August 30, 2026 · Rev. Dr. James Olson · Exodus 3:1-15; Matthew 16:21-28
Moses asks God's name at the burning bush; Peter can't accept what Jesus says is coming. With help from T. S. Eliot's cats and Schrödinger's, Rev. Dr. James Olson suggests we'll never get God into a box, and that faith asks something simpler: trust, love, do, and learn to live with the mystery.
Transcript
I want us to think about the name of things this morning. T.S. Eliot guided us in thinking about this. [reads T. S. Eliot's poem “The Naming of Cats”]
We have in our stories this morning Peter and Moses, who are contemplating a name that they don't know. In Exodus. God says to Abraham, I am the God of your father Abraham, God of Isaac and Jacob. I have come to save you. And Moses asks, who am I to bring this message? God says, you are who I will be with no. Fear to bring this message to Egypt. And Moses asks, but what name shall I use? And this is where the Hebrew gets really interesting, because there is nowhere else in all of recorded Hebrew literature, whether in Scripture or not, we get I am who I am. It's a very weird Hebrew construction. I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and the God of you. I am who I am, Moses says.
In Matthew. We have Peter. Jesus has just told Peter and all the disciples of his trial and crucifixion coming up, and Peter denies it. No, Lord, get thee behind me, Satan! Foreshadowing his denial at the crucifixion itself. Right? Jesus reveals himself to Peter, who he is. I am the Son of God, the living God.
And so we have these two men separated by a couple of thousand years. Faced with the question of who God is. What is God's name is important to Moses. What is God going to do is important to Peter. And both men. Doubt. They doubt themselves. They doubt what they're hearing. They doubt that whatever it is, is before them is even real. Moses is looking at a talking, burning bush. That's slightly odd. Not a thing you run across every day. And Peter is looking at his friend who he's walked with, who he's talked with, who is who he has eaten meals with, who he's run away from the law with. And all of a sudden, Jesus is giving him an entirely different message. And I can imagine that what Peter said to Jesus was much earthier than I would like to say in church. Because Peter was a fisherman. I love Peter. Wait till we get to Transfiguration Sunday I got a whole sermon about Peter's foolishness.
And in them we see ourselves, don't we? When we are faced with things we don't understand, we doubt it's our first reaction. It's the thing that we do. It's like now that can't be. When we are faced with the divine, with the holy, when he, she, it, or they appear to us in unexpected ways. We don't believe. We are twenty first century post-enlightenment, postmodern human beings. We want facts. We want data. We want a manual. Well, we have one. It's over on the lectern. But we don't trust that sometimes. We want verifiable proof. And then we don't believe it when it comes.
And in Peter and Moses, we have two people wondering about the name of God that really only God knows. The Bible is real funny about in the Old Testament in particular, right? Our Jewish brothers and sisters don't write out or say, really, Yahweh, which really isn't the way that it's written in the Hebrew Scriptures. And we've been trying to figure out God. The closest we've come to is an idea about the Trinity, which still doesn't make a lot of sense to most folks. I got a sermon about that, too. Actually, I have a whole series of lectures on on the. heresies over the centuries that we have committed as Christians, trying to explain the nature of God because we can't. And that's the point.
Like the cat, the cat is the one who knows the cat. Any of you who have cats know this to be true. We just get to live with them for a minute. And it's a little bit like God. We go to Sunday school. We do our confirmation, we read scripture, we come and listen to the minister drone on every week. And we're no closer to understanding the true nature of God than we were when we started. In fact, in our attempts to try to pin down who God is, what God's name is, what God is all about, we sometimes end up further than when we started.
God says to Moses. I know who I am. I am your God. And that's all you need to know. God says to Peter and to the disciples, I am the son of the living God. That is all you need to know.
Both men were then sent back out into the world to act as if they understood, to believe, to trust. And to not spend so much time as Christians have in six thousand years trying to nail it down. Nail down, God.
Schrödinger's thought experiment. If you put a cat in a box and this gets into theoretical physics, which I won't do too deeply here, but you know, the you know, the basic outline of it. There's a cat in a box, but you don't know whether the cat is alive or dead until you open the box. But then opening the box changes the experiment. And so the result isn't correct. That is a way oversimplification of it. I'm sorry to anybody who is an engineer or a physicist listening. But the point is, the minute that we open the box, the minute that we try to figure out who God is, the nature of God changes. And gets smaller. Because we really want God in the box. We want the name of God. We want the definition. We want the answer. And our focus is just slightly off center.
Instead of worrying about the name of God and who God is. God has told us. Our only responsibility is to ask a slightly different question. What does the unknowable, ineffable God ask of us? Trust. Love. Do. That's it.
The content of our faith life should not be trying to use our twenty first century post-enlightenment postmodern brains to come up with a concrete answer about things that are beyond concrete answers. But to live with the mystery. That's so hard for us, isn't it? We don't like the unknown. There are things we can know and there are things we cannot know. And wisdom is what lies in between. We're called to be, not to know. The content of our faith. Life is really much simpler than many of us make it out to be. We're called to live in the mystery. Of the who and the why.
At Hope Norton's funeral. A couple of Saturdays ago, I read the beginning of the funeral service that the UCC provides for us in the book of worship, and it talks about gathering as a people to pour out our grief, to release our anger, to acknowledge our emptiness, and to know this about God. Simply that God cares. Because God loves us. If we free ourselves from the anxiety of trying to live into a rigid set of. We have to do it this way, and we have to know it this way. And we have to understand this in a particular way in order for our salvation to come. We miss the point.
Now, this is not an excuse to stop coming to church. In fact, it's an invitation to come even more often to together as a people, as God's people in this time and in this place, to walk this journey of faith, of faith, not of discovery. This journey of faith together. To talk freely about matters of faith, whether it's helping a family that is in trouble because. Well, because. Whether it's discerning how best to use the money that we have, whether it's trying to figure out how best we might serve Rockport and Cape Ann in the world. And to do it all grounded in love, in the invitation God gives us to walk as disciples.
Peter was a fisherman. A blue collar worker, relatively uneducated, went back to his nets for a while after the crucifixion. Moses was adopted into the ruling class in Egypt. Well educated and rejected all of it to return to his people. Both of them while trying to figure out who God was, became improbable leaders. We can do that too. If we focus on the right things. Thanks be to God.