Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

While We Are Down the Mountain Rev. Chandler Stokes Exodus 32:1-14 The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost October 15, 2017 Scripture Introduction Last Sunday, we focused on the Ten Commandments, and today we will focus more closely on the first of those commandments, pertaining to idolatry. FAITHFUL TO THE LIVING GOD—that’s what we are calling the stewardship series of messages. Stewardship: when we remind ourselves why we support this church with our lives: our time, our talent, our money. I owe a great debt to my colleague Leanne Pearce Reed for much of this sermon. Her paper for the Moveable Feast inspired nearly every word. Thank you, Leanne.

Exodus 32:1-14 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 the gold from them, formed it 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 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!’ ” 9 The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10 Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”

11 But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, “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? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” 14 And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

* * *

Some say that this first part of the twenty-first century should be called the “Age of Anxiety” or the “Age of Fear.” There are enough, maybe too many, reasons to believe that human history has tipped toward its ultimate destruction. From Charlottesville to Las Vegas, from the devastations of the Caribbean hurricanes,

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to the disastrous fires in the West and the escalating threats of nuclear war—you can make your own list—in response to these tragedies, more and more I hear the question, “Where, where is God?”

Historian Diana Butler Bass notes that previously during times of public tragedy, like the battle of Gettysburg, the sinking of the Titanic, or the attack on Pearl Harbor, very few people thought to ask, “Where is God?” Most assumed they knew where God was: up in heaven, in the divine throne room. Our ancestors asked instead, “Why did God let this happen?” or “What is God trying to teach us?” or “What does God want us to do in response?” The older questions sought to discern God’s intentions when terrible things occurred, not to query the location of the divinity. … 1

But things have changed. “Where is God?” has echoed from every corner of the planet in recent years in circumstances so dire that many wonder whether we have been abandoned and left to fend for ourselves. [So maybe this is] the “Age of Anxiety…. Hope is at a premium, but the supply is perilously short. Fear is both cheap and plentiful.2

I think she’s onto it. So what do people do when they are anxious, when they are afraid? This is where our text comes in. The story of the golden calf is the story of what happens when people are afraid, when they become anxious.

Before this passage, there is no indication that the people of Israel will turn from God. What triggers the entire episode is the opening phrase: “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain.…” They lose sight of Moses, they are without him for forty days; they feel abandoned and left to fend for themselves, and… become anxious. Moses’s absence triggers their fear. And what do they do when they become anxious?

They choose an idol. Posthaste—one phrase, they fashion for themselves their own god. When Moses goes up the mountain, and he doesn’t come back down for a long time, the people get scared, and they opt for what Walter Brueggemann calls “an available, produced god [over] the sovereign [God] who is not immediately available and who is not made with human hands.” Israel “cannot tolerate the risk of faith…, so Israel incessantly seeks to reduce that risk by domesticating God to manageable proportion.”3 They choose a substitute god for their living, liberating God.

We don’t cast golden calves anymore, but we are down the mountain, as it were, in our wilderness in an age of anxiety. Faced with uncertainty and anxiety, it is in our nature to want to create more certainty and stability.

Diana Butler Bass suggests two other ways we craft certainty in our uncertain times. One way is through atheism. With this solution, there is no need to wonder where God is or why God permits such suffering

1 Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution (New York: HarperOne, 2016) p.7, Cited in Reed, unpublished paper for the Moveable Feast.

2 Bass, Grounded, p. 7.

3 Walter Brueggemann, “Exodus,” New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), p. 934.

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because we assert that God does not exist. Rejecting theism and any practice of religion is one path to certainty.

The other path, of course, is religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalism offers certainty with the claim that we already know all the answers—how to interpret Scripture, how to worship, how to resolve thorny theological questions and social issues. In anxious times, these two paths are proving to be very alluring for many.4

We are down the mountain in our anxiety. But there is a third way, a perilous, honest, and uncertain way. Let me paint you the picture. Today’s bulletin cover features an abstract painting.

First, let me mention a painting that this is not like. I would bet that most of you know the one I have in mind that I want to offer as contrast: John Trumbull’s oil-on-canvas of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It is a very famous painting; it hangs in the US Capitol rotunda; it depicts forty-two of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration. It is twelve feet tall by eighteen feet wide. It is large. And it is astoundingly static, lacking in energy, movement, turmoil, or honesty—save the fact that it’s all white men. As Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in The Hamilton Mixtape:

You ever see a painting by John Trumbull? Founding fathers in a line, looking all humble Patiently waiting to sign a declaration, to start a nation No sign of disagreement, not one grumble The reality is messier and richer, kids The reality is not a pretty picture, kids Every cabinet meeting is a full on rumble What you 'bout to see is no John Trumbull

That’s the real foundation of our nation, the story of the revolutionaries who founded our country. This is no John Trumbull.

Last fall, Stanford historian Carolyn Winterer published an essay which challenged the notion that our founding fathers were sure about everything, that they knew exactly what they were doing as they wrote the Declaration of Independence and forged the documents that became the foundation for our nation. She calls this idea the “Fable of Founder Certainty”—a fable because the founders were in fact uncertain about many things. She writes:

If we imagine the world of ideas as a frozen pond, then the American revolutionaries were the skaters who ignored the sign that said “Thin Ice” and skated on, above the deepest, black water. The ice was thin, but thin was interesting, exhilarating. It was where worlds of exploration and possibility opened. What is this new place, America? How in fact do we know what kind of government best serves the people who live there?

4 Reed, unpublished paper.

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Sometimes they fell through the ice, plunging into the cold, black water. . . . Then they hauled themselves back out of the freezing depths to skate another day. There is a lesson here. The revolutionaries liked to ponder uncertainty, to live in the freeing moments it creates. They realised that the act of thinking about important matters—what kind of government they should have, what kind of society they want to live in—has inherent value. The journey is the goal. The point of skating is not necessarily to get to the other side of the frozen pond, but to tear free of the constraints of merely walking. They skated around, thrilling at the thin ice.

John Trumbull should have painted John Adams and Thomas Jefferson with skates!

I know that the lakes and streams haven’t frozen yet, but you do remember them, right? There’s a Greek word for skating on the ice. It’s pisteuo. Now, it’s usually either translated “believe” or better yet “trust”—but it really means “skating on thin ice.” What I mean is this. I’ve seen people drive cars out onto frozen lakes. And I believe it can be done. I believe even that my car could be driven, could be driven, out on a frozen lake. But there is no way in God’s good green earth that I’m ever going to drive my car out there, because I don’t pisteuo my car on the ice. I might pisteuo gravity. … But that’s my false god, my limitation. Faith gets us out there, out there. …

Winterer concludes:

…doubt and uncertainty can be a great strength. They can spur enquiries, push us to new understandings, and open great possibilities. . . . Part of the adventure of living . . . is to talk together about what we don’t know.5

It is clearly also the journey of faith, of the real pisteuo—and it rejects false certainties.

Listen: “What was true about those revolutionaries has also been true for our ancestors in the faith. In times of anxiety and social change, there have always been those who were willing to skate out on the thin ice. The thin ice of the early Christian communities trying to forge a new way of being community together under occupied Rome—to eat together as Jew and Gentile. Or the thin ice of the Reformation Christians seeking new ways of reading Scripture and worshipping together. Stronger yet, the thin ice of the abolitionists, who said, no matter what the church had taught, they believed that slaves should be free, for they were equal people with full human dignity.

Or the thin ice of those who insisted that the Holy Spirit called women and LGBTQ folk to ordained leadership in the church as well. Over and over in the history of our faith, some chose not to take the path of easy certainty. Instead, they risked going out on the thin ice where discovery and possibility and new insight were possible.”6

Those are our founders. Our first pastor, Courtney Smith, and the twenty-five first Westminster members: they were in that tradition of anti-idolatry, abolitionist ice skating. And learning how to skate on the thin ice

5 Carolyn Winterer, “American Genesis,” Aeon, October 5, 2016, accessed at https://aeon.co/essays/america-treats-its-bold-revolution-as-a-reliquary, cited in Reed.

6 Reed.

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of not knowing, of not falling off to the false certainty of atheism or fundamentalism of any stripe, that is the path of deep spiritual formation, the path of faith formation, of pisteuo: of skating on the ice, where the journey is the goal.

Some chose not to take the path of easy certainty, not to fall off on either side of that fable of certainty. They are our forebears. And that clearly is our legacy at Westminster, what we need to preserve. It is not an abstract idea.

A few weeks back, I was talking about Israel’s crossing the Red Sea, and I mentioned a wise and thoughtful widower. In the wake of his wife’s tragic illness and death he told me, “I don’t believe that everything is just random, that my wife’s cancer is just witness that nothing matters or makes any sense—no. Nor do I believe that God is some kind of puppeteer controlling every action or causing my wife’s cancer and death—no. I am living in between.”

What clear, clear testimony to skating on thin ice. It’s not just random—atheism is a false certainty, just as the fundamentalist solution that God simply controls everything—is a fable of certainty.

No, this man’s testimony, his faith, his genuine pisteuo not to fall off on either false-idol side: that is the legacy of this community’s faith as well. Living through crisis.

His question, our question at our best, isn’t “Where is God?” but “What’s next? What is God calling from us now? In the very midst of these crises? In the midst of these challenges or disasters?” That question is the legacy of our faithful response.

This resistance to idolatry is not a small thing: it informs our honest, no baloney, pastoral care, the formation of our faith in crisis…. This tradition of faithfulness to the living God and resistance to those cheap imitation golden calves.… Our anti-idolatry infuses everything we do… from the pastoral conversations, to how we teach children to wonder, to adult faith formation, to participation in mission, in open-ended, long-term, not relationships, where we do not set the agenda, in Linking Lives and serveGR.com to Black Lives Matter, and our ongoing witness to be as welcoming as we possibly can be.

This is what you preserve with your giving here. Sisters and brothers—all of this is the life-giving, thrilling faith of skating on thin ice. And it is our legacy at Westminster. We’ve got to keep that alive, alive, alive.

Finally, “living with uncertainty is not easy. [Ask my widower friend.] But following those who saw uncertainty not as a threat or danger, but as possibility and adventure, in these uncertain times, we have the chance to skate out on the thin ice. When we do, we might very well discover that God is not absent after all. Maybe, just maybe, God is out there on the thin ice waiting for us.”7 Skating with us.

A new year is coming. Let’s get our skates on. You with me? Let’s find out what’s next. Let’s go skating.

7 Reed.