First Congregational Church, UCC, Auburn MA, October 15, 2023
Exodus 32:1-8 — When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; 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.” 2 Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” 6 They rose early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to revel.
7 The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8 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 worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ”
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
So, here’s where we are today in the story of the flight of the Israelites out of Egypt. They’ve been on the road too long. They’re cold, they’re tired, they’re hungry. It’s as if everyone, all at once, has started whining, “are we there yet?”. And Moses, their leader, has disappeared. Sure, he said he was going to go talk with God, but who does that? And it’s been so long.
Everyone is nervous, worried, upset. Stress is everywhere. They’re out in the desert, lost, don’t know where they’re going, can’t go back to where they were… and they reach out for what always gave them comfort in the past…. Urging Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them a god, a little statue, a physical representation of all their hopes. And he does it.
They left Egypt, land of slavery, surrounded by courage. It was easy to be brave in those first days. It was exciting to get free of that nasty past. But days passed, and the excitement waned. The steady walking got old, and boring, and then challenging. The deep dark of desert nights, so comforting at first, began to be cold, and frightening. And folks wanted to go home, to the past which no longer existed.
You know what that’s like. At some level, it happens to all of us. The excitement of early days turns to routine, and then, boredom. What happened in the exodus, though, took it a lot further.
The Israelites, for all those understandable reasons, did something that was almost unforgiveable. They tried to give up their devotion to the God who cannot be seen, is not represented by statues, not even gold statues, for something made in their own image, something easier to live with, something that wouldn’t push them so hard to create a God-formed community.
I got this far before the events of this week, before the terrorist organization Hamas attacked Israel, before more than a thousand people, men – women – the elderly – babies — died in the first attack… before Israel retaliated, before war descended on the very region in which the Exodus story took place.
That made me think again, differently, about how easy it is to make this story about little things, like being short-tempered or greedy… and to miss that it’s also about the big things, about the evil of war, and the deaths of ordinary, everyday people who were just going about their lives, until death hit them.
Over and over, throughout my ministry, when I’m talking about the Israelites, I’ve mentioned that the land in which they lived, was a crossroads, that they lived in a semi-perpetual battleground. In those days, it was the Persians or the Assyrians battling the Egyptians to see who would control this wide spot in the road, to keep the homeland safe from invasion. These days, that fight is still about control of the land we know as Israel, even as we now name the combatants as Israelis, and – often – Palestinian groups. And it appears that behind Hamas, the terrorist group in Gaza, are those self-same Persians, now Iranians. Today, the war is not just about controlling Israel, but about killing Jews.
There are a million reasons for the conflicts; I’m not going to even try to explain it all, though if some of you would like to explore it, we can set up a study group. For today, it’s enough to know that one of the stated aims of Hamas is to kill all the Jews, and they seem to think they’ve made a good start.
I don’t have any good answers to the questions that lie under this attack. Why do people hate one another this way? How can people commit such atrocities? What on earth is the response when people are trying to kill you and all your family and all your friends?
And, maybe most importantly for us, here in Auburn: what can we do?
The best that I can say is this: I can ask us each and all not to be distracted from our calling by the hatred we see around us. We are a community which practices love and acceptance.
Outside our doors, there are people condemning Jews for their existence; the Jews of our community are upset. This feels too much like the Holocaust happening again. We are called to be a comforting presence in their lives, to recognize their pain, their fear, their anger, to be friends with them.
And outside our doors are Palestinian immigrants, people who had nothing to do with Hamas, and who are also being attacked for who they are. Let us be their friends as well.
In Gaza a war – a vicious, take-no-prisoners, war – is being fought. That’s there, but here, we have the opportunity to continue to build a community that turns away from dividing walls of hostility, turns towards the creation of welcoming spaces.
Some have made little golden hand-carved gods of all kinds of happenings, events, loses, deaths. Our God calls us to remember that God is a a God of acceptance, a God of change, a God love.
Let us follow that God, all our days.
Amen.
© 2023, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 