October 26 2008
Exodus 33

Stand by Me
Rev. Dr. David A. Davis

“Show me your glory” That’s what Moses said to God. The bible tells us that it was a prayer. “Show me your glory, I pray,” he said. But it couldn’t of sounded much like a prayer. At least it couldn’t have sounded much like what you and I have come to expect when it comes to prayer. It wasn’t a whisper. It wasn’t all but silence with just the lips moving; a quiet, reserved, head bowed and hands folded kind of prayer. When you think about it, that’s just not Moses; Moses who was willing to engage God in a whole lot of negotiation that morning next to the burning bush. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? What should I say when they ask who sent me? They won’t believe me or listen to my voice! I’m not that eloquent God! O my Lord please send someone else!” Moses wasn’t the one for dignified prayer. Plagues and sea parted and face all aglow and tablets of stone carried and tablets of stone smashed. That’s the Moses who communicated with God Almighty. The Moses who cried out to God when God had had enough of the stiff necked people; “why does your wrath burn so hot against your people which you have brought out of the land of Egypt with such great power.” When it comes to Moses and his chats with God, it’s not the prayer life you and I tend to imagine.
In the film “The Apostle” Robert Duval plays a preacher haunted by his own moral failure, a character that routinely engages God in rather spirited conversations. At one point, he shakes his fist in the air, he lashes out and he lashes up, shouting in a room all by himself. Shouting up at God “I’ve always called you Jesus and you’ve always called me Sonny!” Moses and God were on a first name basis too. “Show me your glory!’ It must have been with a gut check level of emotion, a demand as much as a prayer, with a shout rather than a whisper. “Show me you glory, I pray”. Moses said with his teeth clinched and his jaw set and his voice something other than lowered. And probably with his hand up in the air and maybe even a wag of the finger. “Show me your glory!!”
This particular conversation between God and Moses comes after the people had made the golden calf and after Moses breaks the tablets of stone on the ground and after Moses goes back up the mountain to tell God what they had done. Moses offers a plea to God on the people’s behalf. God tells Moses to go, that God will send the people up to the land of milk and honey, to the promised land, but God doesn’t intend to go with them. “If I go with these stiff-necked people, even for a minute, I will consume them along the way.” God says. It was as if God knew that God couldn’t hold the temper, or that God knew disobedience along the way was inevitable, or that God knew that the people just couldn’t hold up in the presence of God’s holiness.
It was in the tent of meeting, there where the pillar of cloud would descend when Moses sought the Lord, it was there that Moses comes  again to God, this time for some more back and forth, this time for some more negotiation, this time for some clarification. “You have told me to bring up these people but you haven’t let me know whom you are sending with me. You tell me that you know me by name and that I have found favor in your sight. So if that’s all true, show me your ways. Consider too, and don’t forget…this nation is your people. These people are your people!”
God replies to Moses “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” Moses doesn’t miss a beat. Moses isn’t convinced. Moses isn’t finished yet.  “Don’t send us up there if you’re not going! How is anyone going to know that we have found favor in your sight if you are nowhere to be found? How is it that we shall be set a part, how shall we be protected, what about our security if you aren’t around.” God again says to Moses “I will do the very thing that you have asked. You have found favor in my sight. I do know you by name. I will do what you ask.” And Moses says to the Lord, “Show me your glory! Show me your glory….I pray!
Your glory. It’s not like Moses needed some more one on one time with God. They had more than their share of chats along the way. Glory isn’t a biblical buzz word for quality time. Demanding to see the shine of God’s glory, it doesn’t seem like a request for yet one more mountain top, spiritually renewing, rediscovering one’s relationship with God kind of thing. One might conclude that Moses had already had enough of the mountaintops, thank you very much. Fanning the flames of God’s glory. Show me your glory. Moses certainly wouldn’t be one who needed more proof, or an object lesson, or a teachable moment. River turned to blood. Staff turned to snake. Water rolled back. If crying out for God’s glory was just like putting in a request for a sign (like Gideon’s fleece, or Jeremiah’s potter’s wheel, or Ezekiel’s dry bones), if seeing the glory of God is just about a visible sign, well, Moses had been there and done that. And it must be more than that, more than just asking God for a spit and a handshake on the promise to really go up there with them to the land of milk and honey. Come on God, if we’re going to this, show me your glory!  
            What on earth is Moses asking, demanding, praying? Wanting God’s glory and wanting it now! God says, “I will make all my goodness pass before you.”  Not just my goodness, or a bit of my goodness, but all my goodness. “And I will proclaim before you the name, Yahweh, the Lord. And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.”  Or in other words “I am who I am.” In response to the demand for glory, God offers a reprise on what God said back at the burning bush. Here in the tent, God says to Moses, “My goodness will pass before you. The name Yahweh will be proclaimed. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious. I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. I am that I am. I am who I am. I am.”  But God didn’t stop there when it came to the demand for God’s glory.
            “You can’t see my face; you can’t see my face and live. No one shall see me and live.” That’s how the Lord continues. “There’s a place by me where you can stand on the rock; A place where you can come and stand by me. And while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.” Stand by me, says the Lord. And I will shelter you in a rock. I will cover you, guard you with my hand, until my glory has passed, until my face is gone. When I take away my hand, you’ll just be able to see my back. Or as the King James puts it, “thou shalt see my back parts.” You want to see my glory and you want it now! No. But I will protect you. With my very hand, I will protect you. I will set you high upon a rock and protect you.  Come, stand by me, even if you can only see my back.
            Demanding to see God’s glory; it must be like squeezing the mystery out of all things divine, like reducing the holiness of God to mere superstition, like eliminating the distance between the infinity of God and the mortality of humankind. Maybe it is something like wanting to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, wanting to be like God, or something like building a huge tower, a tower of Babel like thing to symbolize that nothing is impossible, that humanity is just like God, or like taking everything you own and everything you wear and everything you earn and melting it down into one golden calf kind of thing, as if the shine of human-made idols could somehow match the glory of God. Demanding to see God’s glory; it must be like trying to turn the extraordinary power of God into a persuasive tool to get what you want from other people, like transforming the earth-creating, earth-shattering, kingdom-coming awesomeness of God into some kind of domestic servant who is there at your beck and call, like flipping the figure-ground chart of existence so that you are at the center and God is a mere passing blip.
Who knows what Moses meant when he pounded his fist on the table and demanded to see God’s glory. Moses must have been tired of wandering the wilderness with the stiff-necked people. He had to have had enough of their complaining. Maybe Moses had just had it, this working for and toward the Promised Land thing, this being a leader and following God into God knows what, all these chats with God about “I will send and you will go”. Maybe Moses was just about done. “If we’re going up there, Lord, you better bring all your glory because I don’t have it in me anymore.”
Demanding God’s glory; because the piercing light of God’s glory can turn the world into the kingdom of heaven on a dime, because the overwhelming beauty of God’s glory can blow away the ugliness of human sin forever, because the very glory of God will come with such intensity that of course the land will flow with milk and honey, and hearts will be transformed, and people will have ears to hear and eyes to see, and the poor will be lifted up, and the oppressed set free, and the hungry will be fed, and the widows and the children will be cared for, and the dark powers of this world will be brought down, and the homeless will be sheltered, and the sick will be healed, and swords will be used to plow the earth, and the mountains and the hills will break forth into singing, and all the trees will clap their hands…..and Moses, and the people of God, and the followers of Jesus, and you and me…..we won’t have to do a thing! Show me your glory, I pray, because we don’t have it in us anymore to be servants of your kingdom.
Or maybe Moses actually got what he wanted that day in the Tent of meeting, when he was asking for God’s glory. Yes, he wouldn’t be able to see God’s face. He wouldn’t be able to endure the unvarnished, searing presence of the Almighty. One may conclude that Moses already knew that before he asked. But what if glory here, what if Moses and his demand for glory was really, ultimately, finally, a plea for the sure and abiding and faithful and never-questioned presence of God. “I will go with you and I will give you rest” God said. Maybe Moses’ prayer, his plea, his demand for glory was just another way of saying, “Are your sure?”
Because at the end of the day, and in the midst of the journey, and when you and I are up to our eyeballs in working for the kingdom, or when we are trapesing through the valley of the shadow of death, as we wander and complain on our way to the Promised Land, the promise is that God is with us. God says come, stand by me. God says, I will protect you with my own hand. God says behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.
Maybe the promise of God with us is the promise of God’s glory.
You remember don’t you. The Gospel of John.
“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory…full of grace and full of truth.”
Come stand by me. I am standing with you, forever.

 

 

 

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