Whenever we have a baptism we are especially aware of the choosing of names. I imagine that most of us have some story associated with our own names, either why they were given, or how we were given a nickname, or peoples' inability to spell them. Let me tell you about the names of these three children. The name Isaac means "laughter" in Hebrew, because Sarah laughed when she heard that at the age of 90, she would bear a child. The name Elijah means "Yah is my god", and it is the name of the Hebrew prophet who called down fire from heaven. The name Cecily belonged first to a young Roman woman who founded a church and may have been martyred in the 3rd century. She is considered to be the patron saint of musicians.

Today, we don't think of names as having any special qualities in themselves, but in the ancient world, the knowledge of a person's name gave power over that person. The name and the person were so closely linked, that they were thought to share the same essence. An example would be the name of Moses, which means "pulled out", because he was pulled out of the river, and then later, he pulled his people out of slavery in Egypt. The reason today's lesson from Exodus is important, is that God revealed his name (as distinct from his title) to Moses, thereby sharing his power with Moses in some way.

In order to understand the story, however, we need to reflect on the odd situation Moses found himself in. For Moses was a third culture person: that is, his parents were Hebrew, his adoptive family was Egyptian, and as an adult he lived in yet a third culture, of the Midianites. To the best of my knowledge, it was only 20 or 30 years ago that the experience of being a third culture person was recognized or studied. Children whose parents are from two separate cultures, and who then are taken to live in a third culture, as children of missionaries, diplomats, and military personnel often are, have similar issues. They may be uncertain of who they are, while at the same time being very good at blending in; they may feel that they do not belong anywhere, and choose to form only superficial relationships, and they may have been forced to hide feelings of sadness when the family has moved from one place to another.

So one of the things I wish I knew about Moses, is when he learned that he was Hebrew. Being raised in the Pharaoh's household, with all the advantages a royal family had to offer, Moses may have fully identified himself as an Egyptian. There would have been no reason in his childhood, to explore his Hebrew background, and yet he may have been self-conscious about being adopted and feeling different. As a teenager, he may have begun to ask questions about where he came from and who he was. What a shock it must have been to learn that he was the son of slaves, and not an Egyptian at all.

In a very poignant sentence in Exodus 2, it says that one day Moses went out to his people, and saw their forced labor. When an Eghptian overseer began to beat a Hebrew slave, Moses reacted, and killed the overseer. The next day he tried to intervene in a fight between two Hebrews, and one of them asked Moses if he intended to kill him, as he had killed the Egyptian. That was when Moses fled from Egypt, feeling alienated from both the Hebrews and the Egyptians. Among the Midianites, he met the family of Jethro, married one of his daughters, and had a son. He became a shepherd, probably suppressed his grief over the events in Egypt, and settled into his third culture.

All of this is the context for today's lesson, when Moses is shepherding his flock. We tend to imagine this as a tranquil stroll along a path, but the text says that he was "beyond the wilderness", which I take to mean, past the territory known to the Midianites. Perhaps Moses was trying to redirect his flock back home, when a lamb wandered off and Moses went to retrieve it. He was moving purposefully in this direction, when the burning bush caught his attention over there--so he "turned aside" to see it. Moses went closer to look at the bush, and God was in the fire, watching to catch the attention of Moses. Notice the frequent use of verbs of seeing, looking, and observing in this story.

When he heard the voice calling his name, Moses may not have had any idea who it was. God has to introduce Godself, by saying, I am the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Given the likelihood that Moses did not identify himself as a Hebrew, and given the fact that the 2 Hebrew men who were fighting had rejected his intervention, Moses' fear of looking at God seems very natural. The drawing on the cover of the bulletin is an attempt to capture this moment. Of course the fire that burned but did not consume was astonishing, and the voice from the midst of the fire was mysterious, but how much more menacing was the God of his Hebrew ancestors!

What Moses hears next is that God has been observing the Hebrew people, and has seen how the Egyptians oppress them. God intends to rescue his people, and Moses is the agent He has chosen. But this task is not something Moses wants to do. The palace guard know about the murder of the Egyptian overseer, and the Hebrew people may not welcome him with open arms. "Who am I, that I should go to Pharoah?" Moses asked. From our 21st century perspective the answer is obvious: Moses speaks Egyptian, Moses is familiar with the way things are done in Egypt, he is a Hebrew by birth, AND he has been away a long time in another culture. He is a perfect intermediary among God, Pharoah, and the Hebrews.

Then Moses raises his second objection, that the Hebrew people are not likely to accept Moses as one who has been sent by God. What, after all, is God's name? And so God tells Moses his real name, and he tells it in two forms. In the first telling, God used the first person: "I am who I am", but in the second telling God used the third person. The name is a causative verb, to be, and it is very hard to translate. "He who causes to be" is one translation, and another is: "Am, Be, Is" or, "I am He who causes to be everything that is". The Hebrew pronunciation of the name is Yahweh, and it is very close to the sound we make with a sharp intake and release of breath: like this_____. Try it with me, with your mouth open: doesn't that sound like Yah --Weh? So the name of God is the very breath of life within us. Whenever you are reading the Old Testament, and you see the title LORD spelled out all in capital letters, the name Yahweh is in the original. Later in history, the Jewish people thought the name of God too holy to say out loud, so they would substitute "Adonai", which means, "my Lord", and that is how the English translators came to use the LORD all in capitals.

I draw two conclusions from this story. The first one is that the process of breathing is a sign or a metaphor for God's presence within us. In the first creation story, it says we are made in God's image; in the second creation story, it says God breathed the breath of life into the human being he created. This means that God's breath, God's spirit, has come into us, all of us by the very fact that we are alive. Then in the story of the burning bush, we learn that the very name of God, "I am who I am" is the sound of that breath. I conclude that God is like the air we breathe: both within us and outside us.

The second conclusion is that God sometimes deliberately "stands apart" from us, in order to wake us up to some purpose or task He wants our help with. In the Moses story, God needed a leader capable of speaking to Pharoah, capable of leading the Hebrew people, and willing to obey God's guidance. He got Moses' attention with the burning bush, and met the four objections Moses made, most especially with the promise that He would be with Moses all the way.

So today, we have been reminded that the real name of God, Yahweh, means breath of life, the one who causes to be everything that is. We rejoice in the baptisms of Isaac, Elijah and Cecily; and we understand that Yahweh knows each of us by name, from the inside out, for to Him all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from Him no secrets are hidden. May God graft in our hearts the love of God's name, Yahweh.   Amen