(Preached on Sunday, September 12, 2010)
And God did think twice. He decided not to do the evil he had threatened against his people. -Exodus 32:14
So, how do you like God now?!? This is one of those stories that lead people to want to ignore the Hebrew Scriptures. This is one of those stories about God which doesn’t seem to sync with the God Jesus knew and taught about. This is one of those stories where God seems too … human.
I mean, you heard the story, right? Didn’t it make you a bit uncomfortable; cause you to squirm just a bit? Actually, we picked the story up in mid-plot. We came into the tale actually in Scene 3, up on the mountain, where God is consulting with Moses. God’s Google Alert icon flashes on God’s iPhone, and God reads a report of what Aaron and the people had just done down in the valley. So God turns to Moses and says: “Get out of here! Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely … they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”
What petulance on the part of God. God sounds just like that parent that is dumbfounded by what his or her child has just done, who then turns to the other parent and says, “Look at what YOUR child has done now!” Both disowning the child and blaming the other parent in the same statement. And then God goes even further. God does the unthinkable: offering to scrap Abraham’s descendants and start over with Moses and his descendants. “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.”
It’s been a long time since I seriously considered the possibility that God could totally wipe us out. Yet it is a very present possibility in the Hebrew scripture. Here in Exodus, shortly after God has liberated the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, God is ready to pull the plug. In Genesis chapter 6, not too long after the creation stories comes the story of Noah and the flood. And the reason given for the flood is that God has grown sorry for ever having made “human beings” because they have grown so evil. Centuries later, near the end of the time of the kings of Israel, the prophet Jeremiah has a vision that proclaims that God is fed up with the Israelites. So God is going to wipe them out, and in the process undo and reverse God’s initial acts of creation, returning everything to a wasteland, void and dark.
Those are extremely frightening thoughts that God could possibly behave in such a “human” fashion and that we could be in such a precarious position. What happened that angered God to such an extent that God was willing to wipe out God’s chosen people and start over? What happened was the first half of the story which we didn’t read: about Aaron creating a golden calf for the people of Israel to worship. Aaron does this only in response to the request of the people. And the people move to this point out of fear because Moses has been so long up on the mountain consulting with God that they have grown restless and begun to fear he is not returning. Without Moses’ leadership the people become fearful and unclear about the future. They are clearly unhappy with their current environment in the wilderness. And they are really unaware they are doing anything wrong, since they are just looking for a visible image of God to lead them. Without Moses’ reassuring leadership the people lost sight of God and, in turn, lost their direction.
It begins with fear. Moses is gone up on the mountain. He has been gone for 40 days and nights, a long time for a people to live in a camp at the base of a mountain in the wilderness. The people grow fearful that he is not coming back and if that is true what then? What will happen to them since they were following Moses? After all, it was his plan, he was their GPS. He had promised them a land of freedom, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land for their own, but they did not know where to find this land. What would happen to them out here in the wilderness without Moses and possibly without God?
The result was they fell back into old, familiar patterns. Undoubtedly they were unaware they were becoming just like the Egyptian taskmasters who had enslaved them for so many years. They were returning to the old idols and they were giving up their wealth, their gold, taking from themselves, in order to buy the security they so desperately needed. And they were totally unaware, because they were losing their way, losing themselves, losing the possibility for new life which God through Moses had offered them.
In 1998 a film titled “The Siege” told the fictional tale of what might happen in the U.S. if a significant terrorist act took place on our soil. The film starred Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, and Tony Shalhoub, among others. The terrorist act was a suicide bombing of a New York City bus. What happened in response was the U.S. Army moved into New York under martial law, began rounding up Arab residents, whether U.S. citizens or not, and began interrogating them, even torturing some of them. The film did not do very well in theaters, most people considering it too far-fetched, too anti-American, and too unbelievable. Yet in the months after September 11, 2001, that film became the most rented film in the video stores. Suddenly it wasn’t so outlandish.
The screenwriter for that film, Lawrence Wright, later published and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 a nonfiction account of the formation of al-Qaida. In researching the book Wright conducted more than 600 interviews, many with radical Islamic jihadists either possible involved with al-Qaida or highly sympathetic to them. This past Tuesday HBO premiered a documentary film which combined footage from Wright’s interviews with his sources with scenes from a one-man play which he also developed and which ran off-Broadway. In the play and the documentary Wright grappled with many of the moral dilemmas he faced as he tried to remain objective while researching and writing his book as well as some of the insights he gained into al-Qaida and into our response as a nation. At the end of the film he makes the point that al-Qaida cannot destroy the United States, only we can destroy the United States.
When you consider what we have done as a nation in the past 9 years it is a point worth considering. Since 9/11/2001 the United States which has stood as a leader for human rights in the world has lost that standing by virtue of what some of our soldiers did in the prison of Abu Graib; our willingness to engage in waterboarding, which most people will acknowledge is a form of torture; our use of extraordinary rendition to ship terror suspects to other nations for imprisonment and interrogation, where the legal systems do not assure prisoners the same rights as in the U.S. and where torture is much more freely used; and our growing climate of suspicion or and intolerance for Islam. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 54 percent of New York State voters agree “that because of American freedom of religion, Muslims have the right to build the mosque near Ground Zero.” What is striking about that statistic is that it is such a shockingly small majority. Almost half don’t feel that “religious freedom” by definition applies to all religions, even when the question’s put that way.
This clearly illustrates Jim Wallis’ point in his Sojourner’s blog this week that “this conflict is really about the role that faith will play in America. It is about whether or not we will accept Muslim Americans as true Americans or second-class citizens. It is about whether we will blame millions of American Muslims and 1 billion Muslims worldwide for the actions of a small number of Muslims who try to use their brand of faith to murder innocent people. It is about whether or not the country will embrace a Muslim who seeks peace and wants to help rebuild lower Manhattan or reject him because of his religious beliefs.” And then Wallis adds: “This is a test of our character; and we dare not fail it.”
So, if we lose our way, as a nation and as people of faith, will God still search for us or will God wash God’s hands of us as God appeared ready to do with the Israelites in the wilderness who turned to the golden calf for a visible god? Well, there is hope in the story. Thank God for Moses, who confronted God with God’s own promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel: “You promised! You promised Abraham! You promised Isaac! You promised Israel! By your own name you promised!” And God changed God’s mind about the disaster God had planned to bring upon the people. And in Genesis, when God decided to wipe out the human beings and all the creatures, Noah found favor with God and God preserved humanity through Noah and his sons. Even when Jeremiah sees the coming destruction of Jerusalem and Judea, even then God promises to not totally wipe clean the land but God will preserve a remnant.
The gospel reading suggested for today is Jesus telling two parables: of the shepherd who leaves 99 of his sheep in the night pen to go out and search in the wilderness for the one lost sheep until he finds it; and of the woman who turns her house upside down searching for one lost coin out of ten. These stories reflect our experience of Jesus that in him God comes to search and find us. As an anonymous Sufi Muslim, quoted by James P. Carse has put it: “For thirty years I sought God. But when I looked carefully, I saw that in reality God was the Seeker and I was the sought.” Yes, while we might lose our way, God will always continue to seek us out, not to punish, but to save us, and most importantly, to save us from ourselves and our own worst fears.