Exodus 32:7-29

After I complete the 3 year lectionary cycle I plan to add some passages that I wish were included. When they are attached to a current lectionary passage, I will include them now, like Exodus 32:22-29. This lectionary ends the passage at 14, with the Lord relenting from killing everyone. The next verse has Moses coming down from the mountain. A couple more verses and he is smashing the commandments, then he has 3,000 put to death. Oh, and the chapter ends with the Lord striking them with a plague later. It is one of the more gruesome scenes in the Bible. I find it difficult to preach to a passage like this without mentioning all that.

The passage I recommend above features Aaron. The characters of Moses and Aaron probably represent the differences between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. Depending on who is telling the story, one or the other appears to be a smarter or a more just leader. These are stories told by the priests of the divided Kingdom as commentary on each other. You would be much better off reading Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible” or other scholarly works on this, rather than having me attempt to recreate it. (Here's a brief overview)

The other interesting thing that happens here is, Moses argues with God. This is not unheard of, most religions include it, and the Bible has several prophets who do it. This seems to be forgotten when anyone alive today questions something attributed to God. Questioning God is out of the question. But since prophets do it, what they are really saying is questioning a prophet is out of the question. Or more directly, questioning some scholars view of what a prophet meant, or really, questioning what the person you are actually talking to thinks, that's the real no-no. Even in the time of the prophet, the people down below making golden idols and wondering if they should just go back to Egypt don’t get to ask questions.

And imagine if Moses didn’t question God, if he had simply said, “okay, you’re God, go ahead and smite them if that’s what you think is best.” He would have come down the mountain to a pile of dead bodies and the survivors would have asked what happened and Moses would have said, “God did it.” I would expect everyone to ask “why”, and I don’t expect they would be too happy if Moses provided no more answer, just a shrug, and an incredulous, “well, He's God!” I think Moses’ story would end there, or we would have never heard of it because no one would listen to a prophet like that.

The authors of these stories knew they needed a little bit of an explanation. It’s not much of a discussion, but there is are least some excuses made and some negotiation. The Levites end up getting out of this one okay, although I’d think killing their brothers and sisters would have left some emotional scars. “Levite” is a tribal name, one you could choose to join, according to this story. By time these stories are written down, it would have been an inherited designation. (These are details that may not be accurate, feel free to check them.)

But all this gets forgotten or swept under the rug when a story becomes ancient. When the stories were written, they were presented as if they were already ancient. No doubt there was some oral tradition, but they would not have contained the details found here. People would have heard of some ancient person named Moses, and would have had no ability to refute his existence, then someone with authority comes along and says this is what he did and what he said. I don’t blame them for accepting it. Today, we have no reason to accept it. We have just as much information as the priests had, and quite a bit more. We are in a better position to question God than anyone in human history. And all you have to do is read the Bible and find that Moses, Isaiah and anyone who knew Paul, also questioned God. You have the knowledge and the theological backing.

Indigo Girls, Hey Jesus

1 Timothy 1:12-17

Timothy is supposedly a letter from Paul to Timothy, but it's authorship is disputed. Some of the things said in this book raise questions that pastors don't like to address. In response to questions like that, a progressive evangelical compiled an entire book of such questions. Banned Questions about the Bible, edited by Christian Piatt. Some of my favorite answers in that book come from Becky Garrison. One of the questions is about how Paul sometimes seems to support women in ministry, and other times not.

Becky uses quite plain language when she says it wasn't always really Paul and, “As the church became more closely aligned with empire, it began to tone down some its more radical teachings, such as the full equality of all in Christ.”

No matter how you feel about the authenticity of the Bible, or the authority of Paul, I think it's hard to make a case one way or the other on just what he was thinking. We should seek dialog and delve into questions in the Bible, not answers. It makes the history much more interesting. Sorry, not much specific to say about this introductory passage to this book.

Luke 15:1-10

Much has been made of these two brief parables. Matthew also has the lost sheep (18:12-14) and Mark touches on having dinner with sinners in 2:15-16. It's also in the book of Thomas 107, which is probably not in your pew Bible.

We start off with Jesus sitting down with sinners again, and the Pharisees complaining about it. Recent lectionary weeks with Luke have covered that this is how Jesus rolled. The sinners are tax collectors, something that will be covered in more depth with an upcoming analysis from William Herzog, 6 weeks from now. They would have been Jewish and they would not have been well thought of. Much political hay gets made from this throughout the centuries. There is really no comparison with these tax collectors and tax collectors today. There isn’t even much comparison to accountants today. The later choice of jobs in finance for Diaspora Jews is coincidental.

The tax collectors in this story are most likely a metaphor for anyone who had lost their farm or whatever income they had and had to do that job because there wasn’t much choice. For the people hearing the story at the time, not so much a metaphor as simply understanding who those people were. So we have our graceful Jesus here; quite the contrast to Exodus this week or some of the recent readings. Most preachers don’t like to discuss that contrast. Much easier to just focus on the kind Jesus.

And just what is Jesus focusing on here? On the lost ones. Being “lost” and “found” is referenced a few other times. It’s pretty clear that he is talking about being lost from the fold of the protective community. A coin wouldn’t have any conscious choice in walking away, but a sheep would. And there is no arguing that finding either one of those is reason to celebrate.

I’m sure you have seen this in action. When someone stops attending on Sundays, there’s a call to action. When my mother gave me the Bible that her mother had given her, there was a prayer slip from decades earlier, sitting in it like a book mark. It said their names and “young couple, not attending regularly”. Such a common occurrence, someone gets married, their partner doesn’t like the mother-in-law’s church, they stop going. Time to pray. Maybe if they had just talked to them instead.

The key point here is, getting people back is the important job. Those who are already righteous have no need to repent. Is he saying sinners are better? Probably not. More likely this story is demonstrating what God is about at this point in history. He is ready to reconcile. Also, as we see elsewhere in the gospels, everyone is a sinner anyway, so anyone could be said to be “lost”. But God is about giving sinners a chance to repent and return to the righteous path. All that talk we've been hearing from Jeremiah and Amos about what we did wrong is all forgiven. What they did at Mount Sinai, it's forgotten.

This is an approach that will endure. The old approach, like the one that says he is going to wipe us out again like he did with Noah, only lasts until people see things keep getting worse and nothing happens, or getting better based directly on their own actions. But anyone can run off, sin, and come back, and be celebrated for coming back. And anything can be attributed to a god that can come down, live with us, give us some wisdom, then go away.