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"Emmanuel: Glimpses of God Incarnate," December 1
Wednesday, December 1
Exodus 3:1-6
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“Fire and Presence”
A MAN, A BUSH, A CURIOSITY: LITTLE DID MOSES KNOW. Going about his lonely mountainside business, he spots a strange brightness. Upon investigation, this odd flame conceals a voice that knows his name and announces that God is there. This is not just another day at the office, adding on to the series of ordinary life. I would like to think that I, like Moses, would have turned aside to see the flame and be addressed by God. Perhaps I would have been too busy herding the sheep or thinking my solitary thoughts. Perhaps, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning worried, I would have used the light to sit down and have a picnic of blackberries. A man, a bush, a curiosity: little did Moses know that the first reward for meeting God is godly fear.
The world is God’s and those with sharp insight see God in many places. God is in the infinite gravity of black holes. God is there as the hawk going about its majestic, lethal business. But we know that God is not the black hole, nor the hawk, nor the dappled rays of sunlight illuminating the fernstrewn floor of a quiet forest. God is in the social world, too. We greet a stranger and believe that she, like me, bears God’s image. Yet we know that, because of sin, the image of God in many of us feels faint as a halfforgotten tune or an old love note scrawled on now-yellowed paper. Even with curiosity, it can be hard to touch the traces of God around us. We wonder: Where is the fire? Where is the voice?
This Advent, we once again quietly hope to peek into Jesus’s manger. What do we see? A charming baby, one of many? A symbol of Roman oppression? Little did we know that God among us drinks mother’s milk and reads the scrolls of the prophets. Yet, where the child Jesus is, God dwells. There is the fire. His is the voice that calls to us and gives us our true names. This ground is holy; take off your shoes.
– Rev. Dr. Timothy Lincoln, Assistant Dean for Planning, Research Professor in Theological Education, and Director of The Mary B. and Robert J. Wright Learning and Information Center
