The Rev. Austin K. Rios
15th October 2023: Proper 23
As stories surfaced about the atrocities committed by Hamas against vulnerable civilians last weekend, and Israel’s reprisal through the week’s relentless bombing campaign and impending ground invasion led to more death and destruction, I’ve found myself contemplating what it takes to un-choose disaster.
In a cycle of violence that can always look back to ancient and more recent history for examples of bad behavior and inhumane treatment of the other—history which justifies the severity of extreme actions today—it can seem impossible to imagine a way out.
While exploring and unraveling the complexity of what is going on in the Middle East is far beyond the scope of a Sunday sermon, I do think it is worth our time to reflect on the different ways our ancestors in the faith dealt with impending disaster, and apply their hard-won wisdom to our own lives.
This central scene from the Exodus story allows us a chance to see the options they considered.
Remember how they got here?
A Pharoah arose in Egypt that had no memory of the collaboration and cooperation between Hebrews and Egyptians.
Instead of remembering how working together had saved the entire state and people from collapse and famine in the time of drought and despair, this Pharoah instead sees the Hebrews among him as threats.
Too numerous and dangerous.
It is this forgetting that leads to the host of dehumanizing practices of slavery that follow—practices that persist even after God’s warnings of plagues—culminating in the Israelites leaving Egypt through the parting of the Red Sea and wandering through the Sinai wilderness.
Their goal is a land where they will be free from the yoke of the oppressor and free to worship and serve the God who has created them, freed them, and accompanied them.
I imagine that there were many who wandered in the wilderness who thought of this promised land as a place of peace—a land where not only they, but also their neighbors would be free from the same inhumanity they experienced in Egypt.
And likewise, I can imagine a segment that interpreted the promise of land in the narrowest terms—those who would stop at nothing to eradicate opposition to their claims and set themselves up as gatekeepers over who merited inclusion in God’s community and who didn’t.
I don’t know how the camp was divided between these two views, but I also imagine that the vast majority of those who wandered in the wilderness were just seeking to survive.
And as is often the case when tired and hungry people struggle to survive in the absence of resolute and compassionate leadership, they can readily exchange the prospect of immediate relief from pain and suffering for the lasting promise that was their compass and guiding star along the journey.
The people forget the character of the God who worked through Moses to liberate them, and they forget Moses and his leadership while he is on the mountain receiving the law.
Aaron gives into their peer pressure, even if he knew better, and acquiesces to their request to take gold from their ears and fashion a suitable image of God for them.
While the golden calf is a specific kind of idol, it represents all the ways that we human beings prefer to worship and devote ourselves to objects and agendas that are less than the fullness of the God we know.
Perhaps Aaron was looking to his own survival when he said yes to this request—maybe he was afraid that if he didn’t do something they’d stone him, disband, and would die in the wilderness.
Desperate leaders and desperate people often do desperate things.
But whatever failings are Aaron’s, we see in Moses’ response the way wise leadership confronts difficult and desperate situations.
Moses’ initial conversation with God is terrifying.
God witnesses the people’s choices and actions—even though they believe they are proceeding unobserved—and God dangles the ultimate prize in front of Moses.
“I’m done with these people. They are stubborn and they want to praise idols instead of the one who freed them from slavery. Let me destroy them and make of you, Moses, a new nation. It’ll be like in the days of the flood, I’ll wipe the earth clean of these idolaters and install you as the Father of the future.”
For an egotist, this offer represents the ultimate dream.
But wise Moses is not so forgetful.
Instead of embracing the idol of his own supremacy, Moses instead reminds God of the promise God had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And at the same time Moses reaches back into the past, he also reminds God that abandoning the people in the wilderness, even if they deserve it, would only serve to ruin God’s reputation with the Egyptians and all others who would equate such forsaking as impotence.
This kind of remembering—re-membering—the kind that embraces the larger scope of God’s creation, accompaniment in the Garden of Eden, covenant with Noah, and the Abraham to Joseph narrative—is what allows Moses to respond to disaster with wisdom instead of fear.
This kind of remembering—that sees the arc of history not as distant and unimportant, but as present and ongoing—is what allows the God of the Exodus to un-choose the destruction and disaster of people based in wrath.
Moses, as a human being, is as susceptible as we are to such forgetting, and even fails to heed his own advice when he comes down from the mountain[1].
But we who glimpse the correctness of his assessment based in wisdom, mercy, and remembering are charged with planting our own actions and decisions in the same enduring, fertile soil.
We are called to remember the promise embedded in the Garden for all creation, we are called to remember the shared Abrahamic Covenant that yokes Jews, Muslims, and Christians to a common story, and we are called to proclaim and work for a world where wisdom, not wrath, wins the day.
We may not be able to entirely rid ourselves from our desires for reprisal and revenge, but we can refrain from running toward death and destruction by remembering our connections and common humanity in God’s larger story.
That is the first step each of us can take, personally and as a larger body, to begin un-choosing disaster.
To un-choose the disaster of dehumanizing systems.
To un-choose the disaster of climate change.
To un-choose the disasters that arise from war and instead choose life and wisely choose which God we will ultimately serve[2].
[1] Moses will go down from Mt. Sinai with the first set of stone tablets and get so mad at the people that he will break the tablets, pulverize the golden calf, and even empower Levites to serve as destroyers who zealously kill 3000 in a day.