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.

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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?

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