KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 October
You are standing on holy ground
“Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” What do we mean by holy spaces? Morning after morning we meet in Chapel. It is “holy ground.” Why? Because of what Exodus 3 presents to us. It is, we might say, the quintessential story for the understanding of sacred or holy spaces.
It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the story of ‘the burning bush’ in which God reveals himself to Moses not only as “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” but, more importantly, as “I Am Who I Am,” the universal principle of all reality, of the being and the knowing of all things, we might say, philosophically speaking. Here is the defining moment for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What is that? The principle of ethical monotheism.
We are going to spend some time with the Book of Exodus. Not only does the idea of ‘exodus’ belong to the project of education – the idea of our going out from ourselves into a larger understanding of things – but the book itself is, I suggest, an ethical treatise to be considered alongside Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics. In a world where some political leaders think they are above the law, we need to reclaim an understanding of the ethical upon which law fundamentally depends. The ethical is about what is the good from which we might begin to determine what is right to do. The legal depends upon the ethical and not the other way around. The Book of Exodus teaches us much about the ethical and connects to a whole world of philosophical and religious thinking about what is good and what is right.
The story of the burning bush is definitive for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is about ‘Revelation,’ the idea that things are made known to us through what is seen and heard so as to be understood. Here we have a story which is the premise and presupposition of the Genesis story of creation. A bush burns and yet is not consumed. That is not natural. Exactly. That is the whole point. It is entirely about revealing the prior principle upon which the world as any sort of intelligible reality ultimately depends. God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush to reveal himself, not just in terms of particular and tribal identities – read our current identity politics – but in terms of something utterly universal, the famous ‘name’ of God as “I Am Who I Am.”