Transfiguration A, Exodus 24:12-18

I had a car like Exodus once. Whenever you left the house you could never be sure you might not spend forty years wandering around stuck in the wilderness. It was a used '59 English Ford my dad got for fifty bucks. It had transmission problems. Just like those tricky approaches to YHWH on Sinai, you had to double clutch it sometimes to grind down from one gear to the next up that slippery slope. It could get ugly.

The approach to God who is God - not the inherited ethnic God of the current culture - not the thematized God of the church year - invariably requires some fencing off. God for us but not God of us. It's a perilous boundary that shifts with each chapter between the sanctity that can save you and the sanctity that can damn you. The path up that mountain is further complicated by old traditions - some, most likely among the oldest in the Bible - that make the story often feel more like an archaeological dig than a narrative. You pick up a chard the wrong way and you notice you're dripping blood. There are too many ways to make mistakes.

The vehicle was just unreliable. It gave me something to practice on with my student driver's license. There comes a time to change our ride- to get rid of stuff that isn't going to get us where we need to go even if we don't really know exactly where that is. Even the ancient storm god rubric of Sinai feels like something is trying to seize up leaving the whole people Israel stranded in a ditch in the middle of a wilderness they will never live to see the end of. Is it so different, in effect, than the confining neighborhoods of old Egypt they had just left? To what are these people being transmitted? Still, just because we have transmission problems doesn't mean the trip is aborted. There's always a way. That's the kind of God we came out here for - even if we didn't know it when we pulled out of the old barrio.

Copyright © 2017 Andy Gay