God appears to Isaiah in the Temple, the holiest place in all the world to the Hebraic imagination, but all it takes to fill the Temple is the hem of God’s robe. This peculiar little line was a signal to the people about to be cast out into Exile in Babylon: God is everywhere and cannot be contained in a building. There is no “far away” in God’s world. The Irish Christians used the language of “thin places” to identify those holy spaces in the world where God seems closer to us than the breath in our lungs, but even when we feel far from God or estranged from our neighbors, God invites us to reconnect and reengage by just declaring, “Here am I, send me.”
Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.
At the end of forty days and forty nights the Lord gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant….Then the Lord said to me, “Get up, go down quickly from here, for your people whom you have brought from Egypt have acted corruptly….Let me alone that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation, mightier and more numerous than they.”
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.
And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.
And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus.
The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”
But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
He answered them, “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me.” And they brought the boy to him. When the spirit saw him, immediately it threw the boy into convulsions, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth.
