(Click on the title above to hear JJ's sermon on this passage)
The episode of the golden calf is a blight on the record of Israel’s history. Because of it, Yahweh threatened to remove the divine presence from leading the people to the Promised Land. But I am not sure the Israelites were as bad as we have been led to believe.
Let’s put ourselves in their shoes. We have been brought out of Egypt, and know that it was only due to the might hand of Yahweh that we got free from Pharaoh’s tyrannical grasp. Yet Yahweh has been closeted away for weeks meeting with Moses, and we have no idea about when they will be done and return. We’re not sure what to do. Fear is beginning to spread amongst the people. And when fear dips its toe into our communal waters, waves begin to ripple. “How are we going to survive as a people without any clear direction on where to go? There is no clear voice that can point us toward existential certainty…we are standing in the shadow of Sinai and are not sure that we are going to survive and make it to the promised land,” we exclaim!
Hoping to calm the growing uncertainty, our leaders call a tribal meeting. And amidst all the standing around and scratching heads wondering what to do now arises a voice from the back of the tent – “I’ve got an idea!” These are four very dangerous words.
This is what fear does, doesn’t it? Anxiety and fear will cause us to look for anything that will provide relief – it doesn’t have to work; it just has to provide us with the illusion of action and progress.
The golden calf is unimportant by itself. The particularity of the idol is not the issue – the golden calf is simply the symbol of a people who are too afraid to wait on the legitimate presence of the LORD to lead them to the Promised Land.
Upon learning of their collective march toward idolatry, God is, understandably, upset. “Get out of my way, Moses, so that I might smite them with my cosmic death ray!” But Moses’ cooler head seems to prevail in the face of God’s wrath, bent toward the annihilation of God’s people, and God relents.
So in Exodus 33:12-23 we might assume that the problem is God’s temper, and the angel a fitting answer to the Israel/Yahweh relational problem. This is a bad assumption. The problem is, rather, that God’s presence has been withdrawn from the people in favor of a surrogate guiding angel, which is not a welcome sign of God’s presence, but a disappointing substitute.
Moses understands exactly the implications of leadership via angel or the divine presence. God’s presence was always to be Israel’s mark as the unique people of God. From the pillar of fire by night and the cloud of darkness during the day, to Paul’s claim that the church is the temple of the living God, the presence of God is the bedrock principle of what it means to be God’s people. And if God refuses to lead the people then the Exodus was all for naught. So Moses successfully argues that God and not the angel should lead the people to the Promised Land.
But how can we know that the presence of God is with us? In this story, God’s temper seems imperfectly trustworthy, even Moses is a bit suspicious of God’s intentions. So he says in verse 18 – “show me your glory, I pray.” Moses knows that seeing the glory of God will be a reassurance of Yahweh’s presence. In the face of fear and uncertainty, opposition and anxiety, we ask God for unambiguous physical and visual symbols of God’s presence.
But today’s theophanies, or encounters with God, are more subtle. God doesn’t light up the sky with personal messages of enduring presence. Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if God is around at all.
The fullness of the Lord’s presence, what Moses in his fear and uncertainty thinks will help, is in and of itself too much for human comprehension. Such presence would be coercive – faith would be turned into sight. There is always some uncertainty with regard to the Lord’s presence, some mystery associated with God. Otherwise, would there be room for faith and trust?
So how can we know that the Lord is with us?
God told Moses that God will be known through proclamation – “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you.” Knowing God – faith, as Paul wrote – comes by hearing the proclamation of the word. Sight, it appears, does not tell us much about either divine or human behavior. What good is it to see some great miracle of power and glory? It tells us nothing about the nature and character of God. Even if it were possible to walk by sight, I am not sure that we would learn to be faithful anyway. Remember the story of the rich man and Lazarus? After his death, the rich man begged to have Lazarus sent back to bring testimony to his family so that they may avoid his fate. And the response? If they did not believe the words of Moses and the prophets; if they did not heed the proclamation, then they would not pay attention to a resurrected poor man come to save them.
I don’t know how to concretely answer the question about how we can experience the presence of God. Moses asked for a visible symbol and received a proclamation of the goodness and mercy of God instead. We cannot go back to a pre-calf existence when the fullness of God can be seen more clearly…we are left instead with the task of knowing God through our obedience. But isn’t this the way it’s always been? We hear the word of God proclaimed; we hear about God’s gracious and merciful nature and respond to it by offering our obedience – and faith says that somewhere in the offering of ourselves through submission, we will see and know God. I like what the Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote - “How shall we begin to know who You are if we do not begin ourselves to be something of what you are? We receive enlightenment only in proportion as we give ourselves more and more completely to God by humble submission and love. We do not first see, then act: we act, then see…and that is why the man who wais to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.”
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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2 comments:
"I've got an idea". Four dangerous words indeed! Southerners often hear "I've got an idea" or "Hey, Joe! Watch this!" just before the call to "911".
The Christian's '911' is prayer and we must use it often (right after a BRIGHT idea is tried).
And as for "First I must see, THEN I will believe", Jesus, Paul, Moses and lots of other faithful men of God have suggested a better exclamation might be, "If first I believe, I shall surely see."
It seems that even those "chosen" by God/Jesus are often times having to have their faith redefined for them as "missing the point." Whether it was the Israelites giving over their most treasured items, in order to make a representation of what they believed their God to be (remember, they had not received the law from Moses telling them not to do such a thing - it was on its way down the mountain), or 12 young men returning to their fishing boats when it seemed their friend (the one they had left everything to follow, and more than once had to be reeducated have redefined for them who he was and what he came to do) Jesus ended up being killed by a government they believed he would overthrow.
Great adventures in missing the point - is perhaps the subtext or our sacred text, as it seems we still put a great deal of our selves into believing what we see, and when we see things going bad or the wrong way - our faith is somehow overwhelmed in the process. So much of our identity, status, politics, knowledge, relationships, etc. is based upon what we see taking place. We have yet to come to terms with our own faith in believing that regardless of what we see, or what we want to see, our faith is hinged upon something else - God's promise(s). That's pretty weighty stuff to try and get our heads around, and perhaps why we were never asked to try and do that - but most of us try and fail every day to do exactly what we have been told not to or even asked to do.
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