The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Exodus 19
It is said   that dogs have owners but cats have staff. Cats are aloof; they can be affectionate but on the whole it just enough to register their presence with the providers of food, water and janitorial services at the cat flap. Dogs on the other hand are often obsessively adoring, belonging and grateful to their owners.  It’s much more of a two way relationship. So is that with cats, but one senses that cats might prefer to think otherwise. I am of course investing cats and dogs with human feelings, just as we, and the ancient Israelites, tend to do with God. Much of the Old Testament, all of it, really, is concerned the Israelites working out their relationship with God, and the stages of that relationship, culminating, as we Christians see it in a reversal of the humanising fallacy, as God actually becomes man and through suffering and resurrection, transforms humanity into something sharing in the divine.
The natural progression in what one might call the Whig view of theology, starts with the remote God or gods of weather, water and earthquake, the really powerful phenomena which more primitive man could not control or understand but whose gods might be placated by sacrifices and while clearly not human, or superhuman, those gods were supposed to have a taste for roast lamb and roast beef. This is a sort of parallel of the feline model; like cats, men relied on the gods not to do anything too drastic provided they were paid some affectionate attention.
This develops into a more trusting relationship as man becomes able to farm, exploiting the land and seasons, and to control and then harness the rivers as the most ancient river cultures emerge in India, China, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Man is working with nature but also reliant on it. Those really in control, the gods, are no longer merely appeased but co-operated with. They are to be prayed to and thanked; the seasons are reliable, but only up to a point and it is still important now to pray for rain and sun in the right proportions and to be grateful for the harvest when it comes. The relationship with the divine has become more of a dialogue, and more doglike.
As the river civilisations grow on the back of efficient agriculture, so their social institutions become more complicated. Kings needed to claim divine sanction and support, and more democratic (or at least less autocratic) cultures looked to the gods to provide a moral framework and increasingly an identity. How we behave and especially how we worship becomes distinctive and this must be one of the reasons for the move to mono-theism. At first as the one god who works with a particular people and then, as god is seen as the source of moral behaviour and the law, as the one god for everyone. If respect for person and property, or a sense of fairness are the right principles for one nation, they should be for others too. These ideas run parallel with the concept of the creating and ordering god; there is only room for one creator, one organiser and namer of all the elements which up creation. Men are beginning to feel that they belong; the canine model.
It’s at this point that we join the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai; what we heard in chapter 19 of Exodus was the prelude to the giving of the Ten Commandments. God has led his people out of Egypt and will now make them a nation with one God and a rule book to govern their behaviour towards him, each other and the seeds of a relationship with outsiders too.  Rather surprisingly what follows this momentous monotheist revelation is, a lot of small print; the detailed rules and pernickety regulation which contrast strongly with both the literally, lapidary grandeur of the Ten Commandments and the Israelites’ present situation as wandering refugees. Much of this small print (It really is printed small in many Bibles on the basis, I suppose, that no one is likely to read it) assumes that the Israelites have settled into a civic and agricultural existence, with established altars (if not yet a temple) at which to worship God. There was of course none of this in the desert at the foot of Sinai.
The reason for these discrepancies is that the Bible was not written in a contemporary nor consistent sequential order. It is neither a history with a single thread or theme, nor the events recorded as they happened. The story of the Israelite people is overlaid by future developments relating to Israel’s later experience in Canaan and most crucially in exile in Babylon when history seemed to be repeating itself and the nation was once more enslaved. The difference was that by the Babylonian exile writing had been invented and now it could all be recorded. But it was written down- and most of what we know as the Old Testament was written in this period – combining the various strands and different themes that had hitherto been an oral tradition (even if some of supposed to have been written in stone).
So in the story of Moses on Sinai we can recognise the earth god; the god of earthquake thunder and  lightning, but also the god who can talk to humanity’s representative as he did before, argumentatively with Abraham and now, perhaps a little perversely, makes poor Moses climb up and down the mountain. We can also see the strain of purity and reverence, and ritual as the Israelites have to wash, stand back and avoid sex in readiness for the encounter with the divine, although in fact, they only encounter God through Moses.
This for me is the appeal of the Old Testament, despite its sometimes horrific, alien, remote and bizarre elements, it sets out a strange amalgam of reactions to God. These different attitudes, rules, hopes and insights for humanity are often mixed up with one another.
 In this it’s not so very remote really; it reflects our own experience of God.  We are still amazed by nature, by towering mountains and intricate spiders’ webs (so amazed it difficult to avoid clichés) but equally and increasingly urgently realize that we need restore some balance with nature, and face the consequence of our greed and folly. We can also see a moral system stemming from a creating and beneficent God; we can see that righteousness and wisdom should govern our affairs and that without divine origin, and, possibly, divine sanction, ethics and law are perilously prone to human expediency and convenience.
Perhaps it is in worship that we still find the Old Testament remote; there is some sense of awe in our worship, but for me at least, good worship means a closeness to God, to whom we can speak and whom we can hear, and who in communion, gets right inside us. These feelings derive from the Gospel, from God as man.  In the Old Testament God speaks only through chosen prophets, “but in these last days he has spoken to us though a son”, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it. But this intimacy does not mean we need abandon earlier feelings; we can experience God in layers and can be both cats and dogs, although need not share their conservatism. God is not to be pinned down or defined, and nor can our relationship with him be limited, but needs to be allowed to grow, retaining the old while accepting the new. Amen