The story that we heard read today from the book of exodus is a controversial one, like many of the stories in the bible,   its controversial for what it claims, controversial for what it awakens, controversial for what it assumes.    

And the excerpt that we read today did not even include the most controversial part to be found in this particular section of scripture,  the part which falls in the space of the conclusion,   the part where Moses turns to the tribe of the Levites and says:

"each of you kill his brother and his friend and his neighbor and the Levites obeyed and about 3000 people died upon that day."

Controversial? Just a tad.

Dr Francis Macnab, the noted psychotherapist and executive minister at St Michael's Uniting Church in the city,  recently launched a campaign
designed to stimulate debate about the future of the christen faith. As part of this campaign he has been quoted as saying that the Ten Commandments are one of the most negative documents ever written and that Moses was a mass murderer. He bases his claim about Moses on the passage in Exodus, which we have just begun to explore, the one which records that Moses killed 3000 Israelites who worshipped the Golden Calf.

For a more traditional perspective on the story we can look to UCA theologian Howard Wallace who writes:                

The passage about the golden calf falls within the book of Exodus which is formative of Israel's identity as a people, recounting the holy history of God's dramatic act of delivering them from slavery in Egypt.

In this passage Moses continues to act as intercessor between a faithful God and the faithless people, while Aaron shows a leadership more vulnerable to the demands of the tribe.  Or in other words Moses does what God tells him to do whereas Aaron does what the people want him to do.  There are all sorts of ways to find illuminating truths within this passage, and there are also all sorts of ways to avoid looking too closely at the bit  where God tells Moses to tell everyone  to kill everyone else.                                     

The question is of course, is such avoidance the most honest way of reading the text?             

And should we really be going to such lengths in the first place.  Should we really avoid looking the reality of this ancient writing in its entirety? What do you think?  

From a progressive Christian perspective we recognize that the bible is not 'the literal word of god' but that it holds within its pages the
collected writings of individuals and communities who have, over time faithfully recorded their own experiences of the divine. We know that
much of the Bible can be understood as poetry and legend and story and cannot be simply reduced to factual science or factual history.        
                                

And as The Realistic Living Press Editor explains:

We know that some passages of the Bible are difficult for us because they are about ancient laws that only made sense in ancient times  and that other passages are difficult for us because they are about depths of human experience that we have neverexperienced or that we have fled from experiencing.                

And we know that other passages are difficult for us because the ancient language is confusing; and because it's meaning needs to be translated into the images and references that point to what we experience in our lives today. We also know that it is OK to disagree with biblical authors and their interpretation of who God is and what God is asking them to do and that; in fact, we will often find that writers of the various books in the bible disagree with each other.   

  In many ways to not wrestle with the text would be to make of it,  an idol, an idol like the golden calf of melted gold. And the temptation to do this, to idolize the bible is an understandable one, because it makes the bible like a symbol of God's presence, a tangible, sensual thing in front of us that we can hold and handle and put back on the shelf  and that we can always turn to for sanctified answers.             

 
Another temptation is of course the temptation to make God in our image and we can imagine that this is exactly what many of the early writers were attempting to do and so we have an image of god who is ferociously tribal- just as they were  and we have a god who speaks of sides and enemies and of driving people out and we have a god who is jealous and wrathful  and angry and violent and vengeful and all those other dark things  which we all have within us  which we all have within us  but which, at particular points in history, have been allowed  and even encouraged by the culture of the day  to run wild and free in the blood and the streets. 

So what are we to do with these troublesome texts, these stories of mass murder, and these visions of hate?  Are we to read around them as the lectionary so often invites us to do, are we to pick out a bit here and a bit there and to do away with the rest?  Or are we to explore the whole of it, even the bits in Leviticus where daughters are stoned and the part about Sodoam and Gommorah where terrified wives are turned to salt.                                       
 Or are we to do away with it all together and to take comfort in the new testament alone (apart of course from those bits where Jesus is mean to the fig tree and is going on about being the only way to god?)  Radical Canadian Minister Greta Vosper, on exploring the challenge of the bible writes:  For the whole of Christian history we have been trying to work out what the scriptures mean. After all there are some pretty weird things described in the book purported to be the foundation upon which our faith is built.                   

Things like a man swimming in a whale for several days or a miraculous pregnancy in young Hebrew girl….and often if you have been unable or unwilling to enter into these stories as literal truth you have been accused of having too small a faith and have been required to hand your head in the corner in shame'.

           
But by recognizing that the bible is not the 'authoritative word of God for all time' we free ourselves up from attempting to justify the outrageous actions which the writers have claimed to be the 'decrees' of God. We can stop bending over backwards and turning ourselves into theological hoops and we can breathe deep again, in and out, in and out,  in the calm confidence that the god whom we feel as presence within us and without us, in this moment, right here, right now    is not some capricious murdering despot who commits carnage at will but is in fact, love, love, love and only love ... this day and always.

amen