Sacred Anger

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The last time I wrote about Moses, I questioned the motives of his “temper tantrum”  at the foot of Mt. Sinai by suggesting, in part, that his anger might have less to do with the golden calf and more to do with his position of power.  I can certainly imagine in my mind the feelings of sadness, confusion and abandonment Moses might have felt on his return from 40 days of alternating between direct revelation from God and struggling with the understandings and implications of these same revelations.  Making sense out of chaos and fulfilling his responsibility to the Hebrew people and to God were surely at the forefront of his thoughts, and then to see that “his people” were in the process of replacing him, must have felt like daggers to his heart.  Talk about going from a “mountain top” experience to ground zero!  Understandably, Moses’ anger got the best of him.  He smashed the stone tablets into pieces that were seemingly irreparable.  He broke God’s Law literally.

Something that our Christian bibles leave out, but which is embraced by Jewish tradition is that two sets of tablets were carried in the Ark of the Covenant.  The fragments of the first set were placed along side the completed second version.  Why might this be.  Why include one that lain in ruins and the other completely in tact?

Could one possibility be to remember that in our brokenness we can be made whole?   Moses’ heart was shattered in those stone tablets.  He found a way of dealing with the hurt and the anger by transforming them from brokenness to wholeness, from unintelligible to intelligible, from scattered revelation to sacred revelation.  Richard Rohr in “Things Hidden Scripture as Spirituality’ calls this process “making our wounds into sacred wounds”.  It’s about finding a deeper meaning to life’s hurts and disappointments and transforming that into something positive for the greater good of ourselves, our children, and the generations that follow.  In short, it is walking in the wilderness of our lives and remaining open to what it teaches us.

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Boy, Moses Had A Temper

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The following is a scene that has haunted my imagination for a few days now.  It is a scene of chaos and darkness, red and gold, the sound of thunder clashing with the top of a mountainside off in the distance.   It is a scene where clouds hover low to the ground; mist and dampness cover the skin.  The smell of burning flesh  saturates the air which flows in and out of the tents of the people who are gathered.  As far as the eye can see,  these tents and dwellings dot the landscape.  There is an acute awareness of life and death all about.

This, in fact, is the scene I picture just before Moses descends Mt Sinai after being absent from camp for 40 days and 40 nights.  It is a scene filled with anticipation and excitement on one hand and disillusionment, disappointment, and agony on the other hand.

Exodus 32 makes plain what is going on on top of the mountain where Moses is, and what is happening back at camp due to Moses’ long departure.  Moses went up to Mt Sinai to meet God.  It was a spiritual journey to a holy place where, for 40 days, Moses encountered the divine presence of God. During their time together, God wrote His Law, The Ten commandments, to be taken by Moses and delivered to the Hebrew people.

During Moses’ time away, the Hebrews become anxious for their leader. His absence had been long, and there was no sign of his return.  The people grew tired of waiting, fearful of who and what might lead them if Moses did not return. Exodus 32:1 outlines the Hebrews’ solution to the problem, “And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.”

These people were basically asking Aaron for new leadership.  Note that the Hebrew word translated ‘gods’ in this verse can mean civil leaders or magistrates.  God is not capitalized in these verses ruling out the meaning of God as deity.  The people are asking Aaron to provide them with a new governor, and new administration.  They might even be asking Aaron to appoint them to these positions.

This is an interesting insight to me given that while Moses is on top of the Mountain, God says in Exodus 32: 7 – 10  “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt.  They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ “I have seen these people,” the LORD said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people.  Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

Moses then pleads with God not to destroy the Hebrew people in the following verses of Exodus 32.  He pleads for compassion and mercy.  However, when Moses descends Mt. Sinai with tablets in hand, he begins hearing the sounds of people shouting, the sounds of defeat, the sounds of singing.   In Exodus 32:  19 -20 we read what happend next, “When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.”  A few verses down we read where Moses commanded the Levites to kill three-thousand people because they remained against The Lord.

Why exactly did Moses lose his temper and smash God’s law?  Why after pleading for the lives of the Hebrew people, did he order some of them killed?  Was the worship of a false idol (golden calf) really the problem here?

What the golden calf represents here continues to be debated by scholars, but my line of questioning has me debating two other possible interpretations of the golden calf. The first interpretation is that Aaron never meant for the calf to be a god of worship since he proclaimed a festival in honor of YHVH when he finished making it (Exodus 32:5). In other words, he and the Hebrew people did not intend the calf to depict YHVH but to function as the conduit of His presence among them, as Moses had functioned previously.  The other interpretation is that the golden calf could have been a symbol for the new government much the same way we have symbols depicting Republicans and Democrats.

The latter would explain Moses’ temper tantrum more immediately. Moses had been communing with God, he had been in discussions with God as to how to lead and to take care of the Hebrews, he had even been interceding in prayer on their behalf to keep God from destroying them.  Moses cared for his people; he was dedicated to them and to doing what God had appointed him to do.  Everything he did was about serving God and serving the people.  I imagine that when he descended the Mountain and saw that  HE, not God had been replaced, disappointment, confusion, sadness and anger all became part of his repertoire.   Moses had been loyal to his people.  They had not, in his eyes, been loyal to him.

So, What we have here is not a change in deity worship or religion but a change in types of government.  A change from one leader, Moses to a government by the people.  A change from the government of God to the government of Man. Moses promptly takes control back and grinds the gold calf into powder.  He then mixes the gold with water and feeds it to the people.  Gold mixed with water is healing to humans.  Moses is seen here, giving the people healing medicine.  It is medicine for their own good.  But what does Moses do for himself?  How does he transform his anger into healing?  I’m not exactly sure, but I might have an idea or two.  Stay tuned.

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Debate Law? I Think So!

I am in my first year of a 4-year commitment to a class called EfM, which stands for Education for Ministry and is sponsored by Sewanee: The University of the South.  The first year of the class is dedicated to the books of Genesis through Job.  To give you an idea of how painstakingly slow the study is, the class began in late August with Genesis, and here it is the end of January, and we are still in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.

I knew Exodus would be rousing because I had read it before and remembered the drama of the Egyptians enslaving the Hebrew people, Moses being saved by Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses killing an Egyptian and then exiling himself from Egypt so that he too would not be killed.

Then later in Exodus, there is the event of Moses encountering God in the supernatural burning bush. And who can forget the plagues that Egypt was smitten with?  Frogs, boils, locusts, killing of the first-born….Good stuff, right? I mean it’s kind of like the best soap opera ever!

Finally, the Hebrew people are set free to wander in the wilderness for forty years.  This is referred to as the Exodus/Sinai Event.  You would think they would be grateful to Moses for leading them out of such a god-forsaken land as Egypt, but they were not.  They committed many evils among themselves and against God.  Even so, Moses manages to lead them into relationship with God by introducing them to The Law.

This is the point where I thought I might lose interest. Hundreds and hundreds of laws to wade through, yuck!  Seriously, how boring does it seem to sit and read law after law after law; all of the should and should not’s; the do’s and don’ts; the “If you do this, you can expect this to happen” type of thing!  Scary stuff!

I must say, I was pleasantly surprised at how fascinating I found many of these laws to be.  We Christians tend to think of The Law as The Ten Commandments, but there are actually seven major codes of Law to be found in Hebrew scripture.  You have The Ten Commandments, The Covenant Code The Ritual Decalogue, The Deuteronomic Code, The Holiness Code, The Priestly Code, and The Curses Code.  Yes, the Curses code.  That one really piqued my curiosity! I thought to myself, “I’m good at curses.”

Within these seven codes you can find laws like:

Exodus 34:19 “The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. 20 Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons. “No one is to appear before me empty-handed.

Exodus 34:26 “Bring the best of the first fruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.” “‘Do not mate different kinds of animals.

Lev 19: 19“‘Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. “‘Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.

Lev 19:27 “‘Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard. 28 “‘Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD. 29 “‘Do not degrade your daughter by making her a prostitute, or the land will turn to prostitution and be filled with wickedness.

Lev20: 14 “‘If a man marries both a woman and her mother, it is wicked. Both he and they must be burned in the fire, so that no wickedness will be among you

Lev. 20:18 “‘If a man has sexual relations with a woman during her monthly period, he has exposed the source of her flow, and she has also uncovered it. Both of them are to be cut off from their people.

Lev 3:12 ‘And if his offering is a goat, then he shall offer it before the LORD. 13 He shall lay his hand on its head and kill it before the tabernacle of meeting; and the sons of Aaron shall sprinkle its blood all around on the altar. 14 Then he shall offer from it his offering, as an offering made by fire to the LORD. The fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is on the entrails, 15 the two kidneys and the fat that is on them by the flanks, and the fatty lobe attached to the liver above the kidneys, he shall remove; 16 and the priest shall burn them on the altar as food, an offering made by fire for a sweet aroma; all the fat is the Lord’s.

Just a handful of Laws from the hundreds of laws that are surely recorded in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.   The wonderful thing about these laws is that 3000 years ago they made perfect sense and helped maintain community much the way our laws govern us today. When we outgrow a law or find that we need a new law, our judicial system allows for that.  Our Founding Fathers set up a good base from which all law is generated much the same way that the Ten Commandments (base law) generated other laws that were deemed necessary for that culture.

This got me thinking about our own personal laws/rules that are used to govern our daily lives.  How many times have you stopped in the middle of some absurd task and asked yourself “why am I doing this?”  What about this is important?  Maybe it’s not an absurd task at all.  Maybe the thought has something to do with your person or the people you interact with.

We each have our own rulebook, and within that rulebook, I bet, are many outdated rules.  One of the first examples that come to mind is   “Make up your bed every day”.  Another, always keep the house clean and free of dust.  And still others, be happy and cheerful all of the time, never let other’s see your weakness, set the table with the forks on this side and the knives on the other side, don’t wear white pants in the winter, use only 5 squares of toilet paper with each wipe….

Some of these rules are certainly helpful, but others are simply dated and not needed.  Some of us are not aware of all of the rules we have for ourselves and I am wondering if we took stock of what we listen to, might we weed out what is not necessary to uncomplicate our already complicated lives?