“Your
path led through the sea,
your way through the mighty waters,
though your footprints were not seen.”
Psalm 77:9
All three
statements in verse 19 are statements of fact, but only one opens a
mystery.
Lord, even
though the path you led us upon through the sea, with mountains of water
walled-up beside us, and even though we knew we were at that moment in the very
eye of a miracle, through all of that, we never saw a thing of you, only your
power.
There was
nothing there to document what happened, save our experience. Like some diligent tree-hugger in a national
forest, you didn’t leave a footprint. Nothing.
Amazing.
When
Moses encounters an angel of the Lord in a startling burning bush, the bush,
miraculously, speaks. Moses has a fine Egyptian education, but it doesn’t take
an MBA to know something strange has begun, and he catches on quickly. He sees
the bush and leaves the path he’s on; he sidetracks, then takes off his sandals
on command. Credit him all of that—and more: when the bush starts speaking, he
hides his face.
That
desert encounter is a substantial discussion too, some say. Ancient Hebrew
texts make claims the burning bush encounter lasted a week. However long it
actually was, it’s was hardly just an ecstatic moment. When finally Moses
accepts the mission he’s been assigned, he asks the bush who he shall say sent
him.
That
answer echoes through all of scripture and has been translated a hundred
different ways by linguists far more learned than I. Recently I heard an
interesting take on the answer, a slight shift in verb tense: “I will become what I will become.”
The
unseen footprints of verse 19 remind me of that burning bush definition because
“I will become what I will become” offers a view of God that is ever-changing,
that will change, that must change, perhaps, because his people, his beloved,
his chosen, will continue to see him in different ways, as they always have.
I’m not arguing
for a God who has no fixed nature, who is not forever the same; but “I will
become what I will become” suggests something that even a rudimentary
assessment of life in this world makes unmistakable: God’s people not only have
seen him, but continue to see him in remarkably different ways. Zambian Pentecostals, Greek Orthodox, Opus
Dei Roman Catholics, evangelical Presbyterians, Baptist independents—you make
the list; all of them, all of us, worship God, but no two of us see or describe
or define this “almighty other” in quite the same way.
And how
wide is the tent finally? Isn’t that an interesting question?
In Psalm
77, Asaph sings the joy of remembering one single story from Israel’s grand
narrative, a story passed along, even in his day, by generations of
story-tellers. What happened at the shore of the Red Sea gives him courage to
face the day—that’s what the psalm is about. What happened at that moment is
not debatable. God was with us, Asaph says, with me, as he always has been. That’s
his joy and his resolution.
But the
footprints aren’t there because something unseen about this God of liberation
and joy and endless love remains beyond us, forever mysterious, even unknowable,
all of that even to those who love him, who do his will.
And these
very words, my paltry attempts to draw nearer to him, won’t get wholly there either
precisely because he is God and I am not.
For some of us at least, it’s not easy to admit we aren’t in control of
our lives and our destinies. But in the face of one whose fabulous miracles
leave no footprints, we are left on our knees before the mystery.
That may
well be the point. That, and this simple
resolution: we’re his, and he loves us.
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