He also suggests we cannot use the "ten words" in an attempt to avoid the mystery of actually being with God, as unpredictable and uncontainable and downright scary as that can be. As Professor Simpson puts it, "Too often we limit the presence of God to our bright days of promise and times of happiness. This is not the reality for the community or the leader's life. Away from the bright spotlight of leadership, the leader must be willing to face the God who is present and powerful inside the darkness--the abyss, the uncertain, the painful, the fuzzy, the foggy...As the people leave 'at a distance,' Moses returns to the darkness ('thick cloud') where God is." (p. 63, 62)
"Because of the fame of this passage," Dr. Simpson proposes, "a word of caution about anti-Judaism and Christian views of legalism is needed.... The contemporary reality of Christian legalism denies the Jewish roots of Christian belief, practices, and personalities (including Jesus!), while at the same time it ignores the legalistic views present-day Christian churches hold in their polities, Books of Order, Books of Discipline, bylaws, and constitutions." Accordingly, he encourages preachers to "affirm some of the aspects of God that go beyond mere algorithms calculated by strict adherence to laws" and to enter into "the mystery of a daring encounter."
As I read this commentary by The Rev. Dr. Simpson, my mind repeatedly returned to the words and works of bell hooks, the renowned visionary womanist scholar, writer, activist, and spiritual seeker. Like Moses, bell hooks is one who dared to be with God "inside the darkness--the abyss, the uncertain, the painful, the fuzzy, the foggy..."
As a young college student, bell hooks attended an interdenominational retreat where the opening talk was by a Catholic priest whose reflections deeply moved her. In her memoir, Bone Black (1996), she recounts how she speaks with him alone after the session and he listens, he understands her fear and loneliness, and he tells her that "the young woman standing on the cliff, alone and afraid to live, is only suspended in a moment of hesitation, that she will overcome her fear and leap into life--that she will bring with her the treasures that are her being: the beauty, the courage, the wisdom. He tells me to let that young woman into my heart, to begin to love her so that she can live and live and go on living."(p. 176-177)
In concluding this memoir of her girlhood, bell hooks writes that as a young poet and writer, she had a very hard time finding a sense of place in the society she grew up in, and yet she found her way: "At night, when everyone is silent, and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal, I write--I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone-black inner cave where I am making a world for myself." (page 183)
The Rev. Dr. Gary V. Simpson's full commentary on this text can be found in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary, Year B, Volume 2, 2020, pages 61-63.