Moses was gone for like two hours—that’s my bias, we have
no idea how long he was gone, but it feels to me like two hours before the
people start thinking God has abandoned them. God, the God who parted the Red
Sea for them to walk across; God, the God who sent plagues on Egypt, the God
who gave Abraham and Sarah a child in their old age, who saved Joseph to have
him rise to power in Egypt. This God who can do all things: They lost faith in
this God in about two hours. OK, maybe it was days, a week even. How long would
it take to lose faith in this God?
Because I think that’s the big question before us today: What
does it take to lose faith in God?
In order to get at that question I want to talk about a
different question that is part of the inventory I do with couples who are
getting married. It goes like this: “Agree or Disagree: Nothing could make me
question my love for my partner.” Couples who have never been married
previously, and especially those who are young inevitably agree with this
statement. It’s not 100%. Of course it’s never 100%. But most do agree. This
falls into the category of romantic answers that people want to believe in. We
want to believe that the person we are marrying—the person to whom I am giving
my heart—will never let me down and that there is nothing that will happen
between us that could lead me to be any less in love. This is romantic. It’s
less romantic to start to name some realities of things that happen in the
world: adultery, domestic abuse, change in personality, or addiction. In our
most romantic moments we believe that love trumps all those things, and truly,
it does. Just not always our love. Just not the kind of love we are capable of
most days of the week. Our love is more fleeting than we tend to imagine.
But you might be wondering what that has to do with
faith, less still with the golden calf.
Well,
I think we are frequently that person who runs headlong into faith, just as we
do love, and we believe that nothing could possibly make us question our love
of God. So, we practice faith like we enter into love, which is to say we do so
naively. This is because faith is romantic, too. Faith takes us to a place of
idealism and hope and peace and all sorts of things that are good and true but
maybe not as easily earned as we imagine. Faith, like marriage, is tested and
refined not in the mountaintops but in the valley-bottoms. Faith is not
strengthened by virtue of results but of resolve, and this is often the same
with love, though in a different way. We fall in love with an ideal but slowly,
over time, we begin to love a person; a person who is not perfect. Faith is
like this too, except the process works backwards. We begin our relationship
with God by trying to make ourselves perfect, by taking on the biblical command
to conform ourselves to God’s image, then our faith is strengthened over time
as we begin to let go of our need to save ourselves and settle into trusting
God to do what we cannot.
But this process will show our faith for what is truly
is: Is it something that exists to make us feel better about ourselves—a
surface-level kind of assurance that things will be OK in the end that is
always looking for validation? Or is our faith that deep reminder that we are
not God and though the world quakes and our lives appear just as broken as
before there is that great soul-peace of trusting in something much bigger than
myself so it is not incumbent on me to fix it?
The kind of faith the Israelites had is clear. It
shouldn’t have mattered how long Moses was gone, because faith is not dependent
on immediate results. The fact that they ordered Aaron to make them a new god
shows exactly what they thought of faith: It was nice until they found
something better. To be fair to the Israelites, that’s how we live our lives most days of the week. Faith is hard. It’s much
easier to move from God to golden calf and back again as time allows.
Why did church attendance spike following September 11?
Why is the Christian faith growing in places like sub-Saharan Africa and
southeast Asia while it is declining in America and Europe?
Is it because we are a godless people?
NO! It’s because we are the opposite of godless; we have
plenty of gods. We are bursting with gods. We can switch between the God of
Netflix and the God of busy-ness and the God of news media and the God of money
and the God of church. And we can put our trust in whichever one makes us feel
good about ourselves on a daily basis. This is a schizophrenic way to live our
lives, so it’s no wonder so many of us are so harried and distracted. A god is
simply the thing that we value most in the world and we vote on which god is
most important to us every moment of our lives, which means all of us choose
golden calves over the God who created us and died for us, and we do so every
day. It’s only when we are jarred out of complacency by an existential threat
(like what happened on September 11, 2001), or we face those same threats more
imminently every day (as in impoverished places around the world) that we begin
to trust in the real thing over against the good luck charms.
The question is whether those other gods are going to get
us very far. And I don’t just mean eternal life and all the church-y things
that you already know about, because those are the romantic answers. Those are
the things we tell ourselves will matter once my good life is over, but they
aren’t always answers that carry weight with us in our daily lives. These aren’t
always the valley floor answers because they aren’t always hard-fought. A
Christian with his head in the clouds may be just as easily crushed when the
weight of the world finds him, because heavenly thoughts can be just as much an
excuse to not deal with who we truly are at our core as any other false god.
You won’t know what your faith means until you face
hardship, and I don’t wish it on anybody but I can tell you that the people who
have been through existential angst and turned not to their idols but to the
one true God in all the difficulty of doing so; in all the struggle of looking
and listening for God in the midst of hurt that seems contrary to what God is
all about; these people who have been there emerge with a faith that is real
and deep and true. Some of them are here and you can tell. It is faith that is
tested in despair, because that’s where the cross takes us.
The Israelites wanted a good luck charm. They imagine the
good life leads over the mountain top where Moses went. What they don’t
know—can’t know—won’t allow themselves to know—is the price that Moses pays,
and the difficulty of the road they walk ahead. The wilderness journey is a
metaphor for the walk of faith, and the thing about the wilderness journey is
that none of the people get there. They die off, one by one, each never quite
seeing the realization of the Promised Land. That’s faith. Not quick results.
Not turning our lives around. Faith is won in the hard work of failing, because
in our unworthiness we find we have nowhere else to turn so we cry along with
St. Peter, “Lord to whom shall I go?”
That’s faith. If we give the golden calves our allegiance
we may yet put off the angst for another day, but reality will hit us in the face
one day when all the Facebook-scrolling, Netflixing, and football games are
over and we will ask ourselves, “What does any of this mean?” It may be when we
lose something we felt we deserved; it may be when somebody near us experiences
a loss they couldn’t have deserved. In that moment, unless we’re tested by the
valleys we aren’t going to have a good answer, so we’ll walk into the pastor’s
office and angrily say, “Why has God allowed me to sink into such despair? What
kind of God is this?” And the answer may not be apparent to us, though it is as
obvious as the light of day: This God is no golden calf. This God we know in
Jesus Christ bids us to come and die. And if we aren’t into that—if we’d rather
look in vain for another mountain top on which to stand—then we can spend our
life roaming and never get there, walking in the wilderness, not realizing that
our exile is self-imposed.
All of us can emerge from the wilderness at any time. We
had only have faith in the true God, the actual God, which is to say we are to
have faith not in the magic genie who gives us what we want or what we think we
deserve but in the God who calls us to follow without care for the
result—temporary, immediate, or eternal. Just follow. Don’t measure the cost.
You’ll do a poor job adding it up, anyway. You’ll decide on the calf every day
of the week. So don’t decide, just have faith. It’s funny because it’s so
simple yet so hard. Have faith. That’s all.
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