2026-10-21
Brooke Strong
“A Place By Me”
Rev. Judith Bagley-Bonner
Exodus 33:12–23
There is something almost universal about today’s lectionary reading from Exodus. Moses says to God, “show me your ways so that I might know you!” And really, isn’t that our prayer too, no matter how we might phrase it: “are you really there, God?” I want to believe in you but it’s all so nebulous! Show me your ways so that I might know it’s really you, present and active in my life and in the world!”
Moses, like us, wants to see God. He wants some assurance that God is really there, that God is really leading them through the desert, that all of this wandering through the wilderness means something. And God’s answer is both yes and no. God tells Moses that Moses will see God—but not God’s face. Moses will be placed in the cleft of a rock, covered by God’s hand, and allowed to see only after God has passed by. “You shall see my back,” God says, “but my face shall not be seen.”
It is a strange and beautiful image. Moses wants to see God directly, but what he is given is a glimpse. And perhaps that is a pretty good description of what faith is like for most of us…We catch glimpses. We rarely see the whole picture while we are living it. We see pieces. We see one angle. Sometimes we see something only years later that we could not possibly have understood at the time. So I’d like to look briefly this morning at three things this passage might teach us about seeing God.
First, like Moses, we, too, often see God’s presence most clearly in hindsight, after God has been there doing something subtle or life changing, but we could only recognize it later, after God has moved on.
There are things in our lives that we simply cannot understand while they are happening. We are too close to them. We don’t know what they mean. We don’t know what they will become. Sometimes it is only years later that we look back and say, “Oh. Now I see what God was doing.”
I think about something that happened to me when I was a brand-new student at Kent State University forty seven years ago. There was a Christian event advertised on campus, and somehow there was some confusion about the advertisement. Almost nobody came. In fact, there were only four of us there, in a university of nearly twenty thousand. Four college students. Two sets of two friends each, who were strangers to the others. At the time, that was all we knew: we had gone to an event, and hardly anyone else showed up. But those four of us became dear friends. We spent that first evening together by accident, or so it seemed. All new students, we bonded quickly and became the nucleus of a tribe that would grow around us. We lived together in an off campus house the following year. And for nearly fifty years now, we have been soulmates to one another. Including spouses, the ten or so of us still get together twice a year without fail and those reunions are balm for the soul, and at least a year’s worth of therapy or spiritual direction. We have walked through divorces together. We have walked through alcoholism and a child’s suicide and numerous cancers together. We have been there for one another through faith crises and losses and all the ordinary and extraordinary things that happen over a lifetime. And I could not possibly have known any of that on the night we met at Kent State in 1979.
At the time, I didn’t think, “Ah, God is bringing these people into my life because they are going to be my soulmates for the next fifty plus years.” I couldn’t see it in the present. I could only see four young people who happened to show up at a poorly advertized event. It was only much later, looking backward, that I could see something else, that I could see that my life had turned on a dime that night and that this turn had the Holy Spirit’s fingerprints all over it.
And perhaps that is what Moses is doing in this passage. He is being given permission to see what has just happened—not the whole glory of God, not God’s face, but God’s back. Sometimes we don’t recognize God’s presence until we look backward. We may look back at a relationship and realize what a gift it was. We may look back at a difficult decision and realize that something important came from it. We may look back at a seemingly insignificant encounter and realize that it changed the course of our lives. And sometimes we may look back at something painful and, without pretending that the pain was somehow God’s plan, recognize that God was present with us in the midst of it, and was using it to forge a new and necessary path. We could not see it then. But now, looking backward, we catch glimpses.
The second thing I’d like to suggest this morning is that whatever we see of God, even in moments of theophany like Moses’s, whatever we see of God is always only one angle.
That is another remarkable thing about this story. Moses doesn’t get to see all of God. God puts Moses in the cleft of the rock and says, essentially, “You can see this much. You cannot see everything.” That seems to me to be a profound statement about human beings and our understanding of God. We are always looking from somewhere and see only one angle. We see one piece of the mystery. And that ought to make us humble about our theology! I think sometimes religious people talk as though they have God completely figured out. As though they know exactly what God thinks, exactly what God wants, exactly how God works. But this story suggests something very different. Even Moses—the great Moses, the one who speaks with God—does not get to see God face to face in this story. He gets a glimpse from one, narrow perspective of only part of the picture. And so do we. Even our best theology is only a glimpse. Our religious tradition is a glimpse. Our experience of God is a glimpse. Someone else’s experience of God may reveal something that we have never seen, which means that we should hold our convictions with humility. Because none of us sees the whole picture. None of us stands outside the mystery of God and looks at God fully and objectively. We are all standing in the cleft of the rock, seeing one little piece of something infinitely larger than ourselves. Maybe that is one of the reasons we need one another.
Perhaps the different ways people encounter God are not threats to our own faith, but a complementary picture that creates an overall larger view. Maybe sometimes another person is seeing an angle of God that we have not been able to see. And perhaps humility is not weakness, but simply an honest recognition of the limits of our vision.
And finally, the third thing I’d like to suggest this morning is that we have to step away from the ordinary round of our lives sometimes if we want to learn to see God’s involvement and hear God’s voice.
God takes Moses out of his ordinary surroundings and puts him, briefly, in the cleft of the rock with no other task but to watch and listen for God. Moses has to stop. He has to leave, at least for a moment, the ordinary demands of leadership, the wilderness, the people, the problems, the endless work of getting from one day to the next He has to become still and listen, and watch.
And perhaps that is part of what prayer and meditation are for. Not to escape our lives. Not to become less engaged with the world. But to step out of the constant noise and activity of our lives long enough to become aware of what is already there. Because maybe God is not absent. Perhaps we are simply distracted. Maybe the difficulty is not that God isn’t speaking, but that we are rarely quiet enough to listen. Perhaps the difficulty is not that God isn’t present, but that we are moving too quickly to notice. We need our own clefts in the rock. We need places and practices where we step outside the daily round of life and become available to God. That may be prayer. It may be meditation. It may be walking alone. It may be sitting quietly in the morning before the day begins. It may be yoga or worship on Sunday morning.. It may be whatever helps us stop long enough to remember that there is more to reality than what is immediately demanding our attention. There is a depth that indeed hums along simultaneously to our daily round, a place where God abides, “a place by me” as God described it to Moses.
For me, it has been enormously helpful to develop a centering prayer practice, which involves sitting in silence for twenty minutes a day, and when I find my mind wandering, simply returning to an anchor word as I sit in God’s presence. I usually use the word love since for me, that is just another name for God. I don’t do it perfectly, I miss days here and there, but the practice has centered and stilled me and made me much more attentive to the Spirit in my life. And if I miss a couple days in a row, I notice my mind starts to become squirly rather than calm and open to the Spirit.
So Moses asks God, “Show me your glory.” And God does—but not in the way Moses expects. God does not give Moses the whole picture. God gives him a glimpse from behind. And perhaps that is enough. Because maybe faith is not about finally seeing everything clearly. Maybe faith is learning to recognize the glimpses we are given. Sometimes we recognize God only by looking backward. Sometimes we see only one small angle of a mystery much larger than ourselves. And sometimes we need to become still, to step away from the ordinary round of life, so that we are awake enough to notice what has been there all along.
Moses wanted to see God’s face. Instead, he saw God’s back.
And perhaps, that is how we see God, too—not all at once, not completely, but in glimpses: looking backward, looking humbly, and learning to be still…
I said I was going to say three things in this sermon, but I actually want to add one more, since this MIGHT be my last sermon here. (I have learned not to declare that because I have bounced back so many times now) But I am hoping this retirement will more or less stick, so I want to take just a brief moment to thank you for the privilege of your time in all these sermons I have preached over long, intermittent years here now. Preaching is a unique thing without much parallel in the wider culture. Where else is someone given the chance to speak their thoughts for ten to twenty minutes, uninterrupted, and have a whole group of people listen, without the chance to respond right away? It has been a strange, even an odd, calling and I hope I have stewarded the task faithfully. And indeed, I thank you for the privilege of your time, your attention and mostly, your warm and healing love over these many years since I was fourteen years old. This will always be my home and you will always be my family. Amen.
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