Canter Bridge

The sixty-eighty Psalm refers to a marching deity with an archaic expression that might be translated as titular: ‘He of Sinai’.

Israel’s faith does not begin with abstractions nor with generalizations about a cosmic deity and his unchanging rules. Rather, faith in YHWH begins for Israel with memory of an upending liberation from the invincible power that was Egypt, her captor. In time, Israel’s faith will generate exquisite statements about creation and its solidity, about the timeless structures of reality under YHWH’s rule, about the wisdom that is required to inhabit such a place.

But not at the beginning. At the initiation of her faith lies memory of being rescued, of release, liberation, and sustenance against all odds.

So is YHWH titled ‘He of Sinai’:

O God, when you went out before your people,
when you marched through the wilderness, Selah
the earth quaked, the heavens poured down rain
at the presence of God, the God of Sinai,
at the presence of God, the God of Israel. (Psalm 67:7-8 NRSV)

Sinai is in the narrative of Israel’s exodus from Egypt a place to catch one’s breath. Yet it is much more. It is the place where this band of escaped slaves is constituted a nation. Quintessentially, it is the mountain where Israel’s divine Rescuer—the God of her fathers newly active on the historical scene—brought breathless Israel to himself and provided the script by which they would survive such proximity without killing each other.

YHWH the Rescuer, YHWH the Protector, YHWH the Giver of Torah, all of these contribute to the psalm’s ease of reference to ‘He of Sinai’.

Yet this is no mere retrospective parsing of history. Israel recites this psalm in eager and occasionally desperate need that YHWH should become this militant again. ‘He of Sinai’ is precisely who Israel needs their God to become for them once more:

Summon your might, O God;
show your strength, O God, as you have done for us before.

So do we read the Psalms. So do we need them.

So we greet a new day with its lethal mix of anxieties and threats, pleading for a marching God who does this morning what he accomplished for those dust-covered slaves who gathered restlessly before the mountain whose name the psalmist gives Him.