Readings

Exodus 32: 1-14

Maurice Andrew puts the impatience of the Hebrew people into our context by saying:

This is like New Zealanders as they often act in both politics and in ethnic and social relationships, wanting to get on with things, making quick decisions.  We think that not mucking about is realistic, when all along we have not admitted what the true foundations and goals are.  Quick decisions favouring immediate goals cause time-consuming problems. ^[1]

One time when our granddaughter had been staying with us she remarked that she needed to get back to work to continue her battle with Parks and Reserves.  In answer to my follow up question she said they wanted to install new play equipment before she fixed the drains, and if she doesn’t the new play equipment will sink into the ground with the next big rain event.  The reality is that these tasks are better done in order, to be done well. Fast track is not always the best track.

We also need to avoid creating gods of our past treasures at the expense of new innovative design that may better serve a new and different future.

The story of the golden calf is of course grounded in earlier episodes where difficulty causes the people to see security in past slavery and fear the freedom they are journeying towards.  The golden calf is not their god but a tangible image they can enslave themselves to.

As well as mental images of God to suite our personal situations within Christianity our secular world also encourages us to enslave ourselves to ideologies such as ‘the free market’ or ‘competition’ or even Andrew’s ‘not mucking about’ and all such ideologies bring some form of judgement.

Matthew 22: 1-14

In following their agenda of searching for the authentic words of Jesus, the Jesus Seminar say Matthew has deviated from the original parable found in Luke 14:16-24 and Thomas 64: 1-12 and created an allegory of salvation history from a Christian perspective.

The king (God) prepares a feast for his son (Jesus) and invites his subjects (Israel) to the banquet.  They treat the invitations lightly or kill the king’s servants (the prophets).  The king destroys them and their city (Jerusalem) and invites others (foreigners) to the feast.^[2]

In this understanding the Romans are the unwitting agents of God who destroy Jerusalem, an event Matthew has witnessed, and he then goes on to add the guest who is not properly dressed which is in line with his theme that the Christian community contains a mixture of good and bad.

This is the Gospel of Christ.

Sermon

Many Christians grow into the church with quite a conservative evangelical, almost fundamentalist, faith. As their faith matured they became much more questioning and, for want of a better name, liberal.

I started from the opposite direction having grown up with a strong distrust of religion, and evangelical Christians in particular.  Therefore when I was confronted with a mystical experience I mulled on it for quite some time then searched for a Christianity that spoke to my late teenage world-view.  One of the books that was creating a disturbance within comfortable Christianity at the time was John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God, which I struggled through but didn’t really understand.  It did however confirm the validity of my questioning faith.

Years later I came across a quote from that book when working on a post-graduate dissertation on Geering’s Christology and reread the passage in question with much greater understanding.  Needless to say, Robinson’s 1949 arguments on this second reading seemed considerably dated.  But the passage in question still had relevance, which is why Sir Lloyd had quoted it.  Bishop John Robinson alludes to our Exodus passage but we need to remember that it is a paragraph from a 1949 publication.  A time when the word ‘men’ meant people and we failed to acknowledge that the concept of the divine encompasses both genders.  Robinson wrote:

The Christian gospel is in perpetual conflict with the images of God set up in the minds of men, even of Christian men, as they seek in each generation to encompass his meaning.  These images fulfil an essential purpose, to focus the unknowable, to enclose the inexhaustible, so that ordinary men and women can get their minds round God and have something on which to fix their imagination and prayers.  But as soon as they become a substitute for God, as soon as they become God, so that what is not embodied in image is excluded or denied, then we have a new idolatry and once more the world of judgement has to fall.  In the pagan world it was–and still is–a matter in the main of metal images.  For us it is a question much more of mental images—as one after another serves its purpose and has to go.[3]

Robinson was arguing for reform and renewed understanding within the church of the 1940’s. However, the passage also speaks of our ability to build a mental image, an idol or ideology to go before us and lead us through the wilderness.

The obvious disadvantage of building a golden calf, or some mental image or ideology is, that the only land of promise they are capable of leading us to, is limited by our imagination.

Rather than opening our mind to the inspiration of the Spirit that is beyond our imagining we sell ourselves short and limit our potential.  We enslave ourselves to the gods we make rather than accept the freedom, which in the Exodus tradition, is the only true God.

There is also a more sinister disadvantage.  In building a mental image of a divinity we inevitably use ourselves as the model.  So instead of having something to aspire to, we limit our lives to what we know and have already experienced.  There are two pieces of popular wisdom that fit this consideration.  ‘God created humanity in the divine image and humanity returned the compliment.’  The other follows on from that and is much more sinister suggesting that if we discover that God hates the things we hate then we have indeed created a god in our own image. 

When I told Sir Loyd that I was writing about his Christology, he said he didn’t think he had one.  Once I had a B+ for my desertion he of course had a Christology from below. A Christ that grew from birth into an image of our highest ethics and thoughts.

Since I wrote that essay my thinking has developed to a point where I see religion as a way of challenging the ancient part of our brain that instinctively directs us to divide people into ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups.  In the journey from slavery to freedom the image of Christ calls us to see ourselves as the total family of all humanity.

Mind you I have recently read Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work and that prehistoric part of my brain is finding it very hard to see some of the people he quotes as fully human.

We also make gods of our possessions, of things, of mementos of our past that I should be decluttering. Then of course there is money.

This is subtly brought out in our reading when Aaron asks the people to bring their gold jewellery and melts them and moulds them into the calf, then says, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’ (Exodus 32:4)

There are still a number of cultures in the world who wear gold jewellery as wealth for emergencies.  Think of the countless refugees that at this moment are fleeing from violence and have had to leave at a moment’s notice.  In such circumstances gold jewellery is not just a fashion accessory, or part of traditional clothing, it is transportable security that may finance a new life in a new land or buy a ticket on an overcrowded boat.

Time and time again I have read this Exodus passage and wondered at Aaron’s complicity in this creation of a false god.  Aaron, after all, was Moses’ right hand man, divinely appointed to support Moses in his leadership task.

However if we think of Aaron collecting all the jewellery, all the little personal items of worship and false security, and melting them into a communal worship focus, we can imagine a powerful statement being made.  Each person relinquishes their personal security and commits it to the common purpose.  They give up the ability to leave the group and strike out on their own and become dependent on the community.  The god they made is still a false god. But pooling their wealth was part of the journey from a collection of individuals to becoming a people of God.

Aaron then uses the golden calf as a focus for community building worship which he interestingly refers to as ‘a festival to Yahweh’.  Our English translation uses the word LORD, all in uppercase, to indicate the name of God, which in Jewish tradition must not be spoken.

We don’t focus our worship on a golden calf but that is pretty much the only artwork we exclude.  From Cathedrals damaged by bombs, fire and earthquakes to dilapidated country churches Christians very easily transfer the object of their worship from the Triune God we image as Creator, Christ and Spirit, to the building they have always worshiped in.

That is an idolatry that is part of the demise of mainline churches and it is something we have to be extremely careful of as we move into the future.

There is a thin line between constructing a building to house a worshiping congregation and facilitating its mission and building an architectural ‘golden calf’ which is the focus of worship.

That line becomes even thinner when the worship space is designed to give a feeling of awe and a sense of the other in order aid worship.  But regardless of the style of the building, from puritanical blandness to grand design, familiarity over years builds a sense of ownership so the building becomes a god.

Our churches need also be a service to our community and the Māori of the East Coast of the North Island give us a great model as their Marae have sheltered refugees from past floods and now store food, blankets and equipment for future disaster ready to welcome everyone in need.

By contrast the allegory in our reading from Matthew gives a vision of the open banquet of the Christian Eucharist

The challenge of that story lies in the warning about refusing to participate illustrated by the severe penalties metered out to those who refused to attend.

There is also a challenge in the richness of the image of salvation as a feast, which connects with the Eucharist as a vision of what life can be in the divine realm.  Beyond the strategy to save the party, in the setting of the story is the much richer notion of God’s generosity, not as an afterthought, but as God’s enthusiastic being and delight in all people and the pain at their refusal to share the life freely offered.

That image is also present in our Exodus reading where God expresses disappointment, rage even, at the construction of the golden calf.  But Moses mediates and exposes the divine vulnerability and grace.  There is forgiveness and grace which is the divine recognition of our human fallibility.  We understand and articulate that divine grace in the accepting and inclusive Christ who welcomes all to his table.

Our invitation to Christ’s banquet is an invitation to live in Christ and Christ in us.

The call to Christ’s banquet is a call to the journey of promise towards our true humanity and a call to welcome and include all who will join us on that journey.

[1] Maurice Andrew The Old Testament in Aotearoa New Zealand  (Wellington: DEFT 1999) p.123

[2] Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar The Five Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1996), p.235.

[3] John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press 1949) pp.125,126.