still try awfully hard to not notice.
God is calling all of us, all of humanity. Because there are still people who are oppressed, whose cries rise up to God. God shows up for them by sending us to them to be the manifestation of God in the world. God invites us to show up in the world in all the divine glory and beauty for which we were created.
So no matter what your name is, our answer can be the same. Hinani, here we are. We may not know what God wants with us, where God is sending us or why. But if we begin by just showing up, God will make that enough.
To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.
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