This is a sermon I preached on October 9th, 2011 at 6th Presbyterian Church based on Exodus 32:1-14 and Matthew 22:1-14
As I read the Golden Calf passage along with the parable of the wedding banquet, I get the feeling that humanity needs a good counseling. A nice sit down session with legs up on the couch, discussing our issues of commitment and identity. Those really are the two issues identified in these passages, aren’t they?
In Exodus, God has just led the Israelites out of Egypt, freeing them from slavery. They weren’t just freed though, no, God intervened in such a way that God’s power and majesty was made know. God intervened in a very visible way with frogs, blood, locusts, gnats, flies, boils, thunder and hail, and turing Egypt dark for three days. God’s intervention was a cosmic intervention. The Israelites then crossed the Red Sea escaping the danger of oncoming Egyptian armies. Once reaching safety in the wilderness, the people cry out in the wilderness asking for food and water. Again God provides sending manna and quails and sending forth water from a rock. God acts as the provider. Once all of the commotion of escaping from a major world power and surviving plagues, calms down a bit God and Moses have some time to chat up on Mt. Sinai about the forming of this community. God gives Moses instructions for how the community is supposed to live. This is where our passage picks up today. Moses has been on top of the mountain for forty days and just as the instructions are being made, the people down at the bottom of the mountain are getting a little restless. They begin to ask one another, where exactly this Moses guy is. This Moses guy who lead them out of Egypt. Wait, wait a second. Did they just say this Moses was the one who lead them out of Egypt? Is this the same Moses who fled Egypt and argued with God about going back and helping out his fellow Israelites? Did the Israelites miss the whole God and plague thing? I mean, how could we ever mistake what God does for us as the qualities and actions of a person. Reading this story we would never reduce the majestic loving power of God to chance and reason, of course we would give God credit where credit is due.
But this isn’t just the Israelites story is it? This is the story of today as well. This is your story, this is my story. I have been a part of churches where this is their attitude, an attitude of separation from God. It is easy for the members to sit back and criticize the leadership of the church. It is even easier for those outside of the church to sit back and criticize. So often we look at the pastor, or the building, or the presbytery as our leader, don’t we? We begin to follow pastors words as if they are final, we go along with denominational lines simply because they are there, we allow others to pray instead of us, and those outside of the church may even say, “eh well that God thing really isn’t for me.” Now, this is not an attack on those who criticize, or even those who are apathetic, but this instead is an invitation. This is an invitation to examine what it might look like to step into God’s loving grace and to set our hearts and minds on God as our guide. With the view that a pastor, or that “someone else” is our guide we take all of the responsibility off of ourselves and we lose something very important. We lose our identity as children of God. Instead we may become children of the Presbyterian Church, or children of a certain pastor or Christian author just as the Israelites in a way became children of Moses, waiting for direction. But these other leaders do not define truly who we are, and in finding our identity in them, we lose one of the greatest gifts of God. We lose sight of the fact that God came to us in Jesus, so that we may know God and enter into a relationship with God. No middle man, no smoke and mirrors, no games to be played, God longs for us to enter into relationship with God. So I ask of you, please accept this invitation.
But first let’s take a look at the Matthew passage before we get any further. In Matthew, Jesus’ parable doesn’t even seem to beat around the bush. While the message still has some ambiguities the action seems fairly straight forward. There is a king who has prepared a wedding banquet for his son. The food was ready, tables were set, and the kings messengers were sent to invite the guests. However when the guests are first met each one goes on their own way, keeping up with their daily lives. I’d like to say that these people didn’t know what they are missing out on, but I too have unfortunately skipped my fair share of free dinners. When I first read this story it reminded me of my college years. At Westminster, a small liberal arts school, people are notorious for being over committed and unable to say no. If there were 1,400 students there might be 2,800 clubs, organizations, activities, dinners. Ok that might be an exaggeration, but there really were more events than you knew what to do with, not to mention keeping up with the school work that you were assigned. I would get e-mails every day for new events or meetings or speakers, and when I would walk into the student union building there would be flyer after flyer advertising for even more events. After a while I just came to ignore any e-mail update or flyer that came my way. I’m not sure if Jesus’ parable isn’t getting at something similar. In the parable it states that the guests made light of the invitation, one went on to his farm and another back to their business. It is very true that we have things in our lives that we need to take care of. There are bills that need to be paid, which means we need to go to work, and jobs are harder to find now, so we even have to work at finding work, and then there are relationships to keep up, children to taxi around, meals to be made, shopping to be done, and then maybe we can find time to rest, and then possibly if we have rested we might have time to notice these invitations around us.
I am the first to be guilty of this. I am teased of being a person of routine, but its true. I have a routine that keeps me sane in which I can fit in all of my tasks in the day. However, in keeping to my routine I miss many opportunities for unexpected encounters with God. But how are we to structure our lives so that we may be more aware of God? We can’t just sit around waiting, there are things that need to be done. We are students, and physicians, and teachers, and mothers, and fathers, and business men and women, and caretakers, and pastors, and architects, and you fill in the blank. These identities of ours keep us busy, very busy. Who we are determines what we have to do. As a student I have books that need to be read, papers that need to be written, I need to show up for class, and even when I’m feeling a little bit crazy I might participate in class. The same goes for all of our identities, there are tasks that need to be completed that correspond with who we are.
Lets jump back to the Israelites at the base of Mt. Sinai. Remember their problem? They wanted to make a golden calf to worship since it seemed like Moses wasn’t coming back. They wanted to replace Moses because they said it was him who led them out of Egypt. It was Moses they put their trust in. It was Moses that they wanted to follow. It was in Moses that they found their identity. But it wasn’t Moses who led them out of Egypt, was it? It was God who led them out of slavery and God who fed them in the wilderness. Their trust should have been in God, it should have been God whom they wanted to follow. When they were followers of Moses, they lost their identity as a people of God, as children of God. God even recognizes this. In Exodus 32:7 God commands Moses saying, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt are acting perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them.” When we lose our identity, we become committed to other things, or people. The same applies for the Matthew passage. There, the people are identified by their works. It makes sense that they would ignore the invitation of the king, because their identity was not with him, it was with their work. While working is good, it is needed, it seems like this parable and the golden calf story are telling us that is not where we are to find our identity. We are to find our identity in God. Through these texts we have seen what happens when we lose our identity in God, that we become committed to other things, but how should our lives look if we were to find our identity in God?
It would be so nice if I said that this identity grounded in God looked like someone just showing up to church, or if there were steps to follow. I would love that, or at least I think I would at first. I could easily take these steps and fit them into my schedule and go about my routine. But I have found through struggling in faith, that those steps aren’t the fulfillment of grounding our identity in God. And that is because our identity is that of a child of God, and a child is a relational term. Relationships take work, they take time, you can go through many stages in a relationship, and I have found that if you want a good relationship you can’t fit them into your schedule just like another item on a list of to-dos. You see, when we fix our identity issues we also fix our relationships, our commitment issues. A relationship is organic, moving, give and take, dynamic, it is life giving, it is participatory. There is a lot of work in a relationship, but there is so much life, and emotion, and reward, and you feel alive. This is true of a relationship with God as it is a relationship with any loved one. But here is one thing that makes our grounded identity in God so much more fulfilling, so much more life giving than other identities; school ends, children grow up, jobs come and go, but God is. God is the one who was, the one who is, and the one who is coming.
We are called to so much more than a stagnant intellectual thought of God. We are called into a life giving relationship with the one who loves us, created us, and knows us. Now this does not mean that we are to sit around and read the Bible all day long and forget the rest of the world, no, that would be silly. This does not mean we are to not care about our jobs or our other relationships, again, silly. This does, however, mean that our identity in God, our relationship with God influences and gives life to all of our other relationships.
Once we commit to this, to actually living in a relationship with God, it can be a hard process, a process of change, and growing pains, a process of reorganizing priorities, but in this relationship there are many blessings, comfort, and joy, true joy. And we are to be comforted that God came to us in Jesus so that we may know and see what a relationship with God looks like. This is where the church fits in as well. The church and pastors in our lives are to be guides, not someone to be followed, but someone to walk alongside us, assisting in our growing relationship with God. Like I mentioned before, a relationship with is not something that we can just plug into our schedule, a relationship is not something that we can only attend to once every now and then, a relationship is not something that is a one way street. A relationship with God is exactly the same. We cannot just fit God into our schedule on Sundays, we cannot simply come to church expecting to receive, but we must let our relationship with God spread into all of the areas of our lives, be a participatory member of the relationship, grow through prayer and thought, learn more about God through reading the Bible and contemplation, ask questions, get frustrated with God, share your joys with God, when you pray believe what you are praying.
I pray for each of you that you will come to enter into this relationship. I pray that each of us would come to enter into the beautiful banquet which God already has for us, planned and ready before we even do anything. I pray that we as a church would come to make all decisions and movements with this relationship in mind. And I pray that we may all come to know our true identities as children of God.
