Does anyone else think this story is deeply weird?
Familiarity and expectations can be deadly to our ability to see things as they are. I literally cannot remember a time in my life when I didn’t know the story of Moses and the burning bush. If the word “flannelgraph” means something to you, please raise your hand. For the rest of you, to borrow a line, when I was a kid in Sunday school, videos were called flannelgraphs. The flannelgraph was a flannel-covered board on a stand—ours were a medium green—and the teacher had all these paper cutouts of people and animals and other things, clip-art style, which had the backs treated with something so they could be stuck to the flannel and taken off again. I don’t know how old I was, but I can remember the little drawing of the burning bush on the flannelgraph as the teacher told us the story. Which is a good thing, on the whole—but it does create a challenge: can I see the burning bush as more than just a paper cutout?
This is a place where the wisdom of the late Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner resonates:
When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.
There truly is no telling; and there is no telling what you might see if you really look; and if either happens, there is no telling at all what you might do. But for any of that to happen, we need to be jolted out of our expectation of familiarity—from “Oh, yeah, the burning bush” to “Wait, what?” God could show up as a person, or send an angel, and he does both at various times. Here, he shows up as a fire that’s in a bush, or around a bush, but just sort of co-existing with the bush, and waits for Moses to wander by with the sheep. This is like God doing Rube Goldberg, choosing this roundabout way to strike up a conversation; we need to let it rock us back on our heels a bit and make us ask, “Why?” Thing is, if we do that, I think the question points us to the answer: after forty years of meandering through the wilderness with a rabble of dirty, smelly, hapless, stupid sheep, Moses needed his eyes jolted open. This isn’t Rube Goldberg at all, this is God anticipating Flannery O’Connor: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
To Moses’ credit, when he sees this deeply strange thing, he doesn’t run, he moves toward it, as God knew he would; and when he does, God makes him an offer he can’t refuse. He tries, of course—read the whole conversation, Moses spends all of it bobbing and weaving and trying to duck—but when he asks God to name himself, God gives him an answer that actually shuts him up for a while. As it should, because it’s the strangest thing in this whole story: God names himself “I am who I am.” If that doesn’t strike you as bizarre, just imagine calling God by that name. How can you call someone else “I”? Just saying his name turns us inside out, because if he is the “I”—if he’s the identity and the subject of the sentence—what does that make me? I say “I am who I am,” and I don’t mean myself, and I’m at a loss for what comes next.
So if God introduces himself by a name we can’t use to address him without getting hopelessly snarled, what’s the use of it? It’s clearly not just a handle, not a label to use in conversation. Handles, we’re used to. Take me: I have a lot of them. There’s Robert, which is my first name because it’s my dad’s first name; which has meant, since he’s always gone by Bob, I’ve always been called Rob to differentiate between us. James and Andrew are my middle names, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten. Harrison, my last name, is a marker of my heritage; it’s not the only family to which I belong, but it’s the one by which I was labeled at birth. I have a US President and a signer of the Declaration of Independence among my ancestors—both of whom counted as their property other human beings. Like all of life, it’s a mixed bag.
So those are the handles I was given; others, I have chosen. Various websites know me as “The Ancient Mariner,” the username I chose on the very first online baseball forum I joined. I’m a Seattle Mariners fan, I majored in English lit, it seemed an obvious combination. Some people through the years have interpreted it very differently. Then there’s @whollyliving, and @whollyliving1, on Instagram and Twitter, respectively; I haven’t posted on Instagram in quite some time due to a lack of energy and brainspace for writing, and I only joined Twitter to read hockey writers, but those handles are out there anyway. They have something to do with what I’m on about, since I took them from the working title of my incomplete manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount, but whether that will mean anything in the end is yet to be determined.
I have one more handle which was both given and chosen, one which for me is charged with both meaning and peril: “pastor.” This is the one which carries the risk of idolatry, because it’s the one I’m always tempted to make my identity. There are people who call me “pastor”; I don’t make an issue of it, but I don’t encourage it, either. I am trained as a minister of word and sacrament, I have been ordained as a teaching elder for the people of God, but “pastor” is a relational name, not an occupational title, and I am not currently anyone’s pastor. And yet the handle is there, and with it, the temptation.
None of these handles—not even the last—defines me; none of them captures me; none is ultimately anything more than a tag for clarity in communication. To whatever extent they say anything about me and who I am, they do so by pointing to something outside me. This is not true of the name by which God reveals himself to Moses. It’s not to give his people something to call him. They would come up with plenty of those on their own. The purpose of this name is for his people to know him. God doesn’t label or define himself by things outside himself. He articulates some of those connections (for instance, in calling himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), but he does so in order to illustrate his self-revelation. What matters most about God is not who he’s connected to or what he’s done but who he is.
And so Moses asks God, “What should I call you?” and God answers, “I am who I am”; but he doesn’t leave it unexplained. That name is the heart of this passage, and everything else he says serves to tell us something of what it means. God says “I am” in two ways. One is relational, which operates in time. Looking to the past, he identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; in so doing, he declares, “I am the God who formed you, and I am the God who has always been faithful to you. You exist as a people because I promised your ancestors I would make a nation of them, and because I have been faithful to keep that promise.”
In the present, God says, first, “I am the God who sees you.” “You might think no one sees your suffering in Egypt,” he tells them through Moses, “you might think no one hears your cries, but I see you, and I hear you. I know you, and I know what you’re going through.” This leads to the next thing God says: “I am the God who cares about you. I see you in pain, at the mercy of your oppressors, and this grieves me. This is not what I want for you.”
Of course, it’s not enough to stop there, and so God speaks to the future as well. “I am the God who will deliver you,” he declares, “and I am the God who will provide for you. I will end your oppression and your misery; I will bring you out of Egypt and lead you to a good and fertile land with more than enough room for all of you.”
In all this, God also declares who he is in and of himself. His relational self-revelation is based in his essential character: he is the God who loves, and therefore he is the God who keeps covenant. His love and his covenant faithfulness aren’t choices he makes which he could lay aside—they are unchangeable, irreducible, fundamental. Why? Because he is “I am who I am”—or, as the Jewish scholars who produced the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the Septuagint, rendered it, “I am the one who is.” He was not created, he is the one who exists of himself. His name, his identity, is that he is who he is, because of who he is, because he is. No one created him, no one shaped him, no one got to tell him who he is, no one has ever limited him, and no one ever will. He does not need to find himself, or discover who he is, reinvent himself, or make himself up as he goes along. He is not divided against himself, nor does he undermine himself, nor does he ever commit self-sabotage, and so his actions are always in harmony with his character, and his character is not subject to change or deformation.
This is, I believe, profoundly good news we have for the world, but it’s also a profoundly counter-cultural word for 21st-century America. Every age has its idols, and I’ve come to believe the greatest idol of ours is identity. Our society teaches us we have to claim and create our identity for ourselves, or else we’ll have one imposed on us. It’s a salvation/damnation narrative which dumps the whole weight of our salvation on our shoulders and tells us everything is up to us. That’s what idols do, after all. This generates powerful anxiety—soul-deep, bone-deep, marrow-deep—as people scramble to find something that will hold up under the load. For some, their career is their identity; others find their identity in their family or their community in one way or another; and of course, political affiliation is a huge one. That’s why the tribalization of American politics has grown so savage and irrationally uncompromising, because a political disagreement isn’t a rational conversation, it’s an existential threat.
I’m not saying identity idolatry is anything new—if I’m right, we see Paul addressing it in both Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 1, for instance—but I don’t think it’s ever been as universal or as deeply rooted as we see in the contemporary West. There’s good reason for that. I said a moment ago that idolatry generates powerful anxiety, but it’s equally true that idolatry is driven by powerful anxiety. Cultures dependent on the yearly harvest for survival look to fertility gods and goddesses, for example, while the seagoing Philistines venerated the fish god Dagon above all. Our age, from the trenches of World War I to the gas chambers of World War II to the repeated rounds of “will robots/AI/whatever make humans obsolete” to the gig economy—among many other things—has done much to devalue human life and reduce people to cogs in the machine, or worse. We didn’t invent the word “dehumanize”—though it’s only a little over two centuries old, at that—but we feel far more of a need for it than ever existed before.
To all this anxiety, God has given us an answer: he is I am who I am, he is the One Who Is. That offers a radically different basis for our own identity, and for our understanding of our own value and worth and of the meaning of our lives, than the world has. He who is, perfectly, is the one who made us; he is perfect love, and he made us in perfect love. He knows us perfectly and in full, and he loves us, and neither of those things will ever cease to be true; as James 1:17 says, he is “the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” If we try to base our identity on things of this world, they will fail us, for nothing in this world—no relationship, no career, no affiliation, nothing—is solid or enduring enough to support even one human life through whatever may come; but God is.
We try to express that when we call Jesus our solid rock and God our firm foundation; but really, that gives rocks and foundations too much credit. Compared to God, even the greatest rock is as solid and permanent as cotton candy. He has always been and he will always be, and he’s the same God through it all. He cannot go back on his word—that is impossible to his nature—and he cannot be prevented from keeping his word because there is no power in heaven or on earth that he did not create. He will never betray us or abandon us, because he created us in love, and love is his nature; God existed before any other existence in perfect love among himselves, in the beautiful whirling circle dance of the Trinity, and he created a world for us to stand on so we could join the circle of their love. This is who he are; in him, this is who we are.
In a world in which life feels increasingly ephemeral, disposable, and uncertain, God makes us solid and sure. He created each one of us as a special gift, and he holds each of us in his mind and heart. He knows each of us as we truly are, down to the very core of our being, even when we don’t know ourselves (as we so often don’t). We cannot lose ourselves and we cannot be forgotten, because he remembers us to ourselves in perfect fidelity. He is I am, and because he is, I am, and you are; and whatever else may change, that never will.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Study for Moses and the Burning Bush, 1902-08; image cropped to fit. Public domain.