Primal Sin

Scriptures: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), A.D. 2013 C

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

Ah, the golden calf!—the primal sin of Israel, the primal sin of God’s people.

In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God promises Abraham that he will become the father of many nations, and that through his family God will bless all the peoples of the earth. Against all odds, that’s exactly what happens. Abraham’s family grows and flourishes. By the fourth generation they move to Egypt, where they continue to prosper. But when the dynasties change and a new line of pharaohs comes to power, the Egyptians grow wary of the powerful Hebrews in their midst and enslave them—going so far as to murder their children in order to keep the slave population “manageable.”

These descendants of Abraham cry out for liberation, and God sends the great prophet Moses to free them from Egypt and return them to the land of Israel, the land promised to their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. After a series of great miracles, known to us at the Ten Plagues of Egypt, God shatters their yoke of oppression and guides Moses to lead them out of Egypt and through the desert. All of this takes place in the book of Exodus, and forms the basis for the Passover holiday that later becomes our Christian Easter.

On the way back to the land of Israel, the freed slaves stop at Mt. Sinai, the great mountain where God first called Moses to liberate His people. Ascending Sinai by himself, Moses encounters God face-to-face and is given the Ten Commandments, the core of God’s holy Law:

 I AM the Lord your God; you are to have no gods before Me.

You are not to make for yourself any false idols.

You are not to use the Name of the Lord your God in vain.

You are to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

You are to honor your mother and your father.

You are not to murder;

Nor to commit adultery;

Nor to steal;

Nor to bear false witness;

Nor to covet.

To this day, these Commandments form the basis of Judeo-Christian morality and of Western civilization, and they all flow from that first one: no false idols, no false gods.

In the meantime, however, the people of Israel grow restless. Moses communes with God atop Mt. Sinai for no less than 40 days, and they begin to fear that he’s never coming back. They’ve seen terrifying wonders during the course of their Exodus, and now they judge themselves abandoned and leaderless in a strange land. They turn to Moses’ brother Aaron, appointed High Priest by God, and they tell him to make them new gods—gods to replace Moses, whom they credit with their deliverance. Aaron, seemingly under duress, gathers from the people their golden rings, taken as spoils from Egypt, and casts of them a molten calf. “Here are your gods!” the people proclaim. “Here are the gods who led us out of Egypt!” Seeing this, Aaron builds an altar before the calf and proclaims a feast day of the Lord their God. But the people get drunk and engage in public debauchery.

Now, one might wonder, why, of all things, God’s people would despoil themselves before a golden calf. But it’s not so strange when we recall that the people of Israel have spent the last several generations in Egypt. The Egyptians worshipped a royal god named Apis who, believe it or not, was a bull. And I don’t mean that he was a statue with the head of a bull: no, Apis was a real, living, breathing, flesh-and-hide bull. Oxen and cattle naturally represented strength, power, and virility, positive associations for any king or divinity.

The Apis bull was believed to be an aspect of the gods Ptah and Osiris. He was given a great palace and a harem of cows with which to cavort. Priests interpreted Apis’ behavior to divine the future, and his breath was thought to be curative. When this bull reached the age of 28, which was symbolic of the moon, Apis would be slaughtered, his meat fed to pharaohs and kings, his carcass mummified standing up and given a royal burial. Then the priests would go out into the cattle herds and select a new calf, with all the proper markings of reincarnation, as the new Apis. Thinking themselves abandoned by Moses, the Israelites emulate the bull they know.

Aaron, for his part, seems to try to mitigate the disaster. When the Israelites demand that he make them several gods, Aaron fashions only one, and this may be intended not as an idol but as a throne for the true and invisible God. Middle Eastern religion often portrayed gods enthroned over bulls to symbolize strength, and even the great altar of the Temple in Jerusalem is given horns and reverenced as the footstool of God. When the people proclaim the golden calf as the gods who led them out of Egypt, Aaron counters by declaring a feast day for the Lord, the one true God of Abraham. Alas, this doesn’t work, and the people fall into drunken orgies before a cow.

Atop Mt. Sinai, God reacts with righteous indignation. “Go down at once!” He orders Moses. “Your people”—not God’s now, but Moses’ people—“have acted perversely! They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded! My wrath burns hot against them and I may consume them, and of you I will make a great nation!” Here God is portrayed as so upset that He disowns His people, passing the buck to Moses, and proposes to simply hit the reset button: He will scatter the people of Israel and start over with Moses, restating the ancient promise given unto Abraham. But Moses will have none of it.

“Why does Your wrath burn hot against Your people, whom You brought out of Egypt?” Moses insists. “What would the Egyptians say? They would think You a wicked God after all! Remember Your promise to Abraham, Lord, and how You swore by Your own self!” And God does remember, and relents. He “changes His mind” about the disaster He planned to bring upon this ungrateful, faithless people. And He does so not only because God can never break a promise but also out of concern for the Egyptians. Now, theologically the Church maintains that God is perfect and does not really change His mind, so that this verse is to be taken poetically rather than literally. But the point is clear: God hears our pleas; God listens and is moved by both our evil deeds and our prayers; and God is quick to forgive, ever keeping His promises.

Israel, mind you, is punished for the sin of worshipping the golden calf. Forgiveness, remember, means not that there are no consequences for our actions, but that a true and loving relationship is maintained in spite of them. Before the golden calf, God’s Law was simple and straightforward: Ten Commandments and some extrapolations upon justice, hospitality, and piety. After the golden calf, God suddenly decrees a complex system of ritual laws and purity codes, mandating sacrifices for sin and forbidding certain foods, actions, clothing, &c. This is Israel’s punishment. If they want to bow to animals, if they want to return to the strictures of paganism, then God will give them all that they desire and more, until they are sick from it! The interminable laws of the Old Testament, the ones that have nothing to do with morality or justice and seem to make no sense at all, come as a direct result of the golden calf—the primal sin of Israel. Yet even so, God uses them not simply for punishment but for instruction and mercy.

Today, of course, we do not literally worship bulls. But we do sort of worship a lot of bull, don’t we? We place many gods before the true God: false gods of wealth, pleasure, selfishness, fame, debauchery, gluttony, pride, avarice, envy, wrath, nationalism and all the other things that we fear, love and trust more than we fear, love and trust God. This is the double edge of God’s Law: it reveals to us that we must be perfect to earn God’s favor, yet also reveals that we are not perfect and cannot earn it. Thankfully, the Law is only half of God’s Word. The other half is the Gospel.

The Law of God is goodness, truth and beauty. Jesus said that to love God with all you are and to love your neighbor as yourself is the sum of the Law and the prophets. Yet when we fail to live up to the Law, when we see the truth that we are not worthy of God’s love, we are driven to the Gospel truth that we don’t have to be. God’s heart is mercy and forgiveness. He will never force a sinner to come to Him, never force a beloved child to accept divine love, but neither will He ever abandon us, ever give up on us, ever fail to keep His promise of forgiveness and new life. God is a Shepherd searching earnestly for a single lost sheep; God is a Woman lighting lamps to discover just one lost coin, and throwing a party when it is found at last.

We are forbidden from false idols because the Old Testament offers no image for God save this one: the image of God in which we ourselves are made. Did you ever notice that? The image of God is humanity in community, is people in relationship. That’s why we say that God is Love, why we say that God is Trinity. And then of course we see the true Image of God in Jesus Christ, Who is both God and Man, and Who is with us still in the face of our neighbor and of the needy in our midst. We become like those we love, and God so loves us that He becomes one of us. The true Image of God is poor sinners gathered, forgiven, and set free within the Body of Christ. And that, brothers and sisters, ain’t no bull.

Thanks be to God, Who forgives even our gravest idolatries. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.

Prayers of Intercession:

God hears the cry of the poor and is near to all in need. Let us pray for our neighbors, our world, and ourselves, trusting in God’s mercy and love.

Gracious God, You ransom us from death to life in You

           Empower us to pray and struggle after what is true

Your Spirit, Lord, sustains the world, with food and drink for all

           May justice guide our stewardship to hear the needy call

We pray for rev’rence of this life and all the gifts we share

           Restless, let us rest in You.  In mercy—hear our prayer

We pray for all who stand in office of authority

           That people ev’rywhere may live both peaceably and free

You raise the poor from out the dust and give them honored seat

           In harmony with Jesus’ will, we shall repeat this feat

We pray for those exploited, that the strong harm not one hair

           Lord, raise what we’ve degraded.  In Your mercy—hear our prayer

Guide our congregation as we grow and we explore

           All the ways that we may serve You and Your people all the more

We pray for those who witness, and for those who seek Your face

           That Your Gospel may be scattered to each clan and tribe and race

Lord, we pray for those who’ve left us, that they rest without a care

           May we join them at Your banquet.  In Your mercy—hear our prayer

Lord, we pray for those we lift before You, both silently and aloud: for Lon, Pat, Chuck, Nichole, Josh, and Fern; for the Morstad and Hoaby families; for peace in Syria and throughout the Middle East; for the families and children of this community; and the unity of one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; and for all who dare not pray to You.

Into Your hands, O Lord, we commend all for whom we pray

Trusting in Your mercy to light and guard our way.  AMEN.