It was a beautiful October morning in the mountains of North Carolina, the leaves just beginning to turn and fall, the fall air crisp but not cold. Kim and I were there for parents’ weekend at Furman University, just 30 minutes down the road in South Carolina. We were staying in the mountain house of Carol Plunk’s cousin and his wife, and we had a few hours before the plane would take off. Our hosts had suggested we bike around the lake. So we hopped on the mountain bikes in the basement and took off for a ride around Lake Tuxedo. It was glorious, leisurely, invigorating, and just what the doctor ordered. Until … well, until the road ended. Now, it didn’t actually end, mind you; it let out on another road, a road with traffic whizzing both ways, a road I didn’t recognize that didn’t go around the lake. Kim wanted to ask directions. Being a man, and therefore sure of my sense of direction, I headed us toward home. (I hate being a stereotypical male, don’t you know?!) About an hour later we came upon a town that was clearly not on our way home. We were not only lost; we were running out of time to make our flight.

So, in obvious humiliation, I flagged down the next car. Mary had a kayak on the roof of her SUV, but she stopped to help. She was from Asheville and, was driving to pick up her husband, who had kayaked down the river. Seven-month-old Lilly was in the car seat in the back. Mary took pity on us and told us that if we could wait for her to nurse Lilly, she would figure out how to help us. We waited. We looked at her maps. Then she strapped our bikes to the roof rack and headed us toward the house. We barely made the plane.

I told Mary she would be rewarded by turning up in a sermon some time as an example of a Good Samaritan. She said that her pastor had said the day before that we ought to be on the lookout for people God puts in our path to help. That we ought to look for ways to give, without looking for rewards. I told her it was my job to help people with their spiritual lives. Good thing we came along.

We pick up our story today in Exodus with Israel stranded in the wilderness. They have taken a wrong turn spiritually. They have blown it big-time with God, making a golden calf to worship, breaking all the commandments at once, trying to shape God to their own liking instead of being shaped themselves to God’s liking. God is furious, tells Moses about it on the mountain, and is ready to walk away from the ingrates altogether, destroying them for their sin. Moses intercedes, talks back to God as God backs away. He gets God to agree not to destroy the people.

But Moses is relentless. It’s not enough for God not to destroy the people; Moses wants God to stick with them. He can’t stand the thought that God would leave them stranded on the road to nowhere. Moses presses God to get over it and go personally with the people, bringing them home at last. Earlier in the story, God had agreed to send an angel with Israel. We’re not sure why that wasn’t good enough for Moses—maybe he didn’t know much about angels yet—hadn’t seen the Touched by an Angel, I guess. Maybe he was afraid this was God’s way of sending in the second string, not wanting to get personally involved anymore with this wicked people. Whatever his reasoning, he begs God for more. God agrees in a terse concession: My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. The rest God promises is probably the Promised Land of rest.

One little thing, though, that Moses easily caught and we would miss in our English: the “you” God promises presence and rest to is singular. God promises all this to Moses. Moses has found favor with God. Moses is God’s friend. Moses hasn’t made any graven images. God will make a great nation of Moses. But as for those malcontents down the mountain, well, they can just go to hell, I guess.

Moses won’t hear of it. He comes back with all the plural language he can muster. If you will not go with us, he says, what’s the use? How shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight—I and your people, unless you go with us? The only way I and your people will amount to anything special is if you go with us.

If I were ever in trouble with God, I'd want Moses at my table in the courtroom. Wouldn’t it have been easy for him to get uppity up the'e on the mountain and just protect his own interest? God has found favor with him and only him. Moses could be God’s chief prosecutor instead of the defendants’ advocate. But he has decided, in a way I can only imagine Jesus really understanding, that there’s no sense having God’s favor for yourself if you can’t leverage it for the sake of the people you love.

I regret to say that as I thought about it this week, I was not sure I could say I would do the same. I'm afraid I would be agreeing with God "Yeah, Lord, I know what you mean. Seems like it's just you and me." There are too many people I would rather see indicted than acquitted. But this is the remarkable thing Moses does: he puts himself and his own favor with God on the line. It's as if he is saying, Look, Lord, if you can't love and forgive these people, stiff-necked and undeserving though they be, then you can't have just me. I'm with them.

And isn’t that what Jesus did? The Holy Spirit rests upon him in baptism and the voice from heaven says, This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. But he refuses to return to the Father without the world he came to save. Paul says, He became sin who knew no sin, in order that we might become the righteousness of God. This is the amazing thing about grace: Jesus so committed to you that he would not allow the slightest bit of cleavage between himself and you. It's as if Jesus said to God what Moses said: If you want me, you're going to have to take George, too, and Helen, and Jack, and well, you might as well put your own name in there, because you aren't left out. And God does what Jesus asks, because that very thing was God's idea from the very start. All Moses or Jesus do is to show us the heart of God that from all eternity wrestles with itself and all its disappointment with us until it gets around the lake at last to the place God always gets to—at home in God's unconditional love.

This was a point Billy Graham made the other night that I don't remember hearing him make before. Most of what he says is the same as ever--he stays on point better than any preacher I know. But he took us deeper than usual when he said that what this means is that Jesus so identified with us in our miserable estate that he became an in the eyes of God an idolater, an adulterer, a thief, a liar, and every other kind of sinner. He died our death in order that when God looks at us, God can only see God's own Son looking back. Now try to wrap your mind around that!

Simone Weil was a French mystic and scholar in the time of the Second World War. She converted to faith in Christ as an adult, but she lived most of her life outside the church proper, refusing to be baptized—not for the reasons we tend to today, reasons that have to do with our own ideas about the meaning of baptism per se. She kept one foot in and one foot out of the door of the church because she wanted the world to know that there were some Christians who did not want to be saved apart from them. She wanted people who thought they were damned outside the church to know that the church would not close the door on them and party without them. There is no final joy for any of us until there is joy for all us.

When the church of Jesus Christ drops its pride and adopts this humility, maybe the world will take note of our faith, and in doing so, take note of our God. The church is not an Order of Merit that admits only the worthy; it is a Community of Grace that admits only the unworthy. Which really means that the only qualification for joining the saved is admitting you are among the damned. What if people really caught that from us? What if they knew they could count on us to stand with them: She’s with me. Careful what you say! I’m with him. What if we were to intercede with God for them, and be their advocates?

Sister Pearl Caesar is one of my favorite people. She is the lead organizer of Dallas Area Interfaith, a community broad-based organizing group that seeks to empower the poor to take their place as full citizens among us. She was recently working with several Hispanics in an action in our neighborhood. The Latino paper El Sol wanted to take her picture with three Hispanic leaders. She refused and insisted the picture be taken only of the others. Milagro Cruz is a housekeeper by day. She told Pearl they were all disappointed she wouldn’t let her picture be taken. Pearl explained that she gets paid to do the work, but that their payoff was recognition at times like that. Lupe Rodriguez said he understood why she wouldn’t: it was so that others did not get the wrong idea, thinking she was the reason things were getting done, when it was the work of all of them. And then Milagro added, But we do get paid; we get paid by seeing the changes in our families and communities because of what we do.

Exactly. It’s not about who gets the credit, since only God deserves it. It is about getting everyone into the act the way Moses and Jesus did. All leaders do is to bring along others, but there have to be others to lead. All witnesses do is to share their lives with others, and without the others, what would be the use in sharing?

But Moses is still not satisfied to extract an agreement that God would go with the whole people and let the favor God showed to Moses spill over to Israel. Moses wants some face time with God. Let me see your glory, Moses says. Hold nothing back from me, is what he is saying. But God will only let God’s back side show, if you’ll excuse the phrasing. God will not be captured in full and seen face to face. God plays a little peek-a-boo with Moses, hiding him in the cleft of the rock, covering him there with his hand. Moses gets more than he deserves: he gets to see God. But like the rest of us, he gets to follow only the trail of God. We get to live only in the wake of God. We may want more, but we get only what God is willing to give. We get to see God’s back side. We get to point to where we think God has been and say we believe God has passed this way.

For now we must content ourselves with being known by God more than knowing God. One day, as Paul says, we shall know even as we have been known. For now, maybe the point is that we are the back side of God to the world. What the world needs most is for us to content ourselves with being the kind of people who make others say, You know, when I look at him, when I look at her, I have the feeling God has passed by here. Wouldn’t that be something?

There are people lost on the road of life, trying to find their way home. Isn’t it time we stopped for them?