The Visit
Exodus 3:1-6,13-15
Rev. Greg Russell
Who, or what, is God? Where shall we look for God’s presence? Our sages and philosophers are by no means unanimous in their response, but they do concur on one matter: who or what God is, ultimately, is unknowable, for God is the Hidden One, the One whose face is concealed, the Infinite, Unmeasurable One, Unknowable, Unfathomable, Indiscernible. In God’s encounter with Moses, God refuses to be bound by something as fundamental to us even as gender, simply saying instead, “I am that I am;” and saying later, “Tell them ‘I am’ sent you. This is to be my name for all time and forever.”
But we have to have some way to talk about God, so those same sages try to capture our experience of God in familiar images, ones we can comprehend. Early attempts, such as the Kabbalists, went so far as to try to sketch God’s form – the primordial man with each body part associated with one of God’s attributes: heads, arms, legs, torso, even complete to genitalia.
Jewish midrash gives us images of God weeping at the sight of the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea (for they are God’s children, too), God bound in chains and forced into exile with Israel, God laying out manna for them each morning in the wilderness, God studying Torah with the old rabbis.
And we are familiar with a host of Biblical images for God: an immovable rock [Psalms 19, 31 and 62], a shield [Psalms 3, 18, 28], a fortress [Psalms 18, 31, 62], commander of a host of angels [Psalms 24, 46], shepherd [Psalm 23; Isaiah 40; Ezekiel 34], father [1Chronicles 29 et al], and king [Psalm 29, 47, 1Timothy 1]. We forget (or ignore) the images of God as a nursing mother (found both in Isaiah [66:12-3] and Hosea [11:4]) and the vision of God as a mother eagle [Isaiah 40:31], and the metaphor of Jesus as a mother hen, gathering her chicks under her wings for safety [Matthew 27:37]. Each of these metaphors is an allusion, not meant to be appropriated with a flat-footed literalism, but instead meant to point us toward something we can imagine but not really see. It is one of life’s little ironies that a tool meant to expand our vision of the Most High and make that vision accessible has become a straight-jacket of conventional thought and speech, where we refer to God exclusively in masculine terms. If an exclusively male God is the only one we can imagine, then “our God is too small,” to borrow J.B. Philips’ arresting, little phrase. Or, as Mary Daly would later famously offer: If God is male, then male is God.
So, this morning I invite you to stretch your imagination. I invite you to imagine God along with me, and I invite you to imagine her as a woman – a woman who is growing older. She moves a little more slowly now; she can’t quite stand erect; her hair is thinning; her face is lined, her smile no longer innocent; her voice is scratchy; her eyes tired; at times she strains to hear. God is a woman, and she is growing older.
But she remembers everything.
As dusk falls, God sits down in her kitchen at the table, opens her book of memories, and begins to turn the pages – and God remembers.
“There,” she says, “there is the world when it was new and humanity when they were young . . .” As God turns the pages of the book, she smiles as she sees before her all the beautiful colors of our skin and all the varied shapes and sizes of our bodies. She marvels at our accomplishments: the music we have written and sung, the gardens we’ve planted, the skyscrapers we’ve built, the stories we’ve told, the ideas we’ve spun out.
“They now can fly faster than the winds I send,” she murmurs to herself, “and they sail across the water that I gathered into seas. They even visit the moon that I set in the sky. But they rarely visit me.”
There, pasted into the pages of her book are all the cards we ever have sent her when we did not bother to visit. She notices our signatures scrawled beneath the printed words someone else has composed.
Then there are the pages she would rather skip over, the things she wishes she could forget. But they stare her in the face, and she cannot help but remember: her children spoiling the home she created for them; brothers killing each other or putting one another in chains . . . She remembers seeing us race down dangerous roads and being unable to stop us in time. She remembers the dreams she had for us – some which were never fulfilled.
And she remembers the names, so many names, inscribed in the book: names of children she has lost through war and famine, earthquake and accident, disease and suicide . . . And God remembers the many times she sat by a bedside, weeping because she could not halt the processes she herself had set in motion.
So, tonight she lights candles – millions and millions of candles, lighting up the night sky to make it bright as day. Tonight, God will stay up all night turning the pages of her book.
God is lonely tonight, longing for her children – her playful ones, like Ephraim, her darling. Her body aches for us. All that dwells on earth perishes, but God endures; so, she suffers the sadness of losing all that she holds dear.
God is home alone tonight, turning the pages of her book. “Come home,” she wants to say to us, “come home.” But she won’t call – because she is afraid that we will say, “No.” She can anticipate the conversation: “Gee, we’d really love to, but we’re just so busy,” we’d apologize; “we’d love to see you, but we just can’t come; not tonight; not right now. Too much work to do. Too many responsibilities to juggle.”
Even if we don’t realize it, God knows that our busyness is just an excuse. She knows that we avoid returning to her because we don’t want to look into her age-worn face. She understands that it is hard for us to face a God that no longer looks the way she did when we were children. She understands that it is hard for us to face a God who has disappointed our childhood expectations; she didn’t give us everything we wanted; she didn’t defend us against all our enemies; she didn’t make us triumphant in battle, or successful in business, or invincible to pain. We avoid going home to protect ourselves from disappointment – and to protect her. We don’t want her to see that disappointment in our eyes. But God knows it is there; and she wants us to come home anyway.
What if we did? What if we did go home to visit God? What might it be like?
I imagine God would usher us into her kitchen, sit us down at the table, and pour two cups of tea. She has been alone so long there is much she wants to say to us. But we barely let her get a word in edgewise, for we are afraid of what we might hear, and we are afraid of silence – so we fill up an hour with chatter – words, words, words, so many words – until finally she touches her finger to her lips and says, “Shhhh. Be still. Shhhh.”
Then she pushes back her chair and says, “Well, let me have a good look at you.” And she looks – and in a single glance God sees us as both as newly born and dying, coughing and crying, turning our head to root for her breast, fearful of the unknown realm that lies ahead. In a single glance, she sees our birth and our death and all the years in between.
She sees us when we were young and idolized her, trustingly following her anywhere, when our scrapes and scratches healed quickly, when we were filled with wonder at all things new – a new dress, our first pair of shoes, a new driver’s license, the new feelings in our body when we first allowed a friend to touch it. She sees us when we were young, when we thought there was nothing we could not do.
She sees us in our middle years, too; when our energy was unlimited, when we kept house, and cooked, and cleaned, and cared for children, and worked, and volunteered for PTO and coaching little league – when everyone needed us, and we had no time to sleep.
And God sees us in our later years, when we no longer felt needed, when chaos disrupted the bodily rhythms we had learned to rely on. She sees us sleeping alone in a room where two once slept.
God see things about us that we have forgotten and things we do not yet know, for nothing is hidden from her sight.
And when she is finished looking at us, she might say, “So, tell me, how are you?” Now we are afraid to open our mouths and tell her everything she knows already: whom we love, where we hurt, what we wanted to be when we grew up, what we have broken or lost. We are afraid to speak now, lest we begin to cry.
So, we change the subject: “Remember the time when . . .” we begin. “Yes, I remember,” she says. And suddenly we are both talking at the same time, never completing a sentence, saying all the things the greeting cards never said: “I’m sorry that I . . .” “That’s all right; I forgive you.”
“I didn’t mean to . . .” “I know that; I do.”
“I was so angry when you hit me.” “I’m sorry that I ever hurt you – but you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“You’re right: I wouldn’t listen. I should have: I know that now, but at the time I had to do it my own way.” “I know that,” she nods, “I know.”
We look away from her now, our eyes wandering up to the calendar on the wall. “I never felt I could live up to your expectations,” we say. “Oh, I thought you could do anything,” she answers!
“And what about your future?” she asks us. And we stammer out an answer, for we do not want to face our future. God hears our reluctance, and she understands.
And then God reaches out and touches our arm, bringing us back from our nostalgia for a time long ago, bringing us back from the future we fear. “You will always be my child, you know. ‘Grow old along with me/ the best is yet to be,/ the last of life for which the first was made . . .’” She is quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning, our favorite. [Rabbi Ben Ezra]
We are growing older as God is growing older. How much like her we have become.
For us, as for God, growing older means facing death. Of course, God will never die, but she faces death every day, for she has buried more dear ones than we ever shall love. In God we see, “t’is a holy thing to love that which death can touch . . .” – including ourselves, our own, aging selves.
God holds our face in her two hands, and whispers, “Don’t be afraid. I will be faithful to the promise I made to you when you were young. I will be with you; even to your old age, I will be with you. When you are gray-haired, still I will be with you. I gave you birth; I carried you; I will hold you still. ‘Grow old along with
me . . . ’”
Our fear of the future is replaced now by curiosity, understanding that the universe is infinite. Unlimited possibilities always are arrayed before us. Though the sun rises and sets just as the day before, no two days are quite the same. We can greet each new day with eagerness, awakening to wonder:
What shall I learn today?
What can I create today?
What will I notice today that I have not seen before?
It has been a good visit. But now we are tired now and need to go to sleep. But before we go, it is our turn to look at her. The face that time has marked no longer looks only frail to us now, but wise as well. For we understand that God knows those things only the passage of time can teach:
that you can survive the loss of a love;
that you can feel secure even in the midst of an ever-changing
world;
that there is dignity in being alive, even when every bone aches.
God’s movements no longer seem only slow now, but strong and intent – purposeful, unlike our own, for we are too busy to see beneath the surface; we speak too rapidly and too loudly truly to listen; we move too rapidly to feel what we touch; we form opinions too soon to judge honestly – but God moves slowly and with intention. She sees everything there is to see, understands everything she hears, and touches all that lives.
Now we understand why we were created to grow older. Each added day of life, each new year, makes us a little more like God, who is ever growing older.
Looking at her now, we feel overwhelmed by awe (though embarrassed to say so). This aging woman now looks to us
like . . . like a queen, her chair a throne, her housecoat an ermine robe, her thinning hair shining like jewels in a crown.
Today we sit here in this house of prayer, away from our own homes, holding in our hands pages of greeting cards bound together like a book – thousands of words we ourselves have not written. Will we merely sign our name at the bottom and drop the cards in the mail?
God would rather we come home. She is sitting and waiting for us – ever patient until we are ready (for she will not run out of time). She will leave the door open and the candles burning brightly so that we can find our way, waiting patiently for us to come.
And, perhaps, when we do, we will be able to look into God’s aging face and say, “Our Mother, our Queen, we have come home.”