They had journeyed from Rephidim, entered the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; Israel camped there in front of the mountain. 3 Then Moses went up to God; the LORD called to him from the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: 4 You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, 6 but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.”
7 So Moses came, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the LORD had commanded him. 8 The people all answered as one: “Everything that the LORD has spoken we will do.”
In the Name of the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and of Jacob, Rachel and Leah. Amen.
Last week I talked about Abraham and the promise that God made to the great grandfather of the children of Israel.
- Abraham was a giant of a man, remembered as they told stories around the camp fire on nights when the moon was barely a wink coming from the night sky.
Today we meet the other superhero of all the Hebrew scriptures, Moses himself.
Moses is another of those biblical characters who does not break down easily into the morsels we usually serve up as readings on Sunday mornings.
- Even more than Abraham, Moses strides across the stage, never sitting still for a complete portrait. The heart of Hebrew scripture is called the Books of Moses. What governs the people from this time forward is called the Law of Moses.
It was by artful deception and some God given fortune that Moses even survived his own birth in Egypt. At the time Pharaoh had ordered that all male infants be killed.
- Moses’ mother hid him for a few months then floated him in a basket on the Nile where she knew that Pharaoh’s daughter would find him. Which she did - and adopted him and raised him as an Egyptian prince.
But Moses always knew of his own roots as a child of Israel. He showed that when he murdered an Egyptian overseer who was flogging an Israelite slave. Word of it reached Pharaoh so Moses fled again from Pharaoh’s wrath, this time into the Sinai desert.
It was during this time of his life that Moses first heard the voice of the living God. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
Then the LORD said, “I have watched the misery of my people who are in Egypt… and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey... And you are just the guy to make it happen,” God said.
Moses whined some, trying to get off this particular hook. He made a lot of excuses and finally came up with the perfect challenge:
- “OK. Suppose I do go to the leaders of Israel and tell them what you have in mind. Who shall I say sent me?”
The new name that God revealed to Moses is actually very difficult to translate from the Hebrew. It is a form of the verb “to be.” It could mean, “I am who I am becoming,” or “I am who I am,” or simply “I AM.” One translation has it, “I will be there with you.” However you translate it, one thing is clear. God is a verb, not a noun or an adjective. God’s self description is not static, but active. He likes people who are on the move, not stuck in the mud.
“I AM WHO I AM. Tell the people that I AM has sent you to them.”
- And that pretty much shut Moses up. From that point on, at least for a while, he listened and followed orders.
He went back to Egypt and told Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” And he ordered up ten plagues to prove that he really meant it.
Finally Pharaoh’s advisors convinced their boss that Moses and all the other Israelites should leave Egypt before anything worse happened.
- So Moses and all the rest packed their bags and camping gear and headed towards Sinai.
- They got to a marshy patch of the Nile delta that English translators mistook to be the Red Sea, when actually it was the reed sea.
It was just three months after that that this morning’s reading takes place.
- In seven short verses Moses moves from being the great liberator to being the great lawgiver. He made several trips up and down the mountain before his conversation with I AM was over. Each time he brought some new word to the camp on the plain below Mount Sinai.
Imagine how it might have been - a summer storm crackling out of the sky, lightning drawn to this high point, thunder deafening.
- “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,” God says in this morning’s reading. “and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.”
Wow! A treasured possession. Of God’s. Nice.
- It is too bad that that promise stands in the shadow of the phrase just before it: “if you obey my voice and keep my commandments.”
Well…. Does that mean that God’s love is conditional? That if we don’t follow all the rules, then God will NOT love us?
- That is what we are taught from our earliest memories, isn’t it? “If you don’t do as I say you’ll regret it when your father gets home.” “You can come for a beer after work if you fit in.”
Is that the kind of deal that God is offering here? Must we perfectly obey the law to earn the promise?
That is what it sounds like, but that can’t be quite right because Moses himself was a murderer, bringing us the commandment not to kill.
- More import, though, is that Scripture is nothing if not the record of God’s constant reaching across the gulf that we seek to put between God and ourselves.
- Reaching out to Abraham and his wildly dysfunctional family; reaching out here to Moses, forging a new bond with a rag tag troop of escaped slaves.
- In the reign of King David God watched over Jerusalem and the temple, giving a Golden Age of peace to which future generations would look back as they dreamed of a new Messiah - though David was a murderer as well, and an adulterer.
- Through the reluctant and imperfect prophets, God sought to reestablish the constantly re-broken covenant. That seems to be the major theme of all scripture.
When Moses came down from the mountain for the last time with the tablets of the law in his arms, he saw the whole camp dancing around a golden calf that his own brother Aaron had fashioned.
- Moses threw the tablets on the ground, breaking them into pieces. It’s as if he knew that these commandments would never be properly kept.
If the relationship with God were really dependent on obeying the law, then that would have been the end of it right there.
- The whole deal would have been off, wrecked before it was even delivered.
- But that was not it. Moses continued to lead the people towards the promised land because that part of God’s promise to Abraham had not yet been fully realized.
The Promised Land was elusive. They thought they had it for a while, but while Abraham was still alive, famine drove them to Egypt where eventually they would become slaves.
- It was from this status that Moses led the people towards the Promised Land.
Understand that Moses’ band was not lost in the desert. They knew perfectly well that to get from Egypt to Canaan you head northeast up along the coast. But Moses led them southeast into the wilderness.
Somehow he knew that they needed some serious time of rebuilding if they were truly to come together as a nation.
- Having just come through an excruciating period of slavery and abuse, they needed an extended retreat before leaping forward into an uncertain future.
- They needed to reclaim their identity as children of God before they could forge themselves into a united people. That was Moses’ job with them in the desert. He is the archetypal priest-in-charge.
So Moses led them by stages to the Promised Land.
- They broke some of the rules along the way. They discovered that being on the outs with God made them anxious and even miserable.
A rabbi colleague once told me that the Hebrew word “Torah,” which we translate as “law” does mean law in the sense that we usually understand. It would be better translated as “teaching.”
- Starting even with St. Paul, Christians made Torah sound rigid – what we do mean by law - so that the grace of Jesus would be all the more apparent.
- But how might Torah have made sense at the time?
To help themselves stay closer to God, the Hebrews did recall how God had led them out of bondage, and they tried to stay away from idols, things they had thought up themselves as if they could make them happy and content.
In their better moments they understood that actually knowing the name of God, I AM, was a sign that they had a relationship with God that should not be treated casually. They tried to treat God’s name with respect.
They discovered other things: taking a real day off each week reminded them that they were more than their job descriptions.
- they learned that treating their parents well protected their own place in the procession of time.
- they somehow knew that killing each other was a bad idea. Life, while abundant, is still a limited resource.
Some even learned that messing around with marriage vows was a bad plan. It seemed that sticking with one person, working through conflicts and hard times, was the best chance they had for actually growing up.
Stealing and making false promises caused painful fractures in the community.
- And they did sense that being jealous of what others had simply drew them into a morass of self-pity and resentment.
They only needed these ten fairly comprehensive but terse rules to make it all work.
It turned out that the Covenant that Moses brought down from the mountain was not a bunch of arbitrary rules designed to make life hard.
- It was a gift that made life more gracious.
They discovered that the “IF” of God’s promise was not God being stingy. It was just a reminder of what to look out for.
- Both as community and as individuals, they functioned better when they paid attention to the teachings that Moses had received from God.
So hear God’s promise, first to Abraham, reaffirmed through Moses, echoing down the ages so that it is now addressed directly to us: “Out of all the peoples of the earth, you are my treasured possession.”
And that’s both Torah and the Gospel truth. AMEN.
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