First Friends Meeting
Exodus 3:1-15
‘Here I Am’

All of us have this experience now and then of being in a state park, a big museum, or a large shopping center. You need to consult a map to find where we are and how to get where you want to go. Near the entrance, you find a map prominently displayed. You go there and try to figure it all out. It’s a big schematic drawing of the whole place, as if you were looking at it from above – a God-eye view, you might say. Usually, there’s a bold mark on the map that says “You are here.” You need that. Until you know where you are on that map, the map is no help, it really means nothing. It’s all pretty theoretical. (Or if you think of the view from above as a God-eye view, you could say, it’s all pretty theological, in the negative sense. It’s pretty abstract until you can line it up with your own experience – where you are.) So you really need find that “You are here” marker.

Of course, often that place on the map has been kind of obliterated. Unless the map is under glass, the ink has worn away. Sometimes there’s even a hole in the map. Because thousands of people before you just had to put their finger on that place in the map. They couldn’t just look at it and say, “Oh, we’re here.” No, they just had to put their finger on it! Sometimes, the spot has been so obliterated by all those fingertips, that you can’t see any marker there at all. You just figure out, we must be there – why else would it be obliterated? From a Quaker perspective, putting your finger on the map is kind of like using bread and wine to experience communion with God. Go ahead and do it, if you must!

Well, Katie read for us the story of the calling of Moses. In a roundabout way, it reminded me of that experience with maps. Moses was living in the Sinai desert, tending the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro. He had grown up in Egypt. But he had to flee for his life after killing an Egyptian slave-master who was beating a Hebrew slave. So he was hiding out from Pharoah – he had lost himself in the desert, where Pharoah couldn’t find him. He married and became a shepherd. He had learned his way around the desert. He wasn’t really lost out there. I’ve been in the Sinai desert. It’s a beautiful place – if you know where you are. It’s a scary place if you don’t. You won’t last long out there if you get lost.

Well, Moses is going along just fine. He’s enjoying the pastoral life, away from the bright lights of Egypt. But one day, he sees this burning bush – burning, but not burning up. He decides to turn aside and check this out. God doesn’t call to Moses until Moses makes that decision. That’s the way our key experiences with God often work. Only when we turn aside from our own intentions, or from our own routine, do we begin to encounter God in a new way. And we turn aside sometimes because we notice something a bit strange, something we don’t understand, and we’re willing to take some time to explore it. Or we turn aside to help someone, and that encounter leads in new directions you would never have guessed at.

So God calls to him, “Moses, Moses.” And Moses answers, “Here I am.” Moses knows where he is. But he has no idea yet who he’s answering, what he’s speaking to. That’s another key ingredient of spiritual experience. To say, “Here I am” is to become present where we are. It is to become present to the Presence. Last week, we listened to Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” Moses replying “Here I am” is his way of coming into the stillness and encountering God in a whole new way. Abraham too sometimes answered God by saying “Here I am.” The prophet Isaiah answered God’s call, saying, “Here am I, send me!” When God called Mary to bear the Messiah into the world, she responded, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord!” In old medieval paintings of the conversation between Gabriel and Mary, sometimes there is a finger pointing down from heaven at Mary, as if to say, "that's the one," or "you are here."

Two weeks ago, Bonita reflected on these different calls, in relation to the calling of Jonah. I liked her comment that the big fish in Jonah is “a giant red herring.” If we get hung up on the big fish, we lose track of what the story is really about. God has bigger fish to fry with Jonah. Similarly, if we get hung up on the burning bush, we lose track of what Moses’ story is really about. Moses himself completely loses track of the burning bush. Moses didn’t say, yeah, OK, Egypt – but what about that bush? How did you do that?

“Here I am.” I’ve been thinking about that. We’re always somewhere. The 20^th-century philosopher Martin Heidigger spent decades trying to define being. He came up with a word for being: dazein – it means literally ‘being there’. He was getting at the way our being, human being, is always in some particular place, some certain circumstance. We are not pure being – what we are is partly defined by where we are. Heidigger also said that there’s a certain ‘thrown’ aspect to our being. It’s like we’re being thrown somewhere. I suppose it begins from birth – we’re thrown out of that womb. And we spend the rest of our lives figuring out ‘where am I?’ The ‘thrown’ aspect of our being is our being in time. Our being has a trajectory – we move through time and space. It’s always changing. Some of those changes are our own decisions. We decide to move in a particular direction, to a particular place. Other changes just seem to happen to us –we’re thrown into circumstances beyond our control.

The calling of Moses will throw him in a whole new direction – back to Egypt. This would not be Moses’ idea. It’s like that old song, “Indiana wants me, Lord, I can’t go back there.” But Moses is in the middle of this amazing encounter – anything seems possible. Now, God has just told Moses, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of your Hebrew ancestors. Moses knows he is a Hebrew, but he barely knows his own people. You will recall that he was thrown in with the Egyptians from infancy. Something about a basket in the bullrushes. And now this God has seen the misery of the Hebrew slaves. God has heard their cry and known their suffering. “And I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians…so come, I will send you to Pharaoh, to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” Wow! God has come down, like a giant finger, pointing at Moses on Mount Sinai (but not touching!!) – and saying OK, I want you to go back over there on the map.

God is throwing Moses back to Egypt. Well, God is calling Moses to go back to Egypt. Moses can say no – Moses must own this idea for himself, or he can’t really do God’s work in Egypt. But Moses needs some convincing. He responds, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Are you aware of that warrant they have out on me? I’m not just nobody – I’m somebody Pharaoh doesn’t like. God responds, “I will be with you.” Who you are is where I am sending you, what I am sending you to do. And I will be where you are. What you are doing is my will.

So Moses continues, Pharaoh aside, Egyptian armies aside, how am I going to convince the Israelites to follow me out of Egypt and into this desert? They will ask me, “This god of our ancestors, who hasn’t done a lot for us lately – what do you call this alleged god?” God replies, tell them, “I am who I am” – which might also be translated “I am what I am” or “I will be what I will be” or “I cause to be what is.” Now this might be taken to be the ancient Hebrew version of “Puddintame – ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.” Or “Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be.” In one sense, God has revealed nothing. In another sense, God has revealed everything. But you can only see that with the eyes of faith. Moses has already turned aside from tending Jethro’s flocks – for Moses, there’s no turning back.

And thus begins the story of Israel’s Exodus from slavery in Egypt. We hear it as an inspiring story because we read it from the standpoint of knowing how it turns out. But taken on its own terms, this calling of Moses is totally outrageous. It is the outrageousness of faith. It’s what happens when we say to God, “Here I am.” Another great “Here I am.” was from Martin Luther. He stood up against the Church establishment for reform, at the risk of his own life. He summed up his whole life at his great moment of truth: “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God.” He knew he was called, and he knew whom had called him. And by his steadfastness in standing there, he shook the foundations.

Or George Fox, who gave spiritual counsel to forlorn Seekers, people who had wandered this way and that, trying out this religion and that spiritual technique. George Fox said, “Stand still in the light, and let it teach you there.” Become present to God’s Presence in you. Be here now that’s the only place you will meet God.

Or Levi Coffin. We think of him from his years here north of Richmond, a key figure in the Underground Railroad, giving escaped slaves passage to freedom. But that all began in a chance encounter, when he was a teenager on his parents' farm in North Carolina, near Greensboro. He ran into an escaped slave hiding in the woods. Suddenly, he was 'on the spot' -- here I am, here you are, friend -- what shall we do, Lord?

“You are here.” And down through the centuries, the answer of faith is a simple, “Here I am.” God is the great “I am that I am” – everywhere and nowhere – all over this world, but even more, beyond all this. That’s who we’ve got ourselves mixed up with. God help us!