October 11 2020
Exodus 32:1-20
When our kids were in High School Jennifer and I used to go to a lot of football games every Friday night. We went not there because our kids were football players or cheerleaders but because our kids were band kids. Being band parents, the most important time of a football game was halftime; who won or lost was kind of inconsequential.
Now, the only thing I played in high school was the radio. Jennifer, on the other hand was a big band geek so at least she could relate to the kids experiences of being a part of the marching band. For me though, I was always in awe of the band director. I mean every other teacher in school has at most thirty kids to teach but a band directors has more than one hundred students that must be taught a musical piece that is going to be performed before a stadium full of people. Not only that, but the director also has to oversee a myriad of different instruments which have different parts which all must perform together and in harmony. But if that were not enough, these same band members have to perform their parts in harmony all the while marching in step to a predetermined choreography in which the members all move about each other effortlessly because of the countless hours of practice. The band director has to do all of this and he has to do it with kids who range from freshman to seniors who are full of raging hormones and anxiety and stress that is the normal baggage of someone that age.So anytime I hear about a teacher griping about their job I want to tell them just be glad your not a band director.
I was thinking about the many hats that a band director wears because in reading about Moses, I can’t help but see that he was a lot like a band director. I mean he was always trying to get this large gathering of former slaves to all go in the same direction, to get on the same page as it were so that the music of their witness might be harmonious with what they believed. These people of Israel at long last been set free but the big question now was now what were they to do with this freedom they were enjoying. They had heard Moses tell that the end game was to reach this so call Promised Land, a land of milk and honey but first they found themselves out in the desert, at Mount Sinai. Here, Moses was going to introduce the people of Israel with the God who had set them free in order to formalize their relationship.
What the people of Israel were beginning to know about this God who had set them free from their slavery in Egypt was that this God was a God of unbelievable power which induced in them a fear of his presence. They watched in awe and wonder as the wind swept across the Egyptian plain and caused the water to stand upright so that they could walk through the sea on dry ground. Over and over again on their journey the people of Israel had witnessed that this God was a God of unbelievable power. Then Moses brought them to this mountain, the mountain where God resided and there was thunder and lightning a thick cloud upon the mountain. The mountain was wrapped in smoke because God had descended upon it like a fire. The whole mountain trembled and shook and when Moses spoke to God, God replied with thunder. Can you imagine what must have been going through the hearts and minds of these former slaves who had experienced these unbelievable wonders of this out-of-this-world God? We have to at least try to understand how strange and unnerving all of this must have been to them in order to make sense of our scripture for today. I mean we just cannot say that in the absence of Moses the people simply turned to idol worship, end of story. No, there is more going on here than meets the eye.
The story of the golden calf begins when the people realized that Moses, who had gone up on the mountain, into that dense cloud and smoke, into the place of lighting and thunder and had not returned for over a month. It isn’t hard to understand their concern for all they knew, this God of sheer power had overpowered him. There just was no way to tell. They figured that they had waited long enough, it was time to begin the journey to that land Moses had told them about. The only problem is that they had no idea just where it was and the one who could ask God for directions was officially AWOL. So, the people turn to Moses’ brother, Aaron and ask him to make gods who shall go before us. Now, the word for gods used here is the Hebrew word Elohim and it is translated throughout scripture as either power or gods or judges. The idea that actually fits best in this situation is the idea of judge. What they wanted was something that would could bring the presence of this God who seemed so far off, so full of power that it was terrifying to think of him drawing close, to somehow bring him close enough that they could figure out, judge just which way to go next on their journey. This understanding that they were looking to make a footstool for God helps me to understand why Aaron went along with what seems like such an outrageous thing for the people of Israel to do. Aaron never saw the golden calf as an idol but rather as a means of divining the will of the God they were sojourning with in the absence of Moses. So Aaron wasn’t blatantly idolatrous but rather a little naïve and a whole lot stupid.
So, the people of Israel decided that they would take their jewelry, their gold earrings taken from their Egyptian masters on their way of Egypt and have Aaron create a calf out of the gold. Now it is no surprise that they chose a calf because back in Egypt their masters had worshipped a god in the shape of a bull. This god was called Apis and it was said to be a symbol of the king because it embodied the qualities of strength and fertility that a king should have. Perhaps this is why the people of Israel chose a calf because through the covenant they had made with God they came to understand that he was their king and they were his servants. Whatever their thought process, the wrongness of what they were doing never seemed to dawn on them. What they failed to comprehend is that you can’t use your past to figure out your future when your working with God. God demands that your past be just that, past so that you can be present with him.
Well, once Aaron had the calf formed and shaped he announced the next day that on the next day there would be a feast. This feast was copied off the earlier feast that the people had celebrated with Moses written about in the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus. There we read of how Moses built an altar and had also set up twelve pillars of stone to represent the twelve tribes of Israel. In a similar fashion, Aaron also built an altar but instead of building twelve pillars of stone, Aaron placed the golden calf. Now in Aaron’s mind he still thought this was a festival to the one true living God. He was worshipping in hopes that God would come and set his feet upon this bull he had created and in coming close might disclose just what his people were to do next. The problem was that not everyone thought like Aaron and when the people of Israel saw the golden calf and the sacrifices to it they were carried back to a simpler time when they lived in Egypt. The worship of the old symbols led them to relive the life of their old ways. This is the problem with not making a clean break with your past; your past takes over your present. This was to be a continual problem for the people of Israel. As we learn in the twentieth chapter of Ezekiel, God speaking to Ezekiel tells him, “On that day I swore to them that I brought them out of the land of Egypt into a land I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of lands. And I said to them, “Cast away the detestable things your eyes feast on, every one of you, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt; I am the Lord your God. But they rebelled against me and were not willing to listen to me. None of them cast away the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt.” As one person put it, “It took one day for Israel to get out of Egypt and forty years for Egypt to get out of Israel.” You see, they never really made a break with their past and so in the end, their past would end up breaking them. What started out as a supposed feast to God soon descended into an chaotic frenzy of evil that was typical of life in Egypt.
The scripture as translated tells us that the people ate and drank and rose up to play as if they were going to participate in parlor games. This is another example where much is lost in translation. The word translated a play, the Hebrew word, letzachek, has as its origins laughter, which is why the idea of play might come to mind. But there are many reasons to laugh and some laughter admittedly is more sinister than others. When you look at where else letzachek is used it is in association with idolatry, adultery and murder. The Jewish scholars who have studied this word teach us that letzachek occurs when the boundaries of what is considered normal are broken. Immorality is a break in the acceptable boundaries of human relationships. Likewise, murder is taking the sacred life of someone else. And idolatry, of course is breakdown in boundaries of acceptable worship of God. This breakdown of barriers, the sins we know of as being transgressions, is what happens when people worship what God created instead of worshiping the God of creation. When God created our world he set in place boundaries for all that he created including his highest creation, people. This is what is lost in idol worship this idea of creation and a Creator. Idol worship operates in a world where nothing ever changes, time rolls around in a big cycle. How different it is when we know that God is our Creator and we are his creation. Now we know that God has created us for a purpose; we are not here by some blind fate. And if we know we have a beginning then it makes sense that we also therefore have a future, a fulfillment of the purpose God created us for. Creation also implies that there is an order to all that we see because without some order and definition to our world all we are left with is chaos and chaos described just what happened when the people worshiped the golden calf. All the acceptable boundaries were crossed, the purpose and high calling God created people to be was lost and forgotten.
This was the moment when God told Moses to go down for your people whom you brought up out of Egypt have corrupted themselves. Do you see how God wanted nothing to do with these people so they were now going to be Moses’s problem? God tells Moses that the people of Israel are stiff necked because this is a way to describe cattle who can not be led. What God is getting at is that they have worshiped a calf to the point that they are now acting like cattle! God understandably was furious after all, he had heard the cries of these people in slavery and had through a great demonstration of power set his people free. He had led them and cared for them and in the end they left him in the dust to go back to the old familiar gods. What saved the people was the intercession of Moses who first asked God just what would the Egyptians think if they had heard that the people of Israel were set free only to be wiped out here in the desert. And secondly, Moses reminded God of his promises that he had made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that their descendants would become a mighty nation that would bring blessing to every family on earth. Now, I’m sure God already had thought of these arguments but what he wanted Moses to understand is that he was relenting from destroying Israel not because of anything they might do but he was acting toward Israel solely to protect his reputation and because he is a God who is faithful to his promises.. This is what we hear God tell his people in the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, “The Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stubborn people.” Here we begin to understand that it is only God’s grace and mercy and not our righteousness that is the ground for our salvation.
Well, when Moses came down Mount Sinai what instead caught his and Joshua’s attention was the noise coming from the camp of the Israelites. They couldn’t tell if what they heard was the sound of victory or the sound of defeat but most definitely what they heard was singing, the singing of songs of worship to a golden calf. Moses when he saw the calf and the dancing and the evil ways of the people of Israel was so angry that he threw the tablets upon which God had written the Ten Commandments upon the ground shattering them in pieces. This symbolically was what had happened to the relationship between the people and God. Our story tells us that Moses took the golden calf and ground it into dust and mixed it with water so that all who worshipped there might drink of it. This might sound like a strange thing for Moses to do but if you look at the laws recorded in Leviticus, what Moses did was similar to what was called for when a women was caught in an act of adultery. What Moses was conveying to the people of Israel was that in worshiping an idol they were cheating on the one who should have been their first love, the one true living God who had saved them and given them a new life as free people.
Well, in order for this new life to work Moses realized that God could no longer just be the God on the mountain; God had to be the God near by, the God who placed his sanctuary in the midst of his people. When Moses went back up the mountain to get the second set of tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them, he asked God to reveal to him his glory. In the thirty fourth chapter of Exodus we read of how God passed behind Moses and we read that Moses understood God’s glory as being that he is the Lord, a God who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin…” It seems odd that these attributes would be what is God’s glory, but if you think about it it is because God is a God who is merciful and gracious, a God who is full of steadfast love and faithfulness this is why his presence, his glory could be there in the midst of his people to guide them and protect them. When Moses came down from the mountain he instructed the people to build the tabernacle, a place from where God could instruct his people about the proper boundaries and the what sacrifices would be needed when those boundaries are crossed. And there in the most holy of places there would be a proper throne for their king, the ark of the covenant, which would also be known as the mercy seat. Here the people would find forgiveness and renewal once every year at the festival of Yom Kippur.
All of this pointed toward Jesus. It is no accident that John at the beginning of his gospel would write that Jesus came and tabernacled among us. Nor is it any accident, that Paul writing in the third chapter of Romans would say, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as the mercy seat sprinkled with his blood to be received by faith.” When Paul was trying to think of an image of the atonement Jesus provided for us all he could think of is the top of the ark of the covenant where it is said that when sprinkled with the blood God would be able to descend into the most holy of places. This is what happened when the blood of Jesus was shed, he became the most holy place where God could descend and we could draw near to God by faith. No more, for us, is God a God of sheer power, a distant God as the people of Israel once thought but instead we can now know God as a God who condescends and draws near allowing us to have confidence and certainty that he is with us in Christ Jesus.This is what allows us to make our past be in the past so that we can live in the present in the presence of God. This is what sets our hearts free from all of that this world idolizes because the glory of God has filled the temple of our life and there is no room for any other love. May this be true of us now and always. Amen!
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