Mark 14:32–42

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took with him Peter and James and John and began to be distressed and agitated. And he said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.” And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me, yet not what I want but what you want.” He came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy, and they did not know what to say to him. He came a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. Look, my betrayer is at hand.”

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

Well, depending on your perspective, the words that I am about to say may make you a little sad or may make you very happy. This is the last in our sermon series on disputing with God.

Mixed reaction. Just what I expected.

But it’s been a fun journey this summer, so thank you for joining me on it.

Our last Scripture in this series comes to us from Mark, chapter 14. It is a familiar passage, although it is not one that we are used to hearing at this time of year.

From the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 14, verses 32 through 42:

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.”

He took with him Peter and James and John and began to be distressed and agitated. And Jesus said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, even to death. Remain here and keep awake.”

And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible. Remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

Then Jesus came and found the disciples sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake even one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy, and they did not know what to say to him.

He came a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

For the Word of God in Scripture, for the Word of God among us, for the Word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Well, as I said, it’s a familiar scene, though we’re used to hearing this in the springtime, toward the end of Lent or maybe during Holy Week: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying for God to “remove this cup from me,” by which he means his impending crucifixion.

Then there are his disciples, who aren’t even able to stay awake through the night with him. We find Jesus finally, at the end, submitting himself to God’s will, and then the betrayer leading the Romans right to him.

The scene is familiar, but what does it all mean? How does it apply to us? What are we supposed to take from all of this? And finally, how does it fit into our disputing with God series?

Let’s take a minute and review where we have been this summer in this sermon series.

Abraham, Moses, Jonah, the psalmist, the Syrophoenician woman—they all took issue with God in one way or another. At times, as with Moses and Abraham, the issue is something that God is planning on doing, namely punishing the people.

In the case of Moses, he convinces God not to punish the people for their idolatry. Abraham pleads with God to spare the people of Sodom, whose great sin was inhospitality to strangers.

Then there was God, who wanted Jonah to go to the Ninevites and warn the people that God would not tolerate their wicked ways. But Jonah doesn’t want to go because the Ninevites are his sworn enemy.

Then we had the psalmist, who was crying out in anguish and pleading with God to be present, and yet God seemingly remained silent and absent.

Last week, we read about this foreign woman, Canaanite or Syrophoenician, who begs Jesus to heal her daughter. Yet Jesus ignores her until she annoys him so much that he’s forced to answer.

In all of this, we’ve learned that Scripture is not naive about the struggles we face in life and how much you and I can wrestle with our faith.

Many of us were taught, or simply picked up along the way, that disputing with God is a no-no. It’s not befitting a faithful Christian. Yet here we have example after example in Scripture of people—not just any people, but pillars of the faith—doing just that.

In today’s passage, it seems to be Jesus himself who is taking issue with God’s plan. He’s in the Garden of Gethsemane. His arrest, trial and crucifixion are imminent, and he goes there at night to pray.

He brings a couple of close friends with him and asks them only one thing: “Stay awake with me while I face this hour.”

But they can’t do even that.

Jesus prays to God, “Please, Lord, there must be another way. Take this cup from me. Yet, not my will, but yours be done.”

Then Jesus chides his disciples for falling asleep. He’s told them that his soul is deeply grieved, and he’s only asked them this one thing.

But they’re tired, and it’s dark and quiet there in the garden. We can imagine the noises of the wind going through the trees, and the animals and the crickets lulling them off to sleep.

When Jesus sees this, he’s upset. But then he thinks about it for a minute and says, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

We assume we know what he means: that they just don’t have the spiritual strength to face this trial with Jesus.

But I want us to consider this. I want us to ask this: What if, instead of merely chiding his friends and disciples for not staying awake with him, Jesus is reflecting on something deeper—a more profound truth?

You see, in ancient Greek, the language in which this story was written, they don’t have any way of distinguishing between capital letters and lowercase letters. There’s no capitalization in ancient Greek.

So there’s no way for us to know whether the Gospel writer Mark intended to write spirit with a small “s” or Spirit with a big “S.”

What does that matter?

Simply put, we don’t know whether Jesus is referring to their all-too-human spirit or whether he is intending to invoke the Holy Spirit.

As I said, you and I tend to read this as spirit with a small “s,” meaning that they want to stay awake, but they just can’t.

We can all relate to that, right? We’ve had some time or another when we’ve had to try to stay awake, but our eyes get so heavy and we just find ourselves drifting off. I don’t know—maybe it was during some sermon or something.

But what if Jesus isn’t referring to spirit with a small “s,” but God’s Spirit?

What if he is saying that, on their own, they can’t stay awake, but God’s Spirit is available to them to help them in their weakness?

As Paul would later write in Romans 8, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

It’s odd that so much could ride on something so simple. Is it a capital “S” or a lowercase “s”?

It reminds me of those grammar books that have become popular over the past 10 or 15 years. One of my favorites was Let’s Eat, Grandma, which made the point that if you remove the comma, you may go from a nice invitation to have dinner with your grandmother to cannibalism.

Sometimes small things make a big difference, right?

In this case, if we think Jesus is referring to spirit with a small “s,” then these poor disciples are left to their own devices in their time of need. But if we think Jesus is referring to Spirit with a capital “S,” then God is there with them, offering to help them through their time of want and need.

You’ll not be surprised that I would argue that the capital “S” is the way to go here. We need look no further than Jesus himself to back this up.

Jesus is facing his own dark night of the soul. He loves his friends. He doesn’t want to leave them. Yet his mission and his ministry have brought him into conflict with the Romans, and the consequences of that are fatal.

It has been said that Jesus is both a window into divinity and a mirror to our humanity. So it’s important for us to recognize that there may be no more human moment for Jesus than when he is praying in the garden.

He is honest with God: “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be crucified.”

And yet he prays, “Not my will, but yours be done.”

You know, we can only truly pray that prayer when we know that God is on our side.

Too often, you and I think of God as an opponent of some kind—like God has nothing better to do than watch us all day long, just waiting for us to mess up so that we can be punished.

I would argue this is actually the predominant picture of God that many of us carry with us.

I’m sure that, at some point in human history, this was a really convenient theology. I can see what value that would have in keeping society in check. This is what led Karl Marx to claim that religion is the opiate of the masses: religion as a means of social control.

A vengeful, punishing God is really helpful for that.

But what if God is not in the sin-counting business? What if God has better things to do than catch us doing something wrong? What if God is really on our side and has been all along?

What if, as the quotation on our bulletin cover by Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin and more about courageously and actively doing God’s will?

Richard Rohr writes:

“Although Jesus made this quite clear throughout his life, we still largely turned Christianity into a religion where the operative agenda was some personal moral perfection, or attaining some kind of salvation, going to heaven, converting others rather than ourselves, and acquiring more health, wealth, and success in this world. In that pursuit, we ended up largely aligning ourselves with empires, wars, and colonization of our planet instead of with Jesus and the powerless.”

And he concludes, “It’s all caught up with us in the 21st century.”

I think that’s where I want to end this series on disputing with God.

As I pointed out at the beginning of the summer, you’ll notice that those we have encountered in this series—those who have had arguments with God—are not the uninterested or uninvested.

They are those who are already in partnership with God: Abraham, Moses, Jonah, the psalmist and now Jesus.

They are those who know that God is on their side. So they know that they can be honest. They don’t need to hide their feelings or thoughts from God for fear of God’s judgment or punishment.

They know that they’re not left to their own devices, even in the valley of the shadow of death. They know that God is with them.

And they know that when they pray, not only is their spirit, small “s,” activated, but it is God’s Spirit, capital “S,” that is activated in them.

Look, we all want a life that’s free from pain and suffering, and God wants that for us too—but not at the expense of a life of meaning and purpose and service to others.

God knows that pain and disappointment and failure are necessary parts of our journey. But God will never leave us to face them alone.

God promises to be with us.

God invites our questions, our doubts, even our arguments, because God doesn’t want robots as children.

God wants us.

All of us. Not our fake selves, not our pretend selves, not our masked selves that we put on when we go out the door to present ourselves to the world.

God wants our Garden of Gethsemane selves.

So we do not need to live in fear, because God is already with us. And as Scripture says, “If God is with us, who can be against us?”

We do not need to live in fear. We can trust. We can fully trust that the one who brought all things into being loves each and every one of us more than we could ever imagine.

Of course, knowing this does not mean that we will not struggle with our faith. We’ve seen plenty of examples of that this summer.

And if that’s not good enough, we need to look no further than Jesus himself for permission to do so. Because ultimately, his prayer is ours too:

“Not my will, Lord, but yours be done.”

Amen.

The post Disputing with God: God’s Will Be Done appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Discussion Questions:

 1. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

• What does Jesus’ prayer—“Remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want”—reveal about the place of honesty, fear and struggle within a faithful life?
• Pastor Mark describes Jesus as “both a window into divinity and a mirror to our humanity.” What do you recognize about yourself in Jesus’ experience in the garden?

2. The Spirit Is Willing

• How does the passage change when you hear “Spirit” as a reference to the Holy Spirit rather than only to the disciples’ human determination?
• When have you experienced help, strength or prayer beyond what you felt capable of producing on your own?

3. From Fear to Trust

• What images or teachings have encouraged people to see God primarily as an opponent waiting to punish them?
• How does trusting that God is on our side affect our ability to pray honestly, acknowledge failure and seek a life of meaning?

4. Disputing with God as Partnership

• Pastor Mark observes that Abraham, Moses, Jonah, the psalmist and Jesus could argue with God because they were already invested in a relationship with God. How might questioning God express commitment rather than rejection?
• Why might God want our honest, unguarded “Garden of Gethsemane selves” instead of the carefully managed versions of ourselves we present to the world?

5. Applying the Sermon

• Where are fear, disappointment or uncertainty making it difficult for you to trust that God is with you?
• What courageous act of God’s will—particularly one involving meaning, purpose or service to others—might you undertake this week with the Spirit’s help?

The post Sermon Discussion Guide: Disputing with God: God’s Will Be Done appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Mathew 15:21–28

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

All right, I know I’m just back from vacation, but pop quiz time. Let’s see how well you all know your Bible. How many Gospels are there? Four. Easy one, right?

Sometimes the most obvious things are staring at us right in the face, and we’re so used to them that we take them for granted. How many Gospels do we have? Four. Not one—four.

I think this says something really important and significant about our faith. Presumably, those who put the Bible together, deciding which books were in and which were out, could have chosen just one of those Gospels. But they didn’t. Or they could have combined those four Gospels and made one super-Gospel. But they didn’t. They let the four Gospels be and put them side by side.

Now, to be clear, we know that other Gospels were out there that didn’t make the cut. Perhaps those who were putting the Bible together didn’t know about those other Gospels at the time, or maybe they did know about them and thought they were more fringe. But what we know is that the four that are there are there at least partly because they were already widely read among communities of faith.

Still—and this is important—they do not always agree on important details. Where was Jesus born? Where did he start his ministry? Who were his first disciples? What are the names of the women who accompanied him on his journeys?

Sometimes those differences are telling. For example, in Mark’s Gospel, we are told that the woman who asked Jesus to have mercy on her and heal her daughter is a Syrophoenician woman. Syrophoenician is a mixture of Syrian and Phoenician. They were both neighboring countries to Israel—not really allies, but not really enemies. Just neighbors. So it’s kind of a neutral term.

In the context of the story, it means that Jesus doesn’t have to care about this woman because she’s not from the house of Israel. He doesn’t have to care about her, right? Which is kind of what comes into question.

But we didn’t read Mark’s version, did we? We read Matthew’s version. In Matthew’s version, the woman is not Syrophoenician. She is Canaanite.

Now, Canaanites were also from a neighboring region to Israel, but not so neutral. They were the historical and sworn enemies of Israel. When Matthew tells us that the woman is Canaanite, not Syrophoenician, he’s kicking Mark’s version up a bit. It’s not just your neighbor whom you don’t have to care about. This is your enemy whom you’re not supposed to care about.

So, what does this all mean?

It’s widely believed that Mark’s Gospel was the first one written. It’s the earliest. When Matthew sat down to write his Gospel, he was reading Mark. He knew Mark. He knew the stories that were in Mark.

That means the Gospel writer Matthew made an intentional decision to change this woman from being just a neighbor whom Jesus doesn’t have to care about into an enemy—someone who would make everybody reading the story think, “Yeah, Jesus, she’s a dog.”

If you’re like me—even if you’re not—you may be wondering when you read or hear this story: What is going on with Jesus?

We are conditioned to expect him to respond with kindness and compassion to all people. Never be mean. We don’t expect Jesus to be mean. Never short-tempered. Never biased, certainly.

So it’s shocking to read about him not only ignoring this woman who so badly needs him, but also calling her a derogatory name. This is not the Jesus whom we know or expect. So what’s wrong? Is he hangry? Does Jesus need a Snickers? Does he need a nap?

I think more is going on here than that.

We need to remember that when we read the Gospels, we’re not reading an unedited, unbiased account. That’s the brilliance of having four Gospels. That’s the wisdom of our forefathers and foremothers, who thankfully kept four Gospels and did not leave us with just one.

It tells us that we have to engage our brains. We have to engage our intellect. We have to engage our hearts. It’s a two-way street with the text. We have to engage it and wrestle with it.

We are acknowledging that these authors are biased, too. They’re all telling us their version of Jesus—which is something we all do, right? We all have our own version of Jesus.

What we have here with Matthew is that he’s taking a story about not ignoring a neighbor, which is significant in and of itself, and making it into one that threatens to stretch our ideas about who is in and who is out. It forces us to admit that God really does love everyone.

That means not only those whom we love, or even just those we don’t care about very much and are fine ignoring, but also the people we despise.

Now, I’m going to admit something here. This is not the sermon I originally thought I was going to preach today when I was planning this at the beginning of the summer.

I thought I would be preaching to you about this remarkable woman and her persistent faith: how she stood up to Jesus, but did so kindly and respectfully; how she called him out on his bias; and how such a give-and-take is part of our ongoing relationship and dialogue with God.

We need to be persistent in our faith. We shouldn’t be afraid of the questions, the doubt or the struggles. That’s a good sermon. I would have been happy to preach that sermon today.

But something happened this week, and the sermon I thought I was going to preach changed. Maybe it’s because of the summer I’ve had.

In many ways, it’s been a really good summer. I’ve had a good bit of vacation. I’ve gone to some of my favorite places. I’ve spent time with loved ones. I’ve been able to relax—all the wonderful things we want in summer.

But in other ways, it’s been a challenging summer for me. I’m reaching middle age, so these are all normal things, okay? I don’t want anybody to worry. I’m fine, I promise you. I’m fine, okay? Everybody got that? I’m fine. I’m good.

But it’s been challenging. There have been family health challenges. I’m at that stage in life where I’m ushering my children into adulthood, and it’s not easy. Last week, as many of you know—and you’ve been very kind to follow up with me and be compassionate toward me—I dropped my son off at school almost a thousand miles away.

These are all normal things at this stage of life. But as many of you know, they make you think. They make you ponder. They give you a new perspective. You reflect sometimes a little more deeply on things, and maybe your perspective begins to shift a little bit.

I will admit that in this process—and again, I think this is normal; this is nothing to worry about; we all go through it—I’ve had a few dark nights of the soul this summer when I’ve really wrestled with my faith. I’ve really wondered about my place.

Everybody needs a break and a vacation now and again. What I’ve found is that I have truly missed being with you all this summer. I’ve missed worshiping God in community.

That’s a weird thing pastors do. We don’t always go to worship when we’re on vacation. Some do. Some of the really pious pastors, maybe. I occasionally do, but mainly I take a break.

But as I’ve been wrestling with all of these life things, I’ve been struggling because I haven’t been here with you all, discussing these things that matter.

It has all led me to wonder about my image of God and all the things I put on God that are mine and not God’s.

Anne Lamott famously said, “When it turns out your version of God hates all of the same people you do, it’s safe to assume that you have created God in your own image.”

We all create God in our own image, and a big part of faith is deconstructing the God we have created and encountering the true, free, triune God.

I think that’s why Matthew tells the story the way he does—why he changes the woman from Syrophoenician to Canaanite. Matthew knows that we all do it. He knows that, when reading or hearing the story, his audience will be drawn into Jesus’ contempt for this woman. Their own contempt for her will bleed out as well.

They will be pleased that Jesus seemingly has the same enemies they do. Isn’t that nice? He doesn’t like the Canaanites either.

Except it turns out that Jesus was wrong. And so are we when we do the same.

So instead of a sermon about this woman’s persistent faith—and again, there’s nothing wrong with that sermon; it’s a good one—if that’s what you need today, go out and be persistent.

But it turns out that this sermon, which I need to hear today, and maybe you do too, is really about God’s persistent love for us.

Simply put, God never stops loving us. Ever. Not even at our worst.

God not only refuses to be boxed in by our projections and biases; God refuses to let us be confined by those barriers we make for ourselves. And we do it all the time.

Some of you may remember me saying: Every time we draw a line in the sand, the one thing we can be sure of is that Jesus is on the other side of it.

Every time we draw a line, every time we put up a wall or a barrier, every time we exclude somebody, Jesus isn’t with us. He’s with them. He’s on the other side of the line, the other side of the wall, the other side of the barrier, the other side of our prejudice.

That’s how persistently God loves us. God will not leave us to our own devices. God will continually challenge us in love, through love, and for love.

As we near the end of this series about disputing with God, there are many legitimate reasons we’ve come across to have disputes with God—to question God, to wrestle. That’s okay. That permission is important.

But today’s sermon in this series is kind of a caveat to that. It’s a warning that the God we might be arguing with is not the true God, but the God we have made up for ourselves. The God we may be arguing with is one of our own creation.

I have a pastor friend who, when he tells somebody he’s a pastor and they say, “Oh, I don’t believe in God,” responds, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.”

When they start saying, “Well, I don’t believe that God would do this or do that,” he says, “I don’t believe that either.” He finally tries to get to the point where he says, “Well, let me tell you about the God I do believe in.”

We all have to sort that out. Who’s the God we believe in? Who’s the God we don’t believe in? Who’s the God we’ve made up for ourselves? And who’s the God who challenges us—the God who doesn’t always say yes, the God who doesn’t allow us simply to wallow in the mess we have made for ourselves?

Thomas Merton uses this analogy. He says many of us will spend our whole lives climbing the ladder, only to find at the end, when we get to the top, that the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall the whole time.

Thanks be to God that we don’t have to have it all figured out—that part of our journey is the struggle and the wrestling and, yes, even the dark nights of the soul. And the truth of the matter is that when we feel most alone, when we feel most afraid, the God who awaits us is the God who never, ever stops persistently pursuing us in love.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

The post Disputing with God: Persistence appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Discussion Questions:

1. Wrestling with a Difficult Story

• What troubles or surprises you about Jesus’ initial response to the Canaanite woman? Why is it important not to avoid the difficult parts of this story?
• How might wrestling honestly with a troubling passage deepen our faith rather than weaken it?

2. The Persistence of the Canaanite Woman

• What do you notice about the woman’s courage and persistence as she continues advocating for her daughter?
• Pastor Mark suggests that this woman challenges Jesus and helps reveal the expansive reach of God’s love. What does that possibility invite you to consider about how God works through human encounters?

3. The Lines and Barriers We Create

• Pastor Mark says, “Every time we draw a line, every time we put up a wall or a barrier, every time we exclude somebody, Jesus isn’t with us. He’s with them.” How does this challenge the ways individuals, churches, and communities decide who belongs?
• What lines, walls, prejudices, or assumptions might keep us from recognizing Jesus among people we have placed on the “other side”?

4. The God We Believe In

• What does the pastor’s question, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in,” help us uncover about the images of God we may have inherited or created?
• How can we distinguish between the God revealed through persistent love and a god shaped primarily by our own fears, preferences, or prejudices?

5. Applying the Sermon

• Where might God be challenging you “in love, through love, and for love” right now?
• What is one line you can cross, barrier you can question, or person you can see differently this week as you trust the God who never stops persistently pursuing us in love?

The post Sermon Discussion Guide: Disputing with God: Persistence appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

We continue today with our sermon series on disputing with God. The past two sermons in this series have been on the book of Exodus, and in particular with Moses and the people, as they struggled in the wilderness and tried to remain faithful through that time of unknowing and uncertainty. In some ways, we’re kind of moving backward to Genesis 18, but one of the things I wanted to point out that maybe we don’t often think about is that we open the Bible and there’s Genesis at the beginning.

It starts with the creation story, and we think that’s a very natural beginning narratively. But in terms of the way that the Bible was constructed, Exodus, and the Exodus experience of the people being released from slavery in Egypt and God liberating them, is actually kind of the beginning point of the story of the people of God, the Hebrew and Israel. But the book of Genesis then is kind of the prequel.

So it’s kind of like around Christmas time I’ll remind us that, you know, it wasn’t that the story of Jesus’ birth was written down at the time of Jesus’ birth. It was written years and years later, hundreds of years later, really, once people had kind of understood the importance of Jesus’ life and they said, “Gee, I wonder how he was born. We should figure that out and tell that story.” In the same way, also, the people who are liberated from Egypt say, “Well, gee, how did this all come about?”

And so they go back and they tell the stories that we have in Genesis. Most of the stories in Genesis, of course, revolve around a man named Abraham and his wife Sarah. Just preceding the passage that we are about to read, God has come to them, and this is just to help us kind of orient overall into the big picture. This is after Noah and the Ark and the flood, and then the rainbow, and God has promised never to again destroy the earth.

Then God seeks to begin again with this project that God is trying to carry out through humanity and says, Abraham and his wife, that’s where I’m going to start. I’m going to build a nation through them. And even in their old age, then God comes and visits them with two strangers. Abraham and Sarah open up their home to them, welcome them, feed them, and come to find out that they are messengers from God and that they are God’s chosen people to begin again and that through them, even though they are old, they will have many descendants, as many as the stars in the sky.

And then from there, the two visitors go out and we pick up the story from there in Genesis 18. This translation just calls them the men. Other translations might have visitors or even angels.

Genesis 18: 16-33                                                                                                                                 

Then the men set out from there, and they looked toward Sodom, and Abraham went with them to set them on their way. The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” Then the Lord said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.”

So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Again he spoke to him, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” He said, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

Genesis 18, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, is perhaps one of the most misunderstood passages of the entire Bible. The two towns or cities become the focus of God’s anger because of their wickedness. Yet the exact nature of the wickedness is never specifically mentioned.

There’s mention of the way they treat outsiders, how they abuse them and mistreat them. There are certainly accounts of assault and violence. And of course, we all know that this passage has been used over the centuries to shame and exclude and other people of same-sex attraction. People who want to oppose homosexuality from a religious viewpoint point to this passage as their source to affirm homosexuality is a sin.

Now, given the sensitive nature of this topic, I don’t want to feel the need to move down this path, but let me just say this: To equate the actions of any two people in love with that of a violent assault of someone on a stranger does not hold water. It just doesn’t.

So let me relate this to more current events. The New York Knickerbockers—I like to say the whole name, the Knickerbockers—won the NBA championship for the first time in 53 years this past week.

And Knicks fans have lined the city streets in celebration. And as there is any time people drink and celebrate in public, fights have broken out. These fights have nothing to do with being a Knicks fan or a basketball fan and everything to do with being drunk and probably way overstimulated.

We would never say that God is angry with all Knicks fans because of these incidents. The only people who would say that are people who are already not Knicks fans. They will see these incidents as backing their bias. But the bias already existed.

Likewise, nobody reading Genesis 18 would come to the conclusion that God disapproves of same-sex relationships except for those who are already biased against gays and lesbians. It is the violence and assault that deserves God’s anger. Period. That is it.

Those who would use this passage to defend their bigotry or worse, their own physical violence or verbal violence against those with whom they disagree are actually guilty of the very thing that put Sodom and Gomorrah in God’s crosshairs in the first place.

When we widen out and read this story in context, we realize that the real issue at the heart of the passage is hospitality to strangers.

Hospitality to strangers, you see, is a biblical mandate. It could not be more clear. The Bible drives home this point time and time again. You take care of the stranger in your midst, the foreigner or the alien in your country. Why? Again, it goes back to that origin point for the Hebrew people because you were once strangers yourself. You were once foreigners in a foreign land, and you know what it’s like to be mistreated.

Right before the passage we read for today, as I explained in the setup, Abraham and Sarah offer hospitality to strangers. Strangers, who it turns out, were messengers or angels sent from God. And because Abraham and Sarah showed kindness to strangers and welcomed the foreigners into their home and fed and cared for them, God chooses them to begin again after the flood.

And in this passage, God makes a covenant with Abraham. God says, I will be your God, and you will be my people. He tells Abraham that through him he will build a great nation as numerous as the stars.

But this is the second covenant that God makes. The first one is after Noah and the flood, where God says, I will never again wipe out all the people because of their sin.

Now, as soon as the covenant is made, who do we expect to break it?

Abraham, right?

And don’t worry, Abraham makes his own mistakes. But biblically speaking, God is the first to be tempted to violate the terms of the covenant. Did you catch it? When God hears about the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah and the way they treat strangers, God decides to wipe them out. Well, that would break both covenants, wouldn’t it?

So God wonders, seemingly out loud, should I just go ahead and do it, but not tell Abraham?

Wow. That’s really interesting, isn’t it?

We think we’re the ones who should be afraid of God’s judgment. But according to Genesis, God seems to be a little bit afraid of Abraham’s judgments, not the other way around.

This is a turning point in Scripture and the basis for our faith and trust in God. To paraphrase the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, we may choose to live without God. Humanity may prefer a godless existence. But God never chooses to live without us.

Perhaps the central characteristic and identity of the triune God is the refusal to ever be without humanity.

So one way to read this story of Sodom and Gomorrah, a good way I think, is to understand that this is actually a test for God. Prior to Abraham, God was free to do whatever God wanted to do. But now, now God is bound by the covenant that God has made.

God knows that if he lets Abraham in on his plan, Abraham will disapprove. And indeed he does. Abraham says, what if there are 50 righteous who live in these towns? Will you spare them then? God says yes, if there are 50. What about 45? 30, 20, 10.

Just, by the way, footnote, this is where the notion of a minyan comes from. A minyan is that ten people are required for certain prayers in the Jewish tradition. You have to have a minyan. And so, you know, there are some times where there’s a group that might be joining at a synagogue and there’s eight of them and they have to go out and flag down two other Jews to come in and have a minyan so that they can have prayers. That’s where this comes from: If there are ten, I will not destroy the city.

Like Moses, Abraham convinces God to show mercy. But let’s be clear, it’s not the case that God is vengeful and has to be convinced to show mercy. Rather, it is that God is merciful. But sometimes in the midst of anger, God forgets God’s self. It has to be reminded of God’s true nature.

Now it has been said to those who believe, no explanation is necessary, those who do not believe, no explanation will satisfy. I’m not sure if I buy that 100%, but I think it makes a good point. If we are inclined to faith, if we have a sense that we are a part of something bigger, if we believe that there is a benevolent presence that infuses the universe with life and meaning, we don’t need the Bible to convince us.

Rather, the Bible helps us work out what kind of God we believe in. And rather than just telling us what kind of God is, the Bible tells us stories about God that were shared throughout human history of people working out what kind of God is, considering what we know about God and what we know about the world. And if we approach the Bible this way, what we actually find is a treasure chest of the world’s biggest ideas and questions.

I mean, how limited and unhelpful is the interpretation that Genesis 18 is about how two people choose to share their love and affection. How mean-spirited and harmful is that interpretation? And what does it say about God?

Nothing good.

But it was the early Christian theologian and philosopher Augustine of Hippo who wrote, “whoever then thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” In other words, if your interpretation of Scripture doesn’t lead you to love God and neighbor more, you have not yet understood Scripture correctly.

If your understanding of Scripture does not lead you to love God and neighbor more, you have not yet understood it correctly. Conversely, as the quote on our bulletin cover today states, “Hate, it appears, is the heresy.”

Friends, what I’m trying to get at here is that faith is not some static statement of beliefs to which we choose to ascribe or not. Not. Faith is a living, evolving relationship with God and one another. Faith, to put it in the language of the book of Genesis, is the living out of the covenant between God and humanity. “Faith,” writes Madeleine Lengel, “is what makes life bearable with all of its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

And one of the many ambiguities we encounter in life is the very issue of Sodom and Gomorrah. Not human sexuality, but how justice and mercy relate to one another. Because God has a point here. As much as we don’t want to admit it, I mean in the abstract, it’s easy to agree with Abraham. It’s not right to punish the innocent along with the guilty. That’s not fair. That’s not justice.

But neither is it fair to the innocent to leave the wicked go unpunished or unchecked, right? Bobby Williamson points out “there’s no discussion here about simply stopping the wickedness in one way or another. Or even just eliminating the people perpetuating wickedness while leaving the righteous alone.” That’s never even on the table. The assumption here is that they are all in it together. “But if mercy in this case basically means ignoring the land’s outcry and letting the wickedness stand, what does that say? And what does it mean for the innocent who continue to live there?” And he concludes with this: “In a modern society that so values individual autonomy, how do we think about the ways in which our fates are inextricably tied?”

Now that is a question worth wrestling with, don’t you agree? That will get us a lot further down the road than judging what we think about the way that two people love one another. How do justice and mercy relate? And how are our fates intertwined? With one another.

I don’t have answers to that. But I think that’s what we’re supposed to be wrestling with as people of faith.

It’s an odd notion to me that our image of God that we receive as children would not continue to grow and change with us as we get older and experience more of life in the world. We need an adult image of God to carry with us, to walk with us in this complicated and confusing world. But so many of us were never given permission, or whatever, to allow our notion of God to evolve, to wrestle with it in meaningful ways. And so we look like people who are trying to engage this complicated world with this very rudimentary image of God.

So if you’ve never received permission to wrestle with the image of God that you carry with you, please, please consider this sermon series your sign. Permission is granted. God welcomes your questions, your doubts, and your challenges because God has decided not to be God without you. So take it on good authority. Not mine, two guys named Moses and Abraham.

Amen.

The post Disputing with God: Advocating for Others appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Discussion Questions:

1. Reading Genesis 18 in Context:
   ● The sermon describes Genesis 18 and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as one of the most misunderstood passages in the Bible. What interpretations of this story have you heard before?
   ● How does reading the story through the lens of hospitality, violence, and the treatment of strangers change the way you understand it?
2. Practicing Hospitality:
   ● The sermon emphasizes that hospitality to strangers is a biblical mandate. Why do you think Scripture returns to this theme so often?
   ● Where do you see opportunities for RPPC to practice deeper hospitality in our church, neighborhood, and wider community?
3. Scripture, Love, and Harm:
   ● Pastor Mark challenges interpretations of this passage that have been used to shame or exclude LGBTQIA+ people. How can communities of faith repair harm caused by harmful readings of Scripture?
   ● Augustine wrote that if our interpretation of Scripture does not lead us to love God and neighbor more, we have not understood it correctly. How might this guide the way we read difficult biblical passages?
4. God’s Covenant and Mercy:
   ● The sermon suggests that Genesis 18 shows God being held accountable to the covenant God has made with humanity. What does that image of God stir up for you?
   ● Abraham speaks honestly with God, asking whether the righteous should be swept away with the wicked. What does this conversation teach us about prayer, courage, and trust?
5. Justice, Mercy, and Our Intertwined Lives:
   ● The sermon raises a hard question: How do justice and mercy relate to one another? Where do you feel that tension in your own life or in the world around us?
   ● Pastor Mark asks how we think about the ways our fates are “inextricably tied.” What does that mean for how we live as neighbors, citizens, and people of faith?
6. Faith That Wrestles:
   ● The sermon says faith is not a static statement of beliefs, but a living, evolving relationship with God and one another. How has your understanding of God changed over time?
   ● Have you ever felt like you needed permission to question or wrestle with your image of God? What helps make a faith community safe for honest questions?
7. Applying the Sermon:
   ● What is one way you can practice hospitality to someone who feels like an outsider this week?
   ● How can RPPC continue to be a place where all are welcome, where questions are honored, and where love of God and neighbor shapes how we read Scripture?

The post Sermon Discussion Guide: Disputing with God: Advocating for others appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Our reading this morning comes from Exodus chapters 33 and 34. This is the follow-up to what we read two weeks ago, where Moses was up on the mountain talking with God. The people were down waiting for Moses to return with a word from God. And it was taking longer than they expected. So they turned to Aaron, Moses’ brother, and said, “Moses and God seem to have abandoned us. Please fashion for us another God that we can worship.”

Aaron said, “Give me all your jewelry” and melted it down, made a golden calf, and the people worshiped. God looked down and saw what the people were doing and said to Moses… This really upsets me. And I think I’m just done with these people, and I’m going to just wipe them out like we did with the flood. And Moses reminds God of God’s promises and faithfulness to God’s people. At the end of the passage, we find out that Moses has changed God’s mind. God decides not to visit destruction upon the people again. But this is what happens next:

Exodus 33:1–23; 34:4–9                                                                                                                  

The Lord said to Moses, “Go, leave this place, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, and go to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘To your descendants I will give it.’ I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey, but I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

When the people heard these harsh words, they mourned, and no one put on ornaments. For the Lord had said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘You are a stiff-necked people; if for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you. So now take off your ornaments, and I will decide what to do to you.’ ” Therefore the Israelites stripped themselves of their ornaments, from Mount Horeb onward.

Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp; he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise and stand, each of them, at the entrance of their tents and watch Moses until he had gone into the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses. When all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise and bow down, all of them, at the entrance of their tent. Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then he would return to the camp, but his young assistant, Joshua son of Nun, would not leave the tent.

Moses said to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider, too, that this nation is your people.” He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.”

The Lord said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord,’ and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tablets of stone. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name, “The Lord.” The Lord passed before him and proclaimed,

“The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children
and the children’s children
to the third and the fourth generation.” 

And Moses quickly bowed down to the ground and worshiped. He said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, my Lord, I pray, let my Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

The older I get, and the longer I have been in this gig of talking about God for a living, the more and more I am convinced that those that speak of God the loudest, those that speak with the most certainty and authority of eternal matters, those that claim the mantle of faithful and true, are actually most likely to be worshiping an idol of their own creation.

The god they proclaim is so often small and unworthy of the title. This god only cares for some people, not everyone. The god they proclaim is bound by formulas that make little sense and force God into making decisions that are cruel and capricious. The god they proclaim offers salvation by syllables: if you say the right words in the right order, forgiveness and mercy and salvation are yours, no matter what you have done or said previously. That magic incantation is like an eternal get-out-of-jail-free card.

This god is available to those who are willing to turn off their ability to think critically and freely, and just believe certain things to be true. If you call on the name of this god or pray in a certain way, this god will always answer.

Just listen to them and ask, “How big is this God, really?” And does this sound like the God we encounter in scripture? Barbara Brown Taylor makes it plain that it is not. She writes, “Only an idol always answers.”

The God that we encounter in the Bible is no idol. And let me be very clear, I am not talking about idols like the Hebrews built with Aaron, a statue made of their gold jewelry. I am talking about the kind of idol that we make with our minds, false gods of our own making.

Now, to be sure, we all make God in our own image to one degree or another. Recognizing the human proclivity to idolatry is, perhaps, the first step to a more authentic and robust faith. That is why the Bible talks about it early and often. There is little that makes God angrier than idolatry. But again, not for the reasons we may have been led to believe. It is not because God has such a fragile ego that God must be worshiped alone and given credit for everything. Again, what a small god that is. Rather, it is because making God in our own image is the first step into us believing that God is in our corner and on our side, which can be used to justify all sorts of atrocities. Anne Lamott reminds us, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Passages like the one we just read remind us of the dangers of such idolatry, not only because they explicitly tell us so, but because they present us with a God which does not fit neatly into any of our boxes or preconceived notions. The God of Exodus is not a divine therapist sent to make everything in our lives better. The God Moses encounters is wild, free, and not subject to any limits we might set on the divine.

In today’s passage, Moses continues to argue with God over what should be done with the Hebrew people in the wilderness. Let me offer a quick recap up to this point. The people found themselves captive in Egypt, slaves to Pharaoh. Sent by God who heard their cry, Moses frees the people and leads them into the wilderness, where they wander for generations, guided by their hope in the promise of a better life.

But when things take longer than they expect, when they are hungry and tired, when they start to lose faith in Moses and question what kind of God would bring them out into the wilderness just to let them starve to death, they begin to hedge their bets. They start to crave a god who will do what they want them to do.

The biblical witness tells us that when people start to take matters into their own hands, when they start to remake God in their image, God gets angry with them. And not just angry, but furious. So much so that in the passage we read two weeks ago, Moses has to convince God not to wipe the people out. You may remember that Moses won the argument, and the text tells us that God changes God’s mind about the fate of the people. But the story goes on.

In today’s passage, God is still mad, and so while God has decided not to destroy the people, neither does God want anything more to do with them. God tells Moses, “Fine, they can find their own way to the promised land. I am done with them.” Again, Moses intervenes—this time listening to both sides, like a mediator.

Here is how one commentator summarizes what happens: “By the end, God and Israel seem to accept one another as they are. The people confess they are stiff-necked, but God commits to being with them in spite of their shortcomings. Likewise, God reveals a divine Self that is anger as well as compassion. This relationship is messier than we might like, but God and the people remain together in the messiness, committed to a future together.”

That’s all well and good, but what are we to do with this mess? How does it help us in our faith today?

Rabbi, professor, and leader of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Abraham Joseph Heschel, distinguishes between the God of wrath and the wrath of God. He writes, “When I consider the violence my own country, my elected officials, and my tax dollars now inflict on the world, I think of divine wrath. Divine wrath is the cry of the mother whose child has gone to war, to prison, to poverty, to hatred. It is the ache in the heart of the universe—when love is mocked, when power crushes the weak, when truth is twisted into a weapon, when life is thrown away like trash.

“I am told that wrath is not the final story, that God does not give up on us. That beneath the fury, there remains love—fierce and aching. A love that grieves what could have been and should have been, and works toward what still can be, even amid the tragedy. But we must taste the wrath in order to know the hope. We must feel the burn of divine pain before we can feel the balm of promise.”

Passages like those we are reading in our Disputing with God series, like the one we have read today with Moses and God, show us that our relationship with God is not a one-way street, but God invites our whole selves, including our brains and our experiences, into the relationship. Look again at our passage. God is displeased with the people who think of God as a far-off dictator. God is pleased with Moses, who feels free to disagree with God. As Richard Rohr reminds us, “The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people—always meet a lover, not a dictator.”

Friends, this summer I invite you to shed the image of God as a taskmaster in the sky, the god who cares more for formulas of sin and righteousness, the god who needs you to change before you can be loved and accepted.

Moses shows us that the God we find in the Bible is a God of relationship. It is the God who loves us. All of us. Period. No qualifications and explanations. That is the beginning and end of everything. In between, there is a whole lot that matters too. God does not want us causing harm to one another. God does not want us taking creation for granted or damaging the world we inhabit and on which we depend. God cares about these things not because God cares about some arbitrary rules, but because God cares about us, about how we live together and treat one another.

This type of faith may be messier than we would like. It does not offer the comfort of certainty. True faith humbles itself before a mystery. To paraphrase Paul, “It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way.”

What I think we will notice as we continue this series of Disputing with God is that it is the image of God that we carry with us that needs to change. It is not God, but our version of God, that is the problem. The move, counterintuitively, may be toward more doubt and less certainty. After all, which takes more faith?

As Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, “Only an idol always answers.” The God of Moses, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of you and me, is not an idol, but a partner. This God invites us into a relationship that is messy, yes, but is full of love and truth. Amen.

The post Disputing with God: Repairing Relationships appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Discussion Questions:

1. Recognizing Our Images of God:

• Pastor Mark says, “The god they proclaim is so often small and unworthy of the title.” What are some ways people, including ourselves, can make God too small?
• How can we tell the difference between the living God we encounter in scripture and an idol we have created in our own image?

2. Idolatry and Certainty:

• The sermon reflects on Barbara Brown Taylor’s line, “Only an idol always answers.” How does this challenge the desire for certainty in faith?
• Have you ever experienced a season when God felt silent, mysterious, or hard to understand? What did that season teach you?

3. Moses and Honest Relationship with God:

• In Exodus 33:1–23; 34:4–9, Moses argues with God and acts as a mediator for the people. What does this suggest about the kind of relationship God invites us into?
• Pastor Mark says, “God is pleased with Moses, who feels free to disagree with God.” How might disagreement, questioning, or wrestling become part of a faithful life?

4. Wrath, Compassion, and Repair:

• The sermon describes God’s anger not as fragile ego, but as grief over harm, injustice, and broken relationship. How does this change the way you understand divine wrath?
• What does it mean to say that God remains committed to relationship, even in the messiness?

5. Faith Beyond Formulas:

• Pastor Mark invites us to shed “the image of God as a taskmaster in the sky.” What images of God do you need to release in order to trust more deeply in God’s love?
• How does the idea that God loves us “period” — with no qualifications or explanations — shape the way we treat ourselves and others?

6. Applying the Sermon:

• This week, where might you practice a faith that is more honest, humble, and open to mystery?
• How can RPPC continue to be a community where people are free to ask questions, repair relationships, pursue justice, practice hospitality, and engage curious faith?

The post Sermon Discussion Guide: Disputing with God: Repairing Relationships appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Our reading today is from Exodus 32.

Exodus 32:1-20 & 30-35

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.” 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.” So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took these from them, formed them 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!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” 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.

The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! 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; 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!’ ” The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 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.”

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? 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. 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.’ ” And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain, carrying the two tablets of the covenant in his hands, tablets that were written on both sides, written on the front and on the back. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, “There is a noise of war in the camp.” But he said,

“It is not the sound made by victors
or the sound made by losers;
it is the sound of singing that I hear.”

As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’s anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.

On the next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of the book that you have written.” But the Lord said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you; see, my angel shall go in front of you. Nevertheless, when the day for punishment comes, I will punish them for their sin.”

Then the Lord sent a plague on the people, because they made the calf—the one that Aaron had made.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

There is an old Jewish teaching, which is almost like a koan. You all know what a koan is right? In Zen Buddhism, a koan is a thought or question which has no real answer, but which helps your mind concentrate and focus. The classic example is What is the sound of one hand clapping? Though koans are usually more profound than corny.  So the ancient rabbis, their koan, they wondered if God prays? And if so, what is it that God prays for?

But instead of leaving this koan unanswered, the rabbis attempt to fill in the blank. Their answer? God prays that God’s own mercy will outweigh and outlast God’s anger.

We see the struggle between divine mercy and divine anger in today’s passage. Moses, who at God’s sending, helped free the people from captivity in Egypt, led them out into the wilderness, has gone off on some sort of silent retreat. But really, we know that he is up the mountain receiving the Torah, the ten commandments from God. The rabbis say that the Torah is a gift of love from God to God’s people, but like an impatient child at Christmas or their birthday, the people can’t wait to open their gift. Actually, it is really Moses that they are missing. After all, it is Moses who has led them all this way.

Well, again, it is God through Moses, but practically speaking Moses is their connection to God. To them, no Moses, no God. And Moses has left them on their own for 40 days. One ancient commentator postulated, “How late was Moses after 40 days?” Six hours! Just six hours!

They have only been waiting six hours before they lose their ever-loving minds. But that just shows their level of anticipation, their level of dependence on Moses. And so fearing that Moses, and by proxy God, has permanently abandoned them after only six hours, they seek comfort in the next best thing, Moses’ brother Aaron. They go to Aaron and say, “Come, make god’s for us.”

Now if we were to pause here and speculate about Aaron’s response, I am guessing most of us would say that Aaron would refuse their request, remind them that the God of Moses, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the one true God, and that God alone, led them out of Egypt.

Instead, Aaron says, collect all your gold rings, all your gold jewelry and melt it down so we can build a golden statue. What? I mean, I get the impatience of the people. They only seem to have a tenuous grip on what is going on, but Aaron? Aaron is Moses’ brother; he is part of the inner circle. Surely, he should know better!

But before we throw Aaron under the bus too hard, let me point out one redeeming factor: the people ask Aaron to produce for them gods, the generic Elohim in Hebrew. Aaron responds with the name Adonai, which is a direct reference to the God of Moses. So essentially, Aaron consents to the overwhelming need of the people to connect with something greater, but he does not help them build a statue to replace God, rather he does so as a substitute for Moses.

You see, what Aaron fails to recognize is that God acts through people, not inanimate objects like statues, even statues made of gold. God has used Moses, but God can use Aaron too. God can use any of us.

One of the fundamental claims of our faith is that God chooses not to be God without us. Presumably God could have. God didn’t have to create all that is, but God chose to. God could have just created beings which would do God’s will, no questions asked, but God chose to create beings that are free to make their own choices, free to experience joy and pain, love and loss.

Too often life makes us question, what kind of God would allow innocent people to suffer, children to die, disease, war, violence? What kind of God? The only answer I know to that question, and I admit it is not the one we are looking for, one that brings great comfort, is that it is a God who doesn’t want robots as children, but is willing to risk giving us freedom, which means the freedom to experience all the ups and downs. Because love is not love if it is forced or coerced.

So really, in this story, what we have is the sting and pain of rejection that God feels when the people God has chosen, so quickly abandon them and seek comfort elsewhere. The text tells us that God speaks to Moses saying, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 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.”

There is a lot going on in this short passage. God is clearly upset. We get that. But then God tells Moses to leave God alone so that God’s wrath may burn hot. In other words, God knows that Moses will try to talk God out of it. But not only does God tell Moses to leave them along, God makes Moses an offer. If Moses lets him wipe out the people again, like we are told happened in the great flood, God will appoint Moses as the new Noah, the new Abraham. He will raise up a new people, a new nation, through Moses. It is a temptation not unlike that which Jesus faces in the desert.

But Moses is the hero of this story. He refuses to give in to temptation. He refuses to leave God alone to stew in his anger. Moses argues with God and reminds God of God’s own compassion and mercy. And then we get this gold nugget: “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”

Moses won the argument. God is persuaded. Mercy wins. Love wins. Anger subsides. God’s own prayer is answered and God acts out of compassion, not judgment.

The picture that emerges from this text is that the relationship between God and humanity, between God and creation is much more of a two-way street than we may have been at first led to believe. If God chooses not to be God without us, if God wants a genuine, not forced or coerced relationship with us, if God gives us the freedom to choose, then God also chooses not to remain far off and distant. The god we first met, the god who is in charge of everything, and makes everything happen, who has us like puppets on a string, well it turns out, according to the biblical witness that this god may be as false as the golden calf the people built at the foot of Sinai. This god may be one we invented to absolve ourselves from responsibility. We say, God is in charge. God will fix it. If it happened, it must be God’s will. As pious as these sound, they are golden calves of our own making.

The true God, Adonai, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the God of Moses, the God of Jesus Christ, is not a bully or a tyrant, but a partner. And arguing with God, disputing with God, is not blasphemy, but the living out of that relationship. Notice who in the text argues with God. It is not, as we often suppose, those who are against God, those who are far off. It is Moses, God’s own right-hand man in this scene. The one closest to God, who trusts God. Disputing with God is a sign of faith!

What does God pray for? I might answer that question a little different than those ancient rabbis. I think God prays for us to love God and to love one another, the way that God loves us. And that, I believe, is beyond dispute. Amen.

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Discussion Questions:

1. Waiting, Fear, and the Golden Calf:

• The Israelites became anxious when Moses delayed coming down from the mountain. Why do you think uncertainty and waiting can make people turn toward false comforts or quick solutions?
• What “golden calves” do people today sometimes rely on for security, certainty, or control?

2. God’s Mercy and Anger:

• The sermon explores the ancient rabbinic question: “Does God pray?” and suggests that God prays for mercy to outweigh anger. What do you think about this image of God?
• How does this passage challenge or deepen your understanding of God’s character?

3. Freedom and Love:

• The sermon suggests that God gives humanity freedom because love cannot be forced or coerced. How do you respond to that idea?
• In what ways have you experienced both the beauty and difficulty of human freedom?

4. Arguing with God:

• Moses disputes with God and reminds God of compassion and mercy. The sermon suggests that arguing with God can actually be an act of faith. How does that idea sit with you?
• Have you ever wrestled honestly with God through anger, doubt, grief, or disappointment? What did that experience teach you?

5. Partnership with God:

• The sermon claims that “God chooses not to be God without us.” What do you think this means?
• How might this understanding change the way we think about prayer, justice, compassion, or responsibility in the world?

6. Applying the Sermon:

• The sermon challenges the idea that “God will fix everything” while we remain passive. Where do you feel called to participate more actively in God’s work of healing and compassion?
• This week, how can you practice loving God and loving others in ways that reflect the mercy and compassion described in the sermon?

The post Sermon Discussion Guide: Disputing with God ~ Appealing to God’s Mercy appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.