“Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place you stand is holy ground…
  I am who am…this is what you shall tell the Israelites, I AM sent me to you.”

Many times we talk about God as if God is absent or hiding. God seems to be somewhere else rather than here and now in these particular conditions and this specific circumstance (good or bad, easy or difficult, painful or joyful).  God is out there or over there or up there.  It may seem rare that we actually can sense and acknowledge that God is here and now. 

One of the most powerful images of God’s presence is captured in the book of Exodus (Ex 3:1-8a, 13-15).  Moses is tending his father-in-law’s sheep in Midian near the mountain of God, when suddenly he notices a shrub that appears to be on fire; however, the blazing bush does not seem to be consumed by the flames.  Moses becomes very curious about this fire that burns but does not destroy!  He feels drawn closer to see what this is all about.  As Moses approaches the burning bush, God commands Moses to stop and come no closer until he removes his sandals, for the ground upon which the flaming bush burns is Holy Ground!

God is jolting Moses from a stance of curiosity into a posture of reverence before a mystery. God seems to want to steer Moses away from approaching God as a spectacle, and inviting Moses to go deeper, to touch the ground with bare feet so that there is nothing that will prevent or impede the holy encounter.  And then comes the only identification that God will give Moses:

“I AM WHO AM.”

The God who cannot be named is the God of encounter. Encounter and Engagement are so to speak the Being of God.  God is now!

So, God intends to ‘save’ the Israelites in Egypt by engagement and relationship and in no other way. The God of the Hebrew people can only be identified by the manifestation, or indeed, the incarnation and participation in the life of the beloved.  The intimacy of the divine relationship is demanding of the people.  There is a requirement – to recognize and engage with the Divine.  And this means without something ‘in – between.’  The divine encounter and engagement are manifested through the vulnerability of nakedness – a barefoot heart – daring to stand face-to-face with the blaze of a God whose yearning Love burns ceaselessly.

Luke’s Gospel (Lk 13:1-9) speaks about this divine encounter and its invitation (demanding an RSVP) as repentance.  Jesus’ language is strong here, when he points out that those who have suffered at the hands of Pilate and as the result of calamities did not suffer because of their ‘greater’ guilt and sin. 

“But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”

 Jesus seems to be saying that it makes no sense and is not even helpful to interpret the suffering of others as tied to the grievousness of their sin, as if God were quantifying and qualifying all of our actions and doling out punishments accordingly.  No, the ‘sin’ here seems to be related to the awareness of the depth of God’s yearning love for us and our response to and engagement with this Divine Love.

Here, I would suggest a meaning of repentance that involves not so much a turning away from particular sins as much as a turning toward the possibility of a divine newness.  It is a movement toward a mysterious transformation  that promises more than we can imagine, and along with this comes the corresponding move away from old patterns of supposed fulfillment – the ‘parts of us’ that we fear will be destroyed or ‘perish.’

Paradoxically, the powerful love of God seems to demand our engagement for its efficacy. God is God right now, and here and now is where we can and must encounter God. This right here – wherever you are in your life – is the place or the’ sacred ground’ where God is encountered.  God IS the encounter if we will Trust!  This means that we must be vulnerable enough to risk that God’s love can transform us in our lives now in a way that will not destroy us but rather make us whole. 

We get yet another glimpse of this God on fire for us, and indeed the divine patience, as characterized at the close of the Gospel today in the description of a barren fig tree. A fig tree that has not borne fruit for years is threatened with being cut down, but then given more time to bear fruit.

‘Sir, leave it for this year also,
and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it;
it may bear fruit in the future”

Continued effort and the cultivation of practice in accepting and engaging God as God comes to us in every moment of our lives will always transform any failures we have. This is the patience of God.  This is the powerful vulnerability of God.  God invites us with a blazing nakedness (a burning bush), baring the Divine Heart and beaconing us closer. 

Our failure can never keep us from this God. The present engagement in the constant revelations of the divine encounter in our everyday lives guarantees any future that we have by transforming our failures into fruit.  Our repentance is our trust in God’s promise of I AM WHO AM!

The ground we must cultivate now is the ground we are presently standing upon, and we must stand naked upon this ground with bare-foot hearts to encounter the fiery engagement of a God Who always waits for us – yearning for us to repent, i.e., to approach with vulnerable trust, believing that the only thing that can ‘perish’ in us is that which impedes us from drawing even more close to the Divine Fire!

Peace,

Thomas