Sermon: Quick to Turn Aside

Exodus 32:1-14

This sermon is the part of a nine-month series in which we will tell the story of Scripture from Creation to the early Church, using the Narrative Lectionary readings.

A brief recap of our series so far…

• We are earth creatures, given sacred limits as we serve the earth. But we violated these limits and entered into wrong relationship with the Creator, creation and each other.
• The Creator’s “healing strategy” to address this mess was to choose one family — that of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar — to bless with descendants and land so that this family could be a blessing to all the families of the earth by demonstrating how to live in right relationship.
• Forgiveness is essential to living in right relationship.
• The chosen family, now numerous, become enslaved in Egypt. The Creator — and creation — side with these oppressed people and fight for their liberation. God frees them from slavery and gives them the ritual of Passover to remind them of God’s faithfulness to them.

After celebrating their liberation, this group of formerly enslaved people enter the wilderness, the Sinai desert. I can only imagine that the joy of their liberation quickly turned to anxiety over how they were going to survive in this inhospitable place. But Creator takes care of them again and again — quenching their thirst at the rock of Meribah (this is actually a video of that spring), feeding them manna and quail, and leading them by a pillar of cloud and fire. Finally, through the Creator’s providence, they reach Mt. Sinai, the holy mountain. 

Here, the people enter into a sacred covenant with their Creator. The language God uses to initiate this covenant is beautifully intimate: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, out of all peoples you’ll be my special treasure. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you will be for me a priestly kindom, and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:4-6)

The people respond, “Yes, we will be your special people. We will live as you tell us to. We want to be in this intimate relationship to you, and we want to live as a blessing to all people.”

As part of the covenant, God gives them the law, the most important of which are the Ten Rules, also known as the Ten Commandments.  But many other laws spring from these ten essential ones, and these laws will eventually govern almost all aspects of their life as a people. The purpose of law was to provide the political, economic, and ritual structures for the delivered slaves so that the effects of that deliverance could be sustained (from Ted Grimsrud’s book God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes).  How do you actually build a just society? How do you collectively live in right relationship — with Creator, with creation, with each other? What are the nuts and bolts of that way of living?  This is the great project to which the Creator calls the Hebrew people, and it is the project to which they say an enthusiastic yes. 

And so here we are, at our story for today. Moses has gone up the holy mountain of Sinai  one more time, to get more instructions from God about the sacred law that will guide them.  But Moses is on that mountain a long time — 40 days and 40 nights. Presumably, this is longer than his other visits up the mountain because the people get impatient, anxious.  Did Moses die up there? Is he ever coming back?  Think about how important Moses is to this motley, ethnically mixed group of formerly enslaved people. Moses has this special relationship with the God who liberated them — Moses alone is allowed to see God face and face, Moses alone serves as the intermediary between God and this group of people who depend utterly on this God for food, drink, protection, direction. So you can see why the people might be getting anxious that Moses has been gone for so long.  They are having serious separation anxiety. Read 32:1.

The phrase “the people gathered around Aaron” could be translated as “the people gathered against Aaron.” So, in their anxiety, the people are perhaps now starting to murmur against Aaron: “He’s nothing like his brother. I don’t feel safe with him. Let’s put someone in office who can really protect us, who can really provide for us.” Perhaps this helps us understand what Aaron does next.  Read 32:2-6.

The calf sculpture created from all that gold was that of a young bull. Young bulls were common symbols of strength, fertility and divinity in this region at that time. Now they still see this bull calf as the symbol of the God who brought them up out of the land of Egypt but they are violating the second of the 10 commandments: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.” This prohibition against making an image of God stems from the belief within Judaism that the Creator is too big, too vast to be limited to one physical form — and because people might begin worshipping the image itself instead of the Creator that the image is meant to represent.

Needless to say, God is not pleased.  Read Exodus 32:7-10

At this point in the Bible, the relationship between Creator and the covenant people is at its lowest.  It doesn’t get much worse. God is so angry that God talks about starting over — breaking the covenant, destroying the descendants of Abraham and Sarah and beginning again with the descendants of Moses.  Moses is having none of this. He is so tight with God, that he feels he has the permission to persuade God to do otherwise.  Read Exodus 2:11-14.

Moses essentially tells God to do a little reputation management. “Your reputation will suffer if you liberate a people and then immediately destroy them,” Moses says. “How you are going to look? Confused at best and incompetent at worst. ” (From the “Narrative Lectionary” podcast.)  Moses also reminds God of who God is — that to break the promise made so long ago to Abraham and Sarah would actually violate God’s own character as ever faithful. 

Why is God so incensed over the golden calf that Moses has to talk God down from destruction? In a word: Idolatry. Idolatry is really big deal in the Hebrew Scriptures. Turning to false gods is the big sin. It is the way that the people of Israel consistently break covenant again and again in the Hebrew Scriptures. God remains faithful to them again and again — like I said, God never again threatens to break covenant after this golden calf incident. Yet despite God’s faithfulness and despite the fact that the prophets warn repeatedly about what will happen if they keeping choosing idols over the true God, the people of Israel keep turning to false gods.

And so do we. We, like the people of Israel, are quick to turn aside from the true God.

Early in my theological formation, I cam across the work of developmental psychologist James Fowler, who became very influential for me. Fowler doesn’t define faith in a narrow way, as a belief in a series of statements about a deity.  Faith for him is not a noun, really, it’s a verb. It’s the process by which we go about making meaning in life. Our faith might change — because how we make meaning might change – but we never lose faith. We never stop trying to make meaning or, if we do, we become so depressed we have a hard time functioning.  

Faith, or meaning making, thus, is universal for humans. But the content of that faith can be almost anything that gives us meaning. It could be Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist faith, or a mix of those, with a dash of New Age spirituality thrown in. Fervent communists or patriotic nationalists are living by faith. Those who orient their live around success, or accumulating wealth, or accruing status, or pursuing as much pleasure as possible — these are all a kind of faith. The local author Anne Lamont once wrote that she was brought up to believe in books, jazz and nature by her militantly atheist parents. My Dad, she said, “worshipped in the church of Allen Ginsberg, at the Roger Tory Peterson Holiness Temple, the Tabernacle of Miles Davis.” ( From Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith; New York: Anchor Books, 1999.)

In other words, we all have a true God. We all have a center of value to which we give allegiance and around which we orient our lives. The question is: What is that center of value — really, as opposed to what we say it is?  In what do we invest our most precious, finite resources of time, money and life energy? What are we depending upon to protect us, to provide for us?  And is that center of value worthy of our allegiance?  Or is not? Because if it is not, then it is an idol. 

“Real idolatry, in the Jewish and Christian traditions, does not have to do with the worship of statues or pagan altars,” Fowler writes. “Idolatry is rather the profoundly serious business of committing oneself or betting one’s life on finite centers of value and power as the source of one’s (or one’s group’s)… worth and meaning, and as the guarantor of survival.”  Idolatry is committing oneself to finite centers of value and power as the source of worth, meaning and survival. 

Many Christians will tell you their center of value is God, but is it? For protection, they depend on the military industrial complex and for provision, they depend on the stock market and economic growth. And lest we point our fingers out there at those people, I have to say that this is true of me as well. It’s why I am joining the discipleship group that will be meeting next year to talk about war tax resistance — it’s one symbolic way I can withdraw my allegiance from the idol of militarism.  Sarah Augustine believes the stock market is premised on economic growth based in extraction and pollution of the earth — as such, she believes it is an idol, a false god promising false security, and she is not invested it. I’m not there yet, but I am challenged almost very day by her fierce stance against idolatry.

And in more micro moments of my life, I also see myself in the anxious Israelites who quick turn to idol worship. When I get anxious about Patrick, I immediately come up with about a strategy for relieving my anxiety, akin to fashioning a golden calf: Must talk to Patrick about x and try to convince him to share my anxiety so he does what I want him to do. I have made an idol out of my need to control, an idol out of the belief that I am actually in control. It can be a relief, in those moments, to open my hands and release him to Mother God and to his own wisdom. 

This anxiety is why we are so disposed to making idols. Whenever anxiety is present, idol making is probably not far behind. Anxiety makes us quick to turn aside from the Creator and the Creator’s values, the Creator’s way of living. We are anxious about how we are going to provide for ourselves in retirement, and the only solution our dominant culture hands us for alleviating this anxiety is the stock market — on seeing the number of dollars in our 401K go up. But the Amish don’t depend on that. They have that same anxiety but have structured their communal life such that they depend on each other to take care of them when they are no longer “earners.”

And so, those questions again:  

What is that center of value — really, as opposed to what we say it is?  

In what do we invest our most precious, finite resources of time, money and life energy? 

What are we depending upon to protect us, to provide for us?  

And is that center of value worthy of our allegiance?  Or is not?