Amanda McMillen, “Love in Assisted Living”
Recently, I used Chat GPT to help me come up with a postpartum workout plan. Something really slow and easy, can be done at home with like 1lb dumbbells during nap time in like 10 minute increments, a good mix of muscle groups, I gave it lots of instructions, right, I laid out basically all the reasons I do not work out - because I don’t want to make the time and I’m not very good at it. I told ChatGPT all about my regular work schedule to help me come up with the perfect times of day to do this. I really led it down every rabbit hole of my daily life to come up with a quote unquote perfect plan for peak postpartum health, hoping that it would also go the extra mile and just do the workout for me, too. And then, Chat GPT, which is not a conscious entity, dared to say this to me: “From the things we've talked about recently, I've noticed a pattern: you're someone who likes a thoughtful, well-rounded plan. That's a strength—but it can also make it tempting to optimize every detail. Things don’t always work out as planned.” The. Audacity.
Why do we do this? Why did I try to create a “perfect” weekly schedule for my workouts (which by the way, I know already that I will not do). Why is planning my favorite form of procrastination? I think one reason is because we are wired as human beings who live on a spinning rock with so much unknown in our daily lives - we are wired to long for certainty.
Experiencing uncertainty involves the parts of the brain that evaluate danger, so gathering information to deal with uncertainty can be a kind of addiction in itself - if I just read another article or book or listen to another podcast, if I just go back to Chat GPT and tell them about another variable, then I’ll finally understand this problem and have certainty and from there be able to make the one right decision.
Which brings us to our passage today from Exodus. Moses is beginning to panic. He does not have the luxury of chatGPT to come up with all the possible futures ahead of him and the people of Israel. In the past few months, Moses has led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into an unending wilderness, where he says the Lord has promised to lead them into a new land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of abundance and promise and bright futures and freedom and life. Well, the people also panicked and started freaking out when they didn’t get water and food quickly enough and then proceeded to create a golden calf to worship instead of the Lord, hoping that maybe this pint-sized golden god would save them instead. But as Josh put it last week in his sermon on the golden calf, the Israelites’ idols, just like ours, simply cannot bear the weight of that kind of longing for a certain future.
So Moses says to the Lord, “Lord, you told me to bring up these people from slavery, but you have not told me who you will send with me to do this thing.” And the Lord says - “My presence will go with you” - and Moses replies, sort of manically - “If your presence will not go with us do not lead us from here!” The Lord literally just said his presence will go with him. But Moses is inconsolable! He’s totally panicking, he’s longing for certainty that everything is going to be okay.
And of course he’s panicking - uncertainty is terrible. In her book The Worry-Free Parent (which by the way is exactly what I plan to become once I finish reading it), Sissy Goff, a family and children’s therapist explains that “anxiety occurs when ‘our thinking and planning brain spins out of control because it doesn't have enough information.’” In the height of anxiety about an uncertain future, we grab for information, thinking that if we just know what’s coming then we can prepare or maybe even change it.
Or sometimes we long for the certainty of knowing what someone thinks of us, we long for approval and so we think we can have assurance of that approval by just checking in with people - if I show them I approve of them, if I flatter or charm them, well then I’ll be assured that they must think well of me. We can become subject to doing what we think someone else wants us to do, because approval gives us a sense of certainty in where we stand with people.
There’s a great little cartoon of two friends sitting at a bar together, and one of them says, “well I’d love to keep talking to you, a true friend who makes me feel wholly appreciated and wholly accepted, but I just spotted an aloof acquaintance whose approval I’ve decided I long for.” We long for certainty in our relationships, right?
Moses is looking for that same certainty in his standing with God and God’s promises for his future. He wants to know - who will you send with me, and how will you make this promised land thing happen - cause they just made a golden calf down there, so things are looking bad. How can I know for certain that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do, Lord? Please, show me your face, so that I can see you and know that you are who you say you are, that you really are trustworthy.
And the Lord responds to Moses and says, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” The Lord doesn’t lay out exactly how they will arrive at the promised land. He doesn’t tell Moses what the future holds. He doesn’t tell him that in the future, yes, the people will get to the promised land (although Moses himself won’t ever see it with his own eyes) - however once they do they will experience some serious conflict, having king after king leading them from war to war, until finally they are exiled from their promised land under the Babylonians, and when they finally return from exile, they will have to deal with oppressive empires, one after the other. The Lord doesn’t tell Moses about the grief that will come generations down the line. He just says - my presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. He leaves Moses in the dark. Moses lives in a world of uncertainty, and the Lord says, I’m coming with you.
In the assisted living facility where my husband’s Nana spent her last few years, there lived a woman and a man who did not know each other when they moved in. Over time, they got to know one another at the community dinners, birthday celebrations, and holiday gatherings. They had a famous New Years’ Eve ball at this facility where everyone would dress up in 1920’s outfits and there would be live jazz music to dance to and champagne for everyone. Slowly, the man and the woman became friends. They had a lot in common, it turned out - they were both widowed, and they both experienced severe dementia - neither of them recognized their families who would come visit them, but they seemed to remember one another, sitting together at these dinners and parties, day after day. A funny thing happened between these two people. Over time, flashes of memories of their deceased spouses would confuse them, as they spent more and more time with one another. And eventually, a miracle happened - this man and this woman became convinced that the other was their spouse, who had died before them. People in the assisted living facility would giggle behind their backs when they realized what was happening, their families who came to visit were confused and a bit disturbed by this turn of events. But the man and the woman were happy - for all they knew, they were reunited with their love. Each of them were uniquely poised to provide the companionship the other longed for, two people with a shared condition of great loss, by entering into each other’s uncertain and confusing worlds.
When a person has dementia, they say you should enter their world. But it can be quite a painful thing, to enter into the world of someone with dementia. It’s a bit of a wilderness, it’s an uncertain and scary place. You want to shake them and say, come back to this world, where we’ve been this whole time together, where I love you and have loved you. It’s a painful thing, to see their pain and decide to live with them in it, to enter the wilderness of uncertainty with them, as God did with Moses.
God enters Moses’ world of uncertainty. But scripture says, he won’t show him his face. Moses says, “Show me your glory”, but the Lord says you cannot see my face, you cannot see my glory head-on. Moses wants certainty, that God is with him and that God is capable of delivering the people of Israel. But God chooses to show Moses his presence not in shining face to face light, an act of power and glory so strong as to take away any uncertainty in Moses’ mind of how the future will go; but instead, God comes to Moses in a puzzling and unexpected way, he sees God from behind, as he passes by, a kind of image of the shadow of the Lord.
God comes to us too in puzzling and unexpected ways, often in the middle of our suffering rather than in shows of great glory, and he comes there with great love for us. He does not dispel all of our lives’ uncertainties with shows of his power; rather, he comes into uncertainty with us. Our great eternal caregiver, who enters into our confused and confusing world, with all of its uncertainties, no matter the cost to himself.
How do we know that God’s love is certain? It’s not sentimentalism, it’s not ideas about love, not even just words of love. It’s an event of love, in history, that happened, when Christ came to this assisted living facility in which we live, uniquely positioning himself to share our human nature of uncertainty, to be with us, and dwelt among us, and showed his intention to heal us all. Finally, we see the Lord face to face, and what does the Lord’s glory look like? It looks like a cross. Death that we might live. It’s a love that is proven by action, a love with certainty. My presence will go with you, Jesus says to us, and in the middle of all of your uncertainties, I will give you rest.
Whatever certainty you long for, whether it’s about your physical wellbeing and that of those you love dearly, about your approval, about your future and the path ahead of you - the very longing you have for certainty is exactly the thing that draws you to the one solid foundation of the Lord. Your longing draws you right to his arms. And the certainty he gives comes, not from knowing the future or from understanding the past, but from the solid rock of Christ’s relentless love, at all times, in all places, past, present, and future, for you.
Amen.
