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The Treehouse: Conversations About God

Let’s move into a sorta long summation. (Previous post here if you need to look back.)

1. God creates everything (insert rainbow heart emoji here).

2. Breakage occurs (insert broken-heart emoji here).

3. Human beings are on their own, but also not really. (Refer to previous mention of God as possibly codependent.)

We have our first murder when Cain, the firstborn, not just of Eve and Adam but the first born, kills his brother Abel.

(Rabbi Harold Kushner once said he believed original sin wasn’t the woman and the man eating the apple, but that Cain killed Abel because he was afraid there wasn’t enough love from the father for both sons. Also, the idea of Original Sin came mostly from St. Augustine, who was a pretty randy guy before he got religion, so thinking about shame projection as the source of what’s become a foundational doctrine of some branches of Christianity, just sayin’. Consider Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing, which stance got him expelled from the Dominican order by Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI. But I digress.)

Now we have a lot of begetting, and the generations of those who worship the one God “who is better and more powerful than any of the other gods you losers claim with your sad little stone statues and their limited purview (one for rain, one for power in battle, etc. etc.). Our God is in charge of all it because our God created all of it.” (Massive paraphrasing here, but I’m not wrong.)

We have the story of the Great Flood (common myth), which might have been God’s version of uninstall/reinstall and the story of Noah’s Ark, then the covenant promise that God would never again flood the earth, a promise sealed with the sign of the rainbow in the sky.

There is lots more begetting, lots more generations, scene, scene, scene. Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. Now we’re in Egypt, the children of Israel are slaves. And along comes Moses (Moshe from mashah, to draw (out of the water)).

Which is where we’ve been trying to get, if you didn’t know. The Hebrew people are now slaves in Egypt, but even as slaves the king is anxious about their growing population, decides all Hebrew baby boys should be tossed into the Nile (no soldiers to grow up and overthrow his rule), which is how Moses ends up hidden in a basket, found and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter (delicious irony) and nursed and tended to by a Hebrew woman who just happens to be his actual momma (even more delicious irony).

Now. Moses grows up and one day loses his sh*t when he sees an Egyptian who is beating a fellow Hebrew. He kills the Egyptian, buries the body, and flees Egypt to escape a certain death sentence and settles for a while in Midian (probably the other side of the Sinai Peninsula-ish). While there he marries, has some kids, yada yada. Meanwhile, there is real suffering going on with the Israelites, and they cry out to God and God hears their cry. God makes a plan.

Back in Midian, Moses is out tending his father-in-law’s flock and he sees a bush that is on fire, but it doesn’t burn up, wut. Turns out, it’s God calling to him “out of the bush” and telling Moses he’s been selected to go back to Egypt and help deliver the people of Israel (Jacob) out of slavery and to lead them to the land of milk and honey.

Moses is all like, nah, not me, who am I to do this thing, and it takes some persuading, and finally Moses asks what he might have thought was a very clever trick question. "If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?"

In the ancient world, if you knew someone’s name, you had some power over them. Your name was more than a label, your name had meaning, revealed and gave away part of your essence.¹

Imagine the cheek, to ask God’s name. But God was ready with an answer for Moses. Sort of.

“And Elohim says, ‘I AM WHO I AM.² Say this to the people of Israel. I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:14)

I am. Hayah (pronounced haw-yaw). The name of God is basically vowel sounds YHWH, much more a breath than an actual word. (Try and pronounce aeiouy.)

This story right here is a foundational piece of my theology. To me, it shows a God who makes God’s self vulnerable — first by the risk of loving at all, and now by the risk of revealing God’s name, God’s very essence.

And yet. What is actually revealed? I am who I am? I will be who I will be? There are no further questions to be asked. There is no definition to be unpacked, no inferences to be made, no imagery to consider. It is an essential statement of being that is nearly unpronounceable. You breathe it rather than say it.

Thus, I see God as the one who both reveals and hides at the same time. (And there is lots more of this to come.)

Also? I can’t help but think of this name, YHWH, this essence of God that is basically an exhalation, as the ruah that moved across the face of the waters, as the gasp that went into the clay creature ha-adam, that breathed humanity into life. Again, I’m not a biblical scholar; I’m more coming at this from the standpoint of themes that resonate.

So this name of God, this essence of God is not just breath. It’s dynamic.

1. Adam from a-dammah. Isaac from Yitschaq (“he laughs,” the marvelous joke of Sarah and Abraham having a child in their nineties). Jacob, from aqeb, meaning heel, since apparently this younger twin was born breech, and whom God renamed Israel, “God strives” from sarah and el.

2. Can also be read as “I will be who I will be.”