Exodus 3: 1-15
3 1-2 Moses was shepherding the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. He led the flock to the west end of the wilderness and came to the mountain of God, Horeb. The angel of God appeared to him in flames of fire blazing out of the middle of a bush. He looked. The bush was blazing away but it didn’t burn up.
3 Moses said, “What’s going on here? I can’t believe this! Amazing! Why doesn’t the bush burn up?”
4 God saw that he had stopped to look. God called to him from out of the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
He said, “Yes? I’m right here!”
5 God said, “Don’t come any closer. Remove your sandals from your feet. You’re standing on holy ground.”
6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father: The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”
Moses hid his face, afraid to look at God.
7-8 God said, “I’ve taken a good, long look at the affliction of my people in Egypt. I’ve heard their cries for deliverance from their slave masters; I know all about their pain. And now I have come down to help them, pry them loose from the grip of Egypt, get them out of that country and bring them to a good land with wide-open spaces, a land lush with milk and honey, the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite.
9-10 “The Israelite cry for help has come to me, and I’ve seen for myself how cruelly they’re being treated by the Egyptians. It’s time for you to go back: I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the People of Israel, out of Egypt.”
11 Moses answered God, “But why me? What makes you think that I could ever go to Pharaoh and lead the children of Israel out of Egypt?”
12 “I’ll be with you,” God said. “And this will be the proof that I am the one who sent you: When you have brought my people out of Egypt, you will worship God right here at this very mountain.”
13 Then Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the People of Israel and I tell them, ‘The God of your fathers sent me to you’; and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What do I tell them?”
14 God said to Moses, “I-AM-WHO-I-AM. Tell the People of Israel, ‘I-AM sent me to you.’”
15 God continued with Moses: “This is what you’re to say to the Israelites: ‘God, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob sent me to you.’ This has always been my name, and this is how I always will be known.
Moses is out just doing his job like every day, minding his own business of tending sheep. He did not live in Egypt at the time, though he grew up there with the family of Moses after being rescued from a basket floating on the Nile. Moses is out tending his sheep on a mountain, called Horeb, which is believed to be today’s Mount Sinai.
He comes a bush that is burning, and God calls out to him to come over, but not too close. Moses is frightened and in awe. He has never seen such a sight and never heard from God before. He is very afraid. Can you imagine?
God tells him that the Israelites have suffered greatly, and it is time for Pharoah to “Let my people go”. It is Moses job, an Israelite by birth, but part of Pharoah’s family by adoption, to deliver the message.
Moses asks “Why me?” and God says that God will be with him, and the proof that it is God speaking, is that eventually Moses will worship with the people on this same mountain again when it’s all over.
If I was Moses, I think I would want more reassurance about God picking me, beyond God’s assurance that God is with me! Moses must have had great faith!
Next Moses asks God to tell him what to say to the Israelites about who sent him. What is God’s name?
God replies, “I Am”.
When I meet someone new, and they ask who I am, I say, I’m Kathy. I am Kathy. I’m sure you do the same, right? And when you define yourself, you say things like I am a mother, father, woman, man, minister, educator, banker, hard worker, friendly person, Protestant, etc etc. When I define myself as Reverend Kathy Johnson, I am saying that I am not you. I am saying that I am an individual, and I am separate from the rest of the world. I am within this skin, and not beyond my skin. My life is the one that began December 1, 1956 and has continued until now, and does not include other events. I am alone, I am separate, and when I die, the life of Kathy Johnson ends.
God says, I Am.
By this short statement, God is also not limiting God. God is all names. Think about all the names you know for God: God, I Am, Lord, Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah. And there are many others, like Creator, Father, All That Is. And outside the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God is called Goddess, Spirit, Grandfather, Shiva, and many, many other names.
I am who I am. I am. So there is no, “I am not…” if there is no I am not, then God has declared that God is all that there is.
I have a friend, Winnie, who taught me a meditation to bring me to God. I have used it many times when I have felt unbalanced, and unable to really feel God. So we are going to try this.
First, get comfortable in your chair or pew. Take a deep breath in, hold it for a few seconds, and let it go. This time take in a deep breath, breathing in the light and love of God into your heart, and let it go. One more time, Long inhale, hold in your heart, long exhale. Open your eyes.
You look at an object. Let’s pick out the cross behind the altar. You gaze at that, and say, “I am that”. Not God is that, because that separates you from God. You are never separate from God, because God is All. Ok, again, look there and say in your mind, “I am that”. Now pick the Hymnal in your pew. Say, “I am that”. The stained window. I am that. The beams overhead. I am that. The candles up front. I am that. The projection screen. I am that. Your shoe. I am that. Look at someone in the congregation. I am that. Look at your hand. I am that.
What is God’s name? I am. Because God is everything, and God is everywhere. Because you cannot say God is not anything. God is. And God can be found everywhere, including in you.
Let’s see if we can find ourselves to not be separate from God, using science. We just looked at your hand, which I have described before as God’s tools, our hands are God’s hands, and how God works in the physical world. Science tells us that our skin is made up of cells. If we had a microscope here in the sanctuary and rubbed some of our skin’s cells on a piece of glass, we could look through the microscope and see one individual cell of skin from our body. In that cell is all sorts of things that define what kind of cell it is, that make it function properly. One of the items that is in a cell of skin would be water. Our bodies are mostly water, did you know that?
I wish I knew how to look closer, but at this point, I have to trust in science. Science says that water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. They are the elements that make up a molecule of water. Two atoms of hydrogen plus one atom of oxygen. H2O. If you looked closely at one atom of hydrogen, you would see that it is made of particles of energy floating in space. Floating in lots and lots of space, comparatively speaking. Near it is the one atom of oxygen, and their energy is combined in such a way that they stay near each other.
But remember, these atoms are not physical, they are particles of energy and mostly space. Think of it like some stars in the night sky.
Nearby are more atoms, held together by their energy, their electrical charge. More stars in the sky. Maybe the water in the cell in your hand is like a galaxy out in space. And maybe the cell is like many galaxies in the Universe. Just energy and space.
Now imagine the air outside your body, next to your skin. Air has many different molecules and atoms in it, so let’s imagine a molecule of carbon dioxide next to the molecule of water in your skin. They are right next to each other. Particles of energy and space. Because the air is a gas, the molecules are farther apart than the molecules of water in our skin, which are liquid and solid. The closer the molecules are, the denser the matter is.
But the edge, now, the edge is where we are looking. The edge of the skin and the air, the difference between the carbon dioxide and the water molecules. Both have oxygen atoms in them. Both are nothing but energy and space. In our physical world, the difference is perception. The difference is the amount of space between the particles. The difference is the difference between galaxies.
And I am THAT. God is THAT. There is absolutely no separation. We only perceive it that way, because of our limited abilities to see, to hear, to feel, to smell, and to taste.
And God is here. God is this. I am, says God.
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