What If?

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

October 12, 2014

What If?

Exodus 32:1-14

“I will do no such thing.

I am appalled that you would even ask me.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Do you really expect me to turn from Moses,

my own brother?

Are you ready to forget him already?

Are you really ready to turn from the Lord God

who brought you out of Egypt,

out of slavery?

Are you ready to abandon the Lord God

who saved you from Pharaoh and his army,

who has fed you with manna from heaven?”

What if Aaron had said these things,

said these things to the Israelites

when they approached him

and said to him,

“Come, make gods who will go before us”?

What if Aaron had dismissed them as foolish,

faithless,

and selfish?

Aaron should have.

After all, he’d been leading the people with Moses.

In fact, he’d even been up on the mountain,

on Mount Sinai, not long before,

invited by the Lord God to go up with Moses,

and seventy of the elders of Israel,

where, Scripture tells us,

they all saw the Lord God;

where Aaron and the others beheld the Lord,

and then ate and drank in God’s presence.

(Exodus 24:9-11)

But of course, Aaron didn’t confront the people,

the children of Israel.

He did just as they asked,

without hesitating, without questioning.

He fashioned the calf from gold,

and even built an altar for it.

Why did he do it?

Did he fear the people?

Was he afraid that some might have

rebelled against him,

that some might have decided to

split off from the rest,

and make good on their complaints,

returning to Egypt,

to the life they’d left behind;

the certainty of life in slavery

somehow more appealing to them

than the uncertainty

of following the Lord God through the desert?

How many times had Aaron heard them

complain to Moses,

“Why did you bring us out of Egypt?”

Aaron knew how frustrated and

exhausted his brother was.

Aaron knew his brother had pleaded to God,

“What shall I do with this people?

They are almost ready to stone me.”

(Exodus 17:4)

Aaron may well have concluded that the easiest path

was to placate the people,

give them what they asked for,

give them their idol.

But Aaron’s action and the peoples’ response

infuriated the Lord God,

who spit out his words in anger to Moses,

“Go down at once!

Your people,

whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt,

have acted perversely;

they 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 worshipped it and sacrificed to it,

and said, “These are your gods, O Israel,

who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”

But before Moses could even

take a step down the mountain,

to try to restore order,

to try to bring the people back to the Lord God,

God said to Moses,

“I have seen this people,

how stiff-necked they are.

Now 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.”

What if Moses had replied to God,

“Go ahead.

You know how sick and tired I am of those people,

how they have worn me down

with their constant complaints,

their faithlessness,

their selfishness.

I never wanted to lead them in the first place,

so please, set me free of them.

Do to them what you will;

and make of me a great nation.”

Moses didn’t do that, did he?

He interceded for the people.

He spoke up for them,

reminding God that they were not Moses’ people,

they were God’s own people.

“Turn from your fierce wrath,” Moses implored.

How easy it would have been

for Moses to have said nothing,

to have watched from on high

as the Lord God destroyed the people below,

every last one of them.

And what if God had done that?

What if God had paid no attention to Moses,

and turned from the people?

God didn’t even need to push that button

on God’s computer keyboard,

that button that says, “SMITE”.

God simply could have let them alone,

let them fend for themselves in the desert,

let the lack of water and food,

the burning rays of the sun,

all combine to consume the Israelites.

How long would it have taken –

a couple of weeks at most?

The windblown sand would have covered up

every last trace of them,

as many as there were.

In 40 days the children of Israel

would have been no more.

But God did not do that.

God was merciful,

God was forgiving.

Yes, Moses advocated for the people,

but God went from enraged to forgiving

in almost the blink of an eye,…

because that is God.

God is merciful,

God is forgiving.

God loves us, his children,

even when we are disobedient,

and faithless.

Ours is a history of turning from God.

What God lamented to Moses,

God could lament today:

“they have been quick to turn aside from the way

that I commanded them;”

A thousand years later, the shameful story

of the children of Israel’s disobedience and idolatry

was captured in the book of Nehemiah,

the people painted as faithless,

but God as merciful, faithful, loving:

“But … our ancestors acted presumptuously

and stiffened their necks

and did not obey your commandments [O Lord];

they refused to obey,

and were not mindful of the wonders

that you performed among them;

… they stiffened their necks

and determined to return to their slavery in Egypt.

But you are a God ready to forgive,

gracious and merciful,

slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,

and you did not forsake them.

Even when they had cast an image of a calf

for themselves and said,

“This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt”,

and had committed great blasphemies,

you in your great mercies

did not forsake them in the wilderness;

…The pillar of cloud that led them in the way

did not leave them by day,

nor the pillar of fire by night

that gave them light on the way

by which they should go.

You gave your good spirit to instruct them,

and did not withhold your manna from their mouths,

and gave them water for their thirst.

For forty years you sustained them in the wilderness

so that they lacked nothing;”

(Nehemiah 16)

This is our Lord God:

a God of faithfulness, of goodness, of mercy.

a God ready to forgive,

ready to embrace,

ready, eager to enfold his children in love.

This is the God you and I know through Jesus Christ.

This is the God we want Tobin to know.

This is the God we want all our children to know.

                 

This isn’t just a story about our ancestors in faith;

this is our story, we are in this story,

we who are so quick to turn, to disobey,

ignore God’s commandments and teachings.

“If we say we have no sin,

we deceive ourselves.”

But God is merciful,

abounding in steadfast love,

eager to forgive us, to welcome us back.

Our lives as disciples can be challenging;

it is easy to fall into the trap of what

Eugene Peterson calls tourist faith, tourist religion,

where we look only for things that make us feel good,

make us feel happy.

                                   

What we should focus on, though,

is what Peterson calls “long obedience”,

a recognition that discipleship is a calling,

a calling that begins at baptism

and carries through every day of our lives,

including the inevitable time in the wilderness

that we will all have at some point,

until we take our final breath.

It is a calling that requires effort, diligence,

obedience to God’s will,

even when we cannot see tomorrow from today.

We have the promise in Jesus Christ

that God is with us, present in our lives,

seeing us through, lifting us up,

God’s everlasting, ever-loving arms always around us.

Tobin now has this promise, too.

And so we can all sing joyfully with the psalmist,

“The Lord will keep my life,

the Lord will keep my going out and my coming in,

from this time on and forever more.”

AMEN