Speaker 1: Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: Last week, we made our way through the infamous story of the golden calf. And in the story, Moses is up on the mountain of God for so long that the people in their impatience fill the void of his absence with a symbol of other people's gods. And the people think a bull so strong and virile will protect us while that guy what's his name again? Moses. Right?
Moses is m I a. And as you can imagine, the golden calf is a debacle. I love that word, by the way. It's a debacle. The result is shattered commandment tablets, Moses arguing with God to save these idolatrous fools, and the eventual slaughter of 3,000 Israelites as some kind of lesson.
But more than telling you about something weird that happened out in the wilderness, the writers of Exodus have a bigger message. Do not, they say, do not equate God's power with anything you can build. God's power is not in kings or prime ministers, whether you love them or you hate them. God's power is not in kingdoms or countries, whether they go to war or stand for peace. God's power is not even contained in charismatic leaders and every decision they make.
I mean, did God really approve of Moses' execution of 3,000 Israelites no matter how Moses frames it? I don't think so. That blood stains Moses' hands and the editors of scripture bravely leave in those unflattering parts Because Moses has been a murderer and a man whom God adores, kindred and killer both. And today, we wrap up Exodus, and I have one goal, to remind us why this story matters to us at all. We'll do that through the closing chapters of the text, but before we dive in, let us pray.
We begin today noticing the condition of our hearts and how we feel in our bodies. Are you feeling anxious? Do you feel sad? Are you feeling grateful? Maybe you're happier than you've been in a long time.
Maybe you're excited and curious about what could be next. In all times and in all places, God meets us. So we pray, loving God, settle our hearts, surround our bodies just as we are. Remind us of our belovedness. We are loved when we don't know what to do.
We are loved when we've been betrayed. We are loved when we're closing one chapter and opening another. So may the peace of God and the presence of Christ and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit be upon us. Amen. So we're in Exodus 33 to 40, and that will take us to the very end.
We'll talk about a divine DTR, another chance at love, tabernacle, and union. Now you may believe this about me or you may not, but I had a terrible time dating in my life. I didn't date in high school. I didn't have hookups in college. What could have been relationships in my twenties were mostly almost always botched by me because I'm awkward.
I remember hanging out with this really nice guy, Brian, when I lived in California, and we met in ministry and went to some A's games. And early in our hangouts, I got so overwhelmed by the whole thing that I gave him a call on my 2002 flip phone and said, I don't wanna date you. You're a really nice guy. It's not you. It's me.
Blah blah blah. And he jumped in and was like, Bobby, why does it feel like you're breaking up with me? We were just hanging out. And I wish I could say that was the only time that happened in my life. It was not.
I always got ahead of the DTR, the define the relationship conversation. I always wanted to know where do I stand and what are we creating together. And maybe it's because dating was such a struggle for me that I find themes of that struggle in all kinds of places, even Exodus. We do that. We look for meaning through the struggles that shape us.
So let's think about the end of Exodus like this. Who are these people to God? And what are they creating together? We'll start with the story in Exodus 33. At the beginning of the chapter, God tells Moses to take the Israelites and head to the promised land without God.
After the golden calf fiasco, we're told that God is still reeling from the betrayal. And Moses won't have it. There's this scene in what is called the tent of meeting, this minimalist version of the tabernacle which Moses sets up on the edge of camp. It's where Moses meets with the divine face to face. And face to face is a Hebrew idiom that means Moses and God are in direct communication.
There's no actual face of God looking like, I don't know, Idris Elba. The expression has more to do with their voices. So listen in on how Moses changes God's mind. Then Moses said to the Lord, if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us?
What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? And the Lord said to Moses, I will do the very thing you have asked because I am pleased with you and I know you by name. What I love is that Moses tells God how Moses and the people of Israel should be treated and God listens. Theologian Ellen Davis frames Moses' conversation with God here as a domestic dispute. It's intimate.
It's involved and even a little tense. And can you hear how Moses is in the driver's seat? Not because he just sat back and waited his turn, but because he became a person of action, speaking for God and negotiating with pharaoh and delivering new laws and ways of being. Moses got involved with the plans of God, and before he knew it, the plans of God couldn't go anywhere without him. Some of us are content to speak of God's action in our lives.
We're confident. We say, Jesus really showed up for me, or this is what God wants me to do. And others are less sure, or we're in a season of feeling less sure. Speak to God face to face. I never get a reply when I try.
And if we're defining our relationship with God and it is changing with us as we change, might God speak in infinite ways? God might blaze from a bush in the desert. God might whisper wisdom in a person's open heart. God might sit on God's own hands saying, honey, you got this. God might zip God's holy mouth so that the silence is a gift where you finally hear yourself and learn to trust yourself.
This is divine partnership. It is co creative. It is wholly collaborative collaborative with one party refusing to always take the lead. So Moses comes out on top, and then we launch into a redo of the relationship Yahweh has with Israel. It's another chance at love.
In Exodus 34, the Lord instructs Moses to chisel out two new stone tablets. Moses gets to work and then hikes up Mount Sinai in his tivas with the tablets in his hands. Verse six and seven, and the Lord passed in front of Moses proclaiming, Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. Yet the Lord does not leave the guilty unpunished. God punishes the children and their children for the sin of their parents for the third and fourth generation.
This is what is known as the 13 attributes in Jewish tradition. This dating profile of the divine, if you will, is listed 14 times in the Hebrew scriptures. It's God's best qualities repeated and clung to and cherished. Now I thought about cutting off verse seven for the reading today. It's that part about God's punishment reaching the children and their children for the sin of their parents for three or four generations.
I mean, that sounds cruel. But whether we like it or not, there are diverse pictures of God across the scriptures. And a more empathetic question would be why? Why did people need a God like this? It could be that they are just so tired of the abuse from empires squeezing all their vitality out of them that they long for a god to defend them.
Who could hold that against slaves? At the very least, these texts describe the way harm ripples out across the generations of people who are oppressed by forces so much bigger than them. And side note, if you wanna know more about intergenerational trauma, read anything by the Canadian physician, Gabor Mate, who spent years working in Vancouver's downtown East Side. So here we are in the story. The covenant is renewed.
The commandments are reestablished. Wonders are promised for the whole world to see, and Moses gets a bit of a makeover. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant of the law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord. And the Hebrew word for radiant here is Koran, and it's only used four times in the Old Testament, three times in Exodus 34, and once in the Psalms where it means horn to refer to a bull. So is Moses the golden calf, the bull now?
No. That's actually not what it means. My brain really wanted to, like, make a connection there this week. It's not there. What it does mean is that Moses has this mystical experience with God, and it makes him glow.
That's not a stretch in an ancient near eastern imagination where radiance refers to the luminosity of the gods and the authority of rulers. So if you're glowing, maybe it's God. I'm sure you've heard it said that couples, as they age, they start to look like each other. Maybe you're kind of wondering, like, is this happening in my life? Rest assured, a study out of Stanford University says that does not happen.
We have just evolved to prefer sameness, and so we partner with similarity. And still, I really think the idea is here. Moses and God are merging. One scholar says that Moses' face actually becomes the locus of God's presence. And more, the veil used to hide Moses' holy makeover because it so freaks the people out.
It's similar to the curtain and the tabernacle protecting the people from God's holy presence. So now Moses is tabernacle two. And details of the tabernacle take up big swaths in the text two, in fact. Exodus 25 to 31 is where you'll find all these instructions about how to build and adorn what was supposed to be this portable sanctuary. Details like this ark covered in pure gold, the inside, the outside, the cover, all solid gold.
And the table of acacia wood, also covered in gold with plates and dishes of pure gold. And 10 curtains of blue, purple and scarlet linen fastened with 50 gold clasps. There's a courtyard. There's this design of priestly garments. There's incense and basins and oils.
And then Exodus 35 to 40 is where you'll find descriptions of the tabernacle's execution, its construction, its completion. Work is described as the sharing of skilled labor, the contributions of many offerings of foreman, Bezalel, whose name means he's always in the presence of God. And combined, these tabernacle chapters make up one third of Exodus. That's a lot of Exodus. All the details, they can feel pretty boring to us.
But the tabernacle descriptions aren't a bug. They're a feature. When we drop into the story back in chapter one, the Israelites were abused and overworked by a new pharaoh. We're told that their lives were bitter with harsh labor. They are used ruthlessly.
And as Exodus closes, the free Israelites are put to work again, but with two notable differences. One is that at the beginning of each of the tabernacle sections, the people's feelings are considered. Moses gathers offerings to build the tabernacle from everyone whose heart prompts them to give. So there's no force but this invitation to collaborate. And the second difference is that the work should stop for Sabbath rest.
Sabbath rest to be with family, to have a nap, to take your sweet time eating a meal around a big table with neighbors. This is work that cares for hearts and work that considers bodies. So they work and they rest. They weave and they hammer. They listen and they problem solve.
And when they're done, Moses goes around putting everything in its place. Let there be lamps before the Lord over there. Let there be a gold altar with incense that rises and smells so sweet. Let there be a curtain to make everything orderly. Let there be a basin filled with holy water.
Let there be ritual for cleansing and ritual for making holy. Finally, then Moses set up the courtyard around the tabernacle and altar and put up the curtain at the entrance of the courtyard and so Moses finished the work. And the Hebrew word for finished here is kala, and it means to complete. Now don't miss this. Kala is the same word used in Genesis to speak about God making the world, putting the sun and moon and land and creatures and people in their place and saying it is finished, it is complete, it is good.
And so we are meant to see the tabernacle as this microcosm of creation. The chaos is over at least for now, and everything is in its place. The tabernacle represents the world as it should be. Now here's the thing about the tabernacle. It never really happened.
Don't get me wrong. There is some kind of sanctuary that was portable, and we catch that with the term tent of meeting used alongside tabernacle in these later chapters. But it's more likely that the details about Jerusalem's later temple get transposed artistically onto this portable wilderness sanctuary in Exodus by priests who shaped the text hundreds of years later during exile. So did the tabernacle exist? This castle built of gold for God in the desert.
Not really. But was it real? Absolutely. It can be enough to imagine the world as it should be, even if in your lifetime, you never see it come. So maybe it's just a tent, but you see it as a tabernacle.
Rabbi David Foreman talks about the flexibility of the Hebrew word for tabernacle. It's the noun Mishkan, and it comes from the verbal root, Shekan, which means to dwell and to abide. And Foreman translates tabernacle as, get this, a cozy dwelling place. He calls it an apartment we affectionately invite our creator into. So we invite our creator into the work of our hands, the rest of our bodies, the love for our families.
And we invite creator into our deconstruction, our reconstruction, our new ways to pray and play. And we invite creator into our freedom, into the struggle for expansive liberation, into the ways we tend pain and insist on healing for all. Tabernacle is a noun, but in a way, it's a verb. It's a place of divine dwelling and the work of sacred encounter. So here's the closing scene at the end of chapter 40.
Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. We're told that in their travels on route to the promised land, whenever the cloud lifts, the people set out. And there's a cloud of the Lord over the tabernacle by day and a fire in the cloud by night. And so to our surprise, it turns out that a little bit of God might very well be in what your hands can make.
Exodus is a love story. It's union that God was after all along. The story ends with God taking up residence at the center of their camp. It's an incredible ending for slaves, for people running away from powerful masters, for desert wanderers unsure of what comes next. Sometimes they took steps forward.
Other times, they fall flat on their faces. They got things right. They got things very wrong, and their leaders were giants. And they did things that baffled their people. And they shaped a whole faith with rituals that are still practiced to this day.
Exodus is legacy. It's meaning making. It's a story of the divine that still speaks. If you're not sure what to take from this series or from this book in the bible, might I suggest this? Your struggle to be free and flourishing is holy.
It is holy. Now I have a practice that I have used in my life for as long as I've been a student of the scriptures. I hold the Bible in one hand. And in the other, as I study, I hold a cultural artifact, often a piece of art in visual, written, or sung form from our time. And I invite these texts to take up a conversation space in my head and my heart, and I find their similarities.
It's so life giving how the stuff sparks with life. And you might wonder how I find this stuff, and I gotta say, it finds me. If I'm open to it, wise and inspired work always finds me. Last week, I read the black poet and culture critic Hanif Abdurrakib's book of essays called They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. And the title alone is a summary of Exodus.
Under the oppressive hand of pharaoh, crying out from ruthless leaders, the bond between those who suffer is, they can't kill us until they kill us. Abdurrakib's essays are about love and music and survival. They're about growing up black in Ohio and friends gone too soon and grief from so much loss. They're about joy and trash talking and remembering how fleeting our successes can be. Exodus is about all of this too.
So anytime you struggle through a wilderness, a disruption, a moment when the world feels far from fair, remember Moses, the reluctant leader turned glowing companion of of God. And remember Miriam, whom we didn't even get to, a woman who used her voice to declare God's honest truth. And remember the people, all those people together on a journey through the wilderness to be free. Let us pray. God of the center, God of the desert, of a community, God of strange and curious time, We take a moment before we go on with our day to be grateful.
We're grateful for the scriptures, which are ancient and alive at the same time. We're grateful for a community where we can engage our hearts and minds. We're grateful for the mystery of all that it means to be human and to journey with the sacred. If we're holding the questions about who we are and who God is to us, spirit
Speaker 1: of
Speaker 2: the living God, be our guide. And if we're wondering if we could have another chance at love, spirit of the living God draw us into brave new places. And if we're seeking awe won't you show us what it means to see all kinds of tents of meetings in our lives, places where you dwell, tabernacles. So may the beauty of the Lord be upon us establishing the work of our hands. Amen.