Exodus 5:22-6:12 "Quivering, Faltering Lips" Scott Hoezee

Among other things, this evening is a time to pray for our world in what have become quite uncertain times. Last Tuesday when I began to write this sermon, the clock was ticking toward war, and several of the cable news channels reminded us of that vividly by actually having clocks in the corner of the TV screen counting down from the 48-hour deadline the president set Monday evening. Although there is a sense in which this business with Iraq has been noised about to varying degrees for a solid year now, I'm sure that many of you felt what I did in the early days of this week gone by; namely, a sense of dread and impending doom for what was to come. There were, early last week, many things that were at best uncertain such that even as I typed this sermon, I knew I'd have to leave it a little loose, making room for last-minute updates on this very night.

Uncertainty, however, has a way of begetting fear. The unknown has a way of looking like a menace, at least where warfare and conflict are involved. But fear and menace also have a way of putting faith to the test. Whether you have prayed for nothing but peace in recent months or have prayed for peace even if it had to come at the price of war, I would guess that most every person here tonight has been in prayer and that, therefore, every one of you has had to go before God in the wake of what has happened also these past 5 days. Perhaps like Moses you have uttered your prayers with quivering, faltering lips.

We have been in a difficult and dark time. We have lived through a time we wish to highest heaven had never come to us. For nearly nineteen months now since the carnage and shock of September 11, much that we once thought we knew has been revised and some of what we thought we knew has been thrown out of our minds altogether. Whether you find yourself largely in agreement with the president, largely in disagreement with him, or somewhere in between, few would dispute the idea declared by newspapers and columnists of all stripes this past week: the nation of which we are citizens has adopted a new policy and stance toward the wider, dangerous world in which we live. After 9/11, many people immediately predicted that this terrible event would change everything. More cautious observers said that only time would tell whether or not that was true. So far, however, not yet two years out from that event, few could deny that indeed, if not everything, then at least very, very much in our lives has changed.

So far, the twenty-first century is not turning out as we might have hoped. And when things go awry, when the situation seems uncertain, when what we thought was true and had thus prayed about appears to be falling apart, then people of faith go back to God once more in prayer. But although our circumstances and viewpoints, our needs and desires, change over time, the God to whom we pray is forever the same. And so what God says to Moses in Exodus 5 and 6 is still relevant. Although originally applying only to a very unique situation that is now long ago and far away, still God's most basic stance in this passage may yet speak to us in comforting ways on also this present evening in this present circumstance.

God had told Moses, and his brother Aaron, to go to Egypt with a very specific, easy-to-define (though hard-to-accomplish) assignment: work with and work on the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from their bondage. This had not been Moses' idea. Having fled Egypt many years before, Moses whiled away his time as a shepherd in Midian. As we noted some weeks ago when examining Exodus 3 and the famous story of the burning bush, Moses had not spent his years in Midian praying to God to make him a leader of men and the liberator of Israel. As I mentioned in that sermon, commentators like John Calvin have praised Moses for his great patience in Midian while awaiting God's call. But Moses was not waiting for nor expecting anything. All things being equal, he would have perhaps been content to live out the rest of his days with his wife and family over there in Midian.

But God shattered whatever sense of normalcy Moses had established in Midian by calling him to a new and extraordinary thing. God promised to be with Moses, revealed to Moses his personal name of Yahweh, handed off to Moses a bag of tricks that would authenticate his message to the Israelites and certainly also before the Pharaoh himself. Moses still resisted, claiming he was weak of speech and had never been very good at the skills required to win friends and influence people. So the Lord God Yahweh had assured Moses up and down that if he would just speak the words Yahweh gave to him--in short, if Moses and Aaron would just do their part--God himself would see to the rest.

Except now Moses and Aaron have done their part but no sooner did they do so and things went from bad to worse! In fact, within days of their initial high-level meeting with the Pharaoh the situation had reversed itself so radically that now not only did the Pharaoh regard Moses and Aaron with contempt, so did the Israelites! Moses felt doubly betrayed and hence doubly bewildered.

Imagine how any one of you would feel if this congregation elected you to represent us to Governor Granholm in order for you to go to her to make a big request. But suppose the governor rejected you harshly, made you feel almost like a fool for even having asked for such a thing. That would be bad enough, but wouldn't you feel angry if, upon returning to Calvin Church to deliver the bad news, you discovered that no one here believed in your task anymore, either!? Wouldn't you feel betrayed if we also put daylight between ourselves and you just because you did what we asked you to do in the first place!?

I think Moses felt like that, and he was upset and angry about it. He was in fact so upset that he didn't hide his pique from even God. "Is this why you sent me, O God?! Ever since I talked to Pharaoh in your name, he has brought us nothing but trouble and what's more, you have done nothing to help us out, leaving Aaron and me holding the bag!" Moses' situation was dark, difficult, drear, and dreadful. We can't blame him for praying the way he did. His back was to the wall and in good Hebrew fashion, he does nothing to hide this from God. Like any number of the psalms of lament in the Book of Psalms, so Moses' prayer here is not adverse to wagging a finger in the very face of God.

Curiously, in such situations God virtually never roars back by saying, "Don't you dare talk that way to me, you puny lump of clay!" Instead God replies with reassurance. But not only does God repeat the promises that extend into the future, in Exodus 6:2-8 God shores up the present moment and the future time yet to come by reaching into the past. God's speech in these verses is framed in verse 2 and again in verse 8 with the repeated line, "I am Yahweh." God declares who he is at the beginning, end, and also in the middle in verse 6 when God tells Moses, "Tell the people, I am Yahweh." Three times in seven verses God says, "I am Yahweh! I am Yahweh! I am Yahweh!"

If this were anyone other than God Almighty speaking here, you might find this repetition to be a little shaky. After all, at work if the manager of your department has to repeat over and over again, "I'm the boss here! Do you understand: I'm the boss here. Me. The boss," well, that's shaky. People who are confident in themselves, and who believe others have confidence in them as well, don't need to trumpet their authority over and over. If they do, it sounds like they are trying to convince both themselves and others that they deserve to be in charge.

But that is not the case with God. The repetition of Yahweh here reminds us of what that name means to begin with. "Yahweh" means either "I Am Who I Am" or "I Will Be Who I Will Be," or some combination of both. Either way or both ways, it points to faithfulness, constancy, and a never-wavering determination to be true to Himself and all his promises. That's why at this difficult moment in Moses' life, God reaches back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the covenant. Because when you are dealing with God, you cannot say, "That was then but what about now!?" Precisely because God is Yahweh, the Great I Am, the reality of the "then" brings great comfort to the "now" as well as to the future.

God's words in Exodus 6 are grand, glorious, and redolent of hope. But this text is not some namby-pamby vignette that essentially tells us that so long as we can just hear these promises, then all fear, doubt, and uncertainty will immediately vanish. There is some good old fashioned realism going on in Exodus 6. Despite the grandeur of God's reply to Moses, when Moses repeats this back to the Israelites, they don't buy it. And the final verse of this passage shows that Moses remains pretty unsure himself. Since Moses has failed to convince even his allies, what chance will he have with his enemy, the Pharaoh? "Faltering lips" are the last words of this passage.

I like that touch of realism. Exodus 6 is not some equivalent of a religious Hallmark card or some Precious Moments figurine in which pithy piety or teardrop-eyed innocence solves all problems and answers all questions. For Moses the darkness and the doubt persist. But the good news is that even this cannot displace the truth of Yahweh and his determination to get something new accomplished. As such, Moses tonight serves as a good reminder of what it means to have faith in a difficult world: it means desperately clinging to the hope of the promise and yet doing that with the full recognition that for now, and maybe for a while to come, the darkness around us may not lift just yet. But it's not easy to sing the doxology in the dark. It's not impossible, thank God, but it's not easy.

But another good reminder of this passage is that neither does the persistence of that darkness mean God is absent or unavailable. I just mentioned that the final words of this passage are "faltering lips," which is hardly a hopeful way to conclude any story. But don't forget: those words of Moses were spoke to God in the context of a prayer. In times such as we find ourselves on also this evening, our lips may quiver and they may falter and we ourselves may feel just generally shaky, and yet still we pray and we pray in the belief that we are heard. We pray with a confidence borne of the Holy Spirit within us that God is no stranger to the darkness and that he hears the prayers uttered in the dark just as surely as the ones spoken from spiritual mountaintops and sunswept meadows of joy.

In this Lenten Season of our lives, we know (or should know as Christians) that God is with us in sorrow and fear. Whether or not we feel safe at any given moment, we can know that because God is faithful and never wavers in his gracious determination, then whether or not we feel safe we can know that we are saved. God in Christ has promised to be with us, always, even to the end of the age. He did not say he'd be with us, mostly, depending on the circumstances. He said always. He did not say he'd be with us occasionally, now and again, in the good seasons of life but just possibly not in the bad. He said always. And so tonight, with quivering, faltering lips perhaps, we own this God as our Lord and Savior. He is still now Yahweh, the Great I Am. We pray to him, for where else can we turn? We pray to him, for we know he hears us. We pray to him because we know he changes not. He loves us. He said so. The cross says so. In that confidence and hope, let us pray.