Breaking and Entering - Liz R. Goodman

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first word is mama. That’s true the world over. Mama is, for most of us, the first word we ever speak. The motion—lips, mouth, tongue, breath—it takes to make mama mimics suckling. Mama, then, means food, nurturance, and so (on the aggregate) means mother.

      The moment when a baby can at last murmur mama with intent is a watershed moment. It’s when the baby can hold mama in mind, can conjure up mama in image and promise, can maybe even make her come, respond! Now the existence of the one who sustains life is no longer snuffed out when simply out of the range of smell or sight. Now the ongoing presence and participation of mama is no longer coupled with her immediate proximity. To be able to say “mama,” then, is a power akin to magic.

      “Whoshall I tell them sent me?” Moses asked the bush that burned though unconsumed. A voice had spoken to Moses through the bush, had told him that the Lord had observed the misery of the people enslaved, had heard their groans on account of the taskmasters. And so the Lord was sending Moses to Pharaoh, sending him to bring the people enslaved out of Egypt.

      Of course, at this Moses wondered, likely incredulous, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” But moreover, who are you? “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

      The stakes were high here. Moses was asking an impertinent thing. It had long been known that to know the name of a god was to have power over that god. Before anyone knew about the Living God (though a few had their suspicions); back when every nation and every people had their own god or pantheon of gods; back when even households had gods, kept them there on the shelf with their pots and kettles—everyone knew that to know the name of the god was to have power over the god.

      And so this god, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, had demurred about his name. He had lots of nicknames. Even according to Scripture, he had lots of referents: El Shaddai; Elohim or Eloyin; Adonai, and simply El, that is, “God.” But not until this moment had any person dared to ask God, “What is your name?”

      That God answered is an astonishing act of submission. But the answer itself calls that then into question. “YHWH,” an utterance that can’t really be uttered, a puff of air that signifies being. “I am that I am,” or “I am who is,” and from then on in Scripture, simply “the LORD.”

      It’s a strange name, imprecise and as mystifying as it is clarifying. But the fact that God told Moses suggests a few things. That God wanted us to know God’s name, that God wants us to know God’s name, that God submits himself to relationship with us—these are all suggestions of the story.

      But so are these: that God meant for us to know that knowing God’s name is not so straightforward a thing, that God wants us to know that to know God’s name is to know that God’s name cannot be known. We can invoke God, as in a prayer of invocation. But here our power over God ends. Here it becomes instead power with.

      We should remember this whenever we mean for God to do our bidding, and we’d be wise to remember this whenever others speak of God as doing their bidding. Like a good mother, God responds. God even provides. But God doesn’t obey. And whenever we mean to cast a spell on God, we’re opening the possibility that God might cast a spell on us—to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.

      Making Bill Maher Laugh

      When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”

      So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf; and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” They rose early the next day, and offered burnt-offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.

      The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshipped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” (Exodus 32:1–8)

      There’s a man who had a statue made of the Ten Commandments that weighs about five thousand pounds, two and a half tons. He needs a crane to move it, and sometimes the crane buckles under the weight.

      That’s a joke.

      You’re not laughing—which means either the joke isn’t funny or you don’t get it. But I know it’s a funny joke. So let me explain it. (And don’t get too down on yourselves. I didn’t get it at first either.)

      I noticed something last week during worship that I’d never noticed before. The last line of the reading, which was the Exodus version of the Ten Commandments—there are two versions, one in Exodus and one in Deuteronomy—told of the people’s response to Moses’ encounter with God. They had been watching while Mount Sinai was engulfed in smoke and fire, and while Moses disappeared into the pyrotechnics; they saw Moses then emerge and come down, and they listened as he read what he’d been given—Ten Commandments that are actually better rendered as ten utterances, brief as they are, and even more so in Hebrew.

      Here’s what the story said about this response: “When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.’ Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.’”

      Here’s what’s striking about this: Moses’ admission that the reason for all the spectacle, the shock and awe, has nothing to do with God’s presence, God’s essence. There’s nothing about God that is fire and smoke, trumpets blasting, thunder thundering. This isn’t how God necessarily comes to manifest among humans; this isn’t how God’s essence substantiates. No, this has to do with some human need, a human expectation of God.

      Not unrelatedly, there’s been another shot fired in the culture war about religion. Bill Maher—comedian, and provocateur who’s got his own talk show, and mind behind the film Religulous by which he meant to strip naked the ridiculous nature of religion itself—made comments about Islam that then had movie star Ben Affleck coming to Islam’s defense.

      Now, already you can likely guess that the discussion wasn’t an intellectually rigorous one. Not that I think these two are incapable of intellectual rigor—I have no idea about that—but I do know the context for the conversation isn’t conducive of such a thing: a talk show that is often more of a shout-down. Plus, what little I know of each of these two indicates that neither has any actual experience with Islam or any other “religious” practice for that matter.

      So, what superficiality got played out between these two—attacker on the one side and defender on the other—is the idea that there are two kinds of people in the world: there are religious people and their gods, and there are irreligious people and their common sense; there are people who will defend religion (or at least their religion) against any and all attack or critique, and there are people who see religion as, well, “religulous.”

      Amidst all this straw-man knocking-down is this depth that goes uncovered and unexplored and indeed probably entirely unknown: the idea that Lord himself, the Living One whom we meet in the Bible and with whom many people of the book throughout history and the world over pilgrimage through life to life, is as critical of religion as Bill Maher could ever be.

      The Bible is a deeply ironic

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