to live without possessions. Jean Vanier had to learn from them how to live without the protections we think possessions provide. To learn so to live is to learn that death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. The worst thing that can happen to us is to never have challenged our presumption that it would be better that Jean Vanier’s friends should have never been born.
Iris Murdoch observes that the “notion that ‘it all somehow must make sense’” seems necessary to preserve us from despair. The difficulty, according to Murdoch, is how to entertain such a consoling notion in a way that does not hide from us the pointlessness of our living. She argues, therefore, that “as soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer’s mind.”42 I do not think that belief in God somehow makes “it all make sense.” I do believe that the life and work of Jean Vanier makes sense of believing in a God who alone is good.
5
Naming God
A Sermon for the Church of the Incarnation
Dallas, Texas
March 6, 2010
Exodus 3:1–15
Psalm 103:1–11
1 Corinthians 10:1–13
Luke 13:1–9
“God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt” is the hallmark sentence of Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology. This elegantly simple but dauntingly deep sentence took Jenson a lifetime of theological reflection to write. To write such a sentence requires that the grammar of our faith discipline our presumption that we know what we say when we say “God.” For it turns out that we are most likely to take God’s name in vain when we assume we can know what we say when we say “God.”
One of the ironies of the recent spate of books defending atheism is the confidence the “new atheists” seem to have in knowing which God it is they are sure does not exist. They seem to have forgotten that one of the crimes Romans associated with Christians, a crime that often meant their death, was that Christians were atheist. The Romans were tolerant. All they wanted was for the Christians to acknowledge there were many gods, but Christians were determined atheist. Christians were atheist because they assumed the primary problem was not atheism but idolatry. Idolatry, moreover, has everything to do with knowing how to use God’s name.
Augustine in The City of God even argues that the reason the Roman Empire has fallen on hard times is due to their worship of corrupt gods. He assumed rightly that there is a direct correlation between the worship of God, the character of our lives, and politics. According to Augustine, Rome fell because the people of Rome became corrupt by emulating the corruption of their gods. Needless to say, Augustine’s account of idolatry was not well received by the Romans.
So depending on which god or gods the new atheists think they are denying they might discover that Christians are not unsympathetic with their atheism. For example, I suspect we should not be surprised in a culture that puts on its money “In God We Trust” atheists might be led to think it is interesting and perhaps even useful to deny such a god exists. It does not seem to occur to atheists, however, that the vague god that some seem to confuse with trust in our money cannot be the same God who raised Jesus from the dead having before raised Israel from Egypt.
Which is a reminder that the word “god” can be very misleading particularly for those that worship the One who raised Jesus from the dead and Israel from Egypt. For the word “god,” and it is not clear that “god” is a name, can invite us to confuse the One who raised Jesus from the dead with the assumption by many that “god” is the designation many use to think something had to start it all and that must mean when all is said and done that there is “more” to life than this. Those who believe in such a “more” often agree with the new atheists that there is little evidence that such a “more” exists, but they nonetheless refuse to deny its possibility. Yet they assume that such a “more” has many names, for to think otherwise is to risk intolerance.
Our text for today makes clear, however, that naming God matters. God asks Moses to bring his people, the descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, out of captivity in Egypt. God, who seems to have been reading Jenson’s Systematic Theology, says that Moses should tell the Israelites that Moses has been sent to Israel by the God of their ancestors, that is, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But Moses, whose knowledge of Egypt means he senses that escaping from Egypt is going to be a risky business, knows that those who he is asked to rescue will want to know more. They will want to know God’s name. God responds with the now classical identifying phrase, “I am who I am.”
“I am who I am,” or as some have translated, “I will be present to whom I will be present,” has been a rich resource for Christian theologians and philosophers to reflect on the metaphysics of God’s existence. For example, Aquinas argues that only in God are existence and essence inseparable. Put in more colloquial terms that means only God can act without loss. For Christians it is, therefore, never a question about God’s existence, but rather what it means for all that is not God to exist.
“I am who I am,” may be a helpful metaphysical response, but it is not a name. At best, as philosophers like to say, “I am who I am” is a grammatical remark that suggests that God is known by what God does. “I am who I am,” therefore, is but another way to say you know all you need to know by knowing that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is as if God is saying to Moses “Tell them not to worry. Just as I have been there for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob so I will be there for you.” In effect God is saying “trust me.”
We, like the people of Israel, would like to think we get to name God. By naming God we think we can get the kind of God we need. We can make “the more” that must have started it all after our own image. But God refuses to let Israel or us assume that we can name the One who will raise Israel from Egypt. Only God can name God. That, moreover, is what God does. “God also said to Moses, Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.” God’s name is YHWH, but it is a name that Israel could not say.
The name it turns out is a holy reality sharing as it does in God’s holiness. To know God’s name is to know God. As Karl Barth observes, “‘I am that I am’ can scarcely mean anything else than just I am He whose name proper no one can repeat is significant enough; but the revealed name itself by its wording is to recall also and precisely the hiddenness of the reveled God.”
The burning bush that is not consumed wonderfully displays God’s unrelenting desire to have us know him, but to so know God requires the acknowledgment we cannot know God. Moses could not help but be drawn to the firry bush. How could the bush be on fire yet not consumed? He drew near, but the Lord called to Moses, named Moses, out of the burning bush telling him he was on holy ground. He was to remove his sandals and come no closer. Moses did as he was told hiding his face fearing to look on God.
For if God is God how could we hope to stand before God, how could we hope to see God face to face, and live? The burning bush was not consumed, but we cannot imagine that confronted by this God we could see God and live. Israel knew that there was no greater gift than to be given God’s name, but that gift was a frightening reality that threatened to consume her. Israel, who would be tempted by the idolatrous presumption she possessed God’s name, rightly never forgot she could not say God’s name. Israel could not possess God because God possess Israel.
But we are Christians. We believe we have been given God’s name. We believe we can say the name of God. Paul in his letter to the Philippians tells us:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form
of God,
did not regard equality of God
as something to