“Early in the morning,
Moses began to climb Mount Sinai, carrying two stone tablets.” What isn’t clear from the beginning of our
reading, is that this is the second time Moses had carried those stone tablets
up that mountain. The first time hadn’t
gone very well. He had spent forty days
and nights up the mountain in intense intimacy with the God who had delivered
His people from slavery in Egypt and was in the process of entering into
renewed covenant with them. The people
below had not been able to trust that God would keep on leading them into
fuller and richer freedom. They feared;
they felt abandoned. So, at Aaron’s
invitation, they took off their gold earrings and melted them down, forming a
golden calf and worshiping it. They then
encountered the full display of God’s wrath which up until that point they had
only seen directed at the Egyptians.
Moses, angry too, descended and smashed the tablets, burnt down the calf
and made the people drink its ashes. He
now ascends with new tablets, upset, angry, scared.
And this
is how God meets him! God comes down to
meet and gently, playfully even, calls out His own sacred name. He continues to reveal Himself by sharing His
name. And he comments on Himself, giving
God’s own account of God, divine theology.
His name, merciful, kind, slow to anger, rich in kindness and fidelity. That’s God self-account of who He is, shared
in a loving call to restore relationship, in a trusting self-disclosure of His
deepest identity. Merciful, kind;
loving. Slow to anger – not without anger,
not a God who doesn’t revolt at sin, but a God who loves enough to do something
about it. Less than two miles from here
on Friday night, on Jefferson and Kenmore, a man was repeatedly stabbed and is
now in critical condition. How can a
good God that cares about us enough to long to reveal Himself, not be angry
about that? God’s wrath is real. It’s a
particular response to a world made good that doesn’t live up to its created
splendor, that fails in quite spectacular ways at times. But wrath isn’t a continuous aspect of who
God is, it’s not constitutive of what it means to be God. Love is.
And love
isn’t a temporary option for God, extended to the world when he’s in the right
mood, or when we’re good enough to deserve it.
No: love is continually extended to the world because God is
excruciatingly gracious, because God is love.
And Love loves. Love loves love
and, now, love loves us, as infuriating as we are. And when we weren’t, before Love loved us into
existence, love loved love. Love
pre-exists even time, because ‘before’ (and I know ‘before’ makes no sense
without time, but our language always fails when we attempt God talk)…. ‘before’
there was time, love loved. Love is the
most basic, primordial (pre-ordial!) way of being. And that’s what we confess when we claim God to
be Trinity. That love is not created,
finite, limited, subject to failure, like us.
Love is God, and God is for us.
God is eternally the beautiful bonds of love that link Father, Son and
Spirit. And that love overflows, and
love loves us, and longs to reveal that love God is fully to us and draw us
into it.
The world
does not live up to its created splendor, and so God loves it. Moses dared to ask, “walk with us, not
despite, but because we’re a stiff-necked people.” And God says yes. God says, “I already am.” And the love of God is made manifest in
action, in sending the beloved Son.
Jesus’ death conveys the love of God that brings new life when received
in faith, and the Spirit dwells in us, leading us into the life and love of
God, drawing us away from all that Jesus died for, all the violence, prejudice,
selfishness, mistrust, individualism, laziness, sin and Evil that prevents us
from living as a love-based communion of persons.
And here,
we offer our yes, a pale resounding of God’s yes to us, but vibrant still:
real. Here we confess we are what God
made us: Temple of the Holy Spirit, Body of Christ. Like Moses who dropped to his knees in
worship as response to the Gospel Word, we offer all we have received back in
our worship of God the Father, through the Son in the Spirit. And in our worship, we taste life as it’s
meant to be.
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