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The Story of Moses and the Golden Calf Is One of Those Old Testament Stories That Tend to Make Us Uncomfortable

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The Story of Moses and the Golden Calf Is One of Those Old Testament Stories That Tend to Make Us Uncomfortable Sermon Preached by the Rev. Kathryn Reinhard Sunday, September 15, 2013 Christ and St. Stephen’s, NYC Exodus 32: 7-14; Luke 15: 1-10 The story of Moses and the golden calf is one of those Old Testament stories that tend to make us uncomfortable. It’s one of those violent, unsettling episodes, that we’d rather pretend weren’t really in the Bible. The authors of our Lectionary seem to agree with this sentiment because the excerpt we heard in our reading this morning is only a small portion of this complicated, problematic tale. The thing is, this story is in our Bible. It is part of our faith heritage. And so I think it is worth struggling with this story to see if, within in it, we are able to discern something of the “good news” of our faith. To do this, we need to look at the whole story, to see what happens before, and what happens after the small excerpt we heard read. As we know, God has delivered his people, the Israelites, out of their suffering, freeing them from their slavery in Egypt. The Israelites have set up camp in the desert, and Moses has gone up a mountain to talk to God, to get instructions for how they are to proceed on the next leg of their journey. In other words, this is a story of a “young” people -- a people simultaneously eager and vulnerable, a people taking their first tentative steps as an independent nation, trying to figure out what “freedom” really means. And because of their immaturity, their inexperience, really, they are rash and they are impatient. They don’t have a clear sense of what their next steps are. Their leader, Moses -- the one who is supposed to speak for God, and tell them of God’s plans -- has left them, and they fear he is not coming back. This God, who delivered them out of Egypt, who had seemed so powerful, filled with such purpose, now appears to have abandoned them. This God is not quite the God they’d hoped he’d be. He is not a God who is present when they want him to be present, clear when they want him to be clear. Unconsciously, the Israelites sense that this God is a God whom they cannot control. And so in their impatience and fear they ask Aaron to build them a god they can control -- a god they can literally manipulate and fashion into any image they choose, a god they can trust because it is a puppet-god, small and impotent, but understandable and safe. Now when God sees what is going on with the Israelites in camp, down the mountain, he is angry. He says to Moses, “You know what? I was wrong about this people. They are stubborn. Let’s get rid of them and instead, I’ll make a great nation out of you, Moses. Just you, because you have been faithful.” But standing before God, Moses feels compassion for his people. He begs God to remember God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And God listens to Moses, and God changes his mind. This is where our lectionary reading ends: God listens to Moses, and so the people, in a sense, have already been forgiven. And if this were actually the end of the story, I think a lot of us would have fewer problems with the Old Testament. We could more easily identify God as the God he proclaims himself to be before Moses -- merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. But as we know, this is not the end of the story. Moses goes down the mountain. And Moses sees for himself what he has only heard about second hand, from God. He sees the Israelites in their sin, having abandoned hope in the God of their deliverance, and worshipping instead a god of their own making. And Moses is angry. God may have let go of his own anger at the people, but Moses’ anger is a fury of righteousness. He tears into camp, hurling down the tablets that God had so lovingly given to him -- tablets of instructions written with God’s own finger. The preciousness of these instructions is forgotten in Moses’ rage as he drops them and breaks them. He tears down the golden calf, melts it down in the fire, grinds the gold into dust and ashes, which he sprinkles into the camp’s water supply, and he makes the Israelites drink it. But Moses’ wrath doesn’t end there. He calls out into the camp, and asks for any people who remain on “the Lord’s side” to come and join him. And the people that come are the people from the tribe of Levi. And Moses says to the Levites, “OK, if you really belong to the Lord, go kill your brother, your friend, your neighbor on God’s behalf.” And so the Levites go and slaughter their friends and family and by the time Moses’ rage has abated three thousand people are dead. This is a horrible, frightening story. It is a story that dissuades some people from following God at all. It’s a story people point to and say, “I cannot believe in any God who would allow something like this to happen.” But rather than making us fear God, I think really this story should make us very afraid of religious people -- of people who claim to speak for God and enact punishment and judgment on God’s behalf. Remember, God forgave the people when Moses was still up on the mountain. Once Moses comes down the mountain, he is no longer acting on God’s instructions. Moses’ actions, his orders, his anger and rage don’t come from God, they come from himself. God forgave the people, with just a little prodding, but Moses, when confronted with the reality of the people’s betrayal acts as though it is him, personally, who has been betrayed. He enacts a bloody vengeance that God himself decided to forgo. Moses is at the end of his rope. He has been working tirelessly on behalf of the people before God, and when he comes back it seems like all his work was for nothing. He has been faithful, he has followed the rules, and so it seems only fair that the people pay a price -- that they literally choke on the fruits of their sin. It’s important to note that the Levites, the people who rally to Moses’ side and who slaughter their own brothers and sisters, are the ones who become the priests of Israel. They are religious leaders ordained to God’s service through blood, through enacting righteous violence on all those who couldn’t live up to their own faithful example, including their own families, their own friends. I have to tell you that as an ordained person, this story gives me chills. But, I think the lesson here doesn’t just apply to ordained leaders (though we perhaps are the most culpable) but really, it is something we should remember if we are at all “religious,” if we consider ourselves faithful people, responsible followers of God, doing the right things, living our lives the way God asks us to in smug distinction from all those other sinners around us who don’t quite measure up. 2 You see, God’s love isn’t “fair,” at least not by our standards. That is what Jesus is getting at in the parables we heard this morning in Luke. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law, the religious professionals of Jesus’ day, are appalled that Jesus is eating with sinners, welcoming them in a way that should be reserved for the righteous people, the people who have done their jobs faithfully, followed the rules and behaved responsibly. Jesus tells them, “Sorry guys, but the love of God isn’t like that. It’s not fair in that way. If God were a shepherd, and one of his sheep got lost, God would abandon all those good, faithful sheep, who behaved the way they were supposed to, just so God could go and find that one errant, undeserving sheep.” When I was a kid, I was always the “good one,” the responsible one in my family. On long car trips, I was the one assigned to sit in the middle seat, physically separating my younger brother and sister so they couldn’t fight with each other. Often, when they were fighting, sometimes over and around my body, my parents would threaten, “If you two don’t stop it, next time we’re going to leave you at home and take Kate out by herself!” Of course they never did. My siblings’ infractions were inevitably forgotten. But this always made me kind of mad. I was being good, I was behaving the way I was supposed to, but I never got any special reward. Instead, my parents treated us all as though we merited the same love, the same rewards. It’s this kind of resentment that I think we have to be so careful of as religious people. If we are inclined toward being responsible, if we follow all the rules, we tithe and pray and live sober and chaste lives, it can be infuriating to realize that God’s love isn’t fair, that it doesn’t follow an economy of reward and punishment that we feel we deserve over and against those “other” sinners.
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