BILLTESKA

God/Prophet/People. That is the familiar pattern of revealed religion. God talks to us through messengers. They tell us about God, Who remains unseen. The symbolism of the story we heard today has God up at the top of the mountain, out of sight, where no one but the Prophet Moses can go. The people wait in the desert below. They see the clouds and lightning and hear the thunder, but that’s all. They wait. And wait. Eventually, they get tired of waiting and decide to make their own god. They do so by pooling their most valuable possessions and fashioning them into a visible symbol, which they can worship.

This behavior reminds me of the old joke about the man who comes to ask a favor. His friend replies: “Favors, favors, but what do you ever do for me?”

The petitioner replies, in great detail – “I stayed with you when you were sick last year, I lent you allot of money when you asked me five years ago, I helped your kids get into college ten years ago, I got you your job twenty years ago, and I saved your life on that camping trip thirty years ago.”

His friend responds: “Years ago, years ago. Yes. But what have you done for me lately?”

Likewise, God set the people free and brought them with a mighty arm out of the land of slavery, destroying the power of their overlords. But that was way in the past, a memory increasingly dim. Anyway, the meaning of all that was only Moses’ interpretation, and now Moses had disappeared. The people felt forsaken, this so-called “God” Moses talked about had not done anything for them lately. There was really no reason to think He would do anything ever again, or that He even existed. So they decided they would have to fend for themselves.

Our whole religion can be seen in similar terms. God is out of sight – far away, if He even exists at all. And all we know of Him we learn from messengers who come down the mountain from time to time – prophets, sages, and – later on – Apostles and Evangelists. But here we are in the spiritual desert, feeling alone. Here’s our choice: we can trust what those messengers say about the Unseen: that it is the only Reality; OR we can get together and craft our own – something we can see. A projection of ourselves that we turn into ultimate reality.

The story shows us that the latter choice – what we call idolatry – leads to death. The Israelites literally choke on their golden idol. (By the way, it is not an accident that the idol is made of gold, but that’s another sermon!) On the other hand, we can choose to trust the messenger – the Prophet – regarding Unseen Reality. There are no other alternatives. Either the Unseen, Unseeable, and Unknowable God is Real and wants us to know something about Him, or we might as well pool our resources, project a collective image of ourselves and worship it.

We live in a time when that’s what many of us do.  We believe only in what we can see, or in some imaginary projection of ourselves. The notion that what we can see is in some sense illusory and that genuine Reality is invisible is not widely accepted. Actually, our age is not so different from others in this sense. We naturally tend to believe our senses, and to think that if we can’t see it, it is just imaginary. The problem is that we can’t get along without God, so we make our own, which we can see, and it kills us.

There is another detail in the ancient story, which links it to the Gospel for today: the only repentance in this story is God’s. God repents of the destruction He had in mind for the wayward people. God changed His mind – an astounding thing! And this divine repentance came while the people were still whooping it up around the Golden Calf. In other words, God did not need to be appeased first, before He changed his mind. The punishments that followed were all Moses’ doing, not God’s. Likewise, One Greater than Moses, the Personal Fulfillment of All Prophecy, came to those who were most completely lost, while they were still lost. Here the mountain-separation is bridged not by a Prophet, but by God, Himself. The righteous, who are not apostate, but faithful to their end of the agreement with the Unseen One, do not need anything from the Godman. It is the sinners, the apostates, the wicked who do. God comes down the Mountain to eat with them.

Our Lord’s offer of salvation to the really lost is not a “last chance” to “believe or else.” It is the assurance that the door is always open, and there is nothing we can do to shut it. The worst criminal is precious, like the woman’s lost coin. And when there is the slightest glimmer of hope within the heart of the lost, there is rejoicing among the angels in heaven.

AMEN