The Golden Calf

Exodus 32: 1-14, OT pages 78-79 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 have commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped 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 forever.’” And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring to his people. Sermon Fall has come again, and every fall, during my four years of High School, brought with it the Homecoming Dance. That was probably the case for you too. The Homecoming Dance would come along, it was held in the high school gym, and a well-meaning committee would decorate the gym and try to make it look less like a gym than it really was. There’d be streamers, and some kind of tarp on the floor so your shoes didn’t leave marks, the lights would be low and music would be playing but the basketball goals were still there and I remember once that some creative person stuck a fern in each of the basketball hoops to dress it up a little bit. A lot of work goes into a high school dance, and I put a lot of work into getting a date to the high school dance. One year I knew for sure of one young lady who would say yes, which gave me an inappropriate amount of confidence, so what I did was I asked three other young ladies first, knowing that if those three said no I had someone to fall back on. Well, all three of those first young ladies did say no – they had already been asked, but I wasn’t disappointed, I just went to the one I had in mind from the beginning, told myself I was glad it had worked out this way because she was the one I liked the most anyway, only to find that she had been asked the day before. And often this is the way that it goes. That’s why you must be careful taking someone or something for granted, because sometimes you’ll turn your back assuming that she’ll just be there waiting on you, only you’ll turn back around and she’ll be gone. The people had grown tired of waiting for Moses, and assuming that he’d be back sooner or later, or maybe imagining that they could afford to explore their options a little bit, “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.” Now a note of clarification. You may have figured this out already, but someone much smarter than me had to point it out, not noticing it on my own. The people say that they are replacing Moses with this Golden Calf – it’s him that they are tired of waiting on, not realizing that he wasn’t the one who got them out of Egypt, he’s just the servant of the Lord and not the Lord himself, but it’s God who ends up being hurt by all of this, and that’s where this lesson from Scripture really reminds me of the date that I could have had if only I wouldn’t have taken her for granted. When the people turn to this calf and make offerings to it and kneel down before it, “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.”” Now have you ever imagined that such a thing were possible? That after all of our wandering around, getting distracted, finding ourselves and our way, that during all that time when we were exploring our options God might have been exploring his options as well? “Now let me alone,” God said to Moses, “So that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.” You have to be careful taking someone or something for granted, because sometimes you’ll turn your back assuming that she’ll just be there waiting on you, only you’ll turn back around and she’ll be gone. When I was 5 and 6 years old I spent so many days at my grandmother’s house. She was my father’s mother, a painter who I loved, and growing up I thought it was so interesting how she loved Capri Sun juice boxes, because she always had them in her refrigerator, not realizing then that I was the only reason she had them. In the years before her death she struggled to recover from a stroke, learning how to walk again, struggling to remember what she was going to say, and when I was 12 she died, and I remember the funeral was hours away, the family plot in a place we never went to, but I made a promise then that I would go back when I turned 16 – that when I could drive myself I’d drive and put flowers on her grave, only when I finally went, I couldn’t remember how to get there. We just assume that waiting a little while is no big deal, and so I tell our daughters “just a minute” all day long, only they won’t accept that as a reasonable response because they know now what I’ve forgotten – that some things will pass you by if you don’t do something right now – some relationships will pass you by if you put them off. You can’t wait until the weekend to spend time with your children. You can’t wait until your anniversary to celebrate your marriage. You can’t keep putting off the phone call to him because he won’t always be there to answer. You can’t just sit there watching TV assuming that he’ll come around sooner or later, that they’ll be time to talk once this show is over, because once the show is over he may well be gone. “Just a minute” – that’s what we say to our children, our spouses, our parents, our church, and our God. Just a minute – I’m working on a Golden Calf right now and if this doesn’t work out for me I know you’ll still be there, but don’t you be so sure, because your relationship with God, like any other, depends partially on you. There are places on this earth where I’ve felt God’s presence, and I know well enough to value a place like that because not every place is, so I’ve been meaning to get back to this camp I grew up going to. It’s on a lake, and not only did I go there as I kid I was also a camp counselor there, and it’s a place where my call to ministry was affirmed, one of those places where I gained some direction for my life. I’ve been meaning to get back to that camp for years now, only just last week I learned that the presbytery who has funded it for years had to sell it to make ends meet. Every building has been torn down, and this is a lesson to me and to you and to every person who cares about a place like this one – do not neglect this place – because the temptation is always there to sleep in, sit back, and wait for next year before you really pull out your check book and make a pledge, but remember that if you’re melting down your ear rings to make a Golden Calf this church is sitting in the back seat, and is that where your church should be? It’s not that God is going anywhere. God threatened to walk away but Moses talked God right out of it, and more than anything else, the faith that this church stands on offers this guarantee that no matter how frustrated God gets with us God will not walk away, but what about you? Look to the Cross and know that our Lord faced rejection and would sooner face rejection now than walk away from you – but still – here it is Stewardship Season once again, and as you calculate the amount you’ll pledge there’s so much to think about, so many directions that you’re already pulled, sometimes away from God and towards things that are not. Where will that money to God fit in? After the mortgage, credit card payments, vacation fund, cable TV? If there’s any gold left over from the Golden Calf, then God can have the left overs. That’s how humans think. It reminds me of a new minister who was trying to enter our Presbytery. Before a new minister can serve a church here in Middle Tennessee he or she must be examined on the floor of the Presbytery in front of every other minister and so many elders. Some of the questions are hard to answer, but at some point or another every new minister will be asked as this one was, “Son, do you love Jesus?” The new pastor was nervous, but with confidence he said, “Yes I do, but not nearly as much as he loves me.” There’s a lot to balance when it comes to your time and your treasure, but I tell you that you must make God your first priority, because you are always his. Amen.