Sermons
October 6, 2024 (Proper 22)
“Moses was shamefully late!”
Exodus 32:1-14
“What is taking so long? Moses should have been back weeks ago. It’s absolutely shameful[1] for us to abandon us like he has!”
That’s what the children of Israel said to Aaron as they waited at the foot of Sinai. God had given them the beginning of the Law—the Ten Commandments—directly, then Moses went back up to the top of the mountain to receive further instructions, because the Israelites were so frightened by God talking to them directly that they begged Moses to stand between them and God from then on, to receive God’s instructions himself and pass them on to the people.
But it took too long—forty days, the story says, just like the amount of time it rained on the earth in the Noah story, just like the amount of time Jesus is in the wilderness being tempted after he’s baptized. “Forty days” is Bible talk for “a really long time”; whether Moses was up there for literally forty 24-hour days, or fewer days—or maybe even more than that—isn’t actually clear. However long he was actually up there doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things; in the Israelites’ sight, he had been gone for way too long, and the people grew anxious. Maybe they didn’t know if Moses would be back, or if they would be abandoned in the wilderness.
Even though God had provided for them thus far, since they left their enslavement in Egypt, this was a completely new experience and they weren’t sure what to expect. Life in slavery was a life of oppression and brutality, but it was also a life of certainty; and the people were learning that the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of slavery, was a God that may have provided freedom, may have provided manna and water in the desert, but one thing this God does not provide is certainty. They had not yet learned to trust God nevertheless, because while God doesn’t offer certainty to God’s people, even so God could be trusted to take care of them no matter what.
The text portrays the people, in their anxiety, as rising up to ask Aaron, Moses’ brother, to give them some certainty. Aaron doesn’t seem to try to talk them out of it. He may have been as anxious as they were. He just asks for their gold earrings—the text actually says they responded by tearing their gold earrings out, tearing them out of their own ears, and out of their family’s and their neighbor’s ears, in a frenzy of mutual assault. And Aaron takes all that gold and makes them an idol, a golden calf—we might miss the significance of this idol being in the shape of a calf if we don’t realize that both Egypt and Canaan believed in gods who appeared in bovine form.
Aaron does appear to try to redirect the people when it’s made, telling them that, now that they have the golden calf, they will hold a festival to the Lord. But I’m afraid that was lost on the Israelites.
They go through all the motions, do all the things they know they’re supposed to do, worshiping and offering sacrifices—but there’s something that isn’t right. It’s being done in vain, in emptiness,[2] because at the heart of their worship, in the place where God is supposed to stand, is nothing but a hunk of metal shaped to look like a calf. But they don’t realize that because, at that moment, a God they could see provided some certainty.
Fear and anxiety can cause people to do dumb things, you know? If we’re living in a state of constant, anxious fretfulness, we’re going to see everything through that lens, and we’re going to act in ways we might not act when we’re in our right minds.
Early Friday morning I had to run out to Walmart. Normally I would never drag myself up and out that early, but we were out of cat food, and at my house that verges on unpardonable sin.
The pet food aisle, as you know if you’ve got pets, is clear at the back of the grocery section of the store. You have to walk past all the other aisles to get there. And as I passed the aisle where paper products are, I noticed that the toilet paper shelves were completely empty. Not one roll was left.
It looked like those shelves did at the height of covid, when Derek told Lyssa and Lyssa told me that a shipment of TP had come in, and I ran right out there to pick some up since we were running low—and was so excited to have found some that I walked right out of the self-check without scanning it!
Amazingly, I didn’t get caught; but I do my best to be honest, so I actually cut off the bar codes and took them back with me the next time I went out there, scanned them, and paid for the TP I had accidentally not paid for on my previous visit.
Covid is no longer raging—although it’s certainly not gone—but it has put something into our muscle memory, or our lizard brain, the part of our brain that acts without thinking when we’re afraid. If things seem scary, some of us hoard toilet paper.
This past week longshoremen—dock workers—went on strike briefly. And talking heads on cable “news” started talking about the supply chain disruptions that might happen if the strike dragged on. A bunch of them also talked about the effect it would have on the election—but I’m not going to get into that.
All this coverage did was raise anxiety. And anxious people did what anxious people do: react, and not especially rationally. And toilet paper shelves all over the country were stripped bare.
But Friday morning the word came that the strike had been called off as negotiations continued. It might start up again, although not for quite awhile—but if the union and the companies reach an agreement, it may not happen at all.
When we’re anxious—especially if the anxiety is about something way bigger than our ability to do anything about it—we do things that probably wouldn’t make sense to us at other times. It may affect how we vote. We may be willing to give up some of our freedom for the sake of certainty and a sense of security, false though it may turn out to be. We might grow suspicious of people we otherwise consider neighbors, or even friends.
And we just might—although I hope not—start yanking jewelry off each other so Aaron can make us an idol, a golden representation of the God we don’t know if we can trust to provide for us.
We might have some sympathy for Israel. After all, they had been enslaved for over 400 years, and it had been only a few short weeks or months since God had brought them out of slavery.
As I mentioned a moment ago, while their slavery was dehumanizing and brutal, there was also some certainty involved. In Egypt, Israel knew when to get up and when to lie down; they knew what they had to do in between, and (at least the way they remembered it) they were provided with housing and an abundance of food.
And now God, working through Moses, Aaron, and their sister Miriam the prophet, had taken them away from all that.
They might have groaned under the oppression of their enslavement while they were in it, but now that they were set free, they actually looked back sort of fondly on it. The less pleasant parts—the beatings, the cruelty, the never knowing when some capricious overseer might decide to make their lives even more miserable for the fun of it—were glossed over, if not forgotten entirely.
It was all they had known; they had gotten used to it, and now it was gone. And what took the place of that life was a temporary settlement at the foot of a mountain, and a leader who had disappeared up to the top of the mountain, for who knows how long.
They’d never learned to do for themselves, and the very thought of it terrified them. So they did something we, in hindsight, consider to be pretty darn stupid.
We might look at them with a sympathetic eye. They hadn’t learned yet that God could be trusted.
We, on the other hand, have thousands of years of what theologians call “salvation history” (they use a fancy German name for it, but I don’t remember what it is), not to mention the history of our own families and our own lives that show us God can be trusted to take care of us.
So why are we still so doggoned anxious? Why are we worrying about what we’ve seen on the news? Why do we lie awake at 3 a.m. fretting about one thing and another, about a bill we’re expecting, about a medical test we haven’t gotten the results of yet, about something somebody might do somewhere that might cause problems for us?
Why does the prospect of finding ourselves in the necessary room without the necessary paper products send us running screaming to Walmart to empty the shelves? Are we going to take all that paper and use it to build some kind of statue? Will it for one second actually provide anything for us other than a pile of soggy trash when the rain falls on it?
Have we not yet learned that God can be trusted?
[1] The beginning of chapter 13 is softened in English translations; the original Hebrew has the sense that “Moses was shamefully late” coming back from the mountaintop.
[2] This is what the term in the Third Commandment (Exodus 20:7), translated as “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,” actually means. Throw the Name around carelessly and it is emptied of all its meaning and power.