Stray Appetites, Wayward Imaginings, and the Steadfast Love of God

Exodus 32:1-14 and Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23 | Isaiah 25:1-9 and Psalm 23 | Philippians 4:1-9 | Matthew 22:1-14

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott

Si comprehendis, non Deus est.

Saint Augustine

It’s hardly revelatory to say that idolatry of one sort or another is among the most pervasive manifestations of human brokenness. Augustine’s famous maxim—“If you understand, it isn’t God”—is ultimately a caution against saying more about God than we ought, which is an idolatry that takes forms ranging from the subtle to the absurd. Augustine often commented on how readily distorted desire and misdirected love becomes idolatrous, and any number of preachers, theologians, and cultural critics have commented on how readily we justify our wayward longings by claiming that God wills their fulfillment. Even in the wake of 1600 years of credal orthodoxy, we still think, say, and perform as much stupid stuff about God as the generations of our forebears. This week’s readings from the first testament have plenty to say about such matters.

The first reading, from Exodus 32, recounts the Israelites’ worship of the infamous golden calf, which began as a quickly-crafted, idolatrous stopgap to calm their impatient grumbling during Moses’s protracted absence on Mount Sinai, where he received the tablets of the law (Yes, this is irony), and quickly devolved into “revelry,” the translator’s rendering of the Hebrew word tsachak, a common euphemism for “orgy.” At first glance, this appears to be low-hanging fruit where condemnations of idolatry are concerned. The people’s readiness to abandon Moses and the God he had ascended the mountain to speak with, their demand that Aaron fabricate for them “real” gods, Aaron’s ready capitulation, and the ease with which their worship of the calf lapsed into practices resembling the centuries-later pagan syncretism of the people of the northern kingdom (see 1 Kings 12) combine to set the stage for Moses’s tablet-shattering return to the camp and his dispensation of severe fratricidal justice at the hands of the Levites. Read thusly, the story offers a simple, stark warning about idolatry and its discontents.

This is all well and good, but it overlooks important elements of the passage, the book of Exodus, and the biblical narative that implicate idolatry more broadly and subtly. Verses 7-14 tell us that when the Israelites’ behavior came to the LORD’s attention, he announced to Moses his intention to destroy them and start over with Moses and his descendants, echoing the language of the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 12:1-3. Moses’s response was directly and forcefully to “remind” the LORD that he already had a people, with whose ancestor (Abraham) he had made a once and for all covenant:

“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? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’”

Moses’s petition faintly echoes Exodus 2:24, which tells us that when the Hebrews cried out because of their enslavement, “God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” That echo becomes less faint in light of God’s response to his prophet’s exhortation: “And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring upon his people.” This is theologically perplexing, in that it invites questions about how literally to take claims that God forgets, experiences uncertainty, and changes his mind. But it is theologically interesting insofar as it points to what I take to be a primary thrust of scripture, beginning with the story of the Exodus, namely the discovery of the one true God, unveiled as simultaneously wild and faithful, radically distinct from the gods of the nations and every idol our appetites and imaginations beckon into existence.

The crux of this reading is in Exodus 3, the story of Moses’s encounter with God in the burning bush. The broad outline of the story is well rehearsed: The Hebrew Moses, who was raised in the household of the Egyptian Pharaoh, has been exiled to Midian, where he works tending the flocks of his Midianite father-in-law, Jethro. One day, while making his way through the wilderness of Midian, Moses comes upon a bush, engulfed in flame but not burned by the fire. He approaches the bush out of curiosity, and hears a voice from the bush identifying itself as the God of his Israelite forebears (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), who admonishes him to remove his shoes (a gesture of reverence) and pay careful attention, for he is about to be given an important task. God informs Moses that He has heard the voice of the Israelite people, who have cried out after 400 years of slavery in Egypt, and that He intends to send Moses back to Egypt to demand that Pharaoh release the Israelites from bondage so that they might depart for the land promised to their ancestors.

Moses is not sure this is a good idea: first of all, he does not see himself as a leader, and second, he is persona non grata in Egypt. Even so, Moses cannot walk away from the one who speaks from the bush. This gives rise to a negotiation of sorts, centering on Moses’s insistence on knowing God’s name—but not just in case someone happens to ask. In the cultural context within which this story was first told, the question was far from inconsequential. The peoples of the ancient Near East, who tended to worship the tribal gods of their ancestors, believed that knowing and using those gods names allowed the user access to their power. Thus, to know a god’s name was to have a measure of protection from their caprice and the ability to use their power against one’s enemies, who ostensibly would be one’s god’s enemies, as well.

The conversation that ensues is laden with almost-playful irony. Moses inquires, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God’s initial response is elegantly simple: “I AM WHO I AM.” The Hebrew here is sufficiently polyvalent to lead the reader to wonder whether God might be engaging Moses in a bit of verbal sparring, for God’s admonition to Moses to tell the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you…. This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations,” could be read simultaneously as a refusal to play Moses’s game and an assurance that the identity of the God speaking from the bush rendered the question irrelevant. Unlike the gods of the nations, this God is altogether good and without caprice, and can neither be used nor controlled, but merely trusted. God will liberate the Israelites and fulfill the covenant, ultimately redeeming all Creation, not because Moses can direct or influence God’s actions, but because God’s defining attribute to God’s people is hesed, steadfast love and faithfulness.

So perhaps much of the anthropomorphic god-talk we read in scripture—remembering and forgetting, changing God’s mind—is illustrative of the sorting out God’s people have been working through from the call of Abram right up to the present; coming to know the wild, faithful God of Israel, Jesus, and the Church, and learning to distinguish God from the multitude of idols inhabiting our world and our minds. May we remain faithful to this work and forever open to the grace that makes it possible.