Exodus 32:1-14
I have a long habit of doing things the hard way. If I have a choice between carrying the grocery bags in two easy trips or one hard trip, I’ll pick the one hard trip every time. If I have to learn a lesson the easy way or the hard way, guess which one I’m going to pick. Oh, sometimes I can learn from other people’s mistakes and not have to repeat them myself. But otherwise, I always have to do things the hard way.
Take this sermon, for example. This text makes for such an easy sermon. If you only read verses 1-6, this sermon practically writes itself. The people didn’t trust that Moses would return. They didn’t trust that God was still with them. So they turned to idols. And we do the same thing. Go on to list the things we make into idols, and voila, mission accomplished. You have a sermon that will inspire and maybe challenge a little bit, and everybody goes home happy.
I really wanted to do that this week. I really wanted to write an easy sermon—for your sake and for mine. But no. I have to make it hard. I tried, but this week I couldn’t keep the blinders in place that would keep me from noticing what happens next in the story. And if you read on, it is not an easy tale.
God gets really, really mad. First God denounces ownership of the people. All along the Exodus journey God has been calling them “my people,” and all of a sudden they’re Moses’s people. It’s kind of like the “Do you know what your son did today” conversation between parents. God says, “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.” Then God says “Let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.” Moses intervenes on behalf of the people, first by returning the ownership point. Moses asks, “Why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?” Then he goes on to play the public relations card. If you do this the Egyptians will say you brought them out of Egypt to kill them. It’ll really look bad for you. Finally Moses reminds God of the covenant: “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self” to make of them a great nation.” God finally relents.
Then it’s Moses’ turn to be mad. He goes down the mountain and sees the reveling, the party around the golden calf, and then his anger burns hot. He melts the calf, grinds it into powder, scatters it on the water, and then makes the people drink it. Then he gathers the sons of Levi and commands them to kill their brother, their friend, and their neighbor, resulting in 3000 dead.
This does not make for an easy sermon, or an easy preacher. What are we to make of this violence? What are we to do with this fickle God, who one day says “These are my people” and the next day wants to kill them? This sounds more like an abusive spouse than a loving God. What, in the name of God, are we to do with this story?
Well, it depends on your understanding of biblical authority. I hope you all received this chart when you came into worship. I came up with this quite a few years ago, as a way of representing different approaches to the Bible. There are faithful Christians who fall into each of these categories.
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The Bible was not only inspired by God, but dictated by God. |
The Bible was inspired by God, but written by humans.
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The Bible was mostly inspired by God, but largely influenced by humans and human perspectives. |
The Bible was written entirely by humans and does not necessarily reflect God. |
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The Bible has authority because it is God’s words. |
The Bible has authority because it is the word of God. |
The Bible has authority because we grant it authority. |
The Bible has no more authority than any other sacred text. |
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The Bible is inerrant in all its teachings. |
The Bible is inerrant in doctrine but not necessarily in history or science. |
The Bible contains errors in history, science, and sometimes theology. |
The Bible is not to be taken as fact but as opinion so errors are irrelevant. |
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The Bible should be read and followed literally. |
The Bible should be read and followed literally where appropriate, but culture should also be considered. |
The Bible should not be read and followed literally. Their culture and ours should be taken into consideration. |
The Bible should be followed only as it makes logical sense and is consistent with other sacred texts. |
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The Bible is a rule-book. |
The Bible is both rule-book and guide-book. |
The Bible is a guide-book. |
The Bible can guide us, rightly or wrongly. |
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All of the Bible is relevant to our lives today. |
Most of the Bible is relevant to our lives today. |
Some of the Bible is relevant to our lives today, but care must be used in determining which parts. |
Only the major themes of the Bible are relevant to our lives today. |
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There is only one right interpretation and those who are wrong are, regrettably, condemned. |
There is only one right interpretation, but disagreement does not necessarily result in condemnation. |
There can be many interpretations. Community helps evaluate validity. |
Interpretation is solely up to the individual. |
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Scripture alone governs belief and action, though tradition is greatly honored. |
Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit govern belief and action. |
Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience guide belief and action. |
A combination of scripture, reason, and experience point toward belief and action. |
On the left you have a fundamentalist view of the Bible. In this view, God dictated the Bible, word for word, so it is holy because these are actually the words of God. It is without error and must be followed as literally as possible. If the Bible says the earth was created in six days, then it was created in six 24-hour periods, and the earth couldn’t be more than 6000 to 10,000 years old.
In the next column you have the belief that God inspired the Bible but humans wrote it, so it has authority as the word of God as a whole, but not the individual words of God. It is perfect and without error in theology, but not in history or science. In this view, God created the earth, and in the order that Genesis 1 says, but a day could have been a thousand years, and the earth could be as old as scientists say.
In the third column we find the belief that the Bible was inspired by God, but it was greatly influenced by the humans who wrote it down . . . and sometimes they got it wrong. So sometimes they attributed things to God that were not God’s doing, and there are errors of theology in the Bible. To continue our use of the creation story as an example, people in this column might believe that God is the source of creation, but the Genesis story is primarily a metaphor. People in this column are also quick to point out that Genesis 2 has a different creation story than Genesis 1.
Finally we come to the fourth column, with its view that the Bible was written by humans, and it has no more authority than any other sacred text. This is still a possible Christian view of the Bible because being a Christian is about following Christ, not the Bible. In regards to the creation story, people in this column would view it as a myth, so why are we arguing about it?
I’m guessing we have few if any members of this congregation who fall into column one. Column one people like to worship with other column one people. But other than that, I’m guessing we have people who fall into each of these categories. So how you interpret this difficult story depends on which column you’re in.
If you are in the first column, then this story is exactly what it says it is. It is a story of God being so angry that God would destroy the very people God had rescued. And God will do it again.
But God’s mind can be changed by prayer and pleading . . . and possibly by a sizable donation to my television ministry!
But once you move out of that column, it gets harder. Maybe God was testing Moses. By this time Moses was pretty fed up with the people, and by threatening violence against them, God forced Moses to stand up for them, to take their side. This interpretation loses some of its validity when you get to the part about Moses himself having the people killed, but still, it’s an option.
Or, maybe this is just how God behaved in the Old Testament. Maybe the Old Testament God is different than the New Testament God. On the other hand, that is awfully close to Marcionism, which is a teaching from the second century that was labeled a heresy.
Another option is to view God as more human than we usually do. Maybe the people weren’t the only ones who weren’t sure how to handle this new relationship. Maybe God had some uncertainties in this relationship, too. “Maybe God really does love the people deeply and passionately and this whole scene demonstrates . . . a god who is vulnerable, who feels, who invites relationship. God desires God’s people. They desire the calf. God feels it. . . . God is deeply affected.”[1]
I can’t say I’m comfortable with this interpretation. I want God to be human enough to hurt with me, in my pain, but not so human as to hurt because of me, because of my bad choices. But my discomfort with a theology is not excuse to dismiss it.
There is some evidence to support the theory that verses 7-14 are an interpolation, meaning that the part about God being angry was inserted later, by a different writer or editor. This seems possible because God tells Moses what is happening in camp, but when Moses returns he seems surprised by it. So maybe it was added later and not part of the original oral narrative.
Either way, one of our possible responses to this story is simply, they got it wrong. Of course, this is only an option if you’re in the third or fourth column of biblical interpretation. The argument against a column three or column four approach is that it’s a cop-out. If we can just say “They got it wrong,” we can dismiss any parts we don’t like. But it’s not that simple.
There’s this great scene in the movie The American President. In a passionate speech the president says: “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say ‘You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the ‘land of the free.’”
Folks, liberal theology isn’t easy. You gotta want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. Liberal theology says “Don’t walk away from the Bible even though you can.” It says “You don’t have to accept that everything in the Bible is true and right, but you don’t get to pick willy-nilly. You have to wrestle with it to get your blessing, and you have to do so in community.” It’s hard work.
So I’ve preached for ten minutes. Do I have a point? Yes, I think I do, because I think I’ve wrestled with this text enough to find it. For many years I believed that the story of the golden calf was a story about the people creating a false god to worship. But I join with some contemporary scholars in saying I don’t think it is. It’s not a story about creating a false god, but creating a false image to a true God. After the calf was created, the statement was, “This is your God, the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” This is the way God had been referred to throughout the story. It wasn’t a new god. It was an image of the God they already knew. And God was mad at them—not for worshiping a new god but for worshiping an image of a God who needed no graven image.
“Unlike their neighbors who needed images to focus their worship, God insisted that the people worship [God] directly; no images were needed, because Yahweh was close.”[2] Only gods that are far removed from their people need images on earth. A God who is close, who is present, who is with us and within us, doesn’t need an image made from human hands.
Now I’m going to return to a possible interpretation of this story that made me uncomfortable: the one about God feeling. Let’s look at it from God’s point of view. Let’s say, for the time being, that you are God. (Don’t try this at home!) You have some history with this group of people. You promised their ancestor that you would make a great nation out of them, but so far it’s not working out like you had hoped. They are slaves, and you hate it. You hate seeing them suffer. So you get someone to help you help them. You speak to him in a miraculous way, and you empower him to do the job. You perform miracle after miracle to get them freed. You lead them away from their place of enslavement, and you are so thrilled to see these people you love, finally set free. And the first time trouble comes, they blame you. You rescue them, and they rejoice and you rejoice and all is well. And then trouble comes again, and they blame you. You rescue them again. And then trouble comes again, and they blame you. And you rescue them again. All this time you stay close. Your presence goes with them, in clouds and fire, in manna and quail, in prayers heard and answered. And still their first reaction is to blame you. Then all you do is leave them alone for a while, and suddenly they are unfaithful. They worship a picture of you instead of you.
Suddenly you realize: You wanted relationship and they just wanted company. You wanted intimacy and they just wanted protection. Your heart is breaking and you don’t know how the relationship can possibly be fixed. And so you get angry and you say “Forget it! I’m done with you!” And then you say, “Just leave me alone so I can be mad at these people instead of being so hurt by them.”
I can understand this. I can understand loving someone so much that when they hurt you, you’re tempted to give up on them. But God didn’t. Miraculously, “the covenant between God and God’s people somehow endures through the mess of anger and hurt and passion.”[3]
Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe the lesson is holding on through the hurt. Maybe the lesson is that God had to figure out how to be God, just as we have to figure out how to be God’s people.
During my sermons I sometimes tell you “this is what some people believe, and this is what others believe, but this is what I believe.” This morning is the first time I can remember when I have said to you, “This is what some people believe, and this is what others believe, and I’m not sure what I believe, but it may be this.”
What I am sure about is that I am not willing to walk away from the Bible. We cannot make the Bible our god, and we cannot let the Bible became our false image of a true god. But it is our sacred text, for better or for worse. And so we wrestle.
Thank you for wrestling with me.
[1] Blue, Debbie. “Getting Out of Egypt.” The Hardest Question.
[2] Broding, Larry. http://www.word-sunday.com/Files/c/24-c/FR-24-c.html
[3] Ibid.