Bible Text: Exodus 32:1-14 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | Series: Exodus | Just two weeks ago, we expressed our admiration for the Hebrew people, who promised to obey “everything the Lord commanded of them”, even before they knew what those commands would be!  They made this remarkable commitment because they had seen enough of God to know, this is our God!  THIS is who loves us and who we can trust.  They pledged themselves to obey and worship only this God, the God who had brought them out of Egypt.

But in our scripture lesson today, they took off all their gold jewelry, melted it down and made a golden calf statue.  And the people said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” What is going on?  How could they look at a man-made statue and call it their god?  And why would they do something so terrible after promising so earnestly to obey?

I think their behavior can be explained with an old saying, “Under stress we regress.”  They were afraid.  Moses had been gone forty days and forty nights.  That’s a long time to be without their leader!  And remember, this story takes places in chapter 32.  We are studying this out of order—last week we looked at chapter 36, the building of the tabernacle, but they don’t have that yet.  So for right now, without Moses right there with them, they were afraid God was not with them.  Many of them were afraid Moses had died, because no mortal could withstand being in God’s presence for that long.  In their desperation, they decided to revert back to their pagan ways and made a golden calf god.  What choice did they have?  They needed SOMEONE to lead them out of the wilderness.  They couldn’t just stay stuck there forever, could they?

God, the Great I AM, was out of sight.  Moses, their one true connection to God the Great I AM, was gone.  What are people supposed to do when the Great I AM goes MIA?

The golden calf story dates back to 1280 B.C. or so, but wow, this is such a 2020 story.  Can you relate to the Hebrew people wondering where God is?  If we were stuck in the wilderness with no map, no markers, no timeline for when things will get better…well, we can certainly see why the Hebrew people were nervous.  They need someone to help them make the shift from “God is nowhere” to “God is now here”.  But because they don’t yet know how to wait on the Lord, they don’t have much in the way of history or tradition or spiritual practices to help them connect to the God who delivered them from slavery, they revert back to their pagan ways.  When people don’t know WHAT to do, they go back to doing what they know HOW to do.

I feel badly for the Hebrew people.  They are in a scary situation, a wilderness situation.  They have the manna in the morning and the quail at night.  Their basic needs are being met.  But clearly their deepest needs are not being met.  They have no sense of where they are going and who is going to lead them.  I doubt deep down they really thought the golden calf statue was the answers to their prayers.  But I am sure it felt really good to DO SOMETHING.

But you know, the people really did have other choices.  They could have simply gathered up their manna every morning, and eaten their quail every night, and trusted that God had not abandoned them.  They could have refused to take off those gold earrings and bracelets and said, no way, I’m not parting with this stuff, that would be like taking off my wedding ring.  I’m keeping these riches I left Egypt with as proof that God loves me.  The Hebrew people could have looked around at each other and said, wow!  We’re not yet where we want to be, but we’re no longer where we were.  We are living proof that God is with us!

We can understand why the people were scared.  Why their insecurity and anxiety got so out of control.  We can understand wanting something concrete to believe in.  We get how idolatry is never a conscious choice but is really a faith struggle.  But we must also understand that we always have the choice to trust.  We always have the choice to believe that, right where we are, everything is okay.  We always have the option to use our struggles to help us mature.  Under stress we might initially regress.  But we don’t have to keep regressing!  We can choose to use adversity to strengthen our faith.

Today is Christ the King Sunday.  It’s one of my favorite Sundays of the year because we focus on believing in the kingdom we cannot yet fully see.  Next week we start a brand new liturgical year and begin the season of Advent.  This is a time the church devotes to preparing our hearts to receive the Christ child on Christmas.  The liturgical year starts with Advent, then Christmas, the follows the life of Jesus, leading to Lent, and then Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.  In late Spring we celebrate Pentecost and the birth of the church.  After that, the liturgical year is geared toward helping the church grow, building to a climax on Christ the King Sunday.  Someday churches will no longer exist, and it’s not because the church died.  It is because the church will no longer be needed to proclaim Christ’s kingdom.  One day Christ will come again, and the whole world will be made new.  There will be no more disease, no more wars, no more suffering of any kind.

What a joyous day that will be!  There won’t even be any more faith struggles!  Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.  But until then, we can expect struggle.  Struggle in the world, struggle in the church, and struggle in our souls.  The question is, what will we do with that struggle?  Will we use it for good, and allow it to mature us and connect us more fully with God?  Or will we allow anxiety and frenzy to pull us away from God, and put something or someone else in God’s rightful place?

 

When I read this story, I am amazed at how it describes God’s anger.  God was so angry, Moses had to talk God out of destroying the people and starting over.  Did you notice how Moses gets God to change God’s mind?  The story makes God look vain, as if God only showed mercy to the Hebrew people so God wouldn’t look like a villain in the world’s eyes.  That is not the most noble of motives, is it?  And who is God, that a mere mortal like Moses might influence God’s mind?  It reminds me of how, a few weeks ago, when Pastor Karen preached on the crossing of the Red Sea, she said, there are times to wait on the Lord.  But there are also times to take a step forward in faith.  The Red Sea story shows us how God wanted the people’s obedience to have an integral part in their deliverance, and that partnership continues in our story today.  It blows my mind to see God basically admitting, Moses, you’re right.  I shouldn’t destroy the Hebrew people.  You are seeing this more clearly than I am.  Thank you for sharing your perspective!

There is great mystery to this story for sure.  But to me it feels like a set up to help us see why God would eventually send Jesus to be our Savior and the Holy Spirit to be our comforter.  My tenth grade homeroom teacher had a sign up in the front of the classroom that said, “Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.”  From God’s perspective, the Hebrew people should have been fine waiting for Moses.  They were getting their manna and quail. They had the Passover and Red Sea crossing experiences in their recent memory.  They had each other.

But that wasn’t enough assurance for the Hebrew people. Moses had earned their trust—and now he had disappeared.  Aaron was their priest, but he didn’t know how to help them feel better.  What were they supposed to do?

If we weren’t studying this passage in 2020, I might not be able to appreciate the fears of the Hebrew people so easily.  But given what’s going on in our world, we have no problem seeing how easy it is to get nervous and lose faith.  But our anxious tendencies are always with us.  That is why I believe idolatry is rarely if ever a conscious choice.  Even in the best of times we can get lured into putting our trust in concrete things instead of God because we are anxious people.

But God adapts to our human limitations.  As we talked about last week, God instructs the people to make a Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary so they would always have God’s presence with them.  For hundreds of years, God would continue to speak to his chosen people, and they would end up with Holy Scriptures we still study today.  Eventually the Hebrew people would develop rituals and formalized prayers and a plethora of religious festivals to help keep God’s presence in the forefronts of their minds.  And when all of that didn’t work, God would keep pursuing people by sending his Son, Jesus.  The grand story of the Bible reveals a God who never gives up on people.

Under stress, the people regressed. They hedged their bets by trying to court the favor of other gods.  God’s anger against the people was strong enough to destroy them.  With Moses’ influence, God repented and changed God’s heart and had mercy.  But God still did punish the people for their sin.  Moses took the golden calf, burned it in the fire, ground the gold to powder, and mixed it with water.  He made the Israelites drink the powdered calf they had made as a way to remind them, God’s power is not contained in this dumb idol you have made.

I wish we could be together for communion this morning, and all drink from the cup of grace.  “The blood of Christ, shed for you.”  God’s power cannot be contained in a golden calf, but it IS contained in Jesus!  But right now, we aren’t able to congregate easily.  So while I cannot offer you all the cup from communion, I can offer you a strategy for golden calf proofing your life that comes from our communion liturgy, and that strategy is Thanksgiving.  Saying grace and giving thanks is at the heart of our sacrament of communion.  There is no surer way to connect ourselves to God’s presence than to give thanks for what we have.

The Hebrew people were blessed with manna every morning and quail every night.  They were blessed with gold and jewels, physical reminders of God’s blessing.  They were blessed with each other and with progress toward a new life.  But they let their anxiety about what they didn’t have rob them of the peace God intended for them to have.  They let their feelings of abandonment and anger seduce them into thinking the great I AM was MIA.  They let their desire for control lead them into sin.

They could have chosen instead of pay attention, and notice God’s provision.  They could have chosen instead to give thanks.  They could have chosen instead to have faith.  On this Christ the King Sunday, let’s remember that, even when times are confusing and troubling, we know where we are going!  We know God is at work, leading us into a beautiful future.  One day all things will be made new.  And we know who to follow.  Jesus Christ our King.  So even though we are living in times of struggle, let’s give thanks.  If it feels like the Great I AM has gone MIA, find something to be thankful for, and see if that helps you steer clear of those golden calfs!  Amen.