God’s name isn’t God. In the bible, in the Book of Exodus, God introduces himself to Moses as I AM WHO I AM. You have to wonder what God’s parents were thinking giving him a name like that. He’d never be able to get his dress shirts or his luggage monogrammed. And who knows what kids at school would call him. Ben and I have been working on nicknames for Linus. The best yet is “Linusaur” or “Linusaurus Rex.” We shortened that just to “Rex.” Which made us think of Oedipus Rex.
But you can’t call a kid Oedipus, so we shortened Oedipus to Ed, but obviously spelled O-E-D. Which made us think, of course, of the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. Which we figured could be shortened further, either to Ford or to Ox – so that now he’d have a name that sounds more like the kind of name a boy living in Darien, Connecticut should have.
Which is all to say: I can understand why God decided just to go by God. How to translate the original Hebrew of I AM WHO I AM is something that’s been argued about for thousands of years. The name is made up of two Hebrew verbs in the imperfect form. English doesn’t have imperfect verbal forms, but other languages you may have studied in school do. Like: You can say, using just one word, in French or in Spanish, “Ox was walking to the lacrosse field.”
In both of these languages, an imperfect verb tells you two things: how something happened and when something happened. How it happens is incompletely. Ox was walking is an incomplete action. We don’t know when or know if he stopped walking, right? He went on, and maybe went on and on, walking. It’s unclear. Ox was walking does not convey the same meaning as – by contrast – Ox walked, which is a completed action. Ox walked. And then, at some point, he stopped walking. He did not go on walking.
The imperfect verbal form conveys a sense of ongoing-ness, of continuing-on-ness. That’s how it happens. When it happens is in the past. In French or in Spanish, an imperfect verb is a past-tense verb. Ox was walking. In Hebrew, though, the how is the same, but the when is different. Imperfect verbs convey that same sense of incompleteness, of ongoing-ness, of continuing-on-ness in Hebrew as they do in modern languages like French or Spanish, only the verbs describe something happening not in the past, but in the present or in the future. In Hebrew, an imperfect verb is a present-tense or a future-tense verb. Ox is walking. Ox will be walking.
So God’s name is I AM WHO I AM. Or, actually – and most bibles actually do suggest this translation in the footnotes – God’s name is I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. Either I AM WHO I AM or I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE works. But what doesn’t work is I WAS WHO I WAS.
I think this is really important: First, God’s given name is a verb. God is not a noun. God is a verb. God is an action that is in some mysterious sense playing out in us and between us and all around us. God is not a Someone, but a Something that is happening – and in which we are participating. And second: God’s name is an imperfect verb. God is an incomplete action: God is Something that is still happening, is Something that is happening in an ongoing way. God is Something that is happening and which will continue happening. God is Something that is yet to happen. God is a wondrously unfolding future. God is, in some unfathomable way, unfinished. God is still a work in progress. (So it’s okay if we are, too.)
There are modern theologians who take this idea radically seriously. Eberhard Jüngel and Wolfhart Pannenberg – who both, obviously, also would need nicknames if they want to go out for Darien High School field sports – they describe God not as a being, not as a higher or a heavenly being, but as an energy of becoming. They even say that God doesn’t exist, not fully, not yet. Rather, they say, God is always in the process of coming into existence.
If you don’t understand what the heck that means – good. That’s kind of the point. God is as unknown as the future is unknown. The identity of the God whose name is I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE is not set, is not fixed. You can’t make a statue of I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE and put it on a pedestal and worship it. You can’t look to the past. I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE doesn’t live in the past; I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE lives in the future. The future is God’s very essence. The future is a part of what God is and who God is. That’s why it’s not only forbidden to make an idol or a graven image of God, but impossible.
That is the lens through which I read passages like this morning’s scripture lesson from the Gospel of Matthew. To start, it’s worth remembering that taking the bible seriously and taking the bible literally are not the same thing. Jesus spoke the way all of us speak: not always clearly, using figures of speech and hyperbole, and in metaphors, in metaphors so familiar that it’s easy to forget they’re metaphors, like when we say, “I see what you mean.” (We don’t actually see.)
I don’t think it is a good idea to take this apocalyptic, end-of-the-world stuff literally. Not only because Jesus said, “About that day and hour, no one knows,” not only because Jesus said that he, that he himself, didn’t even know when or know how it’s all going to end. But because, if you take scriptures like this literally, you only end up making nonsense of them.
An evangelical pastor in South Africa predicted that, this year, all the true Christians would be disappeared, would be beamed up to heaven, would be raptured – “two in the field, one taken,” just like it says here in the Gospel of Matthew. This was supposed to have happened on the 23rd of September. TikTok blew up. But what didn’t, of course, was the world.
The end of the world is something that does come up a lot in the New Testament. Jesus talked about it, as you heard read earlier. Even though he wasn’t clear on the specifics, Jesus did seem to believe that it was just about to happen. Obviously, it didn’t happen. So, you know, that’s embarrassing. But the Gospel of Matthew was written long after Jesus had been proven wrong, and stuff like what you heard read this morning was kept in the story anyway. Which makes me think that Matthew and the earliest Christians must have understood what modern fundamentalists never quite understand: That Jesus was speaking metaphorically.
I think all this end-of-the-world stuff is a way of talking about the future – in an ultimate, in an absolute sense. It is a way of dramatizing, of emphasizing, how unknowable and how frightening the future can be, how disorienting and how distressing it can be not to know how things are going to go. For someone, somewhere, the world is always ending. There is always some reason to be worried. There is always some reason to be afraid. Jesus paints a picture of the future in its most terrifying mysteriousness.
And what Jesus wants us to see is that however uncertain you are, however scared you are, no matter how dark and unlivable tomorrow may seem, God is in the future. God is in your future. The whole constellation of apocalyptic imagery in the New Testament – the world ending, the clouds parting and trumpets sounding, the return of Christ, the Son of Man – this is what it is all about, this promise: God will give you a future. God is coming to meet you, and where God is coming to meet you from is the future. The Eternal One is traveling back in time to be with you in your confusion and in your despair and in your inability to see the way forward.
What Jesus wants us to see is that there is a mercy trying to reach us from the future. There is a kindness trying to reach us from the future. This is what is out ahead, in the black darkness, in all that is unknown: The mercy of God. The kindness of God. It is flowing backward into your life, washing effects loose from causes, washing consequences loose from actions, washing outcomes loose from diagnoses, creating a new openness, creating new possibilities which, in the hard moment, you might never have dared to dream of.
Fate will never close in on you; the future will open before you – because God is the openness. God is the active opening of the future to you. God is the active opening of the future to a child on the day of his baptism. God is the active opening of the future to every person who yearns to do something big and wonderful, to do some good, with the one wild and precious life they were given. God is the active opening of the future to the ones promising “for better, for worse” who cannot begin to fathom all that “for worse” will mean for them. God is the active opening of the future to those same ones when there is very little of a marriage left. God is the active opening of the future to the sick. God is the active opening of the future to all of us in the hour when we breathe our last.
I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE is the empowering, freeing, life-giving, life-renewing, life-changing Energy and Presence that makes it possible for you to be who you will be. And so, there can be hope – the Advent hope we proclaim as we light a candle against the darkness. There can be hope in these days and in all the days of waiting and longing. There can always be hope. Amen.