Standing in the Breach

Exodus 32:1-14; Psalm 106: 1-6, 19-23

Had not Moses stood in the breach…

What is “the breach”? and what does it mean to stand in it? That’s what I want to look at today. A breach is simply a break in relations, but my favorite translation, from looking the Hebrew word used in Psalm 106, is “an impulse to erupt.” Today’s Psalm clearly harkens back to the story of the golden calf in Exodus 32, a story about a breach in the relationship between God and Israel when God was about to erupt.

Moses had been up in the mountains for quite some time receiving instructions from God on how the Israelites should structure their lives and worship. It begins in Exodus 20 with the 10 Commandments—a code of righteousness, as it were—a code for establishing right relationships with God and with one another. And the 10 commandments begin with this, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” While the 10 Commandments may the the most well-known, there are hundreds of other commands and instructions given to Moses by God. A particularly interesting one immediately follows the 10 Commandments: Exodus 20:23 reads “You shall not make gods of silver alongside me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold.” Foreshadowing perhaps?

God speaks to Moses about how to build altars, how to handle violence, how to manage property, how to deal with crime and practice justice, and on and on about life in community. God even gives instructions on how to build a temple in which the presence of God can dwell in the midst of the people. There are instructions on what fabric and colors to use to construct a tent (linen, knit with blue, purple, and crimson yarns), what metal to use to join the curtain pieces together (gold and bronze), what sort of wood to use for the frame (acacia)…it’s extensive and a little exhausting to read through. There are also instructions for a special curtain to be hung over four pillars within the main tent, inside of this smaller tent is where the ark of the covenant is to be kept. God tells Moses “The curtain shall separate for you the holy place from the most holy.”

Then there are instructions on who shall be priests, what they shall wear, how they shall be ordained, and how they shall practice daily burnt offerings. God punctuates these instructions for worship with what seems to be the reason for worship: “There will be a regular burnt offering at the tent of meeting before the LORD, where I will meet with you, to speak to you there…I will dwell among the Israelites, and I will be their God. And they shall know that I am the LORD their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them; I am the LORD their God.” All of this so God can be with the Israelites, and so that they can remember and respect that presence.

“All of this” took quite some time, as I mentioned before. So long, in fact, that the Israelites grew anxious and impatient. All the while God was instructing Moses on how to structure life, and community, and worship along the paths of righteousness, the people, without having received any of God’s guidance yet, had begun to structure worship on their own. God was telling Moses, “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourselves gods of gold. You shall worship me in order to remember who I am, what I have done for you, and that I am with you, even now,” and all the while the people were saying, “Well, so much for that Moses guy, not really sure where he went or what he’s up to. He said he had something to do with his God, but we don’t really know who that God is. All we know is that we’re free, and that deserves a party! The Egyptians, our former masters, had all sorts of golden statues of their gods, so why shouldn’t we have a statue of the god we can thank for all of this?” And they did exactly what they were being commanded not to do, although unbeknownst to them at the time.

But shouldn’t they have known better? These are people acting as if they don’t know God. But they witnessed the plagues and the Passover, they followed the pillars of fire and tower of cloud to freedom, they walked through the Red Sea on dry land. These are the fruitful offspring of Jacob, who was called Israel. They are literally the people of Israel. Shouldn’t they know God and be familiar with his covenant with Abraham?

“Shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” aside, let’s focus on Moses for a second. At this point, while the Israelites reveled at the base of the mountain, Moses is the only one who knows God’s will and instruction for them. Likewise, Moses is the only one who now knows God’s anger and frustration with them. “Leave me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them,” God says, “and of you I will make a great nation.” Some see this as a test. Will Moses take his own future of greatness and leave the people of Israel to the lava of God’s impending eruption? Thankfully, Moses is not that type of leader.

Some people use faith as a way to disengage with the realities of the world, but that doesn’t seem to be the way God intends for us to use our faith, and that’s not the way Moses uses his faith. Moses’ faith gave him the strength to stand in the breach between God’s anger and the faithlessness of the Israelites

So what is the breach? It is the crack in the relationship between God and God’s people—a crack caused by sin. The purpose of the commands and the instruction of God to Moses was to lead the people on the paths of righteousness—paths of right relationship with the right God—for the sake of God’s name. These were instructions on how to worship and remember who is being worshipped. Instructions on how to revere and respond to the covenant.

A covenant is a portal to a way of life upheld by two pillars of promise. In this case, the portal leads Israel to the paths of righteousness. The covenant between God and Israel is established in the 6th chapter of Exodus, “I will take you as my people and I will be your God,” and reflected in the opening line of the 10 Commandments: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the house of Egypt.” The pillars of this covenant are promises of faithfulness: our faithfulness towards God, and God’s faithfulness towards us.

When the Israelites give reverence to a statue of a golden calf and proclaim, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt,” they have demolished the first of these pillars, putting the pathway to life with God in peril. They have failed in faithfulness to God. This is to be expected as humankind is famously fickle. But what is more shocking in this story is God’s response when he sees the faithlessness of these people. He says to Moses, “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.”

How many of you have ever come home from a day of work to find a fuming spouse who greets you at the door with this line, “You won’t believe what your son/daughter did today!” You know it’s something bad when they say, “your son/ your daughter”; they want nothing to do with this child and are abdicating all responsibility and blame. God seems to be doing this to Moses. “Can you believe what your people are up to right now?” God wants nothing to do with this people and is pushing against the second pillar, putting the entire relationship at risk. The covenant is crumbling. That’s the breach.

Moses stands in the breach so that the portal cannot close, he refuses to allow God to give up on this relationship. Moses’ response to God proves that he was listening to and learning from God’s instruction. Moses stands in the breach, he holds his ground within the crumbling covenant and refuses to let it collapse. “These are your people,” he insists to God, and begs God not be as fickle and faithless as they are.

This is yet another example to add to the collection of texts that reveal God’s disappointment with humankind. It’s difficult to know exactly what to do with text like this. They are frightening and upsetting, revealing a God who can be just as unforgiving as we are. When someone suggests that all of this might have been a test to see how Moses would respond, we jump on the opportunity to let God off the hook. But really…we’re really trying to let ourselves off the hook. I’ll tell you what I mean. Our reluctance to believe that God gets ever angry with us is an attempt to avoid the danger of standing in the breach of a crumbling covenant. But Moses shows us that is the only place where we can ask for mercy. Sure, it’s comforting to imagine God as some cloud of happy fluff and to mask all other emotions in mercy, but our God is more complicated than that—your dog is more complicated than that. Look at the way we treat creation, look at the way we treat our neighbors, look at the way we treat God and revel in constructing idols of worldly wealth; God has every right to express emotions that might make us feel uncomfortable.

Where might God’s anger burn hot in the world today? What idols have we crafted? To whom do we give power and credit for life? How do we revel in things other than God’s grace? The wrath of God doesn’t so much destroy us as it does allow us to persist in a way of living in which we destroy ourselves. It is not God, our creator, who destroys us, so much as it is the ways of a world corrupted by sin, where violence is easily justified, and where greed and personal greatness are glorified. We can use our faith to escape the discomforting realities of the world, but how is that different from worshiping an idol? When God says to Moses, “Let me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them,” he’s not saying he wants to actively harm them…he recognizes that they are already harming themselves, and God just wants to forget about them, let the portal close completely. When we worship gods that aren’t real, we will destroy ourselves by ignoring the realities of God’s creation. When we worship gods that aren’t real, we turn our backs on the world that God created in order to celebrate a world that these other gods will ultimately destroy.

Where does your own anger burn? Who in this world would you permit to be shut off from God’s mercy? We learn from Moses that listening to and learning from God’s instruction doesn’t allow us to be satisfied with just our own safety. Moses did not opt for self-importance at the expense of others. Moses could have easily been just as frustrated with the Israelites as God was. Moses could just as easily have agreed with God, allowed them to be shut off from grace and healing and redirection, and taken his own personal salvation.

But Moses stood in the breach for them, and showed a community in danger to the trailhead of the paths of righteousness. Reminds me of a guy who stood in the breach for a woman caught in adultery, “Do they not condemn you? Well, I don’t either. Here you go, here’s the entrance to the paths of righteousness…keep sure footing and show others the way.” Reminds me of a group of friends who stood in the breach for a paralyzed friend, who used their faith to create a gateway to healing for him through the roof of a house. Reminds me of a Rabbi who blessed 5 loaves of bread to feed five thousand mouths. Reminds me of a guy who stood in the breach and broke bread with his friends. Reminds me of a guy who took the cross for the sake of a world wending its way toward destruction.

Just as Moses stood in the breach for the Israelites, we too have a companion in the breach. Christ stands in the breach for all eternity, that we might know and trust God’s unfailing faithfulness to his covenant with creation. To stand with Christ, then, is to put ourselves back on the paths of righteousness. To stand with Christ is to become an advocate for healing and wholeness, whatever it takes. This is how faith in Christ is a gateway to new life. This is also how we, like Moses, can stand in the breach for others. We enter the breach when we are aware of God’s righteous anger, yet trust God’s mercy, and demand that that mercy be shown to people at risk. We enter the breach to take up our cross and follow Christ. We enter the breach to meet God at the portal which will never close and through which God’s healing Kingdom is breaking into our broken world.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Conventual Franciscan Friar who was sent to Auschwitz for hiding Jews during the Second World War. After a brief internment in a notorious Polish prison, he was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp and branded prisoner #16670.

Kolbe was sent to the work camp. This involved carrying blocks of heavy stone for the building of the crematorium wall. The work party was overseen by a vicious ex-criminal ‘Bloody Krott’ who came to single out Kolbe for particularly brutal treatment. Witnesses say Kolbe accepted his mistreatment and blows with surprising calm.

On one occasion Krott made Kolbe carry the heaviest planks until he collapsed; he then beat Kolbe savagely, leaving him for dead in the mud. But fellow prisoners secretly moved him to the camp prison, where he was able to recover. Prisoners also report that he remained selfless, often sharing his meagre rations with others.

In July 1941, three prisoners appeared to have escaped from the camp; as a result the Deputy Commander of Auschwitz ordered 10 men to be chosen to be starved to death in an underground bunker.

When one of the selected men Franciszek Gajowniczek heard he was selected, he cried out “My wife! My children!” At this point Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

The Nazi commander replied, “What does this Polish pig want?”

Father Kolbe pointed with his hand to the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek and repeated “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.”

Rather surprised, the commander accepted Kolbe in place of Gajowniczek. Gajowniczek later said:

“I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me – a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.”

Franciszek Gajowniczek would miraculously survive Auschwitz, and would later be present at Kolbe’s canonization in 1971. [1]

To enter the breach is to show genuine compassion for those who are already vulnerable to the wrongdoing of worldly ways, and insist that God lead us and them to the paths of righteousness, even if it means we join them in vulnerability. To enter the breach and stand with Christ is to make ourselves vulnerable to the risks of a real relationship with a real God who feels real emotions. Standing in the breach also makes us vulnerable to the risk of offending a warped world wending its way toward destruction—a world willing to destroy us to stay on a self-destructive path, mind you. When Moses stood in the breach he took on the risk of being rejected by God, but he also took on the risk of being rejected by his own people…he took the risk of keeping a portal open through which they might refuse to go. Standing in the breach is risky, but without those risks, mercy doesn’t mean much. With those risks, mercy means everything. Friends, take the risk. Stand in the breach. Amen.

[1] Pettinger, Tejvan. “Biography of Maximilian Kolbe“, Oxford, UK – www.biographyonline.net. 3rd August. 2014. Updated 26 June 2017.<http://www.biographyonline.net/spiritual/maximilian-kolbe.html>