“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul writes. “Do not worry about anything,” he says, which is a lot easier to hear when you have nothing to worry about. But I do worry, and I know many of you do as well, and for very good reasons. And the only reason I don’t immediately dismiss Paul as Pollyanna is that he too has plenty to worry about and he doesn’t. “Don’t be anxious,” is his advice, written from prison, “but in everything make your requests known to God in prayer and petition with thanksgiving. Then the peace of God, which is beyond all understanding, will guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.”[1]
The peace of God, and the joy it brings, the Apostle tells us, is solely determined by our relationship with God amid all kinds of circumstances, but not by those circumstances. He urges his readers to ground ourselves in prayer so we don’t drown under wave after wave of grief, anger, disbelief, and discouragement. Don’t be anxious. You’re not alone. The Lord is near. Pour out your heart before God. Practice gratitude. Trust the promise of Christ risen from the dead.
The story from Exodus is a powerful reminder what can happen when anxiety does take hold. Moses was gone. Moses who had told the Hebrew slaves that God would bring them out of the misery of Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey.[2] Moses who had been with them all this time, through sea and wilderness, through hunger and thirst, through fear and wonder. Moses who had told them all the words of the Lord, beginning with the first, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”[3] And when Moses had finished reading the book of the covenant in their hearing, they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will obey.”[4]
But then Moses went back up on the mountain and he was gone. They didn’t know when he would be back. They didn’t know Moses was receiving instructions about the tabernacle, and the ark, and the mercy seat, the lampstand, the curtain, the vestments, the altar, the ordination of priests, and the sabbath. They didn’t know Moses was having a worship committee meeting with the Lord on the mountain.
“We will do and we will obey” was the last we heard the people say before Moses left. Then there are pages of detailed worship notes, considering every fiber in the priestly vestments and every measure of spice to be added to the anointing oil; the next time we hear the people speak, after the narrative camera cuts from Moses and the Lord on the top of the mountain to the camp at its foot, we see them gathered around Aaron, saying, “Come, make a god 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.”[5]
“This Moses,” they said, in tones of distance and disaffection, “we do not know what has become of him.” So make us something we can see. Make us something that will lead us forward, and we will follow it.
And Aaron, without a moment’s hesitation, obliged them. The story leaves it to our imagination whether he was glad, perhaps even eager, to satisfy the people’s religious needs, or if he was coerced. It all happened when Moses was gone, and that absence, in a way, was like a dress rehearsal for what was to come: they would have to learn to live as God’s people without Moses, without their living link to the living God; they would have to learn to live with the written word of God, the liturgies and instructions for worship, and the priests.
Well, the dress rehearsal, or perhaps we should say, the first opportunity to live as God’s people in Moses’ absence, was a complete failure. The very first thing they did after giving their full-throated commitment to doing and obeying the commandments of God was an assault on the first one that is at the heart of all of them, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”
Moses, up on the mountain, had no idea what was going on, but God told him, “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 form the way that I commanded for them.”
Did you notice how often this line pops up in the story, and how confused things are about who’s the one who brought them out of Egypt? The people point to Moses, “the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt.” Aaron points to the calf, “This is your god.” And even the Lord who at first said, “I brought you out” now points to Moses, telling him, “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt … have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and said, ‘This is your god who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’”
The Lord is furious. “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.” This clearly isn’t working. Let’s start over, you and I together, Moses.
But Moses doesn’t step out of the way and into the possibilities of being the new Abraham or the new Israel; he talks back. “Why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power?” It wasn’t my mighty hand that led them out, nor Aaron’s, nor Miriam’s — this is your people, your doing, your promise, this is your reputation at stake. So turn; change your mind; remember.
Terence Fretheim says that in this story, we learn that “God is not the only one who has something important to say.”[6] This covenant between God and God’s people isn’t solely defined by divine declaration and human obedience, but by a relationship that invites human understanding and speech. It is Moses’ prayer, Moses’ voice against God’s wrath that moves this moment from firey peril to new possibilities of fulfilment. The closing line of today’s passage declares, And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
“Human prayer,” writes Fretheim, “is honored by God as a contribution to a conversation that has the capacity to change the future directions for God, people, and world.
God may well adjust modes and directions (though not ultimate goals) in view of such human responsiveness. This means that there is genuine openness to the future on God’s part, fundamentally in order that God’s salvific will for all might be realized as fully as possible. It is this openness to change that reveals what it is about God that is unchangeable: God’s steadfastness has to do with God’s love; God’s faithfulness has to do with God’s promises; God’s will is for the salvation of all. God will always act, even make changes, in order to be true to these unchangeable ways and to accomplish these unchangeable goals.[7]
Making the calf was an act of idolatry because the God who brought Israel out of Egypt cannot be produced by the whim of the people who get anxious in the absence of the prophet. God is sovereign and free, never an object of artful manipulation, whether carved in stone, cast in gold, or rendered in words. This story opens our eyes to the great sin of substituting the manufactured god, the available god, the domesticated god for the One who made heaven and earth, who brought Israel out of the house of slavery, and who raised Jesus from the dead.
Moses was Israel’s living link to the elusive presence of the living God, and Moses’ absence led to anxiety and the manufacture of a god of manageable proportion — visible, tangible, portable. “Calf-making” is more than an episode in Israel’s history, it is a perennial temptation for all who seek to live as people of God, in the wilderness of freedom, on the way to the promised land. “It is easy to mistake our own creations for our God,” writes Anathea Portier-Young.
It is tempting to shape … an image that pleases our senses, mollifies our anxiety, and invites admiration from our neighbors. But that thing we have made from Egypt’s gold is not our god. That thing may symbolize strength and power. It may personify virility, or femininity, or aspects of both or neither; it may embody rebellion or conformity, generosity or greed. But as close as we draw to it, as much as we celebrate it and place it at the center of our lives, it did not lead us to freedom and will not lead us to our promised inheritance. … It will moor us in the impatience of our ignorance and fear. We may dance with it for a day, but soon find that it has led us to our death.[8]
Idolatry has terrible consequences, and our days are filled with the news of them, but these consequences will not include the final rupture of the relationship between God and God’s people, between God and God’s creation, because God is true to God’s promises, even to the point of bearing the full, crushing weight of our sins.
And there is joy in heaven over every human being who, amid the waves of anxiety and fear, clings to the promises of God and draws courage from the Holy One who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.[9]
[1] Philippians 4:6-7 REB
[2] Exodus 3:16-17
[3] Exodus 20:1-3
[4] Exodus 24:7
[5] Exodus 32:1
[6] Terence Fretheim, Exodus (Interpretation; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 285.
[7] Fretheim, Exodus, 287.
[8] Anathea Portier-Young http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3442
[9] Exodus 34:6