RUN, MOSES, RUN!
Who’s that running down the street,
Down the street with feet so fleet?
That our Mose who’ll set us free?
Yellin’ “MOVE, I gotta flee!”?
Moses givin’ us conniptions
Runnin’ like a scared Egyptian!
RUN, MOSES, RUN!
Moses the fugitive? We always knew there was a reason he had to hide out among the smelly sheep in Gideonm, but the notion of a wanted desperado is a hard to sync with our image of Moses the Liberator. We are more comfortable with Moses di Michaeangelo, the massive granite sculpture of a fierce, horned Moses scowling as he gathers his long beard. Or, of course, Charlton Heston’s Moses, covering his pecs with crude shepherd’s cloth and raising his staff against the mighty Pharoah.
Moses the fugitive?
Most of us remember famous media depictions of fugitives, including the 1993 movie starring Harrison Ford and the 1963 television series staffing David Janssen, both actors playing Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent man convicted of killing his wife. Both fugitives were entirely justified because – unlike our Moses – they did not do the crime they were accused of.
When I was in the Air Force, so long ago that the aircraft I supported are in the Smithsonian, my base commander was a famous fugitive during World War II. Colonel William W. Parramore, Jr., was a quiet man who never missed a chapel service and always wrote a 20-dollar check to the chaplain fund – a princely donation in 1966, worth about $193.10 in today’s money. When he was referred to in military letter codes, William Parramore was Whiskey Papa, which seemed amusingly inappropriate for this ascetic, teetotaling man. I don’t think anyone ever told him his lady wife was called Whiskey Mama behind his back. I always enjoyed using the military alphabet and often considered using Papa Juliet as as a nom de plume.
Be that as it may, William Parramore was a fighter pilot over Germany in the Second World War. His plane was shot down and he bailed out just ahead of a Wehrmacht patrol. He managed to elude them for days, sometimes finding himself crouching behind a thinning hedge row as enemy troops walked by so closely he could read their insignia. Finally, after several close calls he managed to escape across the Swiss border where he was taken in by sympathetic farmers and hunkered down until he could be rescued. William Parramore – Whiskey Papa – was a wartime fugitive and I was proud to serve under him.
But we don’t want to overlook another famous fugitive who, like Moses, was also guilty of the crime for which he was being sought. That fugitive was our own Martin Luther and his crime – at least in the view of Papal authorities – was heresy. Refusing to retract any of his 95 theses or the scores of heretical tracts he was circulating, religious leaders sought him out to be tortured or burned at the stake. Like Moses, Luther ran. Frederick III of Saxony pretended to kidnap Luther to keep him safe at Wartburg Castle. Luther discarded his monk’s robes, grew a beard, and used the name Junker Jörg until the coast was clear.
But let’s return to where we left Moses, a fugitive surrounded by sheep and Reuel’s daughters and possibly reconciled to living out his life in those cozy fields.
And that is where our scripture lesson today leaves him, a wanted murderer, a fugitive, content just to be alive.
But we all know that is not where the story ends. The texts that have been set aside for our summer readings will jump from here to Exodus 14 and 15, the deliverance of the Hebrews at the parting of the Red Sea. But what happens between Chapters 2 and 14?
Most of us know those wonderful stories very well, and that’s because most of us rely on scripture, not Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic, The Ten Commandments.
But not everyone is as biblically literate as we are. Martha had a parishioner at North Baptist Church who was distressed by the fact that the story Martha read from the pulpit was not the same drama she had viewed in VistaVision. In 1956 wags would go the movie so they could tell their neighbors, “I liked the book better.” But in fact, millions who saw the film had never read the book.
Many of the film’s characters are absent from Scripture but the actors are well known. Yul Brynner displays a frozen scowl with emotions ranging from angry to angrier. Edward G. Robinson plays a thuggish Israelite but we miss the cigar he made famous in Little Caesar. Vincent Price as Baka displays the cinematic creepiness that made him famous. John Derek’s sinewy body glistens with so much grease Debra Paget would have slid right off him. Yvonne DeCarlo previews the same character she brought to life in The Munsters. And Charlton Heston expresses the same righteous rage as when he defied NRA critics to pry a gun from his “cold dead hands.”
But we know very well that the crucial development that transforms Moses from a cowering fugitive to a mighty liberator is God’s miraculous appearance in a bush that burns but is not burned.
In the movie, if you listen carefully, the voice of God is Heston’s own baritone, inadvertently creating the illusion that Moses is talking to himself. That raises some Jungian issues that are far too complex to go into here. But it is a dramatic scene.
The most profound revelation in the scene – in scripture and on screen – is when God reveals his name to Moses:
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you … This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations.” (Exodus 3:14-15)
We know the name in Hebrew – Yahweh – is so sacred that Jews will not pronounce it aloud, some times substituting HaShem, “the name,” in conversation. One of our Diakonia teachers – now our Bishop, Paul Egensteiner – declined to pronounce the name aloud out of respect to Jewish brothers and sisters.
But when God revealed God’s name to Moses, the importance of this revelation is enormous. God is revealing to Moses that God is not merely present today, but present outside of time.
Referring to the past, we say, “I was.” God says, “I am.”
Referring to right now, we say, “I am.” God says, “I am.”
Referring to the future, we say, “I will be.” God says, “I am.”
This is no rhetorical exercise. It is a mind-boggling disclosure about the nature of God. It is a stunning revelation that our concept of God may be too small.
Because God exists in all of time. If, to us, the bondage of the Jews in Egypt took place five millennia ago, we must try to grasp the fact that to God it is happening and is always happening.
That is one reason events reported in the bible are so important to our lives. To our feeble frontal cortexes, the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage is a dim, distant historical event. But in God’s time it is happening.
To our feeble frontal cortexes, Jesus was crucified two thousand years ago, so long ago that it’s difficult for us to even imagine it. We rely on ancient scrolls and archaeological digs to remind us what happened, and sometimes it’s difficult to comprehend why the dusty past would have anything to do with us.
But in God’s time, the death and resurrection of Jesus is not an isolated historical event from long, long ago. In God’s time, it is happening now. It is happening yesterday, it is happening today, it is happening tomorrow, it is happening for all time, forever and ever.
And that is the message of the burning bush: a declaration to Moses that God’s liberating and saving power extends not only to the enslaved Hebrews, but to all creation, wherever and whenever we walk the earth.
Praise be to HaShem. Praise be to God.
Amen.
