God Beyond All Names The South Church Mount Prospect, Illinois January 26, 2014 !Exodus 3:13-15 13But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15God 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, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, ! and this my title for all generations. I remember when Angela came back from her first Sacred Dance Guild festival. It was 1999. The festival was held in Cleveland. I knew almost nothing about sacred dance. Bernadette Farrell’s song and the movement you just saw was my first introduction to Sacred Dance. I was blown away by the beauty and the power of the art form. I want to talk about that song today, about the words, the meanings. I often quote the title of this song at the beginning of my prayers. I do this as a reminder to myself and anyone listening that the word “God” is merely a sign, a symbol that points to a great, great mystery. Yes, we know parts of God, qualities of God, and aspects of God. But we should always use that word with respect and humility. Even God would agree. After Moses’ first encounter with God, God sends Moses back to the people with the message that help is on the way. Moses can’t just go back and tell everyone he got some good news from a burning bush. So he asks God for a name, for something that will help the people understand. What happens? God refuses to be named. “I am who I am,” God replies. “I will be what I will be.” Hmmm. What’s that mean? Perhaps it means that God simply refuses to be reduced to any single word or concept. Consider how often that happens. Just think of all the religious authorities who speak as if they have God in their pocket, right where they want him. For those folks God is always a him. They are experts on what God likes and doesn’t like, on what God loves or hates, who God loves, and who God doesn’t. The Hebrew people would have thought that this was the very height of arrogance. Rev. Rick Kesler! Page "1 Because they took quite seriously those words “I am that I am.” God describes God’s self as being, as existence, and as presence. Included in God’s being is incredible freedom: “I will be who I will be.” God’s freedom suggests that we need to be humble and careful about what we presume to know, and of what we can really be sure. If God truly exists, then much of God must be mysterious and inscrutable from a human point of view. We can talk for days about who and what God may or may not be. It’s fascinating. In the coming weeks I’ll be talking about that very long discourse in Matthew called the Sermon on the Mount. We will take a long hard look at what Jesus says about God. Now I’d like to explore what this song says about the force, the energy, the being that we so easily refer to simply as God. The song is that the concept God is “beyond” any attempt of ours to pin God down precisely, to think that we know God completely. This captures the humility and wisdom of the Jewish approach. The song begins with this phrase: “God beyond our dreams, you have stirred in us a memory, You have placed your powerful spirit in the hearts of human kind.” God may be within us but we humans have a habit of forgetting this, or not noticing. Some of us believe that this is the great problem of the human condition—not that we are sinners in need of salvation, but that we have forgotten who we are. We are lost and need to be found. Lost to God and lost to our true selves. But God is at work to stir within us a memory of you we are, and whose we are. This is a radical idea! God is not only out there beyond the stars. God lives within us. We are partly God. There is an eternal aspect to all of us, which we call Spirit. We share that same Spirit with all of humanity. Every being is sacred, every life is holy. Here’s the next verse. “God beyond all names, you have made us in your image, We are like you, we reflect you, we are woman we are man.” In that encounter with Moses God cautioned all of us not to assume that we understand God completely. It’s worth mentioning that in the culture of Moses’ time the name of a god was important for another reason: If you knew the correct name of a god then you had direct access. If you knew the right rituals and prayers you might even have some degree of control over that god. So God’s unwillingness to offer a name was also a way of teaching us that God is not some force that we can magically control. Rev. Rick Kesler! Page "2 This same issue enters into any discussion of humanity being made in the image of God. That means so many things. It means that we too are eternal Spirits. It also suggests that we have been granted God-like powers of creation and destruction. We have great power and need to be cautious about how we wield it. There is another reason to be reminded that we are made in God’s image. That’s because it’s all too easy to start acting as if God were made in our’s. Critics of religion have observed for centuries now that the God many people claim to worship is merely a projection of the best and worst qualities of humankind. Referring to God as beyond this or that word or concept is necessary. If there is no mystery to God, if God can be fully defined and understood, if God’s actions can be predicted by human beings then, well, we are clearly not talking about God. “God beyond all words, all creation tells your story, You have shaken with our laughter, you have trembled with our tears.” Today this phrase suggests to me that not only is God present in us, but in all creation. As Jesus put it, even the rocks and stones could sing out their story if God asked them to. Think of it this way. God did not suddenly become known to the inhabitants of planet Earth when we discovered language. We can’t even be certain that we are the first species to apprehend God. We call God a creator, an author, the Mother of all that is. If that is true then Nature itself was God’s first language. All creation tells God’s story. Our species does not have a monopoly on knowledge of God. And human words may not even be the most effective way to communicate the truth about God. “God beyond all time, you are laboring within us, We are moving, we are changing, in your spirit ever new.” Who said God never changes? Not God. In every scripture known on Earth God is revealed as a personality or force that learns and grows. You could even say that God evolves. It is only human platitudes that claim God never changes. God is deeply entwined with this creation. Some creation stories even picture God as learning about creation through God’s creatures. There is laughter and there are tears. There are loses and gains. Successes and failures. Whether we literally believe the story of Noah and the flood or not, that story depicts a God who learns, who decides that mistakes were made, and even, so the scripture says, repents. Rev. Rick Kesler! Page "3 If there is anything unchanging about God—and again, scriptures say that there is—then it is that God, ultimately, is love. “God of tender care, you have cradled us in goodness, You have mothered us in wholeness, you have loved us into birth.” The most recorded quality of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is God’s steadfast love. Love that is ever present and never changing. When we talk about God beyond all names I think of other names for God. Of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu in the Hindu tradition. Of the Muslim Allah. The Great Spirit of Native Americans. You will find that each of these manifestations of God is also, ultimately, love. And not only a feeling, but love in action, taking the risk to birth us and the creation in which we live and breath and have our being. God is love in action. Finally here are the words of the refrain, sung after each of the song’s five verses. “All around us we have known you, all creation lives to hold you, In our living and our dying we are bringing you to birth.” Again there is that deep mystical awareness that all of creation speaks to the reality of God.