Lent 8

You know, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the Israelites and their 40 years in the desert. But this Lent I'm finding it newly compelling. It is a trick because I do find myself reminding myself that what God says to those people isn't what God is saying to us today - we're not meant to read it as a How To in 2013. I do try to remember that the story is there to remind us of who our God is and how our God is faithful and constant despite our own unfaithfulness and inconstancy.

It's harder to remember that our God is a God who gets rageous and wants to kill us all when we stop loving God The Most.

I've created a story for myself where God gets over it once Jesus dies and is resurrected - all that anger, gone! Poof! Vanished!

But when we read Deuteronomy and Hebrews at the same time, a person has to wonder if maybe all that anger isn't gone so much. Maybe wonder if the state of our hearts today does matter a great deal to the Creator. Maybe wonder if God doesn't just lose God's shit from time to time when we start collecting gold to make a statue to worship because the promise we decided was promised is taking too long to be delivered.

The pain seems to be most acute for the Creator when the people who have known better and loved God and thanked God for all that God has given over time forget all that and start grumbling about all that God is not doing and all that is being withheld and gather up their better ideas and their smarter authors and bloggers and build a new god to worship. God seems to weep in anger when we do that, when we find a new god who will deliver what we want faster and more gloriously.

What does it take to be a person who remembers and keeps on worshiping the God Who Provides and not build a new one for myself?

Deuteronomy 9:13-21

New International Version (NIV)

¹³ And the Lord said to me, “I have seen this people, and they are a stiff-necked people indeed! ¹⁴ Let me alone, so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven. And I will make you into a nation stronger and more numerous than they.”
¹⁵ So I turned and went down from the mountain while it was ablaze with fire. And the two tablets of the covenant were in my hands. ¹⁶ When I looked, I saw that you had sinned against the Lord your God; you had made for yourselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you. ¹⁷ So I took the two tablets and threw them out of my hands, breaking them to pieces before your eyes.
¹⁸ Then once again I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights; I ate no bread and drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed, doing what was evil in the Lord’s sight and so arousing his anger. ¹⁹ I feared the anger and wrath of the Lord, for he was angry enough with you to destroy you. But again the Lord listened to me. ²⁰ And the Lord was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, but at that time I prayed for Aaron too. ²¹ Also I took that sinful thing of yours, the calf you had made, and burned it in the fire. Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust and threw the dust into a stream that flowed down the mountain.