Just as a reminder for both you and myself, a useful way of looking at Lent is to see it as a time to clarify what is deepest in us, that is, what we really want, how we operate, and what we really believe, or what we say we believe. And so within this context I would like to talk especially about this passage from the Book of Exodus that Chris read. I believe that this passage is one of the most important in the entire Bible because it plays out the claim that has been made by Jews and we Christians, the offspring of the Jews, that our god is different from all of the other gods or divinities in that the god of the Jews is best described as the "God of history". And what does this mean? Well, if you look at the religious systems in the world, either the ancient religions or the religions of today (although this is clearer in the ancient religions), the divinities of the ancient world were not much more than the elevated powers of nature. For example, storms, lightning, rivers, the sea, the air, and especially the powers of fertility. You can see why people came to this point of view. The beauty of these systems was based primarily on the idea that the gods were predictable. You knew what was going to happen because plants, for example, do not have a history. They simply grow, bear fruit, and then die. The process is repeated and this is the beginning and the end of it. But this Jewish God breaks out totally unexpectedly to enter into human affairs and none of the other gods in the ancient world did this; they were simply based on patterns. If you look at the great Oriental religions, which appeal widely to people in today's world - - Taoism, Confucianism, even Hinduism to some extent, and the other Oriental religions - - these divinities are radically different because they are simply the patterns of things that are already in place and people simply get themselves lined-up with these patterns. This is their religious quest. For the Jews, it is entirely different and this difference is indicated in this very important passage because we look at it and we see the thing that got this Jew-God going; we see that human oppression was the driving force that agitated this Jewish God to enter into human history: "I have seen the suffering of my people and have come to redress it". And here too this is even more unusual than all of the other gods because the gods of the ancient world and the gods of today are always the gods of the big battalions, the gods of the winners. And often enough Christians have so distorted the God of the Jews, and the God of Jesus the Jew, above all, as to make sure that this God is the God of the winners. But this is not the case. The God of Jesus, the God of the Jews, was the God of the oppressed, was the God of the people who were beat up and were ignored and were losers. Again, a radically different notion in comparison to the other religious systems. Even the Catholic religion that I grew up with was, to a certain extent, based on Notre Dame winning football games because "God was on our side".

So what is history? Trees and rocks do not have history. What is the essence of history? The essence of history is freedom and this is why this Jewish God is called the "God of history", because you cannot have history if you do not have free agents. For example, you can come and look at these benches three million years from now and unless the termites got them they would still be sitting there absolutely unchanged. Why? Not just because they are inanimate, but rather because they do not have freedom. It is only when you have freedom that you have history. This is why the Jews say that their God is the "God of history", because this God freely intervenes in human affairs. And of course from the other side, this God is also the source of human freedom as well. And here too this is very clear: if you compare all of the religions in the world with Judaism and Christianity, its offspring, in no religion is human freedom so exalted, so central. You may talk about obedience in Islam, or conformity to the Tao in Taoism, but to say that human beings can respond to this God who adresses them by answering "yes" or "no" is to say that we are able to "choose" this mode of response and that we too are free.

This is even expressed in this weird name that is given to God. "Yahweh" is the Hebrew word, maybe you have heard it. Nobody knows for sure what this word means. We know that it is a form of the Hebrew verb "to be" and that it is translated here, as it frequently is, "I am who I am". And even if you take this translation, this too expresses God's freedom because it means "I am who I choose to be". But I would like to suggest that there is another translation which is even more helpful with respect to what I am trying to get at. This translation runs: "I will be there when I will be there". In other words, God will operate and intervene in human affairs when she chooses to. And here we would seem to have a problem because if this God is on the side of the oppressed then why, in the name of God, when we live in a world where oppression is so manifest and so universal, does she not intervene and redress our suffering? We do not have to go to Northern Ireland or some places in Africa, you can look anywhere around you to see the powers of oppression working in all kinds of ways. So why does God not act? This highlights the notion that God should intervene if people are nasty. If we believe this, then we are ignoring the freedom of God. And in contrast, if we believe that because we are nice God ought to act, once again, we are ignoring the freedom of God. But why do we think this way? We seem to believe that if we are nice, if we are good, then God should make sure that we are taken care of. We believe that it is only fair that God should take care of us. It does not work this way because what happens is that we are substituting our idea of how God ought to work and how the world ought to work. By doing this, we are ignoring the freedom of God: "I will be there when I will be there".

Now this is profoundly important for one's religiosity because we human beings have this absolutely endless impulse to know, to be secure, to be certain, to know how things are going to work out, to know how the world can be calculated so that if we do this, then that will happen without a doubt. We want this in the worst possible way. We want this kind of safety. We want this kind of tidy and cozy universe in which we know how everything is going to work because of the way we do things. To do this is understandable, but to behave in this way is also a denial of the God that we say we believe in. And of course, the archetypal instance of this is Jesus. What did Jesus do? Jesus was constantly on the side of the oppressed: women, the handicapped, lepers, the diseased, and the outcasts. What did it get him? It got him killed because it is dangerous to behave in this way. It is socially disruptive. So we say that we believe in the God of Jesus and we believe in Jesus as the great manifestation of God and yet we ought to be able to look at the figure of Jesus and say: "All my nice, neat plans and schemes in fact do not work".

So where does this leave us if we operate in terms of this God whom we say that we believe in? It ought to make us very clearly conscious of the responsibility that we have for our world and for responding to the oppression that we find in our world, whether it is in ourselves, in our immediate environment, or in the world at large. We must do this in such a way however, knowing that we cannot calculate how all of this is going to go on and work out. There is a quotation that is frequently cited from Mother Theresa that stands in a long tradition of saints who said the same thing: "My job is not to be successful, my job is to be faithful". That is all, and God can manage and take care of herself. We do not have to manage God and say, "Now you need to do this". No, our job is simply to respond to what is going on in our world precisely in the faith that the God that we say we believe in still runs this universe and still holds this world in her freedom. What we can do is come to the point of faith where we absolutely believe, despite all appearances, that God's love is steadfast, that God is faithful, that God will act in God's own time. It is very difficult to talk about this in the University. We are here rationalizing everything. We live in a rational universe, do we not? No, not according to Christianity. At its deepest level the world is not subject to our powers of understanding, analysis, calculation, and above all, arrangement. Real life at its deepest is this mysterious dialogue between ourselves and this hidden other who will in fact love us in ways that we cannot calculate. This is terrifically important because we all want a God who is dependable: "I want a God who is predictable and dependable and who will do whatever I want, whenever I want it to be done". This is not the God of Jesus or the God of Moses, that is, the God of Exodus and the burning bush, or the God whom we say that we believe in. In coming to accept this, we believe that "God will be there when God will there".