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.