And the Lord changed his mind…

                                                                        -Exodus 32:14a

 
Dear Church,
 
Theologians like to talk about the “omni” properties of God: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.  God knows all, God is all powerful, God is everywhere.  What, then, are we to make of these six words in the book of Exodus?  What does it mean that our all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere-all-the-time God changes God’s mind?
 
That’s the question I’m sitting with this week. 
 
And it’s forcing me to reckon with the assumptions that I attach to ideas like “all-knowing” and “all-powerful.”  Why do I assume that the outcome of those qualities should be a mind that never changes?  And if God does change God’s mind, what does that tell us about the nature of God?  What does it tell us about the nature of mercy? (Or, as one commentator proposed in a podcast that I heard this morning, could this be a story about God testing Moses by threatening to destroy Moses’ people and seeing what Moses says about that?) 
 
That question happens to coincide, for me, with a week in which I’ll be thinking a great deal about change and about what it means to cultivate a mindset able to adapt to change – which, given the realities of climate change, all of us are doing. 
 
I’ll be doing that thinking during a 2-day visit to the BTS Center in Portland, where I will join a small group of leaders from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faith traditions with a shared interest in the intersection between spirituality and climate change.  As a cohort of “adaptive mind fellows,” we’ll have the opportunity to work and learn together, over the coming year, under the leadership of a social scientist named Susanne Moser.  Moser has spent her career studying the idea of the adaptive mind – which she defines as a “a set of propensities, capacities, and skills that allow an individual…to respond with agility, creativity, resolve, and resilience” to stressful changes, including climate change.  I look forward to sharing with you what I learn!
 
And in the meantime, I invite you to join me, in the week ahead, in a meditation on what it means to change one’s mind.  What does a change of mind require of us?  What reactions do you have to this text’s assertion that even God changes God’s mind? 
 
Blessings, friends, on your meditations.  I welcome you, as always, to share with me their fruits, if you feel moved to do so!
 
Grace and peace,
 
Pastor Andi