In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Inspirer

The Rev. Denise Giardina
Sunday, March 7, 2010

Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 63:1-8; I Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

I would like to start this morning by posing a profound theological question. Is it OK to be cranky? More specifically, does God get cranky? Based on today’s lessons, I’d say the answer to both questions is “Yes.” And Lent may be just the time of our church year to consider crankiness. It is the time of year when we are all very cranky about the weather. This Thursday I put on my sunglasses, and realized I had not worn them for months. Depressed people tend to get more depressed this time of year. In Lent, many of us have given up something that we normally take particular pleasure in, and we miss that. It is the cranky season. So why shouldn’t God feel the same way?

Our scripture lessons today are evidence that God’s followers get cranky. St. Paul goes on a bit of a rant in today’s reading from First Corinthians. Let us first recall Paul’s audience. He is writing to new Christians in Corinth, in Greece, not the Middle East. And Paul, in this otherwise beautiful letter, commits one of a writer’s greatest faux pas. He momentarily forgets the audience he is addressing. And so he goes off on a tear about how God wiped out most of the people of Israel, even though He had just gone to the trouble of rescuing them from Egypt. Never mind that this story would be unfamiliar, even odd, to many of the people of Corinth. Paul goes obliviously on, detailing how God wiped out one group because of idolatry, took out another 23,000 or so for unspecified sexual transgressions -- and that’s a lot of sexual transgressions! -- while still others were slain for some vague putting of God to the test. “Don’t be like them,” Paul declares, implying “or you’ll get whacked too.” Meanwhile I wonder if some of those Corinthians listening, as his letter was read to the congregation, began edging their way toward the exit. I do hope they stayed long enough to hear the 13th chapter’s magnificent passage about love, which more than makes up for Paul’s crankiness.

Jesus, God in the flesh, also comes across in today’s Gospel as being in rather a bad mood. First he warns his listeners that unless they repent, they might end up like a group of people recently killed by Pilate, or others who died in the accidental collapse of a tower. At least Jesus acknowledges that, contrary to the popular opinion of the day, these people did not die because they had committed some special sin. Jesus rebuts those who, like Pat Robertson, try to suss out the sins of the victims every time there is a natural disaster. I am sure Mr. Robertson is at this moment trying to figure out what exactly the people of Chile have done to merit their earthquake. But Jesus, thank goodness, will have none of that.

But Jesus is still cranky – at everybody. All of you, Jesus says, are as guilty as were the victims of those disasters. And then he tells an odd story about a fig tree that is not producing fruit, whose owner threatens to cut it down. One commentary I read explained that in this story, when a gardener begs the tree be spared for a year, he also says he will dig around it and put manure on it. The actual word used for manure, the commentary tells us, is a crude one that is not generally spoken in church. So I won’t speak it here. But the commentary suggested Jesus’ listeners might have been shocked by the word, or else depending upon their temperament, might have laughed at it. In any event, the implication of the parable is, OK people, I’ll cut you a break this time. But shape up, or be cut down.

Then we turn to the Old Testament lesson. The story of God’s appearance to Moses in the burning bush is one of the most famous in the Bible – even people who are not religious have heard of it. It is an awe-inspiring story. But it is followed by a passage that is not in our lectionary, and I suspect has never, ever made it into any lectionary. That is because it may very well be the strangest passage in the entire Bible. The famous Jewish literary scholar Harold Bloom has said that it is the passage that made him an atheist.

God in the burning bush dispatched Moses off to Egypt to bring his chosen people there out of bondage. (The same chosen people, by the way, Paul points out would be killed by God on the journey.) No sooner had Moses set out with his family a few verses later than God decided instead to kill him. Why? We aren’t told. But the only way the impulsive murder of Moses by God was averted was that the wife of Moses cut off the foreskin of her son and laid it at Moses’ feet. So God inexplicably changed his mind once again.

Now. I ask you. A God who sends a man on an important mission after appearing to him in spectacular fashion, then immediately changes his mind and tries to kill him, then retreats after being confronted by a bloody foreskin? That sounds, well, crazy. I suppose we could explain it away as an attempt to describe how circumcision came into the world. But this sequence is just plain weird. If, that is, we interpret this passage as a literal, historical event.

One contemporary philosopher, Robert Wright, has written a book called The Evolution of God. Wright does not mean that God has evolved, that God has changed over time. God is the same. But rather, our human understanding of God has changed over time, has grown, and deepened. The Hebrew people of the early parts of the Old Testament were a tribal people, who believed their God was a tribal God, not the God of everyone. Other peoples had their tribal gods who were also exclusive, and sometimes the gods got into arguments among themselves. And the God of the early parts of the Old Testament is to our modern way of thinking somewhat primitive. Because, well, we human beings at that time were somewhat primitive, and that was the way we understood things. But over time, we have come to refine our religious beliefs, to come to a more sophisticated understanding of who God is, a more inclusive, universal understanding.

Our lectionary is an example of that. It has been carefully chosen. The burning bush is included in it, because the burning bush continues to haunt us; the flaunting of foreskins in the face of a murderous God does not. There are parts of the Bible we find indispensable. And, frankly, there are parts of the Bible that are hardly ever read, at least not for comfort or for inspiration.

But not only do we exclude some parts of scripture because they are just plain odd. We are also not afraid to include passages that cause us to question some sanitized presentation of God, and of what it means to be a Christian. So we have today’s lessons, warts and all. Being a Christian is not just sitting around with smiles on our faces and spouting platitudes about love and kindness. Being a Christian is also about getting impatient, about getting angry, and now and then speaking hard words.

The story of the burning bush is one that touches at the very heart of the mystery of God, who is far off and yet speaks to us from one of the most mysterious and paradoxical elements that God created – fire. Fire kills, fire brings warmth. Fire destroys, but fire also refines. Fire is close to us yet it does not allow too close an approach. Like God, who is so far beyond us we cannot really even imagine, and yet God comes down to earth to be with us.

Then there is cranky Jesus, and why shouldn’t he be? He was, after all, not just God, he was a man, a human being. So maybe that day, he had a headache. He’d been through a lot, after all, and was facing much, much more. Don’t you think he got tired, once in a while? If God-made-Man did not, could he really relate to us? And what, by the way, may have made him cranky? Maybe – us? I mean, we never quite get it, do we, despite everything Christ tries to say to us. So if he wants to cut loose with the “S” word on occasion, or yell at us that we need to shape up, well, who can blame him.

Finally there is Paul. Not God made flesh, just a sinful human being like the rest of us. Paul was magnificent; he was also petty. He could write so beautifully about “faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love;” he could give us the courage to face down “principalities and powers”. Then he could turn around and get all sanctimonious and tell women to keep their hats on and their mouths shut in church. Just a cranky human being like the rest of us.

What is there to do then except confront God’s call to us to do the extraordinary things we Christians are called to do. We cannot say, like Moses trying to refuse his call, Oh God, you must only want saints for that task, not a cranky person like me. That sort of response will just make God cranky.