“Coming to Terms with YAHWEH”
Exodus 32:1-14
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
9/28/14
The Israelites have been camping at the foot of Mt. Sinai
for months. Moses, God’s anointed leader, has spent more time on the mountain
with God, than in camp with the Hebrews. Even God-chosen leaders have to make themselves
available. Unattended followers will look elsewhere for guidance, and for the
assurance that they matter.
“Come make gods for us who shall go before us,” say the
Hebrews to Aaron, “as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land
of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
The Hebrews’ demand reveals their desperation. They feel
abandoned by both Yahweh and Moses. And it’s not hard to understand. When the
parents of families or the elders of a community allow themselves to get too
busy with careers, money, entertainments, political wrangling, and other divine
entitlements, what happens to the youth of a community? What happens to others
who are, for whatever reason, pressed to the margins of visibility and power?
They create their own communities, don’t they? They create their own rules, and
sometimes their own gods. And who can blame them? They’re just following the
self-serving examples set for them by their absentee parents and elders.
Maybe Aaron feels this way himself. Without apparent
hesitation, he tells the Israelites to gather all the gold that folks are
wearing in their ears. He makes a mold and casts the image of a calf.
‘Now there’s a god we can trust!’ cry the people, ‘a god we
can see and touch! This is the kind
of god who delivered us from Egypt and who will see us through.’
Equally pleased, Aaron declares the next day to be a holy
day, a day to celebrate the incarnation of their brand new god.
It’s worth jumping ahead for a moment to recall that when
Moses returns, he blames his brother for the people’s idolatry. What led to all this? he asks. Aaron’s frantic,
damage-control sounds like something out of a Bill Cosby routine.
“I said to them,” says Aaron, “whoever has gold, take it
off’ so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this
calf!”
Now, I did not paraphrase Aaron’s words. I quoted the NRSV
word-for-word. It’s Exodus 32:24. See for yourself.
The day after the calf springs from the fire like a
phoenix, the people indulge in whatever it is that golden calves might permit. Yahweh
sees all of this, and the problems begin.
Here we must acknowledge something: This early Hebrew story
was told and retold for many generations by word of mouth, then written and re-written
by hand over many centuries. This ancient story does more than to remember
events. It interprets them. Like scenes from the life of Jesus cobbled together
in stained glass, this written story is part of a grand mural. It is one
picture of many of the Hebrews in their long, lonely, and dangerous journey
into the uncharted waters of monotheism. The first step of this journey is one
that we are still taking. It’s one we keep coming back to, anyway. When leaving
behind all our idols, large and small, human and otherwise, we tend to create very
specific images of even the “one” God. For some reason, those images are
usually masculine. Very often they are military, or at least caught up in
retributive violence against human creatures. It seems to me that the one God we claim to worship and love often
looks and acts a lot like ancient and recent idols.
Years ago, a woman sat in my office. She was upset with me,
again. It wasn’t hard to upset her. I must have said something about the value
of feminine images of God – who is neither male nor female – because she looked
at me through narrowed eyes and said, “No, God is a man.”
It will not surprise you that her image of God, which was
not just exclusively male, but explicitly a human
male, was the foundation of a fearful, power-based theology endorsed and
enforced by her husband, as well. I didn’t call her on all of that. She had
enough to deal with. Besides, her male-imaged god only reflects the same kind
of anthropomorphic struggles of the early Hebrews. Think about it: The Yahweh
of Genesis and Exodus often says and does things that are far removed from the
deep and brooding Spirit whose light shines in and through Jesus of Nazareth.
Consider this contrast, which is but one of many: To Moses
Yahweh says, “Your people, whom you have brought up out of the land of
Egypt, have acted perversely.”
Moses answers God saying, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn
hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt…?”
In Jesus’ memorable parable, a young man, burning hot with
jealous, self-consuming wrath says to his father, “For all these years I have
been working like a slave for you…But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with
prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!”
The father responds, saying, “Son, you are always with me,
and all that I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this
brother of yours was dead and has
come to life; he was lost and has been found.” (Luke 15:29a, 30-32)
In the story of the prodigal, the elder brother mirrors the
ancient view of God as accurately as the father reveals the new and renewing
image of God made known in and through Jesus. That spiritual development continues
today.
We are still coming to terms with Yahweh.
There are many images
of God, because we have to imagine God.
Imagining the Unimaginable, through story, is the best we’ve got. And how we
imagine God determines how we live as human beings. How we imagine God
determines how we love and how we relate to one another and to the earth. If we
imagine God as a projection of ourselves – our fears, entitlements, and
judgments – God will become entirely too imaginable. Indeed, God will become manageable.
The word for that is idolatry. And at its heart, all sin is nothing more than a
variation on the theme of idolatry. That’s why the first commandment states so
directly, “You shall have no other gods [besides] me.” (Exodus 20:3)
By implication, that commandment also states that Yahweh is
not an idol, nor is Yahweh to be treated as an idol – as something small
enough to be defined and understood by the human mind, much less by one image,
characteristic, or pronoun. Idols allow the creation of religions of conformity
and control. But Yahweh, who creates and recreates the universe, gives birth to
faith communities that participate gratefully in the creative process, communities
that recognize and celebrate the God-imaged holiness within every human being
and even in all of matter.1 Jesus of Nazareth, God Incarnate, arises
from the very same stuff as you and I. And in being uniquely born and reborn of
the creation, he embodies promises of transformation and resurrection, promises
which lie beyond our full understanding, beyond our control.
I am coming to understand that that last, troubling line in
today’s reading, And the Lord changed his
mind, has more to do with Israel’s mind than with Yahweh’s. It has to do
with the resurrection of faith within the people of God. Along their journey,
the Hebrews experience the community-destroying effects of idolatry. And
through a prayerful dialogue of repentance, they also experience the healing grace
of redemption. This story illustrates that God’s judgment is not some kind of
show-stopping wrath. God’s judgment is game-changing love.
What are our idols and idolatries?
How do we project onto God our own characteristics,
prejudices, and fears?
How will we embody prayerful repentance so that we might reunite
with the holiness within ourselves, one another and the very earth around us?
God has equipped us with redeeming, resurrecting, game-changing
Love. How will we use it?
1For more on the inherent holiness of the created
order, see the writings of John Philip Newell. Of particular interest: The
Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality [Paulist Press,
1999], Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation [Jossey-Bass, 2008],
and The Rebirthing of God: Christianity’s Struggle for New Beginnings
[Christian Journeys, from SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2014].
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