Standing in the Breach
Psalm 106:1-6,9-23 Exodus 32:1-14
Rev. Greg Russell
Although the lections for a given Sunday do not always share a clear theme, on this particular day a common theme emerges from our three readings: reconciliation effected by an intermediary. In Exodus and the Psalter reading, it is Moses who is the intermediary. Indeed, the psalm ends with this powerful summation:
So, God purposed to destroy them, but Moses,
the man God had chosen, stood before him in the
breach to prevent his wrath from destroying them.
In the Philippians passage, Paul encourages reconciliation between Euodia and Syntyche, asking his loyal comrade:
to help these women, who shared my struggles in the
cause of the gospel, with Clement and my other fellow-
workers, who are enrolled in the book of life.
So, reconciliation is on the menu for this morning. When such a painfully relevant theme as reconciliation emerges from our readings, preachers are tempted, too quickly, to jump to preconceptions as to what the sermon should say. We are tempted to bypass the radically upsetting nature of the biblical passages, especially in the way they portray God.
Both the Exodus and Psalm passages paint a picture of a terrifying God; a God who is so enraged that the people are going to be obliterated. Moses has to plead with God, reason with God, even appeal to God’s reputation among the nations and how it will be tarnished, if God gives in to wrath: Why let the Egyptians say, “God meant evil when God took them out, to kill them in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth!”? And this hardly is a singular occurrence: Walter Wink reminds us:
Killing in war is divinely sanctioned in scripture. Over
1,000 verses depict God engaging in violent acts of
punishment, and another hundred show God expressly
commanding others to kill… Violence easily is the most
often mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew
Bible.
Happily, there are alternate visions of God offered by the Hebrew Scriptures and certainly offered by Jesus of Nazareth, in the way he lived and in what he taught. You can understand why we preachers turn to these other visions because of our pain at finding violent images of God in the Bible. I used to just skip over these passages because I couldn’t figure out how to deal with them. I still would be happy to tear them out and stick them in the back of my Bible behind the maps. But it is more honest, and ultimately more emotionally and theologically more liberating, to face this violent undertow in our tradition.
Maybe the violent intentions of God in the Exodus text help us understand some of the root causes of our own brutality and alienation. To ignore them or to soft peddle them in the name of a more consistent theology about the nature of God, may block our capacity for receiving God’s love by repressing, but not eliminating, our own violent tendencies.
As I worked on this sermon, it took the form of a prayer, awakened by the news on television one evening. In it I try to model the vision that the Psalmist has of Moses – that vision of one who dares to stand in the breach to prevent God’s wrath from destroying the people. I do this out of the conviction that when we demonstrate the capacity to argue with God, it frees us to pray what is truly on our hearts, including our anger with God. Far better to argue with God than to swallow our anger in a misplaced piety that short-circuits a vital relationship with God. And if this is a prayer, it is one that we should offer heads up and eyes wide open:
I turn on the evening news and hear:
This morning a retired army office shot and killed a
teenager who was on the way to school. The officer
says the boy was tailgating him, and when he came to
a stop light, the kid got out of the care and came up to
the car making an obscene gesture.
“O dear God!” I pray the words aloud as I listen. On the evening news the night before I had watched the sentencing of a kid who shot and killed another kid and who now faces 43 years in jail. The boy is 15; the earliest he can be paroled is age 52.
Now, the newscaster reports, the retired Army officer will face the same charge. He will be dead before he can be paroled.
The violence . . . the violence!!
O God, where does it start?
O God, where does it end?
Maybe, O God, it starts with you . . .
Or at least with the way we have pictured you.
We turn to the Bible and find over a thousand verses where
you are engaged in violent acts of punishment.
Even in today’s lesson you threaten your people with
destruction, just because Moses was a long time on the
mountain and they grew weary waiting in the wilderness
and needed to see a god . . . any god.
Of course, it was wrong for them to turn from you,
especially after you had been so gracious and liberating.
But your urge to destroy them is no more fitting for you
as God than for the retired Army officer to shoot the
teenager!
I know it is all right to talk with you this way, God,
because Moses spoke this bluntly with you.
Moses argued with you about your violent intent.
The Psalmist says he stood before you “in the breach”
to prevent you in your wrath from destroying the
Hebrews.
And it worked!
We read in Exodus that you heeded Moses:
So, the Lord God thought better of the evil with which God
had threatened his people.
If only Moses had been in the car with that retired
Army officer!
If only his wife had been there . . . or a friend.
If only someone had been there, who could have said:
Look, I know you have every reason to be angry.
The kid’s acting a fool. He’s being disrespectful and
obscene.
But put away the gun.
For the love of God, put away the gun. Put it away!
Is that why this passage about Moses is in there, God?
To tell us that if you, Creator of heaven and earth, need
an intermediary to turn you from your anger,
we might need one, too?
Maybe that is our calling:
to be intermediaries between the violent and the estranged.
To be intermediaries as Moses was an intermediary.
To be intermediaries as Paul asks his comrade to be
between Euodia and Syntyche, two brave women
who once shared Paul’s struggles in the cause of the gospel,
but who are now estranged from one another.
We know what Paul is talking about:
We can count former friends and colleagues with whom
we once worked on a noble common cause; but now
there is a great gulf between us. We wouldn’t talk to
them if our life depended on it . . . which it does, of course.
Because the life of the world depends on reconciliation:
person to person;
neighbor to neighbor;
nation to nation.
Life depends on our talking to one another.
Life depends on our putting away the gun.
Life depends on our putting away the bitter and poisonous
word.
Life depends on our putting away the vow of revenge.
Life depends on our letting Christ stand between us –
Christ, the intermediary who engenders in us the
dream of a reconciled world, and is present in the person
you send to bring us together with our enemy.
Life depends on Christ, who comes into our own hearts
and appoints us to serve as intermediaries between other
estranged parties.
O God, if the violence began somewhere in the depths of
your Spirit, so, too, the violence ends somewhere in the
depths of your Spirit – in the depths of compassion and
grace that we know in Jesus Christ.
So, on this day – just this today – we pray for the gift of reconciliation – and that we, like Moses, may steadfastly stand in the breach and bring an end to destruction and violence.
And, tomorrow, we give us strength to arise and do it all over again. Amen.