Rev. Teri Peterson
PCOP
God Can’t?
Exodus 32.1-14
9 October 2016, NL3-5,
H1-5 (In God We Trust)
When the Israelites
arrived at Mount Sinai, Moses made several trips up the mountain to speak with
God, receiving the ten commandments and many other laws and instructions for
how the people should organize their lives as a religious, social, and economic
community. The story we will hear today happens during the fourth trip Moses
makes up the mountain, which lasted 40 days and 40 nights as God and Moses spoke.
Among the instructions given to Moses on this occasion was the call for the
people to make an offering of precious metals and stones and fabrics for the
building of a tabernacle—a moveable temple where God could dwell with the
people wherever they were—with its furnishings, the ark of the covenant, the
priest’s clothes, and the altar. As God is finishing up giving the law and
instructions and Moses is preparing to take the tablets down to the people,
today’s story takes place. It is from Exodus chapter 32, and can be found on
page 69 of your pew Bible if you wish to follow along.
When the people saw that Moses delayed to come
down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him,
‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who
brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’
Aaron said to them, ‘Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your
wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’ So all the people
took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. He took the
gold from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf; and they
said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land
of Egypt!’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made
proclamation and said, ‘Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.’ They rose
early the next day, and offered burnt-offerings and brought sacrifices of
well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.
The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down at once!
Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted
perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded
them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshipped it
and sacrificed to it, and said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who
brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” ’ The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have
seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath
may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a
great nation.’
But Moses implored the Lord
his God, and said, ‘O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your
people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a
mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he
brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the
face of the earth”? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not
bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your
servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, “I will
multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I
have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it for
ever.” ’ And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to
bring on his people.
“And the Lord changed his mind”—these are words we don’t
hear often.
As we read the Bible in 90 Days this summer, it came up a
few times, and each time it was a little bit of a shock to many. Before
deciding the flood the earth, God regrets
making humans on the earth…there are discussions between Abraham and God where
God listens to Abraham and adjusts the course of action…and of course there’s
the story of Jonah, where God reverses a decision and God’s ability to change
makes Jonah angry. It makes us uncomfortable, to think of God changing God’s
mind. Somewhere along the way, we decided that is impossible—God can’t do that.
As soon as we start
uttering words like “God can’t do that” we should be getting nervous.
It’s one thing to say “the God we see in Jesus is like ____”
or “in scripture we learn that God does ____.” It’s a whole other thing for us
to claim what God can and cannot do.
One of the core tenets of the Reformed tradition, of which
Presbyterians are a part, is the Sovereignty of God. We believe that God is
free to order and rule creation according to God’s will, and we—who are not
God—can’t restrict God. Which sounds so obvious when we say it out loud, and
yet we are so uncomfortable with God’s ultimate and eternal freedom that we
have placed all these bounds on how God should behave, when really the
unchanging thing about God is Love—that is God’s nature, God’s essence. From
that core reality, God is free to do whatever God will, including changing
direction.
We are so used to metaphors like God is my rock and my
fortress, the ground of being, the foundation, our refuge and strength…our
hymns and our creeds describe God as eternal and unchanging…and we forget that
is one side of a metaphor, one aspect that isn’t the whole story. We like our
God to be stable and reliable, right there when we need someone to lean on, and
not too demanding as we face a world that could never have been imagined by the
writers of scripture.
Which is, in many ways, exactly what the newly freed
Israelites wanted too. They had seen what God could do—witnessed plagues,
crossed through the sea on dry ground, been fed by manna and quail, seen water
gush from a rock, heard God’s voice rumble at the top of the mountain, and
committed themselves to following God’s way. But now…Moses had been gone a long
time, and they were getting antsy. This just wanted something more stable, more
visible, more… unchanging.
It isn’t that they made themselves a new god, exactly. After
all, they use the same liturgy—here is the god who brought you out of Egypt.
It’s more that they made a static image to stand in for our dynamic God. Rather
than give their offerings of gold and fine linen and precious jewels—as they
had been called to—for a tent that would symbolize God living among them, they
give them instead to capture what they want God to be, and hold on to that
image they have built as if it is the real thing.
We often talk about how easy it is to find ourselves
worshipping things that are not God—things like money, opportunity, power,
fame, relationships, social status, nation, celebrity, sports, nostalgia. And
that is true. We need to be aware of just what story our lives tell—where is
our time and money and energy going, and how does that relate to following
Jesus? But there’s another, far more insidious, form of idolatry that I think
is shown by this story. It isn’t only about placing something other than God as
the focus of our lives, it’s about solidifying
what we think God should be and do into a statue we can carry around but
will never change. We take the One true God, maker of heaven and earth, redeemer
and sustainer, with all the complexity and possibility of love incarnate…and
flatten it into something that works for us but bears little resemblance to the
original. God cannot possibly be captured or contained in a stagnant medium,
because God is the God of the living,
always working for a new creation where everyone experiences abundant life, and
because the promise “I will be your God and you will be my people” is always
growing and flexing as the people’s lives change over time and travels.
That’s what Moses reminded God up on that mountain that day.
“Remember the promise you made to Abraham and Sarah? Remember your relationship
with Isaac and Rebekah? Remember the wrestling and blessing you did with Jacob,
and the promise you made to all his sons and daughters? You are a God who keeps
promises.” And God remembered…and changed God’s mind, choosing faithfulness
over rejection, choosing mercy over judgment, choosing love. Because that is
what God does…and what God is free to do, whatever we think of the choice.
This is good and beautiful news. It is also hard news,
because it can be difficult to come to terms with the freedom and sovereignty
of God when we are so bound to what we believe God is like and what Love means.
When we have decided what God can and cannot do, who God can and cannot call,
how God can and cannot love or save…we have made an idol—a false image that we
have carefully shaped to be unchanging and predictable and reliable, something we think we can trust. Too
often what is most reliable about this image is that it makes God out to value
the same things we value, and to dislike the same things we dislike, and to
love within the same boundaries we allow. But behind this image is a real,
living God who won’t be trapped in our beliefs and words any more than God will
be contained in a statue or a picture or a box or a tomb.
But it’s also hard because we do this same thing—flattening
reality into ideologies we don’t question and refuse to believe can change—with
other parts of life too.
We have hardened our conception of what it means to belong
to a political party until we can’t see or accept when things have changed.
We have a pretty solidified image of our elected officials
or candidates, insisting they are who we say they are, whatever evidence is
available to the contrary.
We have turned sexuality and gender identity into a single
image of predatory lust that makes it impossible to see multi-faceted human
beings who long for love and acceptance.
We have dug in our heels and insisted racism and sexism are
over and this is as far as we’re willing to go, and everything beyond this line
is dismissed as “just being politically correct.”
We have claimed that there is just one meaning to the words “black
lives matter” or “Muslim” or “refugee” or “Christian” or “pro-life” or
“feminist” or “American” or “civil rights” or “freedom”…
the list goes on and on of ways our society, our churches,
and each of us have solidified our limited understanding into a statue we can
point to, insisting there’s no change to be had, that the bounds of our understanding of normal and good are also God’s.
Our idols, just like the golden calf, provide a sense of comfort and stability,
an illusion of control in a world where everything seems to be falling apart. And,
like Jonah when God changed his mind about destroying Ninevah, we will have to
come to terms with the fact that God doesn’t play by our rules, and that is actually good news—for us and for the whole world.
God is Love, and Love will not be bound by what we think God
can and cannot do, and will not consent to live in the carefully constructed
belief systems we have built. As 2 Timothy says, “the word of God is not
chained.” Instead God asks us let go of our idols and join in the dance of
doing a new thing. In God we trust, not because God can never change,
but because our God is living and active,
breathing life, creating community, feeding and healing, freely choosing to keep
promises time and again, to be faithful and merciful, slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love, both ever-changing and ever-the-same—no
matter what we think about that.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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