Over the next few weeks we are asking, “What If The Bible Is Still Good News?” Last week, we considered how different lenses can help us navigate the different types of literature we encounter in the Bible: parables, poetry, personal letters, and people’s stories. We remembered that 48 of the 66 Bible books are named after a person or a church! We wondered if the genius of Scripture is how guided by God’s Spirit we lay our story against the Biblical story and therein encounter a Word from God? Perhaps, the Bible becomes living and active when the Holy Spirit guides us, the Risen Christ comes alongside us, and we believe God can do a new thing through us! (Hebrews 4, Matthew 28, John 16, Isaiah 43 and 2 Corinthians 5) 

Today’s lectionary passage is a doozy.  In Exodus 32, Moses, like a psychologist or defense attorney, talks an angry God off the ledge,  “Lord, why are you so angry? Why are you so angry at the people, whom you just brought out of the land of Egypt? Why would you allow the Egyptians to say, ‘God did evil to his own people? Calm down! Change your mind, you are about to do something terrible!  Remember your promises.” 

First off, shout out to Moses who after waves of frogs, gnats, flies, boils, hail, locusts and deadly pestilence has the hutzpah tell God to chill out.  Second, shout out to the writers of Exodus who courageously recorded a story that invites us to ponder the nature of prayer, the challenges of leadership, generational trauma among oppressed peoples, and the collective frustrations of a nation that seems out of control.  Third, shout out to our Hebrew ancestors, who heard a word from God in these stories and decided to put them in the Biblical Bookshelf.   

How do we interpret and apply this troublesome passage? Is it a conversation, a debate, a prayer?  No matter our interpretation, Moses’s conversation with God feels like a heavyweight wrestling match, where strangely God is the aggressor and Moses wins the fight!  “The Lord changed his mind about the terrible things God said he was going to do.”  Maybe we should put that on a T-shirt: “The Lord Changed his mind…. Exodus 32:14”  Did you notice that Moses and the storyteller describe God’s first plan as “terrible”?  Genesis 32 tells us Jacob, the Trickster,  going home for the first time in decades, wrestled all night with God, winning but walking away from the divine encounter with a new name and a limp. Romans 8, tells us that when life overwhelms us so completely that we do not even “know what to pray”, that “the Holy Spirit pleads our case with sympathetic groans that can’t be described with words.”  Maybe after Wednesday’s murder in Utah and the shooting in Colorado you thought a few terrible things? Maybe you do not know how to pray in a world that seems to have lost its way?  In moments of deep loss and collective disappointment God can feel like an adversary.  And some preachers will tell you that God plans terrible things for some of us.  But hear the Good News, the Bible says “God changed God’s mind!”   

We will come back to this mind-boggling idea of God changing God’s mind in a minute, but let’s set the context of our passage, because the word of God is rarely revealed in single scriptural soundbytes! 

The Exodus liberation story could be told with a series of images, maybe stained glass. The story begins with bricks, mortar, pyramids, taskmasters, and Egyptian oppression.  

The next window might be the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who resisted Pharaoh’s racism, injustice and oppression!  

Then picture a middle eastern mother weaving a Moses basket, sealing it with tar, and floating her precious baby down the Nile into the palace, where a queen disrupts her father’s plans and raises Moses, “one of those Hebrew babies”, as her own. (Genesis 2)  

Imagine a twenty something Moses bespoke with golden bling and silken palace finery fleeing after striking down an Egyptian slavedriver  who was beating a Hebrew slave.

Then, the Burning Bush, where after decades as a shepherd, Moses saw something unusual and turned aside. Turning towards Wonder often leads us to God.  Pentecostal flames dance around the tree but no green leaves burn.  God speaks “Moses, I have seen the oppression of my people, Israel. I’ve heard their cries on account of the taskmasters! I have come down to rescue them! So now I am sending you, go down Moses, way down in Pharaoh land. Tell, old pharaoh, let my people go. Go I am sending you” 

How about a stained glass image of Moses saying, “No lord, send someone else.  What if they do not believe me?  No Lord,I do not speak that well. No Lord, who will I tell them has sent me?”  The people had no Bible, no hymnal, no written commandments, no liturgical holidays, no temple, no tradition, no priests, no altar, no name for God.   “No, Lord, please send someone else.”  Moses goes.  

Maybe a “plague window” with Pharaoh’s heart hardened, frogs, gnats, flies, boils, hail, locusts, and deadly pestilence?  Better yet a Passover Meal celebrating liberation! 

Of course windows for freedom’s pathway through the Red Sea, manna from heaven, and Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the 10 Commandments? 

But what about a Golden Calf window?  The story goes “The people saw Moses was taking a long time to come down from the mountain. They said to Aaron “Come on! Make us gods who can lead us. As for this man Moses, we don’t have a clue what has happened to him?”   After tasting freedom, after the Red Sea, after Manna in the wilderness, the people abandon God for a golden calf. Aaron makes an altar for sacrifices and throws a festival. Before Moses can read the Ten Commands to the people they have broken the first two: No other Gods and no idols. 

Have you ever been deeply disappointed in people, angry? Have you ever for just for a millisecond, thought about doing something terrible? The Bible tells us that God broke the news to Moses: “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have quickly turned aside from the way that I commanded them… worshipping something golden like  god… these people are so stiff-necked. Leave me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them.”  That is some revisionist history on God’s part. If I was Moses, I would have reminded God that the past 31 chapters were all his plans! 

What do we do with this passage?  Perhaps, if God can feel disappointed, alienated and angry maybe we can as well. And maybe the way we feel is not the best guide to our actions? Maybe when feeling angry, isolated and alone like God does in our passage, we need to talk to a friend, like Moses, who can help us remember who we are,  who God is, who “they” are, and what is right.  We need each other, we need communal prayer to remind us of our collective identity as children of God.

Despite God’s command to be left alone, Moses refuses to leave God alone. Moses reminds God of who God is.  “Lord, why are you so angry? Why are you so angry at the people, whom you just brought out of the land of Egypt? Why would you allow the Egyptians to say, ‘God did evil to his own people? Calm down! Change your mind, you are about to do something terrible!  Remember your promises.” 

On Monday, Hunter Wade and I spoke for about an hour about these passages and she shared “God is more relational than we ever give God credit for being.” Hunter and The New Interpreters Bible Commentary agree that Moses is indispensable to hearing a word from God, but so is Isaiah, Ruth, Ester, Magdalene, Peter and Job. In Exodus, the words of God and Moses run together, overlap and intertwine. In Chapter 4 God tells us that Moses, “you will be like a god to Pharoah”  Maybe the Spirit of God within us is indispensable as we push back against Bible passages that seem “terrible”?  Keep pushing, maybe God is changing God’s mind, maybe God is doing something new!  

Although our souls and theologies may shake as we read “God changed God’s mind… (Exodus 32:14),  perhaps changing our minds is simply part of the image of God within us? Changing our minds is about the most human thing we do, but maybe it is also a gift from God? To learn we must change our minds.  To forgive we must change our minds. To repent we must change our minds.  And compassion asks us to see humanity, vulnerability, and woundedness in a new light.  Maybe spiritual maturity is letting go of the terrible first reactions we feel and prayerfully engaging in the deep ethics of loving neighbors as we love ourselves? Changing our minds is essential to reconciliation, peace, love and community. How can we stay in community if we do not start anew after some wound, failing, or fracture? 

And perhaps this is the good news for us today: we can change our minds. We can be angry, we can be disappointed, we can feel overwhelmed that the nation is running amok… then we can remember who we are: children of God, who God is and that everyone is beloved by God.  Prayer reminds us “blessed are the peacemakers”, “overcome evil with good”, and “hate can never extinguish hate, only love can do that” (Matthew 5, Romans 12, Martin Luther King  Where Do We Go From Here?l)  This week, I found myself praying,  “Lord, help me to send no more violence into this world, no violence of  words, no violence of slander, no violence of actions nor violence of silence. Lord help me see no human being, no adversary or opponent as any less human than I am.” 

Life is full of adjustments, disappointments, failures, missteps and mistakes.  “Thanks be to God”, for our God who changes their mind, for a God adapts to our golden gaffs, accidental mistakes, and intentional tresspasses. I am glad that when I have failed, when I have thought or perhaps done terrible things, when I have forgotten someone’s belovedness and hurt or harmed myself or others, God has changed the plan, God has adapted, God has changed God’s mind and helped me start again! I am glad God is always doing a new thing- God is changing God’s mind. ( Exodus 32, Isaiah 43,  2 Corinthians 5,  Hebrews 8)

I could preach another chapter or two about Moses, but maybe we just consider one more stained glass window.  Well maybe we should put up one of Moses coming down the mountain and after talking God off the cliff’s edge, seeing the mess for himself, tossed down the Ten Commandments, breaking the only documents in the Bible God literally wrote. That is worse than burning a flag, I think, but a whole other sermon. 

And so by Exodus Chapter 33 with his soul exhausted from battling with God and with the people, Moses has had it and pleads with God “Look, you’ve been telling me, ‘Lead these people forward.’ (But look I am not sure what we are doing here,) show me that you really approve of me, show me your glorious presence.”  When we tumble through the trauma and the trouble we need someone to reassure us. So after talking God off the cliff, Moses needs God to talk him off the cliff!  Moses pleads with God, show me I am doing the right thing. God Moses hides in the cleft of the rock, so as to not sweep Moses away with God’s dazzling brilliance and God shows up and declares a refrain that shows up over and over again in the Bible. 

• “The Lord. The Lord is God!
• The Lord is compassionate and merciful,
• slow to anger, 
• very patient,
•  full of great loyalty and faithfulness,
• showing great loyalty to a thousand generations,
• forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion,
• And yet holding us accountable as well… ”

I do not know which is better, a God who can change and adapt to our missteps and mistakes or a God who is full of compassion, but maybe those are the same thing. Let us, be people of prayer, people in community with each other, remembering: who we are, who God is, and who “they” are so that we pull each other back from the edge of any terrible plan that comes to our overwhelmed souls. Amen