...more like a man,
Flying from something he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
-William Wordsworth
Imagine a young boy in a youth group fired up for Christ. This boy finds belonging and a love for God. Yet, here and there and, in hindsight, everywhere, toxic anti-gay messages have been peppered throughout as a constant threat to belonging. These messages are absorbed into the subconscious, like drinking water sprinkled with powdered kool aid. When he grows up and can (at last!) self-define, this young man recognizes the harm done. He can see it has not only harmed him, but the ones he loves. He speaks to the people about their harm. They refuse to listen. He rebukes them. They refuse to listen. So, he rejects all things spiritual because of this great harm done to the soul--much like a man flying from the thing he dreads. Yet, “aversiveness always conceals a lure.” There remains a hidden longing: for sanctification, holiness, and affirmation from God and community.
I’m a Youth Pastor for a church with 30% LGBTQ and 70% allies (a2blue.org). I hear stories like this because traumatized people have found a safe space to share them. Youth groups and Bible stories can be captivating to young people at a time when belonging is essential. But, there is no denying that religion can be exclusive, toxic, and harmful to people in the margins. To read these texts and be moved by them when you belong to an excluded group, requires a different way of reading. There must come a deep acceptance of self and centering of exiled people. One must cultivate an awareness of the hidden, unspoken, and equally valid points of view not explicit in the written text. We read the stories as inhabiting the full human spectrum. Ultimately, the heart of scripture is the command to love. All people are made in the divine image. Time and time again, we learn: God calls us by name.
Imagine another young man. He finally decides to come out to his conservative parents. He found the person he wants to spend the rest of his life with. He is deeply in love. The young man decides to make this love, this inward grace, visible through the sacrament of marriage. So, he asks his parents to come to his wedding. They refuse. Flying from the thing they dread, they fix themselves to certain pieties. The parents have built up for themselves a certainty that this is the God, and so give up their most beloved possession, their own son.
In the book of Exodus, God describes the people as an intransigent people who cling to the pieties of the past; a people who refuse to hear those who would rebuke them; a people who are loyal to a fault. It is written:
“I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them…” (Exodus 32:9)
This verse comes from the story in Exodus just after they built the Golden Calf. The event is often considered a fickleness, an adulterous turning from the living God to worship other “not-gods.” In this verse, however, God describes another side to their idolatry: “stiff-necked.” In Rashi’s words: “They turn the stiff back of their necks toward those who would rebuke them and refuse to listen” (my italics). In a remarkable turn of events, the people who just declared, “we will hear,” refuse to listen.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg articulates this concept well. She writes,
“If the implications of the “stiff neck” are taken seriously, then, they disturb a primary notion of idolatry as infidelity. Perhaps, after all, the people are all too pious in their attachments? Perhaps they have never, in fact, left [that enslaving nation], that place of the deaf and dumb and the callous hearted?” (409, The Particulars of Rapture)
Rather than a fickle turning to a new deity, the image of the stiff-neck is clinging to a previous attachment with a callous heart.
We must wonder how long it took. How long from the time the people received the revelation, declaring, “We will do and we will hear!” (Ex. 19:8) and this stubborn clinging to old pieties (Ex. 32:9)? A midrash suggests 40 days, two days, half a day…(perhaps two thousand years?). The people had an inkling that the prophet was delayed, and so they threw their most precious possessions into the fire saying with certainty, “This is the God…”
When Moses returns and sees the people, he breaks the tablets at the foot of the mountain. In a gruesome description, he grinds the Golden Calf, sprinkles it into the water, and makes the people drink it (Ex. 32:20). I wonder if this action is a possible therapeutic antidote to their actions. It’s an eye-opener for sure. This time, they taste the “kool aid” in full awareness of its toxicity.
Nevertheless, Moses pleads with God for forgiveness and mercy on the people. In the biblical story (and for some today), the people repent. Their fixed pieties cease to hold power. A new relationship with God and neighbor is made possible. Far from relying on certainties, they finally open their ears to hear.
Listening to the untold stories, like the boy in the youth group or a young man in love, makes way for a deep knowing, to your core, that your friends who are being excluded definitively belong to God’s beloved community, in full inclusion. Biblical stories take on new meaning. Most importantly, the too often silenced exiles and their stories come to be centered as the most precious part of the whole--sanctified, holy, and affirmed.
