First Pleasure, Then Work

It’s really valuable to keep learning new things, and to keep looking at things from fresh angles, and so the Anglican Church, like most denominations, sets aside some time and some money for priests’ continuing education and professional development.  I benefitted from this most recently in May at a conference I attended at Duke Divinity School.  I benefitted from the official sessions of speakers, preachers, worship, and from the various tiny comments or conversations at these kinds of events. Two different people recommended a book on the Old Testament by the scholar Ellen Davis, an Episcopal priest who had taught an Old Testament class I took years ago, and who now teaches at Duke Divinity School.  I decided to buy a copy from their bookstore.  When I got it home and started reading it, I thought, “This is some really good stuff here!  I want to share this with my congregation.”  So I scheduled it to be the book we will discuss during our education program in Lent.  It is called Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament.  One of the chapters is on the passage from Exodus we are reading today.  I will be quoting it extensively in today’s sermon, so today you will get both a sermon and a preview of coming attractions.  

At this point in Exodus, the Israelites have had miraculous experiences not only of God’s power, but of his love for them, guidance of them, and presence with them.  God has parted the Red Sea and led them through on dry land, freeing them from slavery.  God has been present leading them through the wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  God has granted their every need, feeding them with manna in the desert and providing water from flintrock.  God has even spoken the words of life to them on Mount Sinai.  God and the people have celebrated their covenant with the blood of sacrifice splashed on the altar and on the Israelites, marking them as God’s own forever.  

Moses has gone to the mountaintop for forty days of fasting and prayer with God to purify himself to be a clean conduit for God’s teaching.  Moses has left his brother Aaron in charge.  But as soon as Moses’ back is turned, the Israelites slip into idolatry.  They take off their gold jewelry and give it to Aaron so he can melt it and turn it into a little golden calf for them to worship instead of the God who has worked miracles for them.  God is furious with them, and at the beginning of the chapter says he doesn’t want anything more to do with these people, and Moses can lead them into the land of milk and honey himself, because God’s not going with him.

Davis wryly observes that today’s passage in Exodus is the earliest recorded account we have of pastoral burnout. Moses is exhausted.  And he is also angry. Moses is disgusted by these hopeless ingrates, betrayed by his own brother, and now even God is bailing out on him, leaving him with a job he never wanted to take on in the first place.  He reminds God of this when they have it out in a frank talk at the Tent of Meeting: “Look, this nation is your people after all!”  She comments, “I think it must be for his frankness that Moses is so beloved of God.  This conversation at the Tent of Meeting is the most intimate exchange between the two of them that we are privileged to witness.”  He is outraged at God for setting him at this task and then pulling away, and he shouts at God, “Yet you yourself said, ‘I know you by name, and you have found favor in my eyes.’ And now, if I’ve really found favor in your eyes, then show me your way, that I may know you, so that I may find favor in your eyes.’” ( 33:12-13 )  She points out that “four times Moses expresses his anxiety to find favour in God’s eyes, and three times he cajoles God to escort them personally to Canaan…Even after God caves in and says, ‘All right, all right, I’ll come” still Moses keeps at it….Moses is panic-stricken, too frantic to take in what God is saying.”

Then she looks at our lives, and comments that this state of mind may be familiar to us in our life of faith.  As Christians, we are discerning and obeying God’s call, which means we often find ourselves beyond our own competence, frightened at what God demands and feeling left in the lurch with a job that is beyond our own resources.  She says, “Every persistent believer must reckon with that sense of fear and divine abandonment.  Sooner or later, the panic touches each of us who accepts God’s call and heads, eyes wide open, straight into some difficult and mysterious work—like pastoring a church, teaching a class, going back to school, learning a language, creating a work of art.”

How does Moses handle these emotions?  He makes an outrageous request: show me your glory.  She remarks, “I am sure Moses surprised himself with that rash, even crude demand.  For it is crude, completely lacking in religious refinement.  Moses wants God to strut his stuff for him—a private showing of the divine being.  Even more shocking than the request is the fact that God goes along with it…Moses hides in a rock while God strolls past in something very much like a body, singing a hymn, and Moses gets a look at the divine backside.  Yet even the hindsight of blinding beauty makes him fall on his face in awe.”

Why would God agree to this? she wonders.  “Graven images are a lie because they delude us into thinking we have a line on God and know just what to expect.  Fixed images of God violate what is most characteristic of God, free-spiritedness.”  As God puts it at the burning bush: “I will be who I will be”

She concludes, “Above all else, God is a Lover, and every true lover resists being taken for granted yet longs to be desired…At this moment, it is not Moses the political-religious leader of Israel speaking, but Moses the mystic, the ardent lover of God.  The public need has been met: God has promised twice already to go up with the people into the Promised Land.  You would think Moses would be satisfied, but instead he presses for one more thing: a favor for himself alone, a glimpse of God’s exquisite beauty….It is only in that request for a private revelation that God feels the purity of Moses’ love…God capitulates, happily, even to the point of indignity.  For as the whole Bible makes undeniably clear, God is a perfect fool for love—fool enough even to become human, to live and love as we do, and to weep because he loves; fool enough to suffer and die on a cross.”

Turning back to us, she remarks, “All our weariness in being ‘good Christians’ comes from forgetting this, the perfect foolishness of God in love, and therefore our prayers become disordered.  Like Moses, the very best of us grow impatient, sometimes desperate, trying to do the manifold work God has given us, and seeing that the results are often indifferent.  We demand support for our efforts, reasoning, as Moses does, that it is in God’s enlightened self-interest to back us up in our work—so that the church may look good, so that the people of God may be well served.  There is evidence that God responds to those prayers and often does support our good works.  Yet the encounter at the Tent of Meeting suggests that God is even more deeply moved by holy desire: “Show me your glory.”  God is strangely stirred by the unreasonable demand of the one who burns with love, who longs simply to revel in the incomparable divine beauty that all the saints have glimpsed and that left them panting with desire for more.”

But what if we aren’t like that? She reassures us, “God’s beauty is not a pleasure reserved for great saints and card-carrying mystics, religious geniuses who speak in blank verse.  The most tongue-tied, feet-on-the-ground believer is capable of getting a kick out of God—and needs to do so. The reason is simple: it is the very pleasure for which we are made…the Westminster Confession of Faith gives the purpose of human life thus: ‘to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.’  Enjoying God is a trait of the species, like being a biped, no more technically complex than enjoying sunshine or wisteria.  As with wisteria and sunshine, though, we must slow down enough to notice, so that the quiet but nonetheless thrilling ‘pleasantness of God’ may sink into our chilled hearts, refresh our jaded eyes with a warmth and beauty that knows no season.  The psalmist [ in psalm 90 ] has given us a prayer that establishes the proper order for what we ask of God, if we are to remain strong in God’s service:

May the pleasantness of the Lord our God be upon us; 

and the work of our hands,

make it prosper for us;

the work of our hands, O prosper it.

First pleasure, then work.  Pleasure for ourselves in God’s company, God’s beauty, and only then support for our work in God’s service.”