Poolesville Presbyterian Church
02.01.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Exodus 3:1-15
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“Hallowed be thy name.”
There it comes, right there in that third snippet. The word “hallowed,” which comes thumping down on us in all it’s anachronistic glory. It’s just not a word we use in our regular speech, not at all. When was the last time you used the term in conversation? And yet here it is, inserting itself into our consciousness, as obscure as some long lost nubbin of Victorian era slang. We’re as likely to use the word hallowed tomorrow as we are to use the word podsnappery (which means to pretend to be above it all), daddles (which are your hands), skilamalink (which means shady), or gigglemug (which means an always-happy person).
Seriously, though. We should all use more Victorian-era slang. It’s a fine bit of nanty narking. (which means fun) Some words just shouldn’t fall out of use.
But they do, as we stop doing the things that give those words meaning and relevance. Like, say, the words Araba and Barouche, Calash and Clarence, Curricle and Herdic, Sociable and Sulky, Tarantass and Whiskey. A hundred years ago, everyone in this room would have known what those words meant, and what they had in common. And if you know a guy named Clarence whose love of whiskey makes him first sociable and then sulky, that doesn’t count.
So what do all of these words have in common?
They’re all kinds of horse-drawn conveyance. We just don’t use them, because the way of living they represent is not a way of living we’re familiar with.
in the meantime, “hallowed” falls from our mouths, and we sort of know what it means, sort of. We know it’s kinda sorta related to the holy, to the idea we should set something aside as special or unusually important. It refers to battlefields, or to some place that is unusually important, or...conceivably...to the Vince Lombardi Trophy. It has to do with the things and symbols and places we set aside as being fundamentally different, special, important in ways that are hard to articulate.
Hagiastheto to onoma sou, it rings out in the ancient Greek in which Matthew’s Gospel was written, which in the English reads, literally, “Let it be holy-ized the name of you.” That the Greek has a word that means “let it be holyized” is one of the reasons Greek is so simultaneously fun and headache inducing. Why would we “holy-ize” such a thing? Why does it matter?
That meaning comes from the root of where we derive this word, in the passage you’ve just heard from Exodus. Moses is wandering around, and suddenly...whoah...the burning bush, a shrubbery entirely alight but not being consumed. He goes over to check it out, and it speaks, which adds considerably to the bizarreness factor.
He’s instructed to remove his shoes, because he is on holy ground, and then told that this fter asking just who in the Sam Hill he should tell people he’s been talking to, he’s told.
Among the Jews of Jesus’s day and among Jewish folk today, the name of God was approached with reverence. Various Hebrew words were and are used to describe God. There’s Elohim, which is the word used. There’s Adonai, which means “Lord.” And then there’s the name itself, which is written out in four Hebrew letters, a Yud, a Hey, a Vav, and a Hey. Whenever that term is written in Hebrew, Jews don’t say it. They say “Adonai” instead. Funny thing, and your name-of-God factoid for the day: the name “Jehovah” was entirely made up by European Christians in the late middle ages. It comes when you muddle up the consonant sounds of the Hebrew letters YuhHeyVavHey with the vowel sounds of Adonai, and there’s no evidence ancient Jews used that word.
I endeavor not to tell this to Jehovah’s Witnesses when they come to the door. Seems sort of mean, although I do keep a Powerpoint available in case they get too persistent.
The Tetragrammaton, it’s called, because of the four letters, and while we can say it...Yahweh..those sounds don’t convey the depth of it’s meaning. Eyeh Asher Eyeh, it’s pronounced, I say, hoping that this building is well grounded. And there lies the holiness of that name, the sense of the holiness that Jesus is evoking in this prayer.
“I Am That I Am,” Moses hears. But the words can mean “I Am What I Shall Become.” And they can mean “I Will Be What I Will Be.” Finally, Moses is told, simply, “Tell them that the I Am sent you.”
This name bears the sacredness that arises out of unmediated interaction with existence...existence in its depth and power, the root and ground and foundation of all being. beyond language, beyond our ability to grasp and contain and control it. This is more than a little overwhelming. Frightening, even. The holy isn’t easy, and it isn’t simple, and it isn’t mundane.
Holy? What does holy mean in a consumer culture? Honestly, it means very little. The holy is dangerous, and more than a little frightening. It is completely out of the ordinary, set aside as beyond the boundaries of all other things.
Holy? It is a place that is intentionally beyond the scope and scale of our everyday, both a time and a space set aside. We don’t have time for that. We rush about, carefully managing every moment, rushing through life with our every minute scheduled, our every instant accounted for. Unlike Moses, we’re in such a rush that we wouldn’t notice if a bush gave off an unusual radiance, any more than we’d notice that there’s a boxwood out front of the CVS that every once in a while pours forth steam. We’re on our way to the next thing, late and rushed and overscheduled. The holy? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Holy? What does holy mean in a culture that sells every last thing, that marketizes and brands. Some might say the flag can become a sacred object in our culture, and though I have issue as a Jesus follower with any national emblem...even my own...being declared holy, I also just can’t believe it given what I see. How many times tonight, as we watch our great national festival of football, will that same flag be used to sell you something? Buy our product and/or service, because America! And the holy things of my faith are no different. I read part of a book this last week entitled “Jesus Calling.” The phrase is copyrighted...meaning we’d better remember to bleep over that in the sermon podcast. What does the holy and the sacred mean in such a society?
Holy? How do we approach holy when we so easily confuse the carefully choreographed with the sacred, the tugging of our heartstrings with the shaking presence of our maker? We are used to things standing in between us and everything else, to experiences are encountered and filtered through something else. Though words and symbols, which point to things but are not the things themselves. Through the screens that fill our days with the endless flicker of thousands upon thousands of pixels, standing like a shimmering wall, simultaneously connecting and separating us and our friends and our followers and our work. What does the holy mean, to creatures like us, used to having the world processed for us by intermediaries?
And here Jesus is, telling us whenever we pray in private, whenever we speak our relationship to our creator into our days, to remember that none of those ways of being, so part of our lives, can even begin to express the nature of that space where we encounter God.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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