The View from the Cleft

Exodus 33.12-23, Luke 24.13-35

I have been preaching about mountain and valley experiences. There are two final sermons this week and next before “The Season of Creation” in which Jeanette and I will be focusing services around ecology for four weeks.  I am closing this series with two sermons about Moses on the mountain.  At the great points of the journey Moses returned to the mountain. Next Sunday we’ll explore the death of Moses at the top of Mt Nebo. Today we join Moses at the foot of Mt Sinai, the setting for a story about the mysteries of divine presence and glory. Earlier in the chapter God has ordered them to move on from Sinai. He said to them, I will give you the land, I will send an Angel before you, I will give you military victory, but I will not go with you!

“I am leaving you.”

These may be the harshest words in our language. They are harsh when they are spoken by a spouse or a lover. They are harsh when they just happen – in the death of somebody you love. They are devastating words that announce the withdrawal of a presence from our lives and signal an aftermath of loneliness and adjustment.

This is the painful mystery of relationship - a longing for presence and companionship, sometimes meeting a need to leave and find freedom.

The Lord spoke these words to his people by the holy mountain of Sinai. They had failed utterly in the making of the golden calf and God could see that this relationship was not going to work out: Go from this place and I will send my angel and fulfil my promise to you, but I will not go with you.  You are so stiff-necked that I will destroy you if we try to go any further together – I am leaving you!

And there follows one of the great stories of the Bible – the dialogue of Moses and Yahweh over the whole future of the people of God. As they talk together what stands at issue is whether God will be present with his people and what will be the mode of his presence. “I will give you the land, says the Lord. I will send my angel”, says the Lord. “I will give you my power. I will give you prosperity, but I will not give you myself”.

Does it matter whether God is present or not? The people had already shown what kind of presence they wanted. They had met a God who spoke and thundered and shook the earth, and they said “speak to us no more”. They had a God who communed with Moses away on the mountain far from their hearing and they grew impatient. They had fashioned for themselves gods of gold to lead them where they wanted to go. They wanted a presence but a mute presence, a domesticated, predictable divinity. Here in Yahweh’s speech to Moses they are offered what they really want: safe passage to the promised land, prosperity, victory, a future – all the things people usually want from God! They had the promise of progeny and prosperity and power- what need had they of presence?

Moses knows that there is only one thing that is needed: God’s presence, God’s self-disclosure. All the rest means nothing if God himself is not with his people and revealing himself to his people.  So Moses has the temerity to argue and to ask of God: show me your ways! Reveal your nature, your way of acting.  God answers: I will be with you Moses. That’s you in the singular – I will be with you as leader but not the rest of that mob. Moses pleads again: If your presence will not go with us, do not send us up from here. God grants this request also.

This is an important question for every person: do you really want God to be present in your life?  If God said, “I will give you success, fulfil all my promises, give you a home and an angel to care for you, but I won’t be with you?” would you accept the offer?

Many people settle for that, rather than the difficult, arduous, even dangerous business of walking with God. Whole congregations have made this bargain, sometimes the most religious ones!

Then Moses, perhaps deep in despair and needing reassurance, perhaps drawn by the mystery wit h which he was communing, perhaps aware of how fragile a sense of presence is, asks to be allowed into the arena of God’s being, into the heart of the mystery: “Show me your glory, I pray!”  Presence is one thing – a tent or a Temple or a pillar of cloud are all very well. Laws and tablets and rituals and Scriptures are fine things, but the human heart hungers for glory – for the unmediated, unavoidable, undeniable glory of God.

This is the great longing that lies in the heart of humankind: “Show me your glory”. It breathes through all our aesthetics – our love of beauty. It shines in our fascination with the stars, with astronomy, with all our looking to the heavens that declare the glory of God. It animates our love affair with nature - our restless questing into the heart of things through science, our gazing upon the vista of distant mountains, our travelling over the face of the earth as tourists and as pilgrims.

Moses asks the question that every person asks at some point in their lives, in their own way – show me your glory! Make it plain to me, dazzle me with the wonder of it all until my doubting questions disappear and all my fears are burned away.  And the answer comes to Moses, as it comes to us all, “You cannot look at God face to face, you cannot see the glory and live!”

This is one of the fundamental tensions of the human condition: a thirst for glory that cannot be met throughout life. And the irony is that we have collaborated in creating this situation. Like the Israelites, we sense that the divine presence is dangerous and we have withdrawn from God only to find that we live in a disenchanted world that shimmers with a far glory which can never be made plain, a world haunted by a silence that carries the faintest echo of a triumphant heavenly chorus.

Annie Dillard probes this absence, this silence in her story “Teaching a Stone to Talk”:

“The soul may ask God for anything and never fail. You may ask God for his presence, or for wisdom … or you may ask God just to go away. Once, in Israel, an extended family of nomads did just that. They heard God’s voice and found it too loud. …. They witnessed the thick darkness where God was, and saw the thunderings and lightnings and the noise of the trumpet and the mountain smoking. It scared them witless. And they asked Moses to beg God, please never speak to them directly again. …  It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and then change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from the lifeless things of earth and living things say very little to very few.”

This is our condition. We live in a world from which glory has faded among a people who say God is dead!

We, like Moses, yearn for glory but find our yearning met with silence. Yet this is not a silence that is totally empty.  God takes Moses as far into the mystery of God’s being as the limitations of humanity will allow. There is a cleft in the rock where God places him while the glory passes by. God covers him with his hand and shows him just the back of God. He even lists something of what that glory is. There is parade of goodness - all God’s goodness. There is that mysterious powerful name, I AM, which carries the meaning of being. There is the freedom to be gracious and merciful to whomsoever God chooses.  This is the stuff of glory: all goodness, fundamental being, unconstrained grace and mercy. Only the back of this mystery is seen by Moses, the traces, the hints of what it is like.

There are many people who long to see these things: goodness and being and mercy and grace People long for these things more than they know. In the living and glorious God these things are unpredictable and boundless and profoundly dangerous to us. We are given no reasons why this is so, but somewhere deep in my soul I know that, being the man that I am, if I were to see what goodness really is, my own sinfulness would burst into flame. Were I to experience what being truly involves my current existence would prove to be only a mirage. Were I to glimpse the grace that makes my life possible (let alone a world possible!) the judgements my own legalism would bring down upon myself would be total. Were I to plunge into the ocean of mercy in which we all unknowingly bob around, my own constructions of self would drag me down like a stone.

And so, God shields me from these things. We see now through a glass darkly, not because God is hiding, but because, like a child on the first hot day of summer, we burn easily. God is present with us in ways compatible with our present being, quietly transforming us, as Paul said, from one degree of glory to another! God is present, though not fully manifest. God speaks, but not through a megaphone.

In that little house in Emmaus something of the mystery of God’s presence was learned by those two disciples. At the moment they recognise him, Jesus left them. It followed fellowship and grappling with Scripture, and the pastoral encounter in which their disappointed hopes and regrets are listened to, and finally the blessing and breaking of bread. After all this, after all the things that Luke’s little church would ordinarily do, they recognise Jesus with them. And he vanishes. The paradox is that the one who vanishes they recognise as the one who said “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. God is present, though not fully manifest. In that encounter on the road they too were gazing from the cleft at the backside of God – the lingering trace of grace, remembered conversations and the glow of hearts that once had burned upon the road.

And what is the church but another cleft in the rock, a hard and narrow place in which glory can draw near without killing us. When you’re in it, so often there seems to be some mysterious hand of someone or other blocking your view. But there is a view – a view through that narrow cleft, however obstructed, of the great passing parade of goodness, and being and mercy and grace, just the trace, the memory of it, the afterglow of a heart on fire.

I have met some who have longed for the vision of glory – without it they will never believe. The traces are not enough for them. Their instincts are right but they are too ambitious. And I have met some who claim to know the wonder and grace of God in all its fullness – they have mistaken the trace for the reality!  All we can see is what we can see from the cleft, the view that comes from our wrestling with the glory that we may not see. And in that view we encounter the mystery of glory and the promise of presence, for we see just a trace of such wonder that every thing it touches is transformed and made new, and we hear a voice that says “I will never leave you nor forsake you. Lo, I am with you, always to the end of the age!”

Preached at Canberra Baptist Church, 9 & 10.30am 16th October 2005 - Jim Barr

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