Exodus 19:2-8

They journeyed from Rephidim, entered the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; Israel camped there in front of the mountain. Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the Israelites: ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.”

So Moses went, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. The people all answered as one, “Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do.” Moses reported the words of the people to the Lord.

Sermon Text

Family is complicated. Have you noticed that? I do not think anything in life is as messy, as wonderful, as multifaceted as families and what they get up to. Take a moment for yourself, think of some of the mess – good, bad, or otherwise – that defines your family, and it should not take long for you to get exactly what I mean. That mess though, is not unique to any family related by blood, marriage, or circumstance. Any gathering of people will start looking like a family if they spend enough time around each other. There is a reason the Church so often talks about itself as a family. God our Father, Christ our Brother, and all people called by the Spirit, siblings in the same household.

Our scripture today captures one of God’s initial meetings with the people of Israel after they were around Sinai. It had been a long road from Egypt to the Sea of Reeds, and from the Red Sea to Sinai. Though many more years were ahead of them on this road, the people had already established they were not going to make this trip easy. They were skeptical about God’s intent with bringing them into the wilderness. Already, God was accused of planning to kill them with hunger and thirst, and now at the foot of Mount Sinai God was finally in a place to explain things fully to them. Still, the fire and smoke of the mountain was enough to scare the people.

This fear passed through time and shifted into a bit of a bizarre legend. The Babylonian Talmud, a collection of commentary on scripture and exposition on its narratives, describes God getting fed up with the people of God refusing to listen. This legend says that the people met, “Under Sinai,” in a literal sense. God, tired of no one wanting to enjoy what God had for them, picked up the mountain and held it above God’s people – “If you accept the Torah, well and good; and id not, there will be your burial.”[1]

That legend, of course, has never been seen as anything other than an interesting interpretive tradition. It should not, nor has it really ever been, be seen as the story behind this passage of scripture. The fact that we fill in the gaps of this story with this kind of thing, that God would threaten God’s people to make sure they listen, says an awful lot about how we choose to interact with God and with one another. There are always gaps between what scripture says and what we interpret from it, the white fire that burns between the words on the page, and how we fill them says as much about us as it does about God.

Scripture, in both the Hebrew and Greek testaments, contains formulas for blessings and curses. “If you do X, you will receive Y. But if you do A, you will instead suffer B.” You reap what you sow is a basic principle of ethics, Biblical or otherwise. Sometimes scripture teaches that God acts to bring about one thing or another. Other times, it is just a statement of fact. Proverbs tells you, many times, that if you are good with money you will have more money. That is not an act of God, that’s just common sense. In contrast, Christ tells us that if we do not care for the least of these, God will not acknowledge us as part of God’s family. God acts in one, simple causality and chance in the other.

Here, in God’s promise to the people at Sinai, God says that the people of the Covenant will be God’s “treasured possession,” if they keep the things commanded of them at Sinai. This is a conditional statement. “Keep the Torah, and you will be blessed.” That sounds like a quid pro quo – scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. That should tell us that we’re reading it wrong. We know how God works, we know that God is abundantly good and caring. God does not treat us well because we do what we should, we do what we should because God treats us well! Even at Sinai, at the very start, God calls Israel his treasure after they have done nothing but doubt and oppose him since they left Egypt!

The fact is that God has always been a God of mercy and grace. God has always loved with a love that cannot be quenched by anything. The people of God under that mountain and the people in this room today are loved with an unending and incredible love. That kind of love is not conditional, it holds onto people and does not let go. God lifts up the people of Israel here as a Holy Nation, a people of priests to proclaim God’s goodness to all the world. We, as people adopted into that relationship, continue that legacy. We are God’s treasured possession, and that status as God’s treasure is what inspires us to be good, to continue on, to grow.

Returning to our families, the place we began, I think we can all see in God’s love for us something we share with our families. We love our family, even though they drive us insane, even though they do not always treat us like they should. We love them with a love that cannot be quenched, and we love them that way because we follow God’s example. I firmly believe that people can only grow as much as we believe in their ability to do so. God’s overwhelming love for us, the high standard set by Sinai and by Christ, are all present to show us who we can be if we aspire to our highest heights. For our children, our siblings, our family, we have to believe in them as much as Christ believes in us – capable of infinite growth through the love that enables it to begin at all.

However, as God lays out in our passage today, an unwillingness of people to be a part of a loving relationship does break down that relationship. A child who does refuses to treat a parent well or a parent who refuses to treat a child well sometimes has to be cut off from regular relationship, for the good of all people involved. The love we feel cannot be quenched, but you cannot play a game for two with only one person willing to follow the rules.

Our divine relationship, our divine parent and siblings, God the Father and Christ our Brother, they are a different level of relationship. Perfect as they are, we cannot be wronged by them like we can be by human beings. We, though we may fail in a million ways, are always welcomed home – because we are God’s treasure. We throw ourselves onto God’s mercy, and we always find ourselves cared for.

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[1] Babylon Talmud. Shabbat 88a. A good explanation of this text can be found in Tzvi Novick, “Standing Under Sinai,” in The Torah.com available at: https://www.thetorah.com/article/standing-under-sinai-on-the-origins-of-a-coerced-covenant