Proper 23

The 20th century brought us many remarkable technologies, including the automobile, the microwave oven, and the Internet. But there were other inventions as well. Consider, for example, Venetian Blind Sunglasses, which came out in 1950. They were, as the name suggests, eyeglasses with Venetian blind slats across them that could be opened or closed, as the wearer wished. Just what we needed: glasses that render us sightless.

In 1953, the Curved Barrel Machine Gun was introduced with a bang. This was an M3 submachine gun with a curved barrel for shooting around corners. It was the perfect weapon for blasting away without looking at what – or whom – you might hit.

And then there were Illuminated Tires, introduced by Goodyear for automobiles in 1961. They were made from a single piece of synthetic rubber and were brightly lit by bulbs mounted inside the wheel rim. They were perfect if you wanted to study your road map while kneeling on the ground outside of your car at night.

And there was the Wine Glass Grip. Which begged the question: If you need a grip for your wine glass, should you really be drinking?

Cigarettes seem to have inspired several inventions. In 1955, someone came up with a holder that allowed you to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes all at once. That same year, someone else designed a two-person holder so that you and your sweetie could both smoke the same cigarette. The year previously, Robert L. Stern, president of Zeus Corp., invented what he called the Rainy Day Cigarette Holder. It had an arm that suspended a tiny umbrella over the lit end of the cigarette to keep the raindrops from putting it out.

Speaking of things that seemed like good ideas at the time, what about the golden calf?

God had commissioned Moses to lead the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. God’s presence with them was amply confirmed by a pillar of cloud that led them by day and a pillar of fire that led them by night.

But did the Israelites think that was enough? Nope. The first time Moses was out of the camp for several days to meet with God on a mountain, the people turned to Moses’ brother Aaron and said, “Come make gods for us.”

And Aaron, inexplicably, agrees without a single word of protest. He collects gold jewelry from the people, melts it down and casts a golden calf. The people see the calf and proclaim, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” (v. 4)

Talk about dumb inventions! If you were going to create an image of the God who had just imposed the 10 plagues on the Egyptians and then parted the sea so you could escape, would you choose the image of a baby cow?

In any event, once Aaron presented the people with the calf, they proceeded to offer burnt sacrifices and well-being offerings. But eventually, with the calf and not the real God at the center of this worship, things went off the rails. Following the sacrifices, “the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel” (v. 6). When Moses later returns to the camp, he finds some people “running wild” (32:25). Whatever was going on, it profaned the worship of God.

Well, what else is new? We humans have been inventing our own god for as long as we’ve been around, and then tailoring our worship to match our invention. Have you said, or heard someone else say, something like this: “Well, if God is a God of love, surely he wants me to be happy and won’t condemn me for ____________.” That blank is usually filled in with some self-centered behavior that God probably wouldn’t condone. When we do that, we’re talking about a god of our own creation. We’re quite willing to worship that god, but since we’ve set up this god with our own conditions, we shouldn’t be surprised if we, too, go off the rails when it comes to how we live.

Not every god we invent is overly permissive. We may imagine a god who is mostly judgmental – a cosmic scorekeeper – or one who is so distant from us that he doesn’t care about us individually, or one whose main expectation of us is that we just be nice to one another, and all get along.

The Bible presents several facets of who God is, but we’re inventing a god when we act as if all of God were encapsulated in any one facet.

The story of the golden calf gives us one picture of God that we should not miss. After the people of Israel have worshiped the calf, God, who is of course aware of it, tells Moses to head down from the mountain to deal with it. The language God uses suggests that God is disowning his chosen ones, for he says to Moses, “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.”  

And God then says his wrath is so hot that he is going to “consume them” and start over, making a new nation from Moses’ line (v.10).

As good of an idea this must have seemed to God, Moses has an even better idea! He implores God for the people, and he uses language that reconnects them to their God: “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?” (v.11) He reminds God of God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their descendants – the people camped at the foot of the mountain. And in the end, God relents and does not bring his wrath down on the people. Instead, Moses heads down to clean up the mess.

Moses is one who met with God on a level that few others have ever done, and what he recounts is that God, whose first inclination was to punish, ends up not sending his wrath down on Israel. This startling behavior on God’s part was not a function of divine weakness, but of divine grace. In short, God’s grace got the best of God’s justifiable anger. This is part of a biblical pattern: Judgment is never God’s final word.

So, in our quest to know God, it is important to view grace as one of his primary characteristics. This is not to suggest that there were no consequences to Israel for their great sin. Read the rest of the chapter and see that Moses dealt harshly with those who would not repent; he even had some of the people put to death.

Still, God stays his hand, and by his grace, the people of Israel eventually arrive at and enter the land he has promised to them.

Grace is rightly defined as unmerited favor. It’s the startling act of God working on behalf of the very ones who have violated his covenant and substituted gods of their own making for him. Grace can be understood by contrasting it to mercy, which is another divine attribute. Mercy is God’s withholding punishment we deserve; grace is God’s giving us blessings we don’t deserve.

We often fail to live up to our promises to God, but God still lives up to his promises to us.

Yes, there’s judgment. Yes, there’s accountability. But there’s also grace, and any image of God that leaves that out is no more than a calf of gold.

Writer Kathleen Norris tells of being at an airport departure gate one day where she noticed a young couple with an infant. The baby was staring intently at other people, and as soon as he recognized a human face, no matter if it were young or old, pretty or ugly, he would respond with absolute delight. Norris writes:

It was beautiful to see. Our drab departure gate had become the gate of heaven. And as I watched that baby play with any adult who would allow it, I realized that this is how God looks at us, staring into our faces in order to be delighted, to see the creature he made and called good, along with the rest of creation. Darkness is as nothing to God, who can look right through whatever evil we’ve done in our lives to the creature made in the divine image.

Possibly “only God and well-loved infants can see this way,” Norris says. But it means that God can look right through our guilt trips, our failures, our agonies, our phoniness, our invented deities and our sins, and see someone he loves.

Call that divine ability the grace of God. And that’s a really good idea. And one that will last.