Mercy Even for Bull-Worshippers

Wycliffe College, Toronto

 

Mercy Even for Bull-Worshippers

 

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge      Wednesday, October 15, 2008

 

Text: Exodus 32:30-33:6

 

This text from Exodus is a bridge between the lessons appointed for last Sunday and next Sunday, which seems like a good idea for a midweek service. We’ve been in Exodus for a while; many of you will remember the reading for last Sunday which tells of the golden calf which the people of Israel made in the wilderness while Moses was up on Mount Sinai receiving the commandments from the Lord. “Up, make us gods!” say the people to Aaron. “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.” In the fashion of biblical storytelling, the irony in this is only lightly touched upon; we, the hearers, are given the privilege and responsibility of teasing out the extraordinary paradox: Moses is on the mountaintop in the presence of the God who is really God—the God who revealed himself as I AM WHO I AM—and the people down below are manufacturing gods for themselves.

 

And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down; for your people...have made for themselves a molten 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!’”

 

There is a sense in which this is really quite funny. Isaiah sees the joke: “Those who lavish gold from the purse hire a goldsmith, and he makes it into a god; then they fall down and worship it! They lift it upon their shoulders, they carry it, they set it in its place, and it stands there; it cannot move from its place. If one cries to it, it does not answer or save him from his trouble” (Isaiah 46:6-7). It cannot move from its place! There in two short sentences we have the great insight. False gods cannot move from their place. They cannot save in time of trouble.

 

It almost goes without saying that in America, at least, the great god for quite a while has been The Market. One of my students in homiletics, an American, evoked for us in a sermon the great statue of the bull in Wall Street. Now Wall Street has been shaken and Bay Street has felt the tremors. I am told that from every pulpit in the States the refrain has come in one form or another, “Gods of gold cannot save in time of trouble.” It may be a decade or more before faith in The Market recovers. In the meantime some of us, at least, will strip ourselves of our ornaments, like the children of Israel in today’s story, and we will reflect upon the ephemeral nature of human institutions.

 

We read that Moses returned to the top of the mountain and said to the Lord, “Alas, this people have sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold.” We need to reflect upon what a calamity this is for Moses. His history up to the time of the burning bush was chequered, to say the least (one wag has called him “a stuttering murderer on the run”) but God has forged him into a mighty leader who has faced down the ruler of the Egyptian empire, led the people by their thousands through the Red Sea, and throughout their wilderness trek has struggled with the burdens of command. This man has given himself to the service of the Lord with a single-mindedness that stands out even among the many patriarchs and prophets. He has been entirely taken over by his mission; and yet we are given many glimpses of his humanity along the way. Whether Moses is a literary creation or not I will leave others to debate—I say this is a real person whom God took in hand for his incomparable purposes. And by bringing Moses directly into the divine presence—an ineffable favor given to no other—God permits Moses to refract his fierce, dazzling holiness to the people below. Therefore they are without excuse when they turn away to gods of gold.

 

You have been following your own election here in Canada, so you may not know about all the things that happened in the States since the metaphorical collapse of the Wall Street bull. The rage that rose up against the CEOs of the big corporations caught everyone by surprise and almost scuttled the bailout plan. Even now, every night on the most staid and evenhanded cable news channel in the States, the names and faces of these grossly overpaid executives are posted for all to see (it’s another irony that these villains’ names are being gleefully displayed and vilified by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, the son of a Vanderbilt. You know what they say—behind every great fortune is a great crime.) These men (and they are all men) were pulling in yearly salaries and bonuses in the high megamillions. Their consumption of houses and lands became legendary. “They sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play” with a vengeance. When almost overnight their glass palaces came crashing down, the ordinary working stiffs of America were ready to stone them, or at the very least to trash their wine cellars. Somehow I don’t think the typical Christian congregation in the States has been offering any prayers for the souls of the CEOs, any more than they have been offering prayers for our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. “These people have sinned a great sin”—so they deserve whatever happens to them.

 

But it is at just this point that we learn what the Lord has made of Moses. The man who has been so close to the face of God that his own face reflects the divine glory does something extraordinary. Remember how grievously the people have tested his leadership, and how rebellious, resentful, uncooperative, and ceaselessly complaining they have been. Remember also that he has had precious little help from his second-in-command, his own brother. It’s worth recalling Aaron’s reaction when Moses first sees the golden calf:

 

Aaron said, “Let not the anger of my lord [an obsequious reference to Moses] burn hot; you know the people, that they are set on evil.

 

When in doubt, blame someone else! But Aaron isn’t finished getting himself off the hook:

 

The [people] said to me, ‘Up, make us gods, who shall go before us!” And I said to them, “Let any who have gold take it off”; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and this calf came out!” [don’t you love it? Could a five-year-old do any better?]

 

So what is this extraordinary thing that Moses does? Listen again to what the Lord tells him:

 

The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation.”

 

Over the chastened bodies of the idolatrous Israelites, God declares that Moses will inherit the promise all by himself. “I will make of you a great nation.” Who could resist that? Could I? Could you? Imagine it: all the idolaters, and the merchants of greed, and would-be “masters of the universe” will be passed by and you will inherit their kingdom. I, the true Lord of the universe, have set my favor on you.

 

But maybe you, being Canadians, would not really want that degree of power. No, no, we don’t need to be masters of the universe. However, we wouldn’t mind getting just a little piece of it. And we surely wouldn’t mind if the people who had ruined the covenant through their self-aggrandizement received their just deserts, especially when they have abused precisely the trust that had been invested in them. At the very least, their names should be posted on the Internet, so they could be shamed in front of the whole world.

 

Here’s the extraordinary thing. The morning after the smashing of the golden calf, Moses said to the people,

 

“You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”

So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Alas, this people have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written.”

 

Do you see how astonishing this is? This former prince of Egypt, this man who felt entitled to murder a man whom he felt deserved it, this man who was chosen to be the messenger of God’s holy covenant and the bearer of God’s holiest commandments, has become a man ready to take his place alongside the worst of sinners, even if it means he will be cast out forever from the blessedness of God’s presence.

 

This partnership that God has created between himself and Moses is a revelation. We saw earlier in Exodus that Moses’ face reflected the glory of God. We see it in action, right here, as God responds to Moses:

 

“Depart, go up from here, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, to the land [that] I will give [them]. And I will send an angel before you....but I will not go up among you, lest I consume you in the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

 

What is the glory of God? His glory is shown in his mercy. This is the God who protects his own disobedient and ungrateful children by shielding them from his own annihilating holiness. He will take them up to the Promised Land, but he will send an angel to guide them, because his own unmediated presence would consume them in the flame of his righteous wrath.

 

Listen now to some words of another man who, like Moses, was commandeered by God, another man who offered up his own salvation in exchange for that of his unbelieving brothers and sisters.[1] In the fifth chapter of Romans, the apostle Paul wrote a parenthetical comment that is almost always ignored. He wrote, or rather dictated, this parenthesis as a sort of side comment on the main message:

 

Rarely will someone die for even a righteous person—though, perhaps, for a righteous person someone might actually dare to die.

 

What’s the idea here? Paul makes this side comment in order to illustrate from common experience. Not many people will give up their lives for someone else, not even for a very, very good person. Well, maybe—he muses out loud—maybe to save a very, very good and special person, one might be willing to die. That’s Paul’s parenthesis. Here in the middle of this key passage from Romans, a passage of such radical import that some have called it the heart of the gospel, we find an echo of Moses who was willing to die, not for righteous persons but for the worst of the worst. Here is the whole passage from Romans:

 

For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.

 

This is the glory of God. In the next passage from Exodus, God shows his glory to Moses, but he shields Moses from its blinding radiance by hiding him in the cleft of a rock. When the Israelites start out for the Promised Land, the angel given by God shielded them from God’s “consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). When the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his Son (Galatians 4:4). He sent him in a form that we could see and not be blinded, a form that we could hear and not be deafened, a form that we could receive and not be destroyed. There was to come “a prophet like Moses,” but behold, a greater than Moses is here. He is the One who was shamed in front of the whole world, for us, the ungodly. It is for ourselves, this very night, that the Lord’s table of welcome is now spread. r