My first real camping trip out in the woods was just a sleeping bag, on a tarp, on the ground, under the trees.
I woke up in the middle of the night, expecting darkness, but what I saw was a soft magical glow. An old fallen down decaying tree, right next to me on the ground, was blazing silently, phosphorescing. There were all these little glowing insects quietly floating all around us.
I have spent many nights out on the ground in the woods, but I have never seen anything like that again.
A hushed glory dazzling in secret.
Where do we meet God?
For Moses it was the blazing bush, no mistaking it.
The message?
Know God in what is about to happen.
In the life and history of the people that Moses was to set free.
Moses is given the mission and the divine name at the same time.
The name doesn’t reveal who God is, it says God is known in what is going to happen.
Who are you? Come and see.
Deliverance, covenant, manna, law giver.
Names matter. Stories matter.
God may be encountered in blazing mystical encounters, but God is known in life, the end of bondage, in people set free, stepping out into the land of promise. God is known in people, people with names, people with stories, on the way to somewhere.
History.
History belongs to God. History reveals God. Names and stories.
It is a faith statement, a stubborn beginning assumption.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we are suffering from bad history, it has caught up to us.
Slavery and racism. The original sin of our great nation. We are reaping what we have sown. The names, the stories persist, they endure.
I’ve always been a fan of the great southern writers:
William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee.
Faulkner didn’t think that our country, and especially the South would ever escape from our dark past. His famous quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
In other words, we live in history, what was, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen. There is no escape. There can be denial and concealment, but our clay feet always crumble under the weight of history.
Faulkner went against the grain of our usual American attitude expressed best by the amazing industrialist Henry Ford, “history is bunk”. Ford said that over and over again. In other words, just get over it, get on with it, don’t let anything stop you.
There is something wonderful about what both Faulkner and Ford said about history, something true, but also something wrong.
Serious trauma has generational consequences. Even a little bit of living teaches us that. The Bible teaches us that, the sins of the fathers is visited even upon the seventh generation.
The choices that are so often forced upon us: of being defined by trauma, or just hurry up and get over the trauma, they are not faithful choices.
Where do we go from here?
Moses tried to escape his history in Egypt, start a new life free from entanglements. Very American, very Henry Ford.
The holy flame called him to turn aside from his new untangled life.
He had to go back, face his history, he had to face Pharaoh, and Pharaoh had to face the names and the stories.
Deep stuff. The story of a man, a family, a people, a nation, and God being revealed all along the way to somewhere.
The stuff of salvation.
The old arguments about southern history being about heritage or hate, at its heart they are about relationships and how complicated they get.
I think that is our greatest hope as a region and as a country, our persistent preoccupation with names and stories. I think our salvation is found in that.
God is revealed. Knowing each other’s name. Knowing each other’s story. Finding the connections.
Names and stories, Harper Lee spins the yarn of the power of names and stories, like a blaze calling us aside, To Kill a Mockingbird. The pages where Scout accidently defuses a lynch mob out to get Tom Robinson. She calls Walter Cunningham by name, and reminds him of his son Arthur and how they are friends and the relationships connecting their families, their stories.
She was like a little bitty unsuspecting Moses. But this time Pharaoh listened. Walter came to himself. The lynching dispersed. A moment of light in a dark tragedy.
Sometimes Pharaoh’s heart is hardened, sometimes Pharaoh’s heart melts like ice cream in August.
Relationships: they kill, but they also save.
God is revealed in that journey from one to the other.
It can be a blazing glory, or a hushed glory.
That is where we meet God, revealed in relationships, with names, and histories and traumas and hopes, in all those connections that tie us down and lift us up.
Our history is killing us, there is no escape. But Moses went back to face his history, and a new history began and God was made known, the way of the cross of Jesus, the way that is life and freedom. That is the good news of the Gospel, that history is going somewhere, and that is also the challenge, we are on the way to somewhere.
We live in a time where God’s glory is calling to us.
May we turn aside to see the flame.
May we turn aside, to one another, and find that hushed blazing salvation, the names, the stories, melting hearts like ice cream in August.