On
Thursday afternoon I was sitting in my living room, pondering the Israelites
and their golden calf while also thinking about getting by without electricity.
For us, that was a few hours; for others of you it has lasted a few days. We
all have a baseline level of comfort that, when breached, can make us uneasy. When
you take away a simple thing like electricity it becomes immediately obvious
how dependent we are on all sorts of little things around us. Losing power is
different from going on a camping trip. I love hiking, camping and generally
getting away from electricity and technology, but those are occasions where I
intentionally remove myself from those comforts of home. When the power just
goes out I have a very different feeling—a “what on earth do I do now?”
feeling.
I
think that’s pretty close to where the Israelites are at when Moses went up the
mountain. There they are at Mt. Sinai, completely unsure
what Moses is doing up there, and their sense of what is normal has been completely
obliterated. There is no normal, no home, nothing to do now but wonder, “Where
on earth do we go from here?” It may seem silly to turn from worshipping the
God who led them out of Egypt,
but that’s where they are. They’re confused.
What
the people demand of Aaron is something visible to hold their focus in light of
their current predicament. It’s not so much that they want a different god than
the one who led them out of Egypt;
rather, they want a physical image of the true God. Aaron’s problem is that
such an image is not forthcoming; God shows himself to Moses alone, not in
idols to appease the crowd. They have to take it on faith that the road through
the wilderness is led by a God they cannot see. Unfortunately, Israel does not
yet have this kind of faith. It seems silly to create a golden idol and honestly
believe it is a god. Clearly, God is not a calf, but then again, tell me we
don’t do the same thing. How much physical stuff do we put before God? How much
do we consider worship to be about the pastor or the building, the music or the
liturgy? Those are the things that upset us, and though God certainly works
through all of these they are no more God than that golden calf.
In
our lives we have a base level of comfort, and whether it’s the power going
out, a wildfire, an accident, health concern, or something equally unexpected,
there are many things that can rock that comfort. Those are the moments where
the depths of our souls are bared and we are shown for what we really are. Last
week I talked about what is right and what is easy; this is similar: in the
face of trouble, do we build another idol or do we trust in the unseen.
The
stakes are huge. One of the things that gets lost in this story about the
golden calf is that God nearly destroys the Israelites for their stupidity. This
is not a fuzzy, lubby-dubby God willing to offer cheap grace; this is a
powerful God who the Israelites are right to fall before on their knees and
worship. This is a God willing to give it all up and start over with Moses.
This is a God who demands obedience.
This scene really
is remarkable. God proposes to Moses his intent to destroy the people and offer
the promised future instead to Moses and his progeny alone. This is a ticked
off God. And it is Moses who is the calming voice—the one who saves the day—yes,
the very same Moses who came up with every excuse in the book why he should not
be leading the people out of Egypt;
that very same Moses intercedes before God to save the people from God’s own
wrath. He asks that God remember the promises that God has made with Abraham
and Isaac and Jacob, and in a line of thinking that should resonate with people
up here, Moses adds in the line about what Egypt will say about the God who
destroys his people. “What will the neighbors think?” he asks God.
Then, strangely,
in verse 14: “The Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to
bring on his people.”
(Breathe out.)
There’s part of us
that doesn’t like that. It doesn’t square with how we understand God. There are
these Greek terms that Christians like to use, even though they never occur in
the Bible—omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent—which mean
respectively: all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing, all-loving. These terms
do not describe the God who visits Moses, and since we believe in one God, and
we proclaim that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the same God that we
worship today, this should tell us more about our misconceptions about God than
anything else. God is beyond our knowing, so when we try to put God on the
couch, perform a psychological analysis and slip the creator of the universe
into categories of our own making, we are essentially doing the same thing that
the Israelites did: we are asking Aaron to create for us an idol to worship.
God doesn’t like that.
Thankfully, even
when we make our idols we have an advocate. This story is Moses’ time in the
spotlight. As much as he gets a lot of credit for parting the sea and bringing
God’s messages to Pharaoh, the real moment of star-power in Moses’ life comes
here on the mountain, talking God out of the destruction of his people. Honestly,
Moses is only a little man in the scheme of things, but he foreshadows
something bigger and better on the horizon. The conversation between Moses and
God was not just a debate about the future of the chosen people; it was a
preview of what comes to us in the New Testament in the person of Jesus Christ
and the sending of the Holy Spirit into the world to live with us today. We
still have an advocate—not Moses, but the Holy Spirit—who hears what we pray and
intercedes on our behalf with God.
There’s
a reason that the first commandment chiseled on those stone tablets in Moses’
hands is what it is: “I am the Lord, your God, you shall have no other gods
before me.” You want to know a secret about those commandments? We never get
past the first. We get hung up on murder and theft and adultery, but none of us
can be judged right by the first commandment of all. Each of us is building
idols; we’re doing it right now, even in this worship space. We all want a golden
calf; not the true God just beyond our sight. We all want glory; not a cross.
We all want a god we can fashion, not the God we cannot control, who may, in
fact, destroy us at a moment’s notice. “Too bad!” said God in last week’s
reading, “You will be my people and I will be your God… and you have an
advocate who is going to keep it that way.”
Just
as the Israelites didn’t deserve Moses, so we don’t deserve Jesus. We deserve
to suffer for the idols we have made, and yet, God is willing to do something incredible,
remarkable, and completely inhuman: he’s willing to change his mind.
Thank
God for that.
Amen.
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