Sermon: Knowing and Following God- Exodus 33:12-22- RCL 24A

Moses in the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33:22)

The Jews were a stiffnecked people.  That is the conclusion drawn in the run up to today's Old Testament lesson.  My guess is that is one of the reasons God called them and set them apart- so that the rest of us could identify with them.  Today's lesson is part of a much longer Old Testament narrative which lies at the very heart of the Jewish, and the Christian experience.  It is a tale of bad decisions, and lost opportunities, and forgiveness, and more bad decisions, and exile, and really spicy personal details, and outright rebellion, and selfless love, and judgment, and grace, and oh, did I say forgiveness?  At the beginning of the major section of which today's lesson is a small but important part,  Moses had gone up into the mountain to meet with God.  It was a wonderful meeting, in which God communed with Moses and gave him the ten commandments and detailed directions about how the people should worship and order their community. Moses was there for a while.  The people got restless and began to doubt whether he would ever come back.  In the midst of the uncertainty which seemed to be all around them, their memories of life in Egypt began to look pretty good.  They forgot the bondage and the slavery, and remembered the varied diet, the comfortable homes that were not tents, and the nice things that such a settled life  allowed them to accumulate.  They went to Aaron the Levite, the priest and the brother of Moses, and implored him to make them a god, He called for donations of gold and made them a statue of a calf, and they worshipped it with highly sexualized fertility rites, perhaps like those they had seen in Egypt, or among their Canaanitish neighbors.  Now the Lord looked down and saw what was going on, and he said to Moses, these people have corrupted themselves, and I am going to destroy them, but I will make you a great people.  And Moses prayed from the bottom of his heart that God would have mercy on the people, and God decided not to destroy them.  Now Joshua was up on the mountain trail waiting for Moses, where he had been the entire time.  He met Moses on the path, and as the two of them came into view of the camp, they saw what was going on.  Moses was so angry that he threw down the tablets with the commandments on them and they shattered.  And he took the golden calf and ordered it ground to dust, and scattered in in the water and made all the people drink it.  Considering the biology of it all, I think that is a pretty effective way of saying what you think of a false god.  Then he turned on his brother, the priest, and said, "How could you do such a thing?"  And Aaron was very nuanced- that is to say he lied and blamed it all on someone else, and he minimized his part in the whole affair.  Shame on him and on any priest who does such a thing in every age.  And then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and rallied the faithful, and they stopped the orgy that day by killing three thousand of their neighbors with the sword.  And for their faithfulness to the Lord that day, the Levites, who had refused to defile themselves, were blessed as the keepers of the holy things of God in perpetuity.  And then Moses prayed for the people as he had never prayed before.  As his Lord Jesus and his brother Paul would pray some thirteen hundred years in the future, he offered himself for the sins of the people he loved when he said "O Lord, forgive their sins- and if not then blot me out of the book of life!"  In the passion of his prayer that day, we begin to see the depths of  God's love manifested to us and to all who believe in Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Living God.  And then a plague came upon the people, because every action has consequences, and even when we are forgiven by God we must live with the consequences of our actions.  And then God reaffirmed the promise, the covenant which he had made to Abraham, and had renewed with the other patriarchs of Israel. And God called Moses to enter the tabernacle of Israel that day, and as he did so, the cloud of God's glory, the shekinah, descended upon the holy place to confirm that this was of God.  And Joshua went in with his master, and the people, having learned their lesson for the time being, "rose up and worshipped, every man in his tent door."  And that story brings us to today's Old Testament lesson.

"And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend." (Exodus 33:11)  Moses  asked God to show him the way of the Lord, and shared with him his own fears and insecurities.  And the Lord did speak with him as with a friend. And when God assured Moses of his support and direction and providence, Moses asked to see the very glory of God. And it was a wonderful thing, and God answered his prayer, and the Bible says that the face of Moses shone with the light of the glory of God.  And then the Lord answered Moses' first question, the one about knowing the way of the Lord.  There was another set of tablets made for the commandments, and God gave some very specific guidelines for how the tribes were to honor their relationship with him when they entered the promised land.  And the rest of the book of Exodus is about how the people responded to God's love by obeying him and accomplishing the things he called them to do.

 This brings us to the application of today's text to our lives.  The great drawback to all lectionaries is that they tend to isolate portions of Scripture from their context, that is why the reformers insisted on serial reading of the Bible.  Today you have heard the context of the lesson.  And so you are in a better position to understand it more perfectly.  If I were to read today's lesson from Exodus 33:12-23 apart from its context, I might draw the conclusion that God does communicate directly and passionately with his people, and that he on occasion allows us the  personal experience of his glory.  Now both of those things are true.  But the passage assumes a very different intensity and tone if I realize the complex moral failures which preceded the assigned lesson.  And then when I consider the willingness of Moses to give up his own life for the people, and his anger, and his strong leadership, and all of those other things which are a part of the story- the emotional intensity of God's determination to share with us the experience of his presence and glory are all the more amazing.  My heart cries out with the song writer who said, "And can it be, that I should gain, an interest in my Saviour's love?  Died he for me, who caused him pain, for me who him to death persued?  Amazing love, how can it be, that thou, my God, woulds't die for me?"  I am overcome with emotion and thanksgiving that even after it all, he still accepts us and forgives us and desires intimate fellowship- with us. 

And then in the midst of my wonder and joy, I remember that first question of Moses.  "If I have found favour in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight: and consider that this nation is thy people." (Exodus 33:13)    I realize with a new sense of urgency that God's grace is given not just that I might feel wonderful or find self-actualization or enhanced self esteem.  God's grace is given that I might be transformed into the image of his grace and mercy, and that I might reflect his holiness by walking in accordance with his attitudes and his standards of personal and corporate behavior all the days of my life.  Certainly there is forgiveness and even rapture in serving our God.  And there is also duty to live a life of personal holiness according to the moral law of God proclaimed to us in the scriptures. 

Some of you may be thinking, "Pursley is a crazy fundamentalist!  The next thing you know he will be calling for the institution of some sort of Christian Sharia law!"  Well, I am a sort of a fundamentalist, if fundamentalism is defined in its original pre-Scopes trial sense of "one who holds the tenets of the creeds absolutely without redefinition and who seeks to accept the faith received from Jesus and the Apostles as understood by the holy fathers."  But I would remind you that Paul clearly states that legalism and works righteousness have no place in our faith.  Obedience however, does.  And I would refer you to page 869 of the Book of Common Prayer, Article VII - Of the Old Testament.  Our Church has always taught that the ceremonial law of the Jews was a prophetic declaration of the character of God and of the coming of Christ.  That is why we do not sacrifice animals or celebrate Seders, even though the Old Testament commands both.  We also teach that the civil law of Israel fulfills those same purposes, and that the code of punishments need not "to be received in any commonwealth." Hence we do not stone people caught in adultery or stone unruly and rebellious young men, even though both were the law in ancient Israel.  "Yet not withstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free form the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral."  God's moral behavioural expectations touching our relationship to him and to each other  is the same for Athens and for Jerusalem, now and forever.  As blessed John says in I John chapters one and two,  We have all sinned, and yet Jesus takes care of our sins, and those of all the world.  The evidence that we have been redeemed is that we keep his commandments as written in the word of God, and as we keep those commandments, we are perfected in love, and we truly learn to love each other.

So the end of the matter is this. We are a lot like the ancient Jews, a stiffnecked people.  We have fallen and done some pretty horrible things.  But God loves us and in Jesus Christ he has forgiven us.  He communes with us not as mere subjects or servants, but as friends, and we are given the opportunity to experience him in a way that will transform our outlooks and our behavior as surely as it transformed Moses' visage and caused him to glow with a heavenly light.  Let us now claim our inheritance as the sons and daughters of God.  Let us experience his love and his glory, and his transformation.  And by our commitment to obey his moral law, and by our love for all people and for all he has made, let us proclaim the wonders of his glory to everyone, so that in the end, every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord!  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.