Biblical Text: Exodus 3:1-15

It was a fun service to plan. All the hymns of the day contained verse about the name of God (Holy God We Praise Thy Name, At the Name of Jesus, All Hail the Power of Jesus Name, Jesus! Name of Wondrous Love, Savior Again to Thy Dear Name We Raise.) That is quite the powerhouse Sunday of beloved hymns. And all of them are pretty solid on the theology. But the Text is when Moses receives the name of God. The first solid point is that god is not a name. God is a generic word for a category. And the ideas behind that category can be quite different. What Moses receives is the name. We usually say “I AM.” And that has all kinds of philosophical points. But it is first a name. And there is power in names. Not the least that you can drop them.

This Sermon is a reflection on the 2nd commandment (Do not take the name of the LORD in vain) and Luther’s explanation. It finds it’s practical points in our language, namely the causal use of things like OMG. And how OMG might not be that big a deal in itself. It doesn’t seem to trespass any of Luther’s explanation. But that is only because of how flippantly we use it. A deeper meditation would be how such flippant use of language – not just a generic category god – influences everything else we speak or hear. That is what this sermon wants to ponder.

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