Sunday, March 20 - Unnameable

This sermon was preached for the third Sunday in Lent, March 20, 2022 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. The readings for this sermon were: Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9, and Psalm 63:1-8.

I loved choosing a name for our baby. But the endless musings and debates and suggestions drove my husband up a wall. When I asked him about it, he explained that this was one of those decisions that it was impossible to do perfectly. No name would ever be all that we wanted it to be; every name has its issues. The truth, we discovered, is something closer to this: the child becomes their name, embodies and fills out their name, and yet no name totally encapsulates everything they are or are becoming.

Poor Moses would really like to know God’s name. Especially for when people will ask him in whose name he is acting! After all, this strange burning bush has just charged him with an impossible, gargantuan task. It’s only fair of Moses, really, to ask.

But the answer God gives is imprecise and maddeningly difficult to translate. We remember it and read it here in English as:

I am who I am. 

But it could also mean

I will be what I will be 

but also 

I am the one who causes things to pass

or even

I can be whatever I can be. 

God’s answer is, at its heart, a verb. It plays off the three letter Hebrew root of the sacred, unspeakable name of God. God chooses to be defined, not by a name, but by God’s presence and movement in the world. “I will be with you.” If the Israelites push Moses further, God instructs Moses to identify God by God’s relationships and promises. “The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”

Last Sunday evening, our confirmation class sat around a table in the youth room and attempted to write their version of the Nicene Creed. It’s one of my favorite activities to do with eighth graders each year because it asks them to really think through what they believe, right now. Because they are charged with doing this collectively, they also learn that church is messy and full of disagreement - just like the historic council and writing of the original creeds. They absorb the frustrating truth that church is a group project, and the grading and rubrics are very ill-defined. 

This class got a bit stuck where every class I’ve ever had gets stuck: part of the Creed about the Holy Spirit. There was an awesome, healthy debate about whether we’d go with Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost - including some back and forth about which term reminded us most of Halloween - and then we voted on what pronoun to use: he? It? No pronoun at all? Finally, they began to ask each other, and me, “Is there a clear answer as to what the Holy Spirit actually is?” Like Moses, they really wanted a clear answer, one they could write down and be done with. After all, that’s a lot of the impulse to write a creed for a church: the need to define the boundaries of belief, to precisely name the God we worship.

Could it be that church, being church, is less about a concrete set of propositions and more about the act of creating the creed itself? As God’s answer suggests, perhaps it’s more about the verbs than the nouns. We are Christians because we gather around a creed and because we are committed to the conversation that springs from it. We are church because we talk and think and debate and share about our experiences of God. Because there are always exciting questions and never clear answers. As Maddie Nystrom said in her Lenten reflection this week, we argue it out. 

So when the class asked me for a clear answer about what the Holy Spirit is, I told them that I couldn’t give them one. I could point them to passages and scenes from scripture. And I could tell them what the Spirit has done in my life. How I have felt the Holy Spirit move inside me, pushing me toward God, toward others. How she has helped me to choose life, and beauty, and hope. 

Our God is a god of many names. Muslims speak of 99 names, none of which is sufficient, all of which attempt to describe the movement of God in human life: the giver of peace, the forgiving, the sustainer, the protecting friend. The great faith traditions assure that we can know God - in burning bushes, in gentle hands, in song and bread - but that we can never fully grasp the mystery of the divine. Not fully enough to name for sure. 

I became Episcopalian because this is where I felt the invitation to both the wide mystery and intimate experience of God most fully. Here I could be held by the history of the creed and yet not constricted by it. Here was a tradition that challenged my need for a clear answer or an easy definition. The Episcopal communities I have encountered are a conversation. They invite life-long learning and wondering and arguing it out. They celebrate the beautiful, playful tension between what is knowable and unknowable about God. This is a difficult skill to teach but one I hope to instill in our confirmands - and our children and in you and in myself. 

That skill is vital, not just in being church, but beyond, in life. If you are anything like me, there are times in our lives when we long for clarity and certainty. A simple, static answer. Firm ground to stand on. Especially when we find ourselves, like Moses, on the cusp of a big challenge or change. So often the answer we receive to all our questions is dynamic and fluid, complex and full of motion. In those moments, God reminds us that God is complexity, dynamism, and transformation. God asks us to trust God’s movement in the world, in our lives. God asks us to know and believe not in a name but in God’s promise and relationship to us, “I will be with you.”

I am with you. I was with you. I will be with you.