Proper 19, Year C | Exodus 32:7-14
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
September 11, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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We humans have a lot of ideas about and expectations of God. Western monotheistic theology, as it’s developed over the ages, tells us that God is an impassive Sovereign, that our omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God is beyond emotion or change, beyond pain and suffering, beyond time and space—beyond anything we can imagine. We think about God as a sort of disembodied Perfection. Anything good that a human can be, God is to the ultimate degree.
But when it comes down to it, how well do we actually know God? We talk about God taking action in the world, but we don’t really understand how that happens or what it looks like. We hear that God answers prayer, but we struggle to figure out what, exactly, that answer is. No matter how close and loving we describe God as being, it seems there’s always an unapproachable distance between us, making God appear less like an involved, compassionate Creator and more like an unconcerned observer keeping score until the game’s over and the world ends. Over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, we humans continue to develop and idealize who or what God ought to be.
It’s kind of like when you have a crush on someone. You may not have met the person, but you develop complex thoughts and expectations about who they are and what your relationship would be like. Your love for them is as deep and everlasting as theirs is for you—until you actually talk to them for the first time and discover your expectations have nothing to do with the reality of who they are as a person. In a similar way, we often want God to be whatever it is that we need or hope for in the moment. If we’ve been treated unfairly, we want the Judge Who Sets It All Right. When we’re lonely or feel abandoned, we want the One Who Is Near and All Loving and All Compassionate. Life gets hard, and we want a God of Encouragement or One Who Smooths Our Paths. If guilt weighs us down, we want the Merciful and All Forgiving God. And when our enemies are approaching, we want the God of Wrath who’ll crush them and favor us with deliverance.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we aren’t exactly looking for an independent God who made humans in their own image. What we’d really like is a God that conforms to human imagination.
As Christians, we presume we’ve based our ideas about God on the Bible, but when we finally take a look at what that same Bible actually says, we discover someone unexpected—a God we simply can’t predict. God is very much God’s own person. God can be both unpredictable and consistent. God creates and destroys, loves and hates, mourns over disaster and dances with joy. God’s simple presence melts the greatest mountains yet refuses to burn a small bush. God reigns in the might of Chaos and still stops to catch each sparrow as it falls. God is not someone or something we can wrap our minds around. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the Lord is not a tame god.
We run headlong into this vibrant and perplexing God in today’s Exodus reading. At this point in the story, the Israelites have left Egypt and the Red Sea behind. They had heard God’s voice announcing the 10 Commandments, which was such a terrifying event that they all agreed Moses should climb a blazing Mount Sinai as a messenger to relay the rest of what God wanted to say. After several weeks of camping in the shadow of what appeared to be an active volcano, the whole community was growing anxious. As our chapter opens, feeling lost in their surroundings, pretty sure Moses must have burned to death by now, and despite having already promised God they wouldn’t do it, they demand Moses’ brother Aaron present them with a solid image, something they can comprehend and focus their thoughts on when they pray—something like the gods they’d grown up around throughout Egypt. Aaron complies, melts down everyone’s gold, and presents a statue of a young bull. The people cry out, “[This is] your [God], O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” Aaron declares a religious festival, and the people start to party.
Cut to today’s text, and the loving God who delivered the people from slavery and has been caring for them in the wilderness is furious, appearing ready to tear both the earth and the Israelites apart. Absolutely incensed, God turns to Moses and shouts, “Look what your kids have done! You brought them here! Don’t make me go in there—I’ll wring their necks!”
Or does God?
Some people use examples like this to talk about “the Old Testament God” versus “the New Testament God.” The “Old Testament God”—the one that those people worship—is jealous, vengeful, and full of spite. But Jesus revealed the reality of the “New Testament God,” a more peaceful, reposed, and endearing figure. The Old Testament God focused on rules and wrath. The New Testament God is a God of Liberty and Love. They worship a false image of God, but we worship the True and Living God.
There are a number of problems with that idea, primarily that Jesus’ God is the “Old Testament God.” In fact, the idea of an Old Testament God versus a New Testament God was one of the Church’s earliest formal heresies, popularized by a man named Marcion in the mid-2nd Century. The whole idea is primarily rooted in the basic and all-too-common us-versus-them mentality that hopes to trick ourselves into looking better or somehow seeming more righteous by putting other people down.
But going back to Exodus, anger isn’t the only emotion we can read here. Approaching the text with a different expectation than the rage we so easily assume of Israel’ God, even the “burning wrath” sections change their tone, sounding more like a frustrated yet functional adult rather than a tantruming child: “The Lord told Moses, ‘Give me some space…or I might blow my temper. I’m done with them. I’ll just make you into a great nation instead.’”[1] Suddenly the God who demands to let “wrath burn hot against them” in order to “consume” Israel doesn’t sound mad so much as disappointed or maybe even sad.
The fact is, God is not who or what we expect them to be. Neither is God restrained by what we want God to do or look like. God’s emotions flow well beyond those we label as “good” or “positive.” God plots out ideas and decides not to use them. God builds things up and then tears them straight down. Despite sounding pretty discouraged here, God remains faithful and keeps providing for their people. God, as presented in the Bible, disrupts our assumptions yet in the process becomes much more relatable. Confounding our theology and shattering our preconceptions, God somehow becomes more real. The god of our imaginations can’t help us, walk among us, or be with us like this one. It can’t help but be distant, because that god has no connection to reality—it doesn’t actually exist.
Our All Sovereign Creator God somehow allows freedom for growth and change. They appoint the least deserving to the highest positions of responsibility and adopt the deepest of failures as representatives and even children. The One True God grieves the loss when we wander away and responds with delight when we’re safely returned. Despite setbacks and resistance, rebellion and rejection, God continues to remain faithful in, around, and among us.
The God we meet in the Bible may not be the idealization we expect, but this is the God we have. They may not be the God our theology demands, but this is the God we need. Fickle yet consistent, gentle yet unbound, this is the God of Israel, the God of Jesus, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The infinite God of Power and Might who takes delight in the brief life of a desert flower, who spoke the universe into being yet knows the intricacies of our individual pain, this is the God who somehow stands beside us. This is the God who continues to carry us faithfully all our days.
[1] Exodus 32:10 | My translation