North Shore Congregational Church March 30, 2008

The Rev. Karl D. Schimpf Second Sunday of Easter

Old Testament Lesson: Exodus 3:11-14

New Testament Lesson: John 15:1-4

Go back in history with me to the desert of Midian where a man by the name of Moses is tending the sheep belonging to his father-in-law Jethro. It had been 40 years since he had discovered he was not the son of Pharaoh’s daughter but a Hebrew like all the slaves of Egypt. In deep anguish, his anger had prompted his earlier attempt to play deliverer of Israel by murdering an Egyptian taskmaster who was physically abusing a slave. Moses had chosen to take things into his own hands, had failed as a result of that as he fled into the desert. In that stark wilderness, he struggled over the anguish of his people and a god who seemed absent, uncaring, and actionless; and yet, it was in that hostile place that God was preparing Moses to be the deliverer of His people. God was hammering out a man whose only strength would be in God and whose only weapon would be an intimate knowledge and experience of God’s true nature. When Moses was ready and the right time had come, an empowering encounter with the Living God occurred as God spoke from the burning bush.

On that day, God told Moses that he knew of the suffering of God’s people and that Moses was to be the one to deliver them out of the bondage of Egypt as God’s messenger, the one who would lead them to the land of promise. God would be with him and his authority would come from the fact that he was sent by God. This frightened shepherd’s response was perhaps predictable: "Why will they listen to me? If I say to them that the God of their fathers has sent me and they ask, "What is his name? What shall I say to them?"

God’s reply is one of the most fascinating responses ever recorded: God said to Moses: "I am who I am-say this to the people of Israel: I am has sent me to you." That answer introduced Moses to a new God for his own struggles and for the struggles of his people, for in that answer God revealed his essential nature to Moses. In Hebrew, the name is YAHWEH and is based on the Hebrew infinite Hayah-"to be or to cause to happen." When "ya" is added it becomes 3^rd person singular in the masculine, future tense. Thus this new name meant: "He who will make things happen." He is the Lord of Creation, the Lord of our Destiny, the Lord of our circumstances, the Lord of victory in our struggles, the God of liberation and deliverance. No longer was God simple El Shaddai, the all-powerful God of the mountain, but Yahweh: the Lord, the I Am, who will make things happen in the valleys of human struggle.

Lloyd Ogilvie, in one of his books, makes a very interesting point when he writes: "Hundreds of years after Moses, in the 3^rd century B.C.E., when these Exodus passages were being translated into Greek for the Septuagint, the standard text for Jews scattered throughout the then known world, the very meaning ‘to be, to make happen,’ was translated into the present tense in Greek. This was a theological annotation which affirmed the translator’s experience of God. Yahweh becomes ‘ego eimi,’ I am the one who makes things happen now!"

But knowing that God can make things happen is of little help until we know him personally. That’s why Yahweh had to come into history and live among us. Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth," wrote John in the opening of his Gospel.

It’s important for us to realize what this means for you and me in our own struggles. It means that Jesus Christ is none other than Yahweh, the creative Word of God. Jesus is the glory of God, in all God’s excellence and majesty, in time and space, God with us in all our struggles. Twenty-two times in the Gospel of John, the author wants us to hear Jesus as he assumes divine authority over our sin, sickness, and sadness through bold self-disclosures we know as the "I am" saying of Jesus. The Greek words here are the same: "Ego eimi-Yahweh, the God who makes things happen is our Lord, Jesus Christ."

My, how we need to know that in our struggles! To endure in our day, we don’t need advice, admonitions, or guilt-producing accolades. What we need is power from an ultimately reliable source. But most of all we need to know that God who lived among us as Lord, the "I am" who revealed life as it is intended to be lived, who defeated the demons of despair which threaten daily to deplete us, and who vanquished death with all its power; what we need is to know that He is alive, here and now, with you and me in this very hour.

Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I am!" Long ago, the people were faced with two alternatives: they could believe in Him as the expected Messiah, or they could totally reject him and plot his demise. Either Jesus was who he said he was or he was a megalomaniac caught in a complex of assumed omnipotence and self-acclaim. Linger with me on this basic assertion of Jesus: before Abraham, before anything or anyone existed, I am! There is only one response we can make to that: "My Lord and my God." Then, all of our difficulties become stepping stones of opportunity. When He is our Lord, we can allow Him to come into our fears and say, "I am, have no fear!" Into our darkness, blindness, and need for direction, we can hear his assertion, "I am the light of the world." Into our hungry hearts, we can feel his presence and hear his words, "I am the bread of life, he who comes to me shall not hunger and he who believes in me shall never thirst." Jesus can come into any self-destructive patterns we have devised with divinely inspired new patterns of self-confidence. Into our anxieties he can come with the word of comfort, "I am the good shepherd." Into our lusts for life we can hear his words of assurance, "I have come that you may have life and have it in all its fullness." And into our worries he can come as we hear him say, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." He is the Christ who comes into our uncertainties and affirms that he is the way, and the truth, and the life. Best of all, he comes into our anguish over death and the loss of loved ones and sets us free with a liberating promise of hope: "I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die."

On this Sunday after Easter let’s allow Christ to cut through all the layers of distorted thinking that he might touch your heart and mind with the reality of his living presence. When that happens we no longer need to live with the illusion that we are able to handle life by ourselves and don’t need God’s help. When that happens we need no longer to see God as judge of our failures. Instead we can see God as the enabler who loves us in spite of what we have done.

I am convinced that following Easter Jesus demonstrated his great desire to penetrate our inclination to think of God in impersonal historic terms which models a sort of bland agnosticism about what God can and will do today. Instead, Jesus wants to know us as we are and have us love him as he is: present, powerful, promising ever new possibilities. He is the Lord who makes things happen, the one who desires more than anything for us to move out of the cycle of strain, stress, and struggle as we open the door and invite him to come into our lives as Savior and Lord.

We need a new God for these old struggles: not a God of human limitations and prejudices, not a God of negativism and reservation, and not an El Shaddai, powerful God who is basically unreachable. Easter says to us that we ought to enter into a relationship with Yahweh, who was the "I am" in Jesus Christ, who is with us now to do in us and with us what we thought was impossible.

The bush is still burning; do you see it? The voice of Yahweh is still calling us by name; do we hear him? He came in Christ for you and me, the triumphant "I Am;" to defeat anything which would keep us from being all that God means us to be. Death could not hold him or the grave defeat him. He’s alive, here with us now, calling to us by name, and inviting us to give our lives to him that we might share together the adventure of these days; a new God for old struggles.

Thanks be to God! Amen!