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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Today is the penultimate sermon in our Exodus series. Next week, we will bring it all home, wrap it all up, and finish this series off. But we do have one more story along the way to get there, and that is the golden calf. A lot of us are probably familiar with that story, at least the pop culture version of it. Today, we're gonna dive in a little deeper.
Speaker 2:But before we get there, let's take a quick look back at last week where we talked about the 10 commandments. Because the 10 commandments or the Decalogue as we referred to them last Sunday, that really is in a lot of ways the climax of the Exodus story. God listens to the people and hears their cries. God saves the people. God frees the people.
Speaker 2:God feeds the people, and then God instructs the people. But that whole framework, the whole story leading up to, and then as we'll see it today, away from the 10 commandments, all of it is very important. Because if you read the 10 commandments separated from the voice of the God that listens and responds to our pain, or if you read the 10 commandments separated from the memory of the God who frees the slave, then the rules on their own fall a little bit flat. I mean, 10 rules. Then how is that ever going to be enough to structure a society?
Speaker 2:Certainly not an entirely new nation. In fact, all across Torah, the Jewish people identified 613 laws that were needed to structure their social and religious commitments together. So 10 Commandments were really only one small part of that. By the way, if that ever sounds legalistic to you, you should take a look at just how many rules it takes to run Canada. Hint, it's a whole lot more than 613.
Speaker 2:For example, we decided that we needed a law that says it is illegal to scare the queen in Canada. So who's feeling legalistic now? And, yeah, by the way, that is a real Canadian law. It's illegal to scare the queen. Point is, the 10 commandments were not actually ever meant to be a legal system.
Speaker 2:They were intended as a reflection of the growing relationship between this particular God Yahweh and this specific people Israel. And that is deeply reflected in Jewish readings of the Decalogue. As we saw last week in the Talmud, it identifies the first command, not as you shall keep no other gods before me. Now for Jewish readers, that's the second command. The first is to remember the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery and into freedom.
Speaker 2:And that right there changes a lot. It starts not with rules for Jewish readers, but with remembering. However, we also saw that for Jewish readers, it ends with a gift. So here's the full list. Remember, remember your freedom, hold on to no other gods, make no false idols, remember the Sabbath, honor your parents, no killing, no adultery, no stealing, no lying.
Speaker 2:You will not covet anything. And we heard last week from Jewish teachers here about how this last quote unquote command presented some problems. I mean, how do you ever legislate covetousness or desire? As I joked, if I ever see you giving one last long loving look at my ox, do I get to you to take to court over that? Of course not.
Speaker 2:That's absurd. So some rabbis came to believe that you could only ever break the tenth command once you crossed the line on one of the first nine. So you covet and then you lie, or you covet and then you steal, you covet and then you refuse to rest. The point being that maybe this final quote unquote command was never a command to begin with. It was always the promise of the first nine.
Speaker 2:That if you can learn to live within these boundaries, you won't become consumed with this kind of jealousy that will tear you down. And I certainly do not want to pretend that I figured all this out in my life. That's not my intent, but I can say I do see this in my life. The less I lie or exaggerate to prop myself up, the more I take rest seriously for myself and to those around me, the more that I try to center myself on the God who has already brought me on the way toward freedom. Certainly, not in the drastic ways we see in the Exodus story here, but the more that I trust that God is already for me, on my side, cheering me on, saving me, and leading me, then the truth is I do actually see myself wanting less.
Speaker 2:The more you believe that you are loved, the less your status markers will matter to you. And the more you believe that you are actually cared for, the less your bank balance will matter to you, the more you train yourself to be honest and peaceful and committed to what is good, then the less you will find yourself wishing that you were someone else. And you will not covet is the promise on the back end of living out the way of God in our lives. And for me, this is part of what takes the 10 Commandments from just a list of bronze age rules and transforms them into a precursor for the way of Jesus. Remember who you are, live out the way of peace, find yourself free from all the toxic desires that will tear you back down.
Speaker 2:That approach only comes when we read the Decalogue set in a story before it is ever set in stone. Now today, we're gonna see just how poorly rules work on their own when they're not connected to relationship. First, let's pray. God of grace, thank you for all the ways that you invite us to come and to know you. The myriad of ways you welcome our praise and even our approach near you.
Speaker 2:Thank you that we can come with singing or we can come with silence. We can approach through our intellect or through our emotions, that we can come with our complaints or with our thanks, and that you meet us here regardless. At times we know that we miss that mark and we worship things other than you. We give our allegiance to things far less worthy. And we fix our eyes on what glitters rather than what brings true beauty in this world.
Speaker 2:And so for all the ways that we have at times confused you with what we wanted you to be, or we have confused you with what caught our eye in the moment, the ways that we have confused you with the things that we built with our own hands and grabbed our own attention. We apologize and we turn back and we ask you to help us see what it is that will truly bring us joy and peace and lasting satisfaction in our lives. What will point us toward each other with love and the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Today, it's the golden calf, and that means we have to talk about anti propaganda, passing the buck, these are your God, and the heart of worship.
Speaker 2:But might as well start at the start. This is Exodus 32. Moses has been up on the mountain chilling with God, getting all those commands. But back down in camp, when the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him.
Speaker 2:Aaron answered them, take off the gold earrings that your wives and 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 handed him and made it into an idol, cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. 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.
Speaker 2:Okay. We've been on quite the journey now with Moses and the Israelites, and we've seen a lot of the story so far. The God who hears the cries of the oppressed, the plagues, the waters, the pursuing armies, the desert crumbling, and the magical food. And yet somehow, here we are now with the Israelites about to abandon the God of all of that for one made out of their earrings. And to be honest on the surface, that seems a little bit bizarre.
Speaker 2:Right? I mean, God really did all of those things, how could they possibly be now looking for an alternative just because Moses has been gone a little longer than they expected? By the way, I love this translation in the NIV. As for this fellow Moses, who knows what happened to him? I mean, this is the guy who just confronted Pharaoh, the God king for them, parted the Red Sea, made bread fall from the sky, and these guys are like, meh, what have you done for me lately?
Speaker 2:I mean, by the way, I feel like this is my kid's attitude when I pick him up from school these days. I show up. I'm like, hey, buddy. Talking to his friends. He's like, get a load of this guy.
Speaker 2:Who is this fellow? What does he think he's doing? And I'm like, alright. Chill. That said, I really do think this is one of the interesting things about Hebrew history.
Speaker 2:There's this old saying, the history is written by the victors, and that is undoubtedly true. Very rarely do cultures like to relive their most embarrassing moments. In fact, this is actually part of one of the major disputes in attempting to date the Exodus story. There's very little archaeological evidence for Israel as a large group ever being present in Egypt. That's not unsurprising.
Speaker 2:This is a very long time ago. But even using the bay the Bible to find a date can be hard because Exodus mentions the name Rameses. That would put the Exodus somewhere about December. But then later in first Kings, the Bible says that Solomon started construction on the temple four hundred and eighty years after the exodus, and that would put the exodus a little farther back around the year fifteen hundred BCE. Thing is, that's a completely different Egyptian dynasty.
Speaker 2:Now for the record, four hundred and eighty years, that sounds a lot like forty years, which is a generation in Hebrew times the 12 tribes of Israel, which gives us four hundred and eighty as a symbolic representation of completion and preparation and waiting. So it's very unlikely that number in first Kings was ever meant to be read literally. But either way, the problem is there doesn't seem to be any Egyptian record of a large group of slaves running away during either dynasty. That would have been a huge loss economically and politically, and yet there's nothing about it in the Egyptian record. Now that fact alone probably signifies that the historical event that gave rise to the Exodus tale was a smaller and perhaps slightly less dramatic than the eventual telling in scripture, but there is another contributing factor here.
Speaker 2:Because while we might hope to find a record of the Exodus in some smaller off the beaten path document written by some pharaonic naysayer, archaeologists are actually not all that surprised to see nothing of this sort in the official Egyptian record. Because in fact, according to Egyptian official records, they never lost a war ever. They just didn't tell those stories. They didn't like them. They didn't write them down because they didn't want to preserve tales that didn't serve the narrative of the kings.
Speaker 2:Thing is, that goes for Egypt, that goes for Babylon, it goes to some extent for Greece and Rome and America, it certainly goes for Canada. And this is indigenous people's month right now, and we are still learning all kinds of things about our history as settlers and what we did. Stories that we hid and that we continue to hide from our eyes even to this day. Right? History is written to the benefit of the powerful.
Speaker 2:And by the way, that goes for your personal stories as well. You know that one embarrassing story about you as a kid that your mom insists on telling every time your family gets together? And it has gotten more and more ridiculous every year for the past 20 Christmases until at this point, no one but your mom believes that actually ever happened, there's a reason you're not the one telling that story. We tend to repeat tales that reinforce the narratives that we want, and we slowly let slip the stories that embarrass us. That's the default.
Speaker 2:We all do it. Israel is the anomaly. They love their embarrassing stories. Truth is, there are a few shining moments of Israelite success in the scriptures, but even those are pockmarked with failure. The great king, the most successful monarch in Hebrew history, David is a disaster.
Speaker 2:His son Solomon who is supposed to bring in the era of peace and justice, he uses slave labor to build the temple of God. Even Moses, recognized as the greatest prophet of Israel, is eventually banned from entering the promised land because he takes credit for one of God's miracles. The Bible reads like all of the stories you would never want anyone to ever write down. It's basically your mom turning all your embarrassing tales into the best selling book ever. Just be glad your mom doesn't have a bigger audience than she does.
Speaker 2:But here's the thing. I think that's part of the appeal. I mean, state propaganda has a pretty limited shelf life. And don't get me wrong, there is some of that propaganda in the Bible. We should be honest about it.
Speaker 2:But the Hebrew ability, their wisdom to remember more than just their best moments, this is part of what keeps them moving forward. In fact, a big part of ensuring that their worst doesn't define them was very specifically making sure that they wrote it down and metabolized their failures. That's why we get stories of Moses doubting himself because I see myself in those stories. It's why we get stories of people grumbling about the menu because I see my kids in those stories. It's why we get stories of Israel becoming impatient and turning the wrong way because I know I certainly recognize myself in this story at least a few times along the way.
Speaker 2:And the real trick when it comes to transformation and growth in our lives is to hold on to our past, but to do it open handed enough that we can learn from it without ever becoming trapped by it. That's what this story is about for me. That's why it's here in our bible. So let's take a closer look. Moses goes up on the mountain to get the 10 words, but he's gone a little too long and the people get antsy.
Speaker 2:And so they gather around Aaron who's sort of been the second in command by Moses through this whole story, and they demand some action. Now as a note here, the NIV says they gather around Aaron more literally. It should be something like they assemble over Aaron. That phrase is used a few times in the Hebrew scriptures, but it is always a confrontation. So they're not coming to Aaron for some guidance here.
Speaker 2:They're not coming with a suggestion, maybe we should try this here. They are confronting Aaron. They're threatening him like it's our way or the highway. And that to me makes a little more sense. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, I have a tough time imagining Aaron who has been by Moses' side through all of this miraculous story just saying, yeah. Sure. Let's abandon Moses to the mountain. He's probably dead anyway. Let's make a big golden calf.
Speaker 2:That's probably gonna work out fine. Still, sometimes being in charge is saying no. Right? Like sometimes being a parent is saying no. And honestly, sometimes being a friend is saying no.
Speaker 2:Sometimes even being a pastor is saying no, and sometimes saying no is the much harder thing. But Aaron doesn't want all that weight. And so he says, okay, bring me all your gold. He takes all the gold and he melts it down. And then he creates a mold and he pours that molten metal in and then he uses an engraving tool to fashion it and do a little bit of detail work.
Speaker 2:And the text is all very explicit about this whole process because when Moses comes down off the mountain and confronts him about this wildly inappropriate golden calf, Aaron says, look, man, they gave me this gold. I put it in the fire. Out came this calf. What do you want me to do about it? And let's be honest here.
Speaker 2:This has got to be about the worst excuse ever. I remember in grade three, I threw a snowball at recess and it hit a little girl in the face, and I'm ashamed of it. But I got called into the principal's office, and I tried to explain to him that I actually did not throw the snowball. In fact, I was just innocently holding a snowball, and somebody else threw a snowball, and it hit me in the back of the hand, causing my hand to fling forward. And I was unable to hold on to the snowball because it was slippery.
Speaker 2:It was snow after all, and it flung out of my hand and it hit her in the face. And it was sort of me, but it wasn't really my fault. Aaron's excuse here is sort of like Jeremy in grade three level grasping and game gotta respect game. So props Aaron for even trying this one out with Moses, but this is life. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, justify and we renarrate and we reduce our culpability and we shift it onto someone else or something else to protect ourselves. The problem is, what you can see here is that this kind of stuff is almost always completely transparent to everyone except us. Like, have no doubt Aaron is hearing this story come out of his mouth, and he's thinking, yeah. This is totally gonna work. Moses is gonna buy this, and Moses is thinking, just like my grade three principal, why can't this kid just tell the truth so I can finally send him back to class?
Speaker 2:In my experience, at least since third grade, I've realized the more I obfuscate, the more transparent I become. And the quicker that I can recognize and take responsibility for my mistakes, and the quicker I can get on to the work that is going to need to happen sooner or later anyway, all the reparation I need to make. But that is precisely the entry point into the heart of this story, think, at least for me. Because understanding why this story was recorded in the first place means decoding what the problem really was. And it's pretty easy to think, well, we know the problem.
Speaker 2:Golden calves are bad. Don't do that. After all, we just read last week, you shall have no other gods before me. But Aaron's deflection here, in some ways, gives me a clue into the real lesson for us. What what is he trying to deflect away from?
Speaker 2:So let's go back to what we read earlier. These are your gods, Israel, who brought you out of Egypt. So when Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord. In English, we have this translation. These are your gods.
Speaker 2:The tricky part here is that the word gods, plural, and the most common name for the specific god of Israel, it's all the same word, Elohim. Now Elohim is technically a plural form, but it has a quite wide semantic range. It can mean gods, and it's used that way. It can mean heavenly beings, So it's used to refer to angels, good or bad, in the Hebrew scriptures. And when it's used as a proper noun, means the God Yahweh.
Speaker 2:Problem is they don't use capital letters in Hebrew. You just have to figure this out from context. And here, the initial context indicates it should be God's plural. The verb for brought us out of Egypt is also plural. So we have that.
Speaker 2:Except then the subject of the phrase is the singular golden calf. And so you end up with this weird kind of phrase, this is your gods or maybe these are your god. In fact, that is exactly what a lot of scholars think this should be translated as even though it doesn't really make grammatical sense in English. In English, we don't have a sentence structure to convey the ambiguity or perhaps better, we could say the confusion that is written down in this sentence. And you can see it here because look at how Aaron responds.
Speaker 2:He built an altar in front of the calf and announced, tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord. Now Lord, l o r d, all capitals, that means that that is the Tetragrammaton, y h w h. And with that, there is absolutely no ambiguity. That is the personal name for this God. That is the name that was given to Moses earlier in the Exodus story.
Speaker 2:I will be who I will be. So what's going on here? Well, for one, this is not a conversion story. This is not apostasy. The people are not leaving one God to find a better one slash ones.
Speaker 2:This story is not a contravention of the first command, you shall have no other gods before me. This story is a contravention of the second command, you shall make no idols of me. And here's why that's important. The people here are worshiping the God who has saved them. They're just not doing it well.
Speaker 2:See, in the ancient Near East, the image of a calf, technically, what this would have been was a young bull. So don't think of a baby cow here. Think of a young fertile bull. That image was very frequently associated with all kinds of different gods. Why?
Speaker 2:Well, because what's the point of having a god? It's someone to look after you. And what do you need someone to look after? Well, all the stuff that you can't really control for yourself. Right?
Speaker 2:And in the ancient world, often that came down to weather and fertility. In other words, the gods were about thunder and babies. And if you're a man running around in the ancient Near East, and it's kinda nice to think of yourself as a big strong bull of a man with lightning fast semen, kinda like impregnating two birds with one stone, why don't you picture your God that way as well? A God who will make your flocks grow, a God who grants you more children, a God who intends for all of your wealthiest dreams to come true. In other words, Israel likes this God Yahweh a lot.
Speaker 2:They like how the story has been going so far. They just want this God to stay on the terms that they prefer. And I wonder if all of a sudden this sort of weird old story about golden calves and bronze age superstitions, all of a sudden doesn't start to sound kinda maybe just a little bit relevant. Because religion is not just about choosing the right God, it's about the way we imagine that God in the world. And this God who frees slaves, this God is not your fertility God.
Speaker 2:This God is not your prosperity God or your war God or your political God or your sports God or your blessing God or even your personal God. This is the God who intervenes on behalf of the slave, who proclaims good news for the poor, freedom for the prisoner, sight for the blind, who sets the oppressed free to quote Isaiah by way of Jesus. And yet, as soon as the Israelites are free from the clutches of those that oppressed them, they start trying to reimagine this God as the kind of God that would give them all the wealth they need to maybe even turn around and do it all to someone else. And this God says, nuh-uh. That's not the game we're playing here.
Speaker 2:I'm not interested in the imagination of worship where you stroke my ego and I fill your quiver. This God isn't interested in just worship. This God is interested in transforming the world for the better as worship. And so here's the hard edge of the story for us. You and I, we can absolutely worship the right God in the wrong way.
Speaker 2:And that means you can call yourself Christian, and you can believe the right things about Jesus, and you can hold a festival to God, and say all the right words, and wave all the right flags, and you can still be absolutely diametrically misaligned from the divine. If the intent of your worship is for you and not for your neighbor, then the God of the Exodus will ultimately say to you, I'm not interested in your golden calves. And the thing is, it's not just ancient fertility gods. We can and we do worship the right god in the wrong way all the time today. We militarize God, and we politicize God, and we turn God into a weapon against others.
Speaker 2:We use Jesus as a prop to push back against those that we don't like or aren't like us, and we draw our boundaries, and we feel safe within them. All the while, the God of the Exodus is saying over and again that salvation looks like unexpected welcome. Welcome for the foreigner. Welcome for the fatherless. Welcome for the widow.
Speaker 2:Welcome for the neighbor that does not look like they look inside beside you right now. And that welcome is the worship that moves us away from the golden calves that serve us and back to the heart of the God who first heard the cries for help that were coming from Egypt. And that God is the only God worth worshiping today. The only worship in our lives that is worth anything today is the kind that points us toward those in need with all of the resource and love we can muster because that's what God is asking for. Let's pray.
Speaker 2:God, for these stories of golden calves separated from us by millennia of tradition and experience and history, Stories that on their surface can seem very distant and archaic, and yet within them carry the seeds of the same traps we all fall into all the time. This desire to turn you into something that will serve us and bring us what we want at the expense of another. God, may all of the golden calves that we have constructed and held onto in our lives, might they slowly become smaller and smaller in our view. And in their place, might you, by your spirit, help us to understand the call toward freedom and liberation, justice, graciousness, generosity that calls us to not just worship you, but to live out your presence and love in the world. May our steps that we take contribute to the peace of the person who is beside us.
Speaker 2:And in that, may we contribute to a world that looks slowly, step by step, piece by piece more like the kingdom you imagine. In all of these ways, may our worship serve our neighbor. And in that might you be truly pleased with us. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.