Exodus 32:7-14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
Don’t you wonder sometimes why God doesn’t
just get fed up with people and walk away?
I mean, think about human behavior. For thousands of years, people have been judging
each other based on meaningless differences, keeping others away from resources
God has provided, and treating each other violently.
And think about our own behavior. When I offer Morning Prayer each day, and the
time comes for the Confession of Sin, I find myself mostly confessing the same
things I confessed the day and the week and the month before. That may mean that I suffer from a failure of
imagination, but I don’t think I’m alone.
Try this thought experiment: How
do you take your own path and turn away from what you know God would prefer? Bring a few examples to mind. Got some? OK, now, if I’d asked you that question last
week or last month or last year, would you have given very different answers? I imagine hearing our confessions must be
incredibly boring for God, because the story really doesn’t change much as time
goes on.
For the first people of the covenant, the
people of Israel, their collective category of sin seems to have been idolatry,
in the sense of embracing gods other than Yahweh. Sometimes those gods looked a lot like our own
idols: possessions, privilege, power. But
sometimes those idols looked like, well, idols – as in today’s reading from
Exodus.
Moses goes up Mt. Sinai to receive God’s
Law, and we know he’ll be gone 40 days.
But the folks back in the camp, at the foot of the mountain, don’t have
any idea what’s happened to Moses. Maybe
they’re just looking for a chance to party, but maybe more than a month of
silence has made them wonder whether this Yahweh really was the one who’d
brought them out of slavery after all.
Maybe it was the local deity – which is how people understood divinity
in that day, different gods reigning over particular geographies. So, they create a representation of a local
god, a golden calf. Maybe it’s celestial
fishing, trying to see whether that god would take the bait. But for whatever reason, they do what people
have been doing forever, which is to put the worries of the moment, and their
own self-interest, first.
So, God sees this and goes into a
rage. “What, it’s not enough that I
inflicted plagues on your enemies, and freed you from enslavement, and gave you
water from a rock, and fed you in the wilderness with the bread of angels? You want to worship something else instead of
me?” God tells Moses to get out of the
way while the Lord brings the hammer down.
“Don’t worry,” God says to Moses, “I’ll just start the covenant over
with you once I consume all of them.”
But Moses says to God, “Wait; hold on a minute.” And he talks the Almighty out of it.
OK, let’s hit the “pause” button on this
story. Here’s Moses – not exactly a guy
with a perfect history, a murderer who turned down his call from God multiple
times – here’s Moses interceding for these stiff-necked people who are dancing
around the golden calf. Now, put
yourself into this scene. Imagine that
God was speaking as directly to you as to Moses. And imagine that God was about to bring down
judgment on everybody but you. Would
you decide to ally yourself with the people God was about to “consume” in
righteous anger (Exodus 32:10). What was
Moses thinking?
I don’t think Moses was on the side of the
rebellious people per se; I think Moses was on the side of the relationship
with God that they’d broken. Once Moses
got back down the mountain, he was just as angry with the people as God had been. It’s not exactly a happy little story that
follows today’s reading: Moses and his
supporters kill everybody who’d turned against his leadership, and God sends a
plague against the ones who remain alive.
Clearly, there are consequences for turning away from a covenant you
make with God. Because keeping the
covenant is job one.
So, back to the story. Up on the mountain, Moses explains to God why
the Almighty’s plan is wrong. And then
comes maybe the only thing more surprising than Moses’ response to God. It’s God’s response to Moses: God changes God’s mind.
OK, hit the “pause” button one more time. Isn’t God supposed to be omniscient? At least some Christians would say that God wrote
the whole script for existence before the Big Bang ever happened, that God knows
all and has worked out everything yet to come.
But here, we see God changing God’s mind. What’s going on?
Maybe both for Moses and for God, the answer
lies in the importance of honoring commitments.
Moses pledged to God that he would bring the people out of slavery –
slavery to Pharaoh and, now, slavery to their own temptation to choose the gods
they want. And well before that, God
pledged to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to bless them and their descendants with
land and abundance. God and Moses are
both fully aware that the people have failed utterly by substituting their own
solutions for God’s. But in a covenant
relationship, you’re not simply pledging to observe the stipulations of the
deal. That’s a contract. In a covenant, you’re pledging yourself to
the other party and committing yourself to walk along together.
We know a little something about
covenants. Every time we celebrate Eucharist,
we remember Jesus’ New Covenant with God’s people, eternal life for all who’ll trust
and follow him. Every time we celebrate baptism,
we renew our Baptismal Covenant, pledging to trust in God who is Father, Son,
and Spirit; and pledging to live our lives following Jesus, in loving
commitment to God and the people around us.
When we get married, we stand before God and make a covenant with our
beloved to invest ourselves in that relationship as long as we both shall live. When we’re ordained, we make a covenant with
God and God’s people to live out the trust and responsibility of a new order of
ministry. So, covenants seem to be our
pattern of commitment, too.
I think it’s interesting that what God asks
of us is not just our worship or our tithes or our following of the rules. Apparently, what God values most is covenant
living – investing ourselves in relationships, with God and one another, even
when the other covenant partner doesn’t deserve it.
Think about how crazy it is that the most
influential follower of Jesus in all Christian history is the apostle Paul. At the start, Paul even beats Moses as the
most unlikely hero, not just telling God “no” but “Hell, no!” In the second reading today, Paul describes
himself as “formerly a persecutor, a blasphemer, and a man of violence” (1
Timothy 1:13), arresting and killing followers of Jesus because they were
breaking the religious rules of the day.
For having co-opted God’s role as judge, Paul was the last person
to give us a gospel of grace, of divine love freely given – but that’s
precisely how God asked Paul to change his mind.
Paul didn’t deserve a second chance any
more than the people of Israel. The
truth is, neither do we – and our redundant confessions confirm it. So, here’s the good news: that God chooses
love over the highest holiness score. Remember the Gospel reading today: Where God works the hardest is with the one
who’s lost. Where God works the hardest is
in the areas of our lives that are out of alignment with divine purposes. Sure, God appreciates all the coins that are
properly collected and kept neatly where they’re supposed to be. And God appreciates the 99 sheep who don’t
go off on their own paths. But what makes
God rejoice is when the lost one is found and brought back home.
So, in our own lives, what are the
relationships that challenge us the most, the ones we might feel justified in
letting go? Where do we need to consider
changing our minds? Maybe it’s sticking
with someone we’d sooner leave behind. Maybe
it’s entertaining the possibility that there might be some truth, maybe even
some holiness, in the “other side’s” world view. Maybe it’s remembering that being in
relationship is what makes all people grow into the full stature of
Christ – both “them” and “us.”
When we ask ourselves those hard questions,
and when we do the work to strengthen the covenants that challenge us most, we gain
the last thing we’d expect – peace. In
the upside-down reality of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, we find that committing
ourselves to hard relationships brings counterintuitive joy. We are blessed with being stuck with people we
find hard to love. We are liberated from
judgment when we bind ourselves to God’s grace.
In those moments when we think we know
best, when the world tells us we’re completely within our rights to walk away
from the people we’re bound to, or even to punish them for their sins, that’s
when God says, “Wait. Grace beats judgment,
even when judgment seems deserved, even when judgment seems righteous. After all,” God says, “even I changed my
mind.”
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