Glimpses of God

 Exodus 33:12-23

Moses bargains to see God. He can't see God directly, he can only see God's back. Hid in the cleft of the rock to protect him. This is why we never see God fully all our lives, we only get glimpses of God. 

A glimpse of God, that time when you know you have encountered the divine. You can't put it into full words to describe to someone else. You know it is not a full understanding of God either. It is the place where you have had a divine encounter. It's like Peter, James, and John with Jesus at the Transfiguration. They all see what happens, Elijah and Moses appear and Jesus becomes, not earthly. The voice comes from heaven. Peter immediately wants to keep this God encounter somehow, or see it more fully. Describe it; build the booths to each one and nail it down. This is not what happens. There will be other God encounters for these disciples.

An encounter with God takes us from what is known and into unknown spaces. Brief glimpses of divine. They don't always make sense, they may disrupt the present our cue is to be attuned to spotting them. This may be the other reason to be hidden in the cleft of the rock. It is being attuned to what is happening. 

Some people spend their whole lives searching for this one encounter. They think it has to be something big and flashy. Something so disturbing or other worldly it takes us out of this one. It is found in the ordinary becoming something we didn't expect. In finding the hidden right in front of us.

One year I came to the church to finish all I had to do for the Christmas services. I was making extra money by running my child's daycare while she was on vacation and doing the church secretary job at the same time. I was tired, I was exhausted. I didn't want to be there. Things weren't going right, mistakes had to be corrected, announcements put in, jams in the copier and all. I went to put the completed bulletins upstairs in the sanctuary and I hit the top step and fell to my knees. All the tiredness slipped away, I was in holy space and I knew it. The poinsettia's, the creche hidden in it and the altar, the dark, I can't fully describe it all I know is it was not what it usually was.

It is like Gordon describing to us the perspectives of us, of the crosses caught in the camera shot. It is not the normal, it is a spiritual way of being. We can't recreate it, we can't fully posses it, it comes and is among us. What it takes is recognizing within us a change in the ordinary into the extra ordinary. It is a place to be spiritually attuned.

One of the best descriptions I have heard was in an On Being episode with Krista Tippet and Cory Booker, where he talks with her about spirituality. It is a powerfully stirring podcast. Senator Booker describes finding the spiritual in the everyday, even in making the bed a spiritual practice. This is where we find the ordinary can become something which teaches us about God.

Glimpses, it's all we get, all we have of the spiritual life. I'll take these any day. They are the places where we realize the connection of God. They may be in one another. They may be here in the service. They may be out there in the world. They can happen in nature, in a crowded city, under the stars at night, or in a new practice which help us to see differently than we have before. It doesn't matter if we have or find the words to explain it. What matters is we have been ushered into the divine and are transformed forever.