Sunday Sermon 11th Oct 2020

 Exodus 32/matt22

In our reading from the Hebrew Scripture last week, we heard God give the Ten Commandments to Moses. They were the rules of guidance from a loving God to his people, to keep them holy and to set them apart from other nations. The people of Israel are still in the wilderness and Moses again goes up the mountain to commune with God. And while he is away, the Israelites develop selective amnesia, forgetting all that God has done for them. They decide that an animal which they fashion from gold will be their leader and protector.

These are the people who have been freed from slavery in Egypt, they have witnessed the promises and power of God through the plagues on the Egyptians, and they have crossed the Red Sea on foot and seen the pursuing Egyptians drowned. Now they are in the desert, they are given water to drink and food to eat, and they still don’t get it. When I read this passage from Exodus, I have to ask myself – what on earth were the people thinking? What made them think that a lump of metal could do all that for them? And not just a lump of metal, but a lump of metal that they have made for themselves. They created this idol.

Even though they had seen the invisible God in action, they still wanted a familiar God which they could shape into whatever image they desired. They were tired of a God who would not show his face, not even to Moses. It wasn’t enough to know that God was with them, they wanted to see him. I wonder if we are like the nation of Israel. Are we tempted to make God fit our own image of him, to make our own golden calf of God? To mould God to fit our expectations. Do we assume that God thinks as we think that God feels as we feel? That would make it easy to obey Him if we agree, or convenient to ignore Him if we disagree.

I would suggest that there have never been as many idols for humanity to worship as there are in our society. In some countries, people are compelled to worship their governments, such as in communist countries or dictatorships. In other places, people worship what is perceived by others to be success, whether it is a career, or a sports car or the biggest house in the street.

And don’t get me started on the woman’s magazines, which encourage us to emulate other’s people clothes, glamerous careers, or their body shape which they achieved by starving themselves.

And then of course, there are sporting teams to adore and worship to. And the sad thing is that none of these things will help your relationship with God. They are temporal, here today and gone tomorrow. And in two thousand years, no one will remember that Geelong won this year’s grand final.

As Jesus himself said, do not store up your treasures here on earth; rather store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. Make your relationship with God your priority. Believing in God is not unique to Christians, but believing in God who revealed himself to us through his son Jesus is unique to the Christian faith. As the author Marcus Borg states “Christianity finds the primary revelation of God in a person”.

Faith in Jesus is what gives our religion its distinctive character. And it was Jesus who said that to see him was to see God the father. God was no longer the abstract impersonal God out there somewhere.

God became fully human in the person of Jesus, so that we wouldn’t have to wonder what God was like, and so that we would have no need to build idols. He became the God the Son who came to us, who walked and talked, ate and laughed and taught us about God. He came to invite us all to the great wedding feast as honoured guests.

The unique power of the Christian message is this - that God knows us personally and intimately. He is not out there somewhere. God’s love is a gift; He gives it to us knowing that we are not perfect. He doesn’t expect us to be, but He loves us unconditionally. He invites us into a deeper relationship, reminding us to look at what he has already done in our lives.

And how great is our God. A final thought: A young girl of 7 called Nancy was asked what she would say to God if she met him. Her reply “God, I bet it’s very hard to love everybody in the world. There are only 4 people in my family and I can’t do it.” Such is the love of our God.

AMEN