This is quite the story to kick off our summer sermon series about “Disputing with God.” It’s at once familiar, at least in its outline and persistent cultural allusions, and at the same time like that movie we saw a long time ago, the whose general plot we can remember, but the details and side stories are fuzzy – like that part about the Israelites drinking the crushed up tablets. That part didn’t make it into my Sunday School curriculum. The colorful booklets of my childhood went from the Ten Commandments and the prohibition of worshiping idols on one page to the Israelites building an idol on the next. The chapters between and the verses following didn’t make the editor’s cut.
Essayist and poet Kathleen Norris says that, “Maybe God addresses the problem of idolatry at the outset of a new relationship with Israel because human beings are incurable and remarkably inventive idol-makers.” 1 It’s the first of the Ten Commandments to be announced, and it’s the first of the Ten Commandments to be broken, so that sounds about right. But Norris goes on to say, “I no longer think idolatry is a problem of primitive people in a simpler time, those who worshipped golden calves in fertility rites. I have only to open a newspaper to contemplate the wondrously various ways in which idolatry is alive in the here and now.”
Well, I haven’t opened a newspaper in a number of years, but I still open the news app on my phone, and her observation sent me to my phone to check the hypothesis. Headlines and stories are full of words like “hard-liners” and “loyalists,” “stockpiles” and “establishments.” Reports conjure images of lines in the sand, immovable factions, maybe, as the LORD calls us in Exodus, “a stiff-necked people.” Could this polarization that we see and feel be a symptom of this tendency toward idolatry? Is it because we have molded an idol out of being right, being sure, being certain – even to the point where we’re unwilling to consider any ideas but our own, or those of our party or ideology? Have we made such an idol of our positions that we disengage from the push and pull of *healthy* debate and *good faith* disputation that can refine our relationships with one another?
When the Israelites patience finally broke at the foot of Mt. Sinai, Moses had been gone for forty days and forty nights. This is after the Ten Commandments had already been spoken by God to Moses and by Moses to the people of God. At the end of that visit on Sinai, Moses had written down all the words of the LORD, and the Israelites had made sacrifices and offerings on a temporary altar to acknowledge the importance of the covenant. The people had promised, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient,” (Ex 24:7). And with those first things first, Moses returned to the mountain at God’s invitation to receive the intricate and detailed instructions about how and where the people of God would meet God in worship as they moved through the wildnerness to the Promised Land. Forty days and forty nights of detailed instructions.
To the Israelites back on the flat land below, that seemed a bit too long. In the teaching stories of some of the ancient rabbis, it’s said that it was exactly 6 hours too long, that the Israelites were just fine waiting 40 days and 40 nights for Moses to return, but when he was 6 hours late, it was too much for their faith. They couldn’t wait any longer. Maybe they got it in their heads that Moses wasn’t coming back. That their leader who could speak to God in a burning bush, who could hold his hands up to part the seas, who heard God’s voice in the loud wind on a mountain top, maybe they had convinced themselves that he wasn’t going to return and without this direct line to God, maybe that meant that God wasn’t going to return to them either.
Any questions or curiosity, wondering or what if-ing they may have entertained was solidified into a certainty that they needed to take matters into their own hands. They stopped turning their heads from side to side looking for other options, other ideas, and they stiffened their necks, fixated on just this one way of thinking, that Moses who had brought them out of Egypt wasn’t going to lead them the rest of the way. They were going to need new gods – – or rather, likely some old gods – – to finish the journey to freedom.
It did not take long for the smell of their offerings and the sound of their reveling to make it to the top of the mountain where Moses and the LORD were finishing their meeting, and God was not happy about it. Like a parents bickering over disobedient children, “Go down there and fix what *your* people did,” God commanded. “*My* people?” questioned Moses. “Oh no! These are *your* people,” he insists, pushing back against God’s wrath, burning hot against the Israelites.
That can’t be ignored – that wrath. It dominates pretty much the rest of the chapter, from the early declaration in verse 10 that God is going to consume them, past God changing God’s mind at Moses’ imploring, and even continuing with a promise of punishment and plague “because they made the calf – the one that Aaron had made.” But I think that wrath has to be read in light of God’s love. I know that might be hard to see in this chapter, but hear me out.
These tablets God had been working on, these commandments about worship, but also the ones about idols and the right use of God’s name, honoring elders and honoring all life, integrity in relationships and contentment in living, and Sabbath – – especially Sabbath, this beautiful gift of rest in the midst of work, rest for those who had been enslaved…. These tablets and these commandments were a love letter from God to God’s people, showing them what freedom in God’s presence looks like – relationships defined by respect not dominance, agency in society not disempowerment, trust in God who is everywhere not localized in the statuary of the rich. And so when God saw the Israelites get antsy when it looked like that love letter was taking a bit too long, I think it’s possible that God’s heart got broken. While God was writing on every possible nook and cranny of the stone, to make sure God’s people would know exactly who they are and whose they are, they were down on the ground grasping at straws looking for something else, anything else that would bring them comfort or security or certainty. God’s heart was broken watching God’s people just abandon God’s faithfulness seemingly without any thought, without any push back, without any engagement.
That’s what strikes me as we consider this story as the first in a series of stories about “Disputing with God.” The Israelites didn’t even try to dispute. The story makes the cut, of course, because Moses puts up quite a fight on their behalf. When God demands to be left alone to let God’s wrath burn hot, Moses refuses to leave. Moses implores God not to do something disastrous. When God offers to wipe the slate clean (and the people from God’s sight), Moses refuses the offer to be the sole person from whom God’s great nation will be made. When God wants to start over from scratch, Moses steps in and asks God to step up for God’s people whom God has saved. He appeals to God’s pride of reputation, asking “What will the Egyptians think?” He begs God to remember the generational promises that were made with Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.
Moses, unlike the Israelites, stays engaged in the relationship with God, even if that engagement has to take the form of a dispute. Moses, trusting that God who went to great lengths of a showdown with Pharoah into order to save these people, does not back down when God acts contrary to his expectations, but instead puts up a fight and boldly calls God to be God’s own best self in this relationship – even when the relationship seems to be hanging on by a very thread, held together by fragile tablets.
The contrast between the Israelites who turn inward, and Moses who turns outward, toward God is striking to me in the way that it sets a pattern for idolatry that holds even today. Fixed on their own interpretation, not looking for another understanding that might explain their experience, and most notably not even appealing to God, the Israelites didn’t bother to dispute with God when they felt abandoned. Instead of engaging with the one who has shown them great faithfulness and mercy, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, they insist on a solution that they can work it for themselves, building idols of certainty. They turn away from the love God has demonstrated, the relationship God has been offering, and sink themselves and their resources into the god they can craft with their own hands.
Kathleen Norris’s thoughts about idolatry that I began with continue this way, “[The problem of idolatry] is all about resisting love. We can even make that resistance an idol, walling ourselves in, physically or emotionally. We can become so safe that, as far as other people are concerned…” and I would add as far as God is concerned, “…we might as well be dead.”
But God desires more for us. God desires more with us. In this anthropomorphized version of God, God gets pretty angry, but even God’s anger can be tempered by Moses’ engagement. Moses refuses the idol of power, the idol of being the main character of the story, the center of a new nation. Moses puts up a fight and stays in relationship with, demanding that God stay in relationship with God’s people, and that is what is rewarded, that is what gives us the next verses, the next chapter, the next story.
Although, the next verses, the rest of the chapter may not feel like the ending to the story we really want. I will note, most of those Sunday School lessons we learned when we were children just end the story at v. 14 where God changes God’s mind. But that’s too simple, too tidy. It wraps the whole experience up with a nice neat bow, but that’s not really how the story works. That’s not how relationships work, is it? We know that from our own human relationships as well as our own relationship with God. When we have felt abandoned by God or people, when we have had our best efforts at offering love rebuffed or forgotten or ignored, when we have refused to stay engaged with our family or friends and even our God, when the love letters are torn, the covenants shattered, things don’t go right back to normal right away.
Moses stepped between the people and God’s wrath, but we can see his own wrath boiling over as he stomps down the mountain. He kept God from consuming the people, but he forced them to consume the detritus of their offense. There even was a period of violence that followed that we didn’t even read! But we did read a continuing negotiation of how God and the people, the people and Moses, God and Moses will all move forward from this crisis in their relationships. God’s mind is changed, but the relationship still needs careful tending. There are still consequences for a broken covenant, but even consequences are a sign of engagement, a persistence of God’s desire to be in the relationship, as messy as it is.
Relationships are messy – human relationships and relationships with our God. They take twists and turns, there are hurts and healing, but relationships, human and divine, persist when we stay present in them, when we resist molding idols of certainty to conquer our fears of the unknown, when we dispute (with the goal of calling each other to our best selves) rather than disengage.
- Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith ↩︎