Can't Do This Alone

Exodus 33:12-23; Matthew 22:15-22

I can’t do this alone.

 

That’s what we heard Moses saying to God this morning. 

Okay, God, you told me to lead this people to your land. But if you’re opting out of the journey with us, forget it.

They’re in a tough place, Moses and God. 

They’re just figuring out how to recover from Golden Calf Gate – the incident where God’s people felt rather lonely and abandoned in the wilderness, made an image to try to substitute for God’s presence with them, made God mad, then made Moses so furious he broke the whole covenant (or anyway, shattered the stone tablets that symbolize the relationship between God and God’s people) and shoved the ruins of the golden idol literally down the throats of the people.
(It’s a heck of a story – go read all of Exodus 32 some time).
There’s a battle, there’s a plague…. 

 

Now God tells Moses, “okay, get the people moving again, and take them to the land. I’ll keep my promises, but I can’t go along – these people are such a hot mess that just being with them will make me destroy them.”

 

And that’s when Moses says to God:

You know me; you chose me; you chose us.

Don’t opt out.

I can’t do this alone.

 

And God listens, and God says, “Yes.”

Yes, Moses, I will stay close to you.

 

And then Moses doubles down.

Not just me.

Us.

You’ve got to be unmistakably with your whole people.

If you aren’t with us, we won’t trust each other; we can’t hold on to our identity. No one will believe in us if you don’t stay with us.

We can’t do this alone. 

 

And again, God listens.
God says, “Yes.”

Yes, I will do exactly as you ask. I will be with the whole people, the community. 

Because God knows, as well as – no, better than Moses – that he can’t do this alone.

We can’t do this alone.

 

None of us, individually, can do the work God gives us to do, alone.  

None of us can really grow into the promise of our personal relationship with God alone, either.

 

We need God, and we need our community. 

We need God in and with and close to our community, while we are in and with that community.

Because as a community, we can’t do the work God gives us alone. 

We need God’s help, God’s presence, God’s guidance and love.  Without that, we can’t grow into the community – the people, the church – God wants us to be. On our own, we can’t grow into the promise God offers us. 

We need God’s close and constant support. Not just for Moses – not just for one of us, not just for a leader or two – but for the whole community. 

 

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this month, as we’ve talked in worship and committee meetings about our annual pledging, and in small groups and in Vestry meetings about the challenges we expect to face us as a church in 2024 and the near future.

 

We do our best, at Trinity – as individuals and as a congregation – to follow where God is leading us, year after year and day by day.

And from time to time – now, perhaps – we find ourselves in uncharted, or less-charted, territory. A wilderness, of sorts. Where the things that worked before don’t work so well. The ways we’re used to worshipping God, the ways we’ve organized ourselves as a community, don’t fit as well as they used to.

Eight/Ten a.m. on Sunday, and volunteering during the week, feel out of step with the realities we’re grappling with, personally or culturally. For many of us, things we’re used to do or have to support our faith feel harder, or less natural. 

 

That’s not just about a few of us, not just Trinity – that’s congregations all over the country these days.

 

And in those less-charted places, we don’t stop needing God.
We don’t stop needing each other.

It’s more and more and more true that we can’t do this alone.

 

So, if you’re Moses, and you recognize that truth, you demand the presence of God.

And get it.

And ask for more. 

For God not just at our side, but face-to-face.

 

God tells Moses no human can see the face of God and live. 

But you know, I can. 

Well, I sort of can.

 

I can see the face, the image of God, the way Jesus reminds us to see, today. When he points at the image of Caesar on a Roman coin, and tells us to give Caesar what bears Caesar’s image, and give God what bears God’s image: Us.

The whole great diversity of the human race, bearing the image of God.

The face of God that we can see, embrace, and live among.

 

I see, constantly and unmistakably, the face of God in the Trinity community. 

On the face of a child receiving communion. 

In the hands and mind of a volunteer lifting boxes, digging in the garden, cleaning up the kitchen, making sandwiches to feed hungry neighbors, teaching a Sunday School lesson, organizing a ministry, meeting late into the night to craft a sustainable plan for our congregation’s future.
In the shape of all of us gathered, in times of grief and of celebration.

 

I see the face and presence and promise of God,

and I know we are not doing this alone.

We never will be.

 

We affirm that promise to one another every time we baptize a new Christian. 

The face of God is here. We are not doing this alone. We never will be.

 

I discover the truth of that promise over and over every time I show up here on a Sunday morning.

Every time I sit down with the Vestry, or a committee, or someone coming to the church for comfort, assurance, and support in one of life’s crises or a slow stretch of wilderness. A promise I affirm every time I write a check to pay my annual pledge to Trinity, or fill out my own pledge card for the next year each fall.

 

When we show up for our community in many different ways, small and great, my actions, and yours, affirm that we are not alone. That we are here for one another, with one another, with God.
Never doing this alone, or just for ourselves.

 

This is the time every year when I tell you how important it is to me to invest in Trinity with my financial giving.
That I hope that for you, making a pledge commitment to support – to show up for – this community, and paying that pledge over time, is as joyful an action as it is for me.
That I find making and keeping – and regularly increasing – a commitment – financial, right now – time and talent too – to be life-giving, because each action I take to fulfill that commitment made in love means I’m part of God’s own presence and support and love for this community. 

 

I talk to you about it just once, or a few times, each year. 

But it’s true for me every day, year after year.

When I step up, I see the face and presence and promise of God in all and each of you, and I am assured all over again that I am not – that we are not – doing this alone. 

We never will be.

And I want that assurance for you, too.

 

We have a lot to do together, you and I. And God. 

We have some wilderness to navigate. 

We have a shining promise of God to claim. 

We have both work and rest that God has prepared for us. 

We have God’s path to follow, day after day.

 

And just as Moses insists on that mountain long ago, we can’t do it alone.

 

And we won’t have to.

God says yes to us, just like to Moses.

Yes, I will be with you.

All of you, together.

 

So listen with me to God, to Moses, to Trinity. 

Listen until our hearts as well as our ears hear the unshakable truth:

We’re not doing this alone.

We never will be.

Rules of Belonging

Exodus 20:1-20; Philippians 3:4b-14

How many of you have heard of “the Ten Commandments”?

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that phrase?

 

(Every commentator I read this week mentioned Charlton Heston and courthouse walls)

 

The “Ten Commandments” – known in some traditions as the Ten Words, or Ten Utterances – have a place in our culture, a claim on our collective mind.

Sometimes, that place in our minds is a shape – an image of two arched tablets, with a numbered list of short, strong, Dos and Don’ts

 

But…when we look in the Bible, at the twentieth chapter of Exodus (which we read this morning, and where these words, these commandments, are first introduced) or at the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy (where these commanding words are reiterated), it doesn’t look all that much like a tablet-friendly list. 

 

In fact, there’s rather a fluid texture to many of these words, as God tells Moses on the mountain, and the ancient people of Israel, and us now, both who God is, and what we are to do about it. And there are at least three mainstream traditions about how to divide this fluidity into ten points.

 

In the original text, God’s direction for our actions is embedded in a lot of context about God’s nature, history, and personality, and God’s relationship to the people who first heard these words from a mountain of awe in the middle of a wilderness. 

 

Our ten commandments – God’s ten words – do not start out as a list of dos and don’ts meant for general guidance in good living.

These are – at their root – a way of being that is laid out for a particular people, in a particular time, to build a community unlike any other.

 

These ten words [310 words in the New Revised Standard English translation which we read today; these ten “utterances”] are spoken to a motley mob of refugees, uprooted from the life and places they know, coming out of a situation of trauma.
A collection of not-quite-lost folks who are wandering in a wilderness of uncertainty, not sure what’s just happened to them, or what’s going to happen next. Who are facing a whole new bunch of challenges they probably have no idea how to even start managing.

 

That might sound a little familiar to many of us – either from individual experience, or from shared experiences in the last few years.

Then – and now, too – God is speaking to a group of people who need to become a people, a community with a shared identity, a shared sense of who we are, and how we are. 

 

So God starts with belonging.

I am the Eternal, your God, who brought you out of Egypt.

In some accounts, that right there is a commandment, the first one. I am your God. We belong to each other.

You will have no other gods besides me.

When Episcopalians count, that’s where we draw the “first” command – a mutual, primary, and exclusive belonging. We root our identity, and our obedience, in belonging, first and foremost, to God. 

 

The next several sentences (and two or three commandments) are more detail about how that belonging works – about staying focused on the particularity of this relationship, being careful with the power (the Name of God) in the relationship – and then on a way we mark ourselves as belonging to God, by being like God in the observance of Sabbath. By preserving pause, and rest, for others, as well as in our own work.

 

Starting there – in the way we relate to one another in Sabbath, as well as to God – the focus of the rest of these words is on our relationship with one another, the shape of our community, all rooted in this particular relationship with God. 

 

We do not take life, or property, or relationships, or truth away from one another. We respect one another, with particular attention to some relationships. We belong to a community that does not harm one another – and doesn’t even dream of harming one another. 

Because we belong together. 

We belong to one another, because we belong to God.

And God to us.

 

And that’s something we really need to know – when we’re coming out of pain and trauma, when we’re wandering in uncertainty, when we’re facing new challenges – exploring new opportunities – we’re not even sure how to start to manage.  

When some or all of those things are true for us, as individuals, it really matters to be part of, to belong to, a community, to a unity of people who know who we are, and what we do, together.  

When some or all of that trauma, uncertainty, and challenge are true for us as a community, too, we need to know – not just know in our heads, but in our hearts, souls, and bodies – know that we belong – to one another, and to God, and God to us.

 

That’s the context God is speaking to, in these commandments, these words of belonging. That’s maybe why God is staking this claim on us, and on how we live together.

 

Sometimes, we may not know we need or want this community, this belonging to God. That’s why – at the mountain in the wilderness, and in our lives – God usually moves first to establish that belonging. We heard Paul tell his friends in Philippi this morning that he owes his desire to belong to Jesus to the fact that Jesus has already laid claim to him; he wants to belong because he knows he already belongs to Jesus.

 

God lays that claim on us, too. On you and me.

What Moses tells his mob of motley refugees, recorded in tradition and scripture, is a story of belonging through an escape from slavery and genocide, through God’s work in creation and invitation to us to be like God, through the promise of home. Belonging initiated by God, belonging that causes our desire to belong to God, causes our care with God’s image and power, causes our care to live peaceably, honestly, and generously with one another. 

 

In our own context, millennia later, we tell a similar story in the Eucharistic Prayer, as we bless the bread and wine to be our shared meal of Christ’s Body and Blood. A story of belonging through inheriting that freedom and promise and teaching, through God becoming like us, through the promise of abundant life in the home of God. 

Belonging initiated by God, God placing a claim on us that makes it possible for us to long to belong to God, to the community that shares Christ’s Body and Blood and follows his teachings, to love one another as God loves us and we love God. 

 

Belonging that carries us from our losses, pain, or trauma, individually or together. Belonging that carries us through the uncertainties we wander in, carries us to new challenges, and belonging that is where we begin to find the answers to those challenges, begin to find joys in new opportunities. 

And always, the answer to who we are.

And most of all, whose we are.

 

Not by the dos and don’ts we follow, but by the claim God puts on us: that we belong to God, that God belongs with us, and we with one another.

 

That’s more than ten words.

But it’s the word we need.

That we belong.