Sermon

I Know You by Name

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Of all of the photos that have emerged from the Occupy Wall Street protest movements, surely one of the most arresting was that of 4 men, clad in dark business suits, carrying a 50-pound golden calf made of papier mache through the streets of New York. The Blogosphere lit up with accounts of people, many of whom from outside of the Judeo-Christian heritage, who recognized the symbol. Such is the power of the story we heard in last week’s Old Testament lesson. You’ll recall that Moses had gone up Mt. Sinai to confer with YHWH. The absence of their leader made the Israelites anxious, and so they called for Aaron to fix their anxiety. He did so in the time-honored way: by creating a tangible symbol – the golden calf -- for the people to rally around.

And rally they did, angering God and endangering their own welfare in the process. Moses was able to persuade God to withhold his justifiable wrath, and in today’s lesson, we hear the continuation of the story. God will honor God’s promises, but will delegate to an angel the task of accompanying the Chosen People to the Promised Land. The implication is that God’s wrath is still burning pretty hot, and that it is safer for the people if one of God’s emissaries leads the people rather than God’s self.

But Moses is having none of that. In an amazing display of chutzpah, he says in essence, “Hey, this was your idea, this business of schlepping your people to the Promised Land. If you’re not going to accompany us, then don’t send us at all.”

And God says, “I will do the very thing you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”

The intimacy of this divine exchange is breathtaking. Each has full knowledge and trust of the other, enough for Moses to name courageously before God what the people need, and for God to listen to that persuasive wisdom and to choose to abide with them in their journey. And only through that intimate knowledge of God is Moses able to trust. He dares to petition God, not because he underestimates God’s holiness, but rather because he has a clear measure of God’s graciousness. We are meant to see that such trust stands in sharp contrast to the anxiety that permeated the Israelites who were camped below in the foot of the mountain.

Anxiety – fear – has a way of messing lots of things up. Fear messes up our capacity to think clearly, to react thoughtfully. Fear messes up our capacity to wait faithfully. The creation of all manner of the golden calves should surprise none of us. We get it. The Israelites were in the wilderness, their leader had gone missing, and their God was invisible. It was a situation ripe for fear to take over.

I’ve spoken before about the particular region of the human brain whose only function is to process fear. It’s called the amygdala. Neuroscientists have discovered that the amygdala “talks” to the thinking centers of our brain. Interestingly, they’ve also found that the connectors are not symmetrical – meaning that the brain messages are skewed one way. Our thinking brains get the fear message, but our fear center does not receive thinking messages back in equal measure. When our brains are flooded with fear messages, we don’t think. We  react. One of the ways we often react is to create idols: someone or, more often, something which we believe will keep us safe.

We see that dynamic in our gospel lesson for today as well. The Herodians and the Pharisees normally would be at each other’s throats. The Herodians placed their trust, their faith if you will, in the power of the Roman Empire. The Pharisees placed their trust, their faith if you will, in the power of the Torah. What these rival gangs had in common was fear. Fear of Jesus and the unknown kingdom he was ushering in. Fear that he would upset their carefully crafted status quo. Fear that he would devalue their precarious social currency in Jerusalem. Hence their trick question which they believed would give them the ammunition either to discredit him or to have him arrested. Jesus, of course, side-steps their trap with his customary brilliance. Caesar’s image is on the denarius so give it to him. And give to God the things that are God’s.

And what is it that is imprinted with the image and likeness of God? In a word, ourselves. We are made, as we read in Genesis, in the image and likeness of God. We have been given the capacity to engage the kind of trust-filled relationship with God that Moses exemplified on Mt. Sinai; that Jesus exemplified on Mt. Zion. But here’s the catch: only when we ourselves are clear, deep in our bones, that we belong to God – that God knows us by name – will trust, rather than fear, guide our actions.

Which brings me back to the papier mache golden calf. The implication is that we behave as though Wall Street is our God and that those who inhabit the economic centers of this country are, indeed Masters of the Universe as author Tom Wolfe called them. The irony, of course, is what the motto on our currency tells us: in God we trust.

Do we? Really?

In his stewardship letter to you all, your fellow parishioner Jeff Johnson observed that God invites us to respond to God’s grace with the very substance of our lives. In this way, a true stewardship response is reflected first in the way we live and then in the way we give. When we place our whole trust in the one in whose image we are made, who knows us each by name, we are able to live as stewards of all that God has given us.

In the name of this gracious God. Amen.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedralg>