October 15, 2023 Sermon
Sermon title: "Moses Pleads for Israel"
Scripture: Exodus 32:1-14
(Other lectionary suggestions include Psalm 106 (selections), Philippians 4:1-9, and Matthew 22:1-14.)
Exodus 32:1-14
The Golden Calf
1When 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." 2Aaron 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." 3So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. 4He 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!" 5When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, "Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord." 6They 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. 7The Lord said to Moses, "Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8they 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 worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!' " 9The Lord said to Moses, "I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10Now 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." 11But 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? 12Why 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. 13Remember 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.’ " 14And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
The sermon title is "Moses Pleads for Israel", but before I start the sermon, I need to say something about the awful things that are going on in the Middle East right now. I have always believed that Israel has a right to exist, and I have also believed that the Palestinians have rights, too. But I also believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and it really doesn't care about the Palestinians. It wants to do one thing, and that is to eradicate the Jews. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as the Apostle Paul says - but no group of people has the right to say to another group of people, "You have no right to exist." The sad thing is that if Israel goes ahead with its plan to invade Gaza, many more innocent people will die, including children. And as one commentator has said, if you care only about the Israeli children and not the Palestinian children, there is something wrong with your moral compass. So let us pray for peace, not only in the Middle East but also in Ukraine. As I told our Bible Study class, I had a professor in seminary - and this is over 50 years ago - who said that some problems are insoluble - and as an example, he pointed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His statement doesn't mean we stop trying to make peace, but we also need to realize exactly what we are up against. Thank you for listening. It just seemed to me that something needed to be said about what is happening NOW, not centuries ago. Perhaps what did happen centuries ago can throw some insight on what's going on in our day. But I felt the need to share my anguish about what we humans still do to each other.
This sermon title could also have been "The Golden Calf", which is what Aaron, who is Moses's brother, fashions for the Israelites. I have always thought Aaron was a bit of a chicken-hearted guy in giving in to the cries of the people. But it just could be that he was playing for time, and maybe by asking the people to part with their gold, he was hoping that maybe they'd think twice. As it turns out, they did NOT mind parting with their gold to make the idol - but at least Aaron tried. He may not have tried very hard, but at least he tried....maybe!
Isn't this an interesting passage that we heard today? I have always thought so, because we have a very angry God who is bent on destroying his people for their lack of faith - but it is MOSES who saves the day! Not God who saves the day, but his servant Moses. You have heard me say before that I believe we have evolved in our faith over the centuries, and today's Scripture reading is for me an example of our Unevolved faith! I mean, here we have an angry God who wants to punish his people, and a human being - MOSES - talks God out of it! Do you and I these days really believe that God has to be talked out of doing something bad? That's not my faith understanding. Is it yours? I mean, there are no right or wrong answers here. If you believe that OLD, UNevolved way, fine! I just don't happen to believe that way! I believe we have a loving God as our father, and his son Jesus showed us just how much he loves us. Because of Jesus, we have evolved our thinking about God. That's what I believe, anyway.
I tried to say something nice about Aaron a moment ago. Now let me say something nice - or try to say something nice! - about the Israelites, who had Aaron build them that golden calf. H. L. Ellison, the guy I quoted last week in my sermon on the Ten Commandments, in his commentary on the book of Exodus says, "there was no wish to abandon the worship of Yahweh {{Israel's God}}. The bull {{or calf}} was to serve as a sign of his presence. {{In the minds of the Israelites}} the bull was the throne of Yahweh and that he was conceived of as standing or sitting on it. So, to be able to control the bull showed his strength and power."
Now is H. L. Ellison trying to stand up for the Israelites? I don't know. What do you think? Ellison says, "Although no image had been made of Yahweh, he had been linked not with cherubim, heavenly beings, but with the beasts of the field, and thus put on a level of the nature gods of the heathen. This tendency was to plague Israel" for a long time.
Remember last week when we talked of idol worship and wondered exactly just what was an idol? I mentioned pictures of Jesus; are those idols? Regardless of how you answer that question, there seems to be a need for us religious folk - or at least some of us - to have something that we can hold on to, even though there is that Commandment of "Thou shalt not make any graven image". Maybe you and I want it both ways: we KNOW we're not supposed to have a graven image, and yet it's just a little bit comforting to have a picture of Jesus as a "reminder". Not an idol, just a "reminder". Well, perhaps that was going on when Moses was up on that mountain, talking to God. The people didn't really want to abandon Yahweh as their God, but maybe what they were striving for was just a little "reminder" that God was still their God. Now I am NOT saying this was okay with God. In fact, God was FURIOUS! But maybe all the people wanted was a reminder that they had not been abandoned. So, what they were saying was, "Aaron, please build us a reminder of God, the bull or calf that we know he rides and controls."
The Scripture we heard for today ends with verse 14. If we had read a little further, we would have read about Moses throwing down the tablets of stone and breaking them once he saw the dancing and reveling around the golden calf. We are told that "Moses' anger burned hot....And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it upon the water, and made the people of Israel drink it."
Our commentator Mr. Ellison says that God TESTED Moses by offering to fulfill his offer to the Patriarchs (that's Abraham and Isaac and Jacob) through him (Moses). But Moses rejected the temptation, and Ellison says, "the forty years in Midian seemed to have burnt all ambition out of him." Until preparing this sermon, I'm not sure it ever registered on me that God was offering a "plum" of sorts to Moses. I remembered, of course, that Moses pleaded for Israel, and I remembered that Moses was so angry that he broke the Ten Commandments God had given him. But God's offer to Moses somehow slipped right by me. See? I really can learn things from my own sermon!
One more thing from Commentator Ellison: "Making the people drink the gold dust was intended to impress on them the powerlessness of any sacred image." And he goes on to say this: "We tend to be so influenced by the alleged power of the demonic that we fail sometimes to realize that the overwhelming power of God All-Sovereign can empty it of all influence and might."
Wow! I am stunned by the power of our sacred Scriptures, and I stand in awe of such people as H. L. Ellison who have given their lives so that we might see the awesomeness of God. Thanks be to God for this opportunity to be in His Presence. Amen.
Pastor Skip
