Sunday, November 9, 2025… 22nd Sunday after Pentecost
“If God is I Am, Who Am I?”
Scriptures: Psalm 148; Exodus 3:1-15; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-17; Luke 20:27-40
Divine Service III, p.184, Lutheran Service Book
Hymns: “Come, Let Us Join Our Cheerful Songs” #812; “Before the Throne of God Above” #574; “Just As I Am, Without One Plea” #570
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior , Jesus Christ. Amen.
Who am I to judge? Who am I to say? Who am I to tell someone what they’re doing is wrong? Who am I to tell someone else how to live or what to believe? I’m just a nobody; who’s going to listen to me anyway? Now humility – genuine humility - is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But using false humility as an excuse not to do something you could or should be doing? That’s another thing altogether. That becomes a sin.
In the Book of Exodus, the God who names Himself “I Am Who I Am,” comes to Moses, to send him to rescue the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. And Moses answers the Lord, “But who am I?” Moses didn’t see himself as worthy, or feel himself up to the task he was being given. And isn’t “Who am I?” the question we have to ask of ourselves as well? Who am I, that the Son of God should be willing to die for a sinner like me? Who am I, that I should deserve to be shown God’s mercy, be forgiven for my sins, and be blessed with His wonderful grace? And who am I – little old me - that the great “I AM” should send me into the world to tell Good News? Let’s look and see!
We read from the Book of Exodus, “Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.” Now Moses, if you remember from Exodus, had been born to Hebrew parents in Egypt, but he’d been raised by Pharaoh’s daughter in the Egyptian royal court. Then one day, after he was grown, he came across an Egyptian overseer beating one of his fellow Hebrews and killed him. The thing became known, and he had to run for his life. Moses fled to the land of Midian, to the home of his father-in-law, and there he stayed until he was 80 years old, whiling his life away peacefully herding sheep.
Then one day, as Moses was with his flock out in the wilderness, “The angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush.” And Moses walked over to see the strange sight, why this bush was on fire but wasn’t consumed. And then we’re told that it was God Himself who called to Moses from within the bush. God called to him, “Moses! Hey, Moooooooooses!” And Moses answered, “Here I am!” Yes, that’s me. Such as I am, just as I am, here I am.
Now, God knows who Moses was, and what he was, and where he’d been, and what he’d done. He knows us all, mind, heart, and soul; and God knows a sinner when He sees one. That’s why God tells him to take off his sandals and not to come any closer, because he’s a sinner standing on holy ground, where he has no right to be. By invitation only do we sinners dare to draw near to a holy God.
Then, once Moses is properly barefoot and terrified, this “God of the burning bush” identifies Himself: "I Am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” He says. “I’m the eternal God, the God of Creation, the Alpha and Omega, the God without a beginning or an end. I’m the One who was, and the One who is, and the One who is to come, the one and only God there is.” Moses falls on his face upon hearing that, fully believing that anyone who looks on the face of a holy God is going to die.
And now that the Lord has Moses’ attention, He gives him the reason He’s come to this wilderness to find His wandering servant. The Lord says, "I’ve seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I’ve heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I’m concerned about their suffering. So I’ve come down to rescue them, and to bring them home to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk. The cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I’ve seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.” So now, Moses, go. YOU go. Not somebody else, but YOU. It’s YOU I’ve chosen to do this. I’m sending YOU to Pharaoh, to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.
And Moses answers God, “Who, me? Why me? Who am I, that I should be the one to go to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (Arguing with God is never a good idea!) God responds to Moses’ self-deprecating doubts with a promise. “You go, Moses. And when you go, I’ll be with you. GOD will be with you.” (What more could you ask for than that? “And as a sign of the promise, when you’ve done as I ask and brought My people out of Egypt, you’ll come back to this place to worship Me.”
You’d think that would have been enough for Moses; but he really, really doesn’t want to do this. So he asks God another question, hoping the Lord will change His mind. "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is His name?' Then what shall I tell them?" And God, no doubt getting a little irked with Moses at this point, answers, "I Am Who I Am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.' Say to the Israelites, 'The Lord, the God of your fathers-the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob - has sent me to you.' This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.”
The name “I AM,” for generations afterward, became the sacred to the people of Israel. “I AM” - pronounced Yahweh - was a name so holy for them that it couldn’t be spoken aloud, or even written down on a printed page. When the Holy Name came up in the Scriptures, it was indicated by four punctuation marks, but never written down. (If your Bible says LORD in capital letters, that indicates that the sacred I AM name is being used; it’s OK for us to say “Yahweh,” though). So when the scribes and Pharisees demanded of Jesus, “Tell us plainly who You are,” and He answered, “I AM,” they were shocked, shocked beyond words, and they picked up stones to throw at Him. It was outright blasphemy, punishable by death, to claim to be God, to claim to be I AM. (Unless, of course, it was true!)
Moses, later on in chapter four in Exodus, tries to make even more excuses to God about why he shouldn’t be the one to go; he’s still thinking, “O Lord, you’ve picked the wrong man for this job.” And God shoots down his excuses and brushes them aside one by one. Moses tries to say, “Lord, the Israelites will never believe that You appeared to me in a burning bush.” And the Lord responds by giving him a staff that will enable him to perform miracles for the people to see, as proof that what he’s saying is true.
Moses tried telling God, “Lord, I’m not a good speaker, I’m not really good with words. I’m a stutterer, I’m “slow of speech and tongue.” (I’ve been talking to no one but sheep for all these years). And the Lord tells him, “I’ll open your mouth and give you the words to say; and I’ll send your brother Aaron along with you. He’s a better speaker than you are, and he can be your spokesman. ”Moses pleads one last time, “O Lord, please send someone else – anybody else.” But that’s the last excuse the Lord is willing to hear. It’s you, Moses; it’s you and no one else. God knows His man and what he’s capable of. God knows Moses better than Moses knows himself.
We underestimate ourselves, too, don’t we? God knows what we’re capable of, if only we’ll follow where He leads us. But still we say to ourselves, “Oh, I could never do that. I could never be a witness, or an evangelist, or confront someone about a sin, or tell someone about Jesus.” But if “I AM” says we can, and it’s Him doing the asking, and even promising to give us the words to say, who are we to argue the point or tell Him no? So Moses, in the end, get up and goes. He’s scared to death (who wouldn’t be?), and he’s probably grumbling as he goes, “No one is going to believe me, and Pharaoh is probably going to kill me; but if you say so, Lord, I’ll go, if I have to, I guess.”
In our Gospel in Luke 20, some Sadducees – who didn’t believe in a coming Savior or a resurrection or a life to come - or much of anything else, from the looks of it – come to Jesus with that ridiculous story about a woman who married seven brothers, one after another, and how they all died one by one, and they asked Him how the whole thing would be sorted out in heaven. (You’d think the fifth or sixth or seventh brother in line would have had second thoughts about marrying her!) The point of the Sadducee’s story was to poke holes in the whole idea of heaven or an afterlife, and to make anyone who believed in such things look foolish. And isn’t the world just full of doubters and modern-day Sadducees today? The “This world is all there is and then you die” crowd is alive and well.
“So, tell us, Teacher,” they ask (and can’t you just hear the sarcasm?), “whose wife will she be at the resurrection?” But who are they mocking? Who is it they’re trying to argue with? They think Jesus is just another ignorant country bumpkin with a God complex. But who is He really? He’s “I Am Who I Am.” He’s the God of Eden’s garden, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who shut up Noah in the ark, and the God who called out to Moses from the burning bush. As God had given Moses that staff to do miracles as proof that God has sent him, Jesus did miracles with His own hands, as proof of who He was.
The Sadducees, Pharisees, and scribes knew about Jesus’ miracles. They’d heard all the reports about Jesus healing the sick and raising the dead and all the rest. They’d even seen Him perform miracles themselves. And still they refused to believe Him or follow Him. And Jesus – the great I AM, the King of kings and Lord of lords, God Himself come to earth in the flesh – answers them with words of truth, wisdom that shut their mouths, and that they have no answer for. (He’s God – He can do that! Again, it's a bad idea to try to argue with God).
Marriage, you Sadducees, is an earthly institution, an earthly necessity as a concession to our sin. It’s a holy and divine contract that binds two sinners together for as long as they live here on earth - and death is the end of the contract. In heaven, such contracts will no longer be necessary, because there will be no sin there and nothing to divide us. You’ll still be with the love of your life in heaven, but your new relationship will be holy and perfect and pure, in a way it could never have been on earth. It won’t be less, but more. And if you had more than one spouse on earth, heaven will have all that worked out, too. It’s all going to be good. We’ll all going to be “children of the resurrection,” and all of that will work out in heaven in a beautiful way, and in a way that will be more than we can ask for or imagine or begin to praise God for.
Jesus, to make His point, points the Sadducees to what God said to Moses from the burning bush. Our God is (not was) the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the same God yesterday, today, and forever. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, chose to step into this time-bound world, but He Himself isn’t bound by time. He came to this world to die a human death on a cross for the sake of our sin, but death and time had no hold on Him. And that is what His Resurrection proved. Jesus is the God of the Living, the “Lord and giver of life,” the One who gives us “life and life to the full,” if only we will trust and believe in Him. That’s who He is, and for that we worship and praise and obey Him.
So if that’s who He is, who are we? Sometimes we Christians act like we’re ashamed of being who we are, and that shouldn’t be. Again, humility – genuine humility - is a good thing. We should be meek and humble, as Jesus asks us to be. But again, using false humility as an excuse not to do the things we should be doing is another thing altogether.
St. Paul, in Thessalonians, says who we are is “people loved by the Lord, and chosen from the beginning by God, to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.” Saved by grace, in other words. Paul says here that God has “called us by the Gospel” – the Good News about Jesus – “that we might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And what is His glory and ours? What can we do to glorify God? Well, Moses had his calling, and we have ours. He had his Egypt and his Israel for his mission field, and we have our Oxford and Packwaukee and central Wisconsin. Our calling, our glory, and our mission, is to pass on the Christian teachings that have been passed down to us, and to share the Good News by word or mouth or letter or by whatever means may be available to us. I’m not telling anyone how to live their lives or what to believe, far be it from me. I’m only trying to bring you the “love and encouragement and good hope” that I myself have found in Christ, and to point you to heaven if I can.
May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word, wherever God has put you and wherever He may send you. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
“We Will Glorify” (Twila Paris)
We will glorify the King of kings
We will glorify the Lamb
We will glorify the Lord of lords
Who is the great I AM
He is Lord of heaven, Lord of earth
He is Lord of all who live
He is Lord above the universe
All praise to Him we give
Hallelujah to the King of kings
Hallelujah to the Lamb
Hallelujah to the Lord of Lords
Who is the great I AM
We will glorify the King of kings
We will glorify the Lamb
We will glorify the Lord of lords
Who is the great I AM
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI, LCMS Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI, LCMS
pastorshepp@gmail.com