In the ongoing Exodus story, we find Moses this morning negotiating with God about going forward through the wilderness. When they strike an arrangement, Moses is brimming with enough confidence to then ask to see God’s glory. This cannot be, of course, for a human being to gaze upon God directly is to be utterly consumed in the brightness of that divinity. The three great monotheistic—one-God—religions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—have lots of theological differences, but all agree on this fundamental: God’s glory is simply too powerful for a human creature to bear all at once. Our God, in full form, is dangerous to frail flesh and blood.

So God lovingly puts Moses into a cleft in the rock—a long, narrow opening—and explains that the divine hand will be put over the opening as God passes by in order to protect Moses, and when it is taken away, Moses will see only the back of God moving away. That’s all even a faithful, chosen servant like Moses can bear to witness, and, as it turns out, just that momentary exposure makes Moses’ face start to shine so brightly that when he comes down the mountain, he has to put a veil on so the people can stand to be in his presence.

We know the story, and we certainly know the hymn, “Rock of Ages,” which we’ll sing in a moment, but let’s affirm what it all means: God loves us, cares for us, wants to be in relationship with us, but the story makes clear we can never forget that God is the almighty creator of the universe, the life force beyond our imagining, the great mystery that our limited intellects can never fully comprehend. Moses knows God only partially, because he’s given only a glimpse; a small piece of that incomprehensible whole.

Whether it’s Moses glimpsing God in the cloud on the mountain, or you and I encountering the person of Jesus Christ, our God chooses to be revealed—BUT God reveals only as much we need to know and to live as God wants; and what we need to know is not and never will be everything God knows; what we see of God is not and never will be all God is.

And the big hitch, the fundamental problem is that we confuse the glimpse with the whole, and, strange as it may sound to say and to hear, we tend to believe we actually understand how God works and what God thinks. It’s not always crystal clear, and we acknowledge there’s a fair amount of mystery there, but these very human images of God we use to describe God—a cloud with a hand, or a man from Nazareth—they lead us to think that the Divine, the Eternal Creator, is really kind of just a more powerful, wiser version of ourselves. The popular preacher and teacher Fred Craddock says, “to hear some people talk, you would think they circled God three times and took photographs!”

And there are real consequences to overestimating ourselves and underestimating the incredible, otherworldly power of God. When I see someone I think I know from the back—as Moses does in our story—sometimes I’m correct—it really is who I think it is. But just as often I’m wrong, I misidentify him or her because I have only a glimpse, a limited view. Believing we know for sure what we really don’t, based on limited information and partial perception, makes for big trouble.

When I worked as chemist, I was directed by absolutely brilliant scientists, women and men who knew an incredible amount about particular subjects. But a lot of the time these same researchers were arrogant people, mistaking their considerable power in one slice of life for expertise in all of it. World War II with its horrific atrocities was rooted in the Nazi conviction that absolute truth had been revealed to them and they could therefore do as they pleased with confidence. This national financial crisis we’re in right now is due, at least to some extent, by speculators and economic experts who thought they understood the whole financial picture but really didn’t. Citizens are weary of the political process because elected leaders and those running for office seem to believe they know for certain what needs to happen, what policies need to be enacted, but time and again are revealed to have only had a partial picture, a glimpse of all the factors involved.

And people of faith are just as tempted, sometimes even more so, to mistake the glimpse for the whole. Absolute certainty of God’s will for humanity on the part of Christians has led to persecutions throughout our history. Jesus showed us how we’re supposed to live together, and that is reliable and grace-filled. But from that simple foundation we extrapolate, we draw definitive lines with finality, we begin to think we know the will of God for specific situations in all its fullness, so that some Christians feel free to insist that God is most certainly on one side of an issue or another; or that if you’re not blessed with money or good health, you must be doing something wrong; or that if you’re not a Congregationalist, or a Roman Catholic, God isn’t as happy with you as God would be if you were on the right team.

Just consider the interpersonal conflicts in your life right now: aren’t most of them the result of either you or the other insisting that you’re right, that you see the whole situation for what it really is, and the other simply isn’t seeing the whole like you can? The times in my own life when I have found myself in the most trouble have always been when I was sure I knew what it turned out I didn’t know at all.

Friends, the point of the Scripture lesson is simply this: that cleft in the rock reminds us that we simply cannot know or experience everything, especially when it comes to the glory and inner life of our God, the way grace works in the world. And if that sounds too obvious for people as smart and sophisticated as we are, all we need to do is check on our own behavior to see that we kinda think we do know. What the world needs now still is love, but maybe even before that it needs a little more humility and a lot less arrogance. Each in our own way, all of us—from the politician to the pundit to the pew sitter to the preacher—we all can become too big for our britches, we think because we have a glimpse of truth that we get it all. Especially for this season we’re in, faithfulness is enacted by stepping back from certainty in all the forms we practice it, and taking a breath and reserving judgment. Frances Taylor Gench is a Presbyterian minister who teaches at Union Seminary in Virginia, and she puts it this way: “Education is the process of moving from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.” Not passive surrender, but “thoughtful uncertainty.” Doesn’t thoughtful uncertainty leave room for God to enter the conversation going on in our hearts and minds? I know that sometimes my internal voice is so loud and persistently confident, I don’t know how God could get a word in edgewise. Or to say it another way, you and I need to find our appropriate place, and our place is in the cleft of the rock where our vision is limited through the graceful, loving care of God.

William Beebe was a world explorer and naturalist who happened to be friends with Teddy Roosevelt. And he tells how the two of them would often spend the evening talking at Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill home, and then go out onto the lawn and look at the stars. Roosevelt would always point out a certain spot of light near the lower left-hand corner of the constellation Pegasus, and then recite, “That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda. It is a large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.” Then Roosevelt would grin and say, “Now I think we are small enough! Let’s go to bed.”

Friends, because we love God, because we want to serve and please God, we have to each find our own path to feeling appropriately small in the days ahead—not small as in weak, or passive, or helpless, but small in the sense of comparison to the greatness of the God we want to guide us. Let us willingly step into that cleft in the rock, that appropriate human place, so that God can draw nearer to us, that we might glimpse that glory and find that trusting in God’s knowledge and power will always be more reliable than our own. With God truly in charge—in ways we’ll never know or completely figure out—we’ll get through this economic crisis, we’ll get through this election, we’ll get through all those places of uncertainty each of us carries this morning. Rock of ages, cleft for you; rock of ages, cleft for me.