One afternoon, the summer before my freshman year of high school I got a phone call I was utterly unprepared for. On the other end of the line was a guy named Christian Laugen, he heard I was thinking of running cross-country in the fall and wanted me to join the team for a run. I was aghast. I knew Christian only by reputation. His nickname was Golden- he was the captain of the cross country team, the best runner in the state, smartest kid in the school, started on the basketball team, had a beautiful girlfriend, he was in my eyes, golden. Under his leadership we worked hard all year, and placed 2nd in the state championship, but the next year when he left we encountered a bit of a leadership void. We had counted on Christian for everything, and now he was gone. The closest thing we had was a Sr called chewy, due to his similarity in his appearance and personality to the character from star wars. Chewy’s ugh, leadership, culminated with him encouraging the team to sneak out of our hotel rooms late the night before the state championships to make a statue out of the trashcans around the course. Needless to say, we bombed the next morning, we got 10th overall. For four years the cross country team had relied on the flawless Christian Laugen, and once he left we freaked out.
Probably all of you have a version of this story. Maybe you didn’t even realize how much a leader – whether formal or informal - was holding everything together. Suddenly… the leader leaves…and we freak out. That’s exactly what happened with Moses and the Israelites. Our text begins in Exodus 32:7 with God telling Moses to go down to Mt. Sinai to deal with the Israelites who are in utter disarray, but the story begins a little earlier. Many of you actually know this story, but I will do a quick recap. Moses leads the Israelites away from Egypt, they cross the Red Sea, and begin wandering in the Sinai. They do this for about 40 years before settling below mt Sinai where God reveals the 10 commandments to Moses. Moses tells the Israelites the 10 commandments, and then returns to mt Sinai for 40 days to receive the rest of the Law from God. But the people begin to get restless while Moses is gone- Moses has been their spiritual and political leader for 40 years. The Israelites fear that something has happened to Moses, and they freak out. Aaron, Moses’s brother who was with Moses when they told the pharaoh to let the people go, is the defacto leader. Aaron tells the people to bring him all their gold; he melts down the gold and makes a golden calf, and the Israelites have revelrous festival.
God is none too pleased with the golden calf business, and this is where our text picks up. God tells Moses “get back down to your people, they are totally blowing it.” But before Moses has a chance to return to the people, God’s anger grows, and God, tells Moses, “leave me, so I can kill them all. I will still have a people, but they will only be your descendants.” This is quite shocking, God is ready to scrap the abrahamic covenant, and start over with Moses, but Moses does something even more shocking. He talks back to God. He lays out two arguments to convince God not to kill the israelites. Moses tells God:
1) What will the Egyptians think if you kill the people you just saved?
2) REmember the covenant you made with Abraham that his descendants will make a great nation, do you really want to break this promise.
And then something remarkable happens. I really think this is one of the most amazing verses in the Old Testament. And I will quote the NRSV, because I think it does a better job with the translation, I quote “And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”
God’s mind is changed. The God of creation listens to Moses’s arguments, and God’s mind is changed.
I am going to be honest here, I am not sure what to make of this, but in lieu of a simple explanation, I want to offer three thoughts on what this story tells us about God and our relationship with God.
1) First, When we go before God in prayer, we should be bold. If anything, Moses was bold. Moses argued with the God of creation, and God relented. And Moses didn’t beat around the burning bush, so to speak. Moses tells God to “turn from your fierce wrath” in verse 12. When I looked at the Hebrew text for this passage, my jaw dropped. The Hebrew word for turn, Shuv, has several meanings that are not completely distinct from one another. The literal meaning is to turn around and go to a previous geographical location, but figurative meaning is to repent. It is one of the most frequently used verbs in the Old Testament. Whenever a prophet tells people to repent, they use this word. I am not saying that this verse should be translated “Moses told God to repent”, but that any Hebrew who read this would have been aware of the many uses of the word, and recognized the gravity of what Moses was saying to God.
a. This reminds me of the film Bruce Almighty where Jim Carey gets mad at God and starts yelling, "The only one around here not doing his job is YOU!" ANSWER ME!"
b. Now I dont know about all of you, but I am certainly not that bold when I pray. In fact you hear me pray every week, my prayers are filled with sentences like this, “Lord, if it’s your will, might you consider doing... whatever”. So I think we, I, should be willing to be a little more bold when we pray- not all the time, but recognize that there are times when we need to be like Moses and stand up to God in prayer.
2) My second thought is that God is affected by our prayers. “God not only listens to our prayers, but God is affected by our prayers. While we don’t know how this works, This story sends a very powerful message that the God of the Universe not only lends his ear to our petitions, but bends his heart as well. And this is huge because it shows us that we are not just God’s minions, but in vital two-way relationship with God.”
3) My last thought is how important it is to Let God be God- Throughout this passage the Israelites struggle with God’s transcendence. Moses had been a mediator between them and God, and had, in a sense, personified God. We get hints of this in verse 1 when the Israelites say that Moses delivered them from Egypt, rather than God delivering them. So when Moses leaves they replace him by creating a golden calf that can represent God. I don’t think that the Israelites were trying to make a new God, I think they were just trying to simplify God- make God tangible and understandable. They chose an image of a bull that had been used to describe God in Genesis 49:24. Then after they make the calf, they claim that is the God, Elohim, who delivered them from Egypt. After they identify this God as the same God who delivered them, they have a festival to Yahweh. They weren’t worshiping a different God; they were just changing the way people perceived the one true God. They were making God easy, tangible, present, less mysterious, and simple. In short, they made a false image of the true God.
a. I can’t help but think of the first scene in Exodus where Moses encounters God, and learns the name of God, God says, “I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be”, but when they make the golden calf, the Israelites are telling god, “you are who we want you to be”. And this is what draws the ire of God.
This is especially relevant for us; we are not that likely to melt down our jewelry and fashion an idol. I am not too worried about anyone inventing a new God and a new religion, but it can be pretty tempting to simplify God- to make God into something easier to grasp, or even more tempting, to make God something more like what we want.
There is actually some pretty interesting research about this done by a social psychologist at the university of Chicago. His team interviewed American Christians on their perceptions of certain issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and the Iraq war. They then asked what these individuals thought that God thought of those same issues, and what they the American public thought of those issues. They found that whatever the individual thought, God also thought, but not necessarily the American public. They then did a follow up experiment with the same people and gave them literature that caused many of them to change their views. When people’s views were changed, all of sudden God’s views changed too, but the average American’s views did not. To sum it up, it’s really hard for us to not model God after ourselves.
I know this from my own life. I love talking to people and I have always been drawn to social justice, and so when I read the bible I tend to gravitate towards the stories when Jesus spent time talking with people and healing people. Conversely, I am not great with alone time, so it’s easy for me to ignore the times when Jesus went off by himself and prayed in solitude, when Jesus stepped back from the crowds, when Jesus cried out to God in loneliness and frustration. My motives aren’t bad, but if I allow myself only to see the parts of Jesus that I identify with or the issues that I agree with, I miss out on the fullness of God’s glory and grace.
This story, then, should lead us each to some rigorous questioning of our own selves – where, in our own lives do we make God in our own image? How do we reduce God into something more agreeable? These questions can be challenging and at times discouraging… But this is not a story that should leave us in despair; in fact, it is a story that should motivate us to deepen our relationship with God. For the more time we spend in prayer, in reading, serving others, in meditating on God, and in Christian community, the better we know God. And that is the key to all three of these lessons from today’s text. Knowing someone really well gives us confidence to ask the hard questions because we’re secure in the relationship, it gives us faith in the person’s answer because we know it is a caring answer, and it gives us respect for the person because we understand him or her more deeply. And so it is with God. The better we know God, the easier it is to be bold when we pray; the better we know God, the easier it is to trust that God is affected by our prayers; and the better we know God, the harder it is for us to change God into our image. So as we come before God in Prayer this week, may we be bold, may we have confidence that God cares about and is affected by our prayers, and may we let God be God.
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