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Moses - Exodus 32
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
We are in the season of Advent, where we prepare and we hope and we wait for the coming of Christ. But we still have two weeks left with Moses. And I know the Christmas decorations are up and our readings have turned to focus on Advent. But for two more weeks, we want to continue with our friend, Moses here. And I say our friend because hopefully, over the past six weeks, you are starting to gain a new appreciation for Moses.
Speaker 1:Not just as a biblical character in felt cutouts from Sunday school that you remember as a kid. And not even just as a godly leader or a significant player in the biblical story, but as this very real human being in the midst of a very human tale. On the surface, the series is all about slavery in Egypt and exodus through the seas and wandering in the desert. And all of these are very displaced experiences that can be hard to identify with here in Canada. It's hard to see ourselves in slavery walking through the sea.
Speaker 1:And yet, my hope in this series is that as we have talked and we've explored and we've taken time to dig into the smaller moments of Moses' life, we are beginning to see just how relatable these stories can be if we let them speak and breathe for a bit in front of us. And so next week, I wanna take some time to look back over Moses' life and see where we've been throughout the series. We wanna do one more question and response session to wrap up our time with Moses. But today, we're actually gonna jump right into our text. Because this is our second last week with Moses, and we still have some really important stuff to cover.
Speaker 1:And so today, I wanna change things up just slightly here. So far, we have been moving through the book of Exodus in a pretty linear fashion. We've just spent time to dig into some of these areas and others we've moved through very quickly. But we followed the story in a very linear fashion through the book. Today, I actually wanna jump ahead to the end of Exodus.
Speaker 1:And we're gonna look at a story about a golden calf. And then next week, we're gonna backtrack to Exodus 20 and talk about the Decalogue or the 10 Commandments. Because the truth is, I just didn't wanna end on the golden calf. I just thought the 10 commandments was a much better way to end the story of Moses. So that's what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1:So this week, we're gonna move to Exodus 32, and there we find the Israelites acting out again. Next week, backtrack to the 10 commandments. But we're actually gonna start this week in Exodus 31 verse 18. And there we read this. When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.
Speaker 1:When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and they said, come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him. Aaron answered them, take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons, and your daughters are wearing and bring them to me. So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. And he took what they had handed him and made an idol cast in the image of a calf.
Speaker 1:He fashioned it with a tool, and then they said, these are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord. So the next day, the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offering. And afterward, they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. Exodus thirty one eighteen through thirty two six.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, thank you for all the ways that you invite us to know you. The myriad of ways that you welcome our praise and our approach towards you in this space. That we can come with singing or with silence. That we can approach with our intellect or as equally through our emotions.
Speaker 1:That we can come to you with our complaints and with our thanks and that you meet us and you welcome us and you heal us. And yet at times, we know that we miss that mark. And we worship things other than you. And we give our allegiance to things that are less worthy than you. Now, we fix our eyes on things that shine rather than what brings true beauty into this world that surrounds us.
Speaker 1:And so for all of the ways that we have confused you with who we wanted you to be. For all the ways that we have confused you with the things that caught our eye. For all the ways that we confused you with the things that we built with our own hands and our ingenuity and our strength, we apologize. And we turn back toward you to ask forgiveness and healing so that we could see what it is that truly brings us joy and peace and lasting satisfaction in this world. Even in this season, as we are running mad to buy gifts and decorations, to attend parties, to host family, Help us to slow down long enough to remember, to see, to experience something of your profound presence here in this world in every conversation we have and person we meet.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. So we're here in Exodus 32 this weekend. And we have come quite a way with Moses over the past few months.
Speaker 1:God has done some amazing things in his life. God has done some incredible things in the story of the Israelites. And yet here in this penultimate conversation of this series, we find the Israelites grumbling and complaining one more time. They have been through the sea. They have been pulled from captivity.
Speaker 1:They have been fed miracle bread and all the quail they can manage. And yet, here we find them making mistakes again. And this is one of those things that really seems to set the Israelite story apart from many other ancient Near East histories. We talked in the series earlier about some of the similarities between other ancient Near East stories and the Israelite story. This ability to tell the unspoken tales, the tales you don't want heard, is what sets them apart though.
Speaker 1:The old saying goes, history is written by the victors. And that is almost absolutely true. Cultures tend to narrate their history in the best possible light for that culture. It's actually one of the problems, the major disputes we have in trying to date the Exodus. When did this happen?
Speaker 1:There's actually very little archaeological evidence for Israel being in Egypt. That's not unsurprising. It was a very long time ago, and there is some. And it's likely that we can point down the Exodus to probably either the fifteenth or the thirteenth century before the common era. Now, there's debate about that.
Speaker 1:Because in Exodus, the writer mentions the name Rameses. And that is likely a reference, Egyptologists say, to Rameses the second. That would put the Israelite savory and the Exodus in about December, so just north of 3,000 ago. The problem is that First Kings chapter six says that Solomon started construction on the temple four hundred and eighty years after the Exodus. And since we know when Solomon was, if we backdate that, that puts the Exodus at fourteen forty six BCE, which is a completely different Egyptian dynasty.
Speaker 1:Now, four eighty years in the Bible sounds a lot like forty years, which represents a generation in Hebrew culture, times 12 tribes of Israel, which gives us four eighty years, a symbolic representation of completion and preparation. It's unlikely we should read that literally. But either way, the problem on the other side of the story is, whether you go thirteenth century or fifteenth century, there is no major record in Egyptian archaeology of a huge group of slaves leaving the country. It's just not there. And this would have been a huge economic and political loss to the empire.
Speaker 1:Why don't we have Egyptian records for this? The answer, of course, is that we have almost no Egyptian records of any Egyptian defeat in history. They just didn't tell those stories. They didn't want to write them down and preserve those stories. They didn't want narratives that didn't serve the story of the kings and the pharaohs.
Speaker 1:Now, this goes for Egypt. It goes for Babylon. It goes to some extent for Greece and Rome and America, and let's be honest, Canada. Think about high school and what you learned in history class about the great European settlers and explorers in our country. And compare that to what you know about First Nations peoples.
Speaker 1:We narrate stories in ways that make us look good. And it probably goes for you as well. Right? You know that one embarrassing story about you as a kid that your mom insists on telling every time people come over for Christmas? And it has gotten more and more ridiculous over the years until twenty years later.
Speaker 1:At this point, you're not even sure your mom actually believes that this has some remote connection to anything that actually historically happened in the past. There's a reason that you're not the one who tells that story. You don't want it told. We tend to repeat stories that reinforce the narrative we want. And we slowly let slip the stories that embarrass us.
Speaker 1:Israel here is a complete anomaly. In fact, though there are a few shining moments of Israelite success in the Old Testament, even those are pockmarked with failure. The great king, the most successful monarch in Hebrew history, David, sleeps with his neighbor's wife and murders her husband, and they tell that story. His son, Solomon, the one who was supposed to bring in the era of peace and justice, uses slave labor to build the temple of God. Even Moses, who we have been with for the past seven weeks now, the greatest prophet of the Old Testament, is eventually banned from entering the Promised Land because he takes credit for one of God's miracles.
Speaker 1:The Bible reads like all the stories the Jews would never want anyone to hear. The Bible is like a Jewish mother telling you all the embarrassing stories she can think of about her kids. And you read it. And yet they told them. And they remembered them.
Speaker 1:And they rehearsed them. And they tried to learn from them. Now earlier this year in the fall, we went to the book of Philippians. And we read from Paul there where he says this, forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal. That's great advice.
Speaker 1:You are not defined by your past. You are not what you have done. You are who you choose to be. To echo the words of God from this series, you are who people discover you to be. But Paul, as a good Jew and a wise human being, is not actually telling you to forget anything.
Speaker 1:Mistakes need to be remembered. They need to be studied. They need to be metabolized and understood so that we move forward. Paul is not saying forget it. What he's saying is don't be defined by your past.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, the best way to make sure you're not defined by who you have been is to own it, and remember it, and move from it. So if you have embarrassing stories locked away in your closet, that's Okay. Bring them out once in a while. Remind yourself about what it was, and figure out what you need to learn. Because God is no more interested in holding that against you than he is holding the golden calf against the Israelites now.
Speaker 1:But he certainly did want the Israelites to learn from the story of the golden calf. And that's why it's in the Bible, and that's why we need to spend some time here. Because it is a bizarre story on its surface. Right? The Israelites have been brought through the Red Sea.
Speaker 1:Waters parted and they walked through. They have been pulled out of captivity from the most powerful empire in the world. The Egyptians, they have been fed miracle bread and all the quail they can stuff in their bellies. Moses goes out for a walk on the mountain. And all of a sudden, a few days later, they're panicking saying, we need a new God.
Speaker 1:Now, Exodus 24 tells us that Moses has been gone for forty days and forty nights. This again is what we call a Hebraism. It's a Hebrew idiom. It does not likely mean exactly forty days and forty nights. It's a Hebrew way of saying he's been gone for a very long time.
Speaker 1:However many days it is, it's enough that people start to panic. And think about this. Moses has been their leader. He's been the one through whom God communicates to the people. He's the one who brought some courage and some spine to them when they needed to stand up to Pharaoh.
Speaker 1:And now, let's say it's been a week. Let's say it's been a month and they haven't seen him. What do they do? What's going on? Did he abandon us?
Speaker 1:Is he dead? Did he go up on the mountain too far and got lost? We don't know what's happening. And so they gather around Aaron. Or at least that's how the NIV translates it.
Speaker 1:Technically, in Hebrew, it says something more like this. They assemble over Aaron. And different people have pointed out the verb assemble here, nikal in Hebrew, together with the preposition al or over here. Everywhere those two words show up together in Torah, they describe a threatening encounter. That makes a little more sense to me.
Speaker 1:Right? I have a tough time imagining Aaron, who has been through all of this by Moses' side the whole way. Just saying, yeah, sure. This seems like a good idea. They're like, we should make a golden calf.
Speaker 1:And he's like, yeah. You know what? I haven't seen Moses for a while either. Let's do this. I know God just told us not to make any idols.
Speaker 1:But that sounds reasonable to me. So give me some earrings, and let's make this happen. Now, I'm not trying to excuse Aaron here. It's not like he puts up a huge fight either. But peer pressure, especially from an angry, fearful mob that assembles over you, is a little tougher to ignore than a mild suggestion from the crowd.
Speaker 1:So Aaron says, give me all your gold. He takes it. He creates a mold. He pours the molten gold in. And then he uses an engraving tool to finish it and carve it.
Speaker 1:The text. It's actually very explicit about the steps that he takes to make this golden calf. And I think at least part of that is because when Moses comes down off the mountain a few verses later and confronts Aaron, this is what Aaron says in verse 24. They gave me the gold, I threw it in the fire, and out came this calf. As if he had absolutely nothing to do with anything that happened here.
Speaker 1:And again, this sounds absurd. Right? You're reading this story and you're like, come on, Aaron. It was like 10 verses ago, you just described all the things that you did to make this calf. Now you're gonna say not my fault.
Speaker 1:But this isn't really all that crazy, is it? My son, who is barely a year old, has already learned how to take something like my phone say. Throw it across the room and then turn to me like, what had happened? I'm like, you happened. Stop doing that.
Speaker 1:My dog will destroy things. Chew them to bits. Last week, he got a hold of my copy of the Peaceable Kingdom by Stanley Harrowas. A fantastic theological book. A classic text.
Speaker 1:And when I get home, he looks at me like he has no idea what's happened in the house that day. This book got up. It started tearing pages out. The pages tore themselves. Then I was just lying there, and it rubbed itself against my face and got slobber all over it.
Speaker 1:I don't know what happened here. He's a golden retriever. He's got little sad eyes. He looks at me like, I don't know what happened here. The worst part is, when your dog eats your copy of the Peaceable Kingdom, like one of the great pacifist texts of the Christian faith, it's really hard to scold him too much for that.
Speaker 1:You shouldn't do that. But I'm not gonna do anything about it. Anyway, let's be honest. How many times though have you avoided responsibility for some silly mistake by re narrating the past to reduce your culpability in it. And you told the story slightly differently, and then slightly differently, and then slightly differently.
Speaker 1:And over time, you actually convinced yourself, this wasn't your fault. I play hockey. We have a team from this church that plays in a league here in the city. And I see this all the time. A guy will skate back to the bench after getting a penalty with an altercation or something.
Speaker 1:And he'll be like, did you see that? Ref is ridiculous. Nothing happened. I didn't do anything. That guy pushed me right in front of me.
Speaker 1:Nothing the right happens. I get a penalty. I can't believe what happens. And they're like, Jeremy, you clearly tripped that guy. It was awful.
Speaker 1:It was terrible. And I'm like, yeah. But that's because I can barely skate. I was just trying to steady myself in my defense. You see we do.
Speaker 1:Right? We justify and we renarrate and we reduce our culpability by shifting it to someone or someone else. I threw it in the fire and out came this thing. Moses, I know this looks bad, but this is what happened. Honestly, I just threw it in.
Speaker 1:Out came this. It's not my fault. The problem is this kind of thing is almost always completely transparent to everyone else but us. I have no doubt that when Aaron was saying this, in his head he was like, yeah, this is going to work. Moses is going to buy this.
Speaker 1:It'll be cool. He and I will go for a drink. We'll talk about how terrible the Israelites are. It's all going to be fine. The problem is it won't be fine.
Speaker 1:Because even if it works and you justify yourself and it gets you off the hook in the moment, the problem is that by re narrating your past, you rob yourself of the opportunity to actually learn from your past. Presenting yourself in the best possible light, that's good advice on your resume. But not being honest with yourself about why you're in the predicament you're in. This is a disaster that's to get worse. So you're in debt right now.
Speaker 1:And maybe there are reasons that are completely beyond your control. That's fair. But refusing to acknowledge that you're buying too many double mocha caramel frappuccino nonsense drinks all the time, and you're driving a car that you really can't afford, and you're continuing to buy clothes that you don't need to cram into a closet that can't fit them is not going to help. It doesn't matter how you narrate it. Maybe your faith journey seems like it's stalled.
Speaker 1:That's fair. Life is full of ebbs and flows. I get that. There's seasons that we all go through where we haven't heard from God in a very long time. But refusing to acknowledge that you're not actually reading your Bible.
Speaker 1:You haven't cracked it in months. And you're not actually honestly engaging God in prayer and saying, where are you? You're not participating in community. This is not going to help. It doesn't matter how you narrate it.
Speaker 1:So you can't just throw up your hands and say, it's not my fault. I just threw in the gold. Out came this. If we don't actually learn from what happened and move forward. And so regardless, Aaron gives into this peer pressure.
Speaker 1:He goes along with the plan that's been made up. It's fairly obvious why God is mad. And we will do the Decalogue and the 10 Commandments next week. But no doubt, you've heard this one at least. Don't make any false idols.
Speaker 1:You shall have no other gods before me. And there are all kinds of ways we put other gods before our god. But the key in this passage for me is actually hidden in the details here. You see, the people say, these are your gods, Israel. The thing is, that could also very easily be translated, this is your god, Israel, singular.
Speaker 1:You see, in most Semitic languages, the generic word for God is the word El. The plural of which, in Hebrew, is the word Elohim. The thing is, when the Hebrews speak of their God, they always use the plural form Elohim. Now, some point to this and say, this is a hint about the trinity. Not sure I buy that.
Speaker 1:And possibly, the most simple linguistic explanation is far simpler. It's what we call a plural of majesty. So when the queen meets someone, you have tea with the queen. She will say to you, we are pleased to meet you. She's not talking about her and England and all the people in the room.
Speaker 1:She's talking about herself. She says, we to signify that she is better than That's how it happens. Alright? It's called the plural of majesty. Now regardless of what you think of the queen and who is better than who, what's happening in the Hebrew language, the reason that God is always referred to in the plural, is to signal his distinction, his separation, his holiness, that God is other.
Speaker 1:He's different than us. And so whenever translators come across the word Elohim in Hebrew, they have a choice to make based on context. If the passage is speaking of the Hebrew God, then Elohim means God, singular with a capital g. If they decide that the passage is talking about other gods, then Elohim is gods, plural, with a small g. Same word though.
Speaker 1:The question is, which is being talked about here? Now, the pronoun is plural, these, that's in the Hebrew. But there is only one calf to speak of in the story, singular. And so perhaps, the best translation choice that a number of scholars have pointed to is to simply leave the ambiguity in the sentence. These are your God, Israel.
Speaker 1:It reads awkward in Hebrew. Let it read awkward in English. But the real key for me comes here when Aaron speaks. Speaks. They say, these are your God, Israel.
Speaker 1:And Aaron says, tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord. See that capital l o r d there? That is the personal name for God, Yahweh, in the Hebrew religion. This is not a conversion story. The Israelites are not leaving Yahweh to worship another god here.
Speaker 1:They're not abandoning the god who brought them out of Egypt to find a new one. What they are doing is worshipping God, but they're not doing it well. And this is the problem when we use this story to talk about idols in our culture. We say things, oh, like you're worshiping the idol of money. Or you're worshiping the god of success or power, influence, or whatever modern stand in it is that you want to substitute here.
Speaker 1:And I am sure that there's a great sermon in there somewhere for someone. But here's the thing for me. It's far too easy to say, no. Like, don't worship money. I like it.
Speaker 1:I don't worship it. I don't serve success. I want that, but I don't serve But that's not really the question here, is it? The question isn't what God are you worshiping. The question is how are you worshiping God?
Speaker 1:So where do you see God? Where do you look for God? When you imagine God, what is the image that comes into your mind? That's the question here. See, the Israelites, they want to worship Yahweh in this story.
Speaker 1:It's just that they're looking for a tangible way to see that God's presence with them. And for them, that comes out in the very narrow image of a calf or a bull. Now, in ancient Near East cultures, calves and bulls are very prominent images of fertility. Very common image of blessing, and wealth, and fertility across all kinds of these connected cultures. So here's the question.
Speaker 1:Maybe you can honestly say you don't worship money. That's not your God. But if the only thing you thank God for is a full bank account, then you're not worshiping him well. Because you're associating him with a very small slice of your life. If the only thing that you worship God for is your politics, then you've taken God and you've reduced him down to one very small slice of your life.
Speaker 1:And that's what the Israelites are doing here. You may be worshiping God. You're just not doing it well. The problem here is not the object of the Israelites praise. That's Yahweh.
Speaker 1:It's the way that they've reduced him down to one very small expression of life. And they're refusing to acknowledge him everywhere else. Yahweh does not want to be represented by a bull because Yahweh is not a fertility God. Yahweh is not a prosperity God. God is not a political God.
Speaker 1:He is not your war God. He's not the God of the harvest, or the moon, or the sun, or the mountains. The reason that Yahweh says, no idols, no images, no stand ins for me, is because Yahweh is singularly the God of all creation. And when we take God and we reduce him down to one image in our minds, and we say, this is how I think of God, it teaches us not to see God everywhere else. And worship that kind of God well, the God of everything, means we need to find ways to acknowledge Him in our finances, in our fertility, but also our struggle and our pain.
Speaker 1:We need to acknowledge Him in our worship and our singing, but also in our silence and our contemplation. We need to find ways to acknowledge God with our minds and our intellect, but also with our bodies, with our emotions, to learn what it would mean to come and stand before God, to kneel before God, to go out on a run before God. You see, to worship God well means that we acknowledge God when we come here to church, but also when we shop, and when we vote, and when we take our turn to speak, and again, when we sit, and we wait, and we listen while others share what's on their mind. This is the real problem of the golden calf. It's not just about replacing God with another god.
Speaker 1:It's about boxing him off and confining him down to very specific slices of life. That's what the Israelites are doing. God means blessing to them. So they represent God with an image of blessing. And God says to them, no.
Speaker 1:That's not going to work. Because that's not all of who I am. It's one part of it. But that's not enough. And I'm not interested in being one small part of your life.
Speaker 1:In fact, that's why I already gave you my image. I stock it inside every other single person you would ever meet as you go through this life. And it's there so that every time you get up and you look in the mirror, every time you engage in a conversation, every time you call out for help, every time you offer your hand to someone else in service, you will remember where it is that your life truly comes from. Don't try to make an image of me. I gave you an image of me.
Speaker 1:It's in every person you meet. And I wanted to be remembered, not just in the religious moments and the ceremonies, or just when you walk into church. I wanted you to see me everywhere. As Mike Mason writes, to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity in the world is still to be closer to God than looking up into the starry sky or a beautiful sun set. Now, that is a tough sentiment to swallow at times.
Speaker 1:But this is how God designed it, that he embedded his image in us. And, yeah, we see God in the sky. We see him in the sunset. We see him in the mountains. We see him in all of life.
Speaker 1:But God put his image in places that we couldn't ignore it. We couldn't box it up and put it away. We couldn't close it off when it was convenient. He wanted it where it couldn't be forgotten. And so today, especially as we begin this move towards Christmas, this advent of Christ and God into the world, where he takes up his own image and becomes human.
Speaker 1:At this season, where perhaps you will be face to face with people you love and maybe people you wish you could avoid for a bit. Perhaps the question you can ask yourself this season is not just about the terrible ways in which you've abandoned God and worshipped a false idol. But perhaps, all of the more insidious ways in which we all exclude God from certain areas of our life and we celebrate him in other ones. Have you shopped this Christmas season without considering how your faith would impact those choices? Have you gone to work without considering how God might want to reinvent what it is that you do?
Speaker 1:Have you voted without considering the least among us? Have you joked without considering what God might say about your humor? Have you thanked God, but only for the blessings, and never for the trials? You see, that we come and worship God is only part of the equation. The second part of it is that we learn to worship him well.
Speaker 1:And that means finding a way to acknowledge him with every aspect of what it means to be a human being. See, my guess is that no one here in this room is going home tonight to bow down before a tiny graven image of a calf in order to say a prayer. Right? Maybe a Christmas tree, that's a whole other story. The thing is, if you leave this room and you don't think about God until the next time you enter it, or if you leave this place and you interact with people and you forget how present God is in the midst of those interactions.
Speaker 1:If you look for God this Christmas in the special moments, but you miss him in the midst of the ordinary, then it's all kind of the same thing. Because you're reducing God down to one type of expression. So my prayer for us this season is that in the busyness of Christmas, that you would find the courage and the space and the time and the awareness to look for God's face, not only in the Christmas moments, in services, and specials on TV, but in the midst of every face that you encounter in this season. Let's pray. God, help us as we try to take a story three thousand years removed from our context and find the ways that it would breathe and speak to us now.
Speaker 1:Help us to realize that we may not have false gods. We may not sit down and worship and bow down before other things, but there are ways that we reduce you when we make you smaller than you are. We remember you in religious moments. And we acknowledge you in our blessings. And we celebrate you when we laugh and when we joke.
Speaker 1:But we miss you in the smaller interactions with other humans. We miss you in the struggles and the trials that we inevitably go through. We miss your divine presence that comes and sits with us in the midst of our ordinary as we go about our day, and we do our work, and we live, and breathe as human beings. And so we would ask that you would help us not only to avoid the terrible mistakes of bowing down before a golden calf, but also a smaller, sneakier, more insidious mistake of only recognizing you when we want to. God, this season, as we celebrate your coming, and we remember the moment where you took up your own image and you became human, you became a face in front of us.
Speaker 1:Help us to see you in every face, every conversation, every interaction, every opportunity to extend grace in this world. World. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen.
Speaker 2:This is a podcast of Kensington Commons Church. We believe that God is invested in the renewal of all things. Therefore, we wanna live the good news by being part of the rhythms of our city as good neighbors, good friends, and good citizens in our common life. Join us on Sunday or visit us online at commonschurch.org.