Sermon by Pastor Seth - September 23, 2026

Exodus 32:7-14

The people grew restless. Frantically awaiting the return of their liberator and leader, wilderness weary and idle at the base of the mountain, the Israelites call upon Aaron to give them something tangible to believe in. Fearing Moses might not come back, without a moment’s hesitation, Aaron obliges — encouraging the masses to disavow themselves of their gilded jewelry. Collecting the clinking gold, he fashions together a golden calf, dedicating the graven image as an object by which to worship the Lord. Anxiety quelled, altar built, and Moses absentee, Aaron organizes a festival for the forgetful Israelites with their newly minted statue as a centerpiece.

Up on the windblown mountain, Moses had just received the divinely kilned stone tablets from the Almighty when this monumental moment suddenly takes a turn for the wrathful. Furious attention set upon the disobedient Israelites and their blasphemous worship, God appears to have a temper tantrum. Threatening fire and violence, Moses is left stuck between a rock and a hard decision — ultimately mustering the courage to advocate on behalf of his people and challenge God to remember the covenant. And, apparently, it works — fire and brimstone averted.

This is a difficult text to read — a God of supposed mercy and grace and steadfast love acting with such fury and vitriol seemingly changing God’s divine mind. As we hear this passage from Exodus 32, I invite us to consider: what change occurs in this story?

Congregational Response

What change occurs in this story?

• God seemingly changes God’s mind
• Can finite beings influence an infinite Divine?
• Moses calling God back into relationship
• Perhaps God was providing an opportunity for Moses to stick up for his community and grow in his leadership
• To love is to affect and be affected by one another
• Importance of where this story ends up; God, in all of God’s power, does not destroy the Israelites

Theological Reflection

In her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, author Anne Lamott shares a piece of wisdom a priest friend shared with her. The priest said, “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.” For as long as religion has existed, humanity has misappropriated doctrine for domination, exegesis for exclusion, worship for war, holiness for hate — all in the name of a god who bears a striking resemblance to the whims and wanes of self interest, hidden agendas, and projected fear. God has been objectified to justify who’s in and who’s out, who gets access to love and who gets a punishing hand as if we could ever fully understand the ways of the Divine. It must be quite a traumatizing and bleak way to live — to isolate one’s soul so fully that God becomes nothing but a vengeful gatekeeper of worth sparsely given out, if at all.

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than it does [God],” the late Thomas Merton reminds us — our understanding of the Divine always filtered through the limited lens of our human experience. This lens often serves as a mirror reflecting back to us what we think and believe about ourselves rather than reflecting who God reveals God’s self to be and who God says we are. What good news that is, too.

I’m not always very kind to myself; we are not always very kind to each other. Out of fear and ignorance, we have the propensity for self-loathing, violence, greed, and if we are not mindful, we can easily project those feelings and attribute — casting God in our own image. It is good news to know that God’s love of us is free from the conditions of love that we place upon ourselves and so much infinitely more than what my insecurity and ego projects it to be. When I can remind myself of this, I am transformed, changed, even if only for a moment. I wonder if this is part of what was happening on top of Mount Sinai as Moses stood between his people and his idea of God.

As an infant, Moses was a political refugee with a hit on him. As a child and young adult, he lived in close proximity to an oppressing power. As an adult, he was marked a murderer and hunted yet again, ultimately called to venture back into the violence of the state in order to liberate his people. Moses’s life was quite the journey, literally and figuratively, defined by the retaliation of outside forces and the desperation that so often and understandably accompanies the need to survive. And he does survive, his people survive, but I wonder how much of the trauma of his lived experience survived in his heart along the way. And I wonder how much of that painted his understanding of God. Perhaps Moses hears wrath from God because his heart is so conditioned to feel deserving of wrath and punishment. As a seminary professor of mine shared with our class: Moses got Israel out of Egypt; but it was another story to get Egypt out of Israel — to liberate Israel, to liberate himself, from their own internalized oppression.

It’s hard to reconcile such violent, threatening, disowning words with a God of love, mercy, and grace. I want to suggest that one way of reading this text is to read it as Moses having a hard time reconciling this as well. I want to suggest that Moses, the survivor, is perhaps working through his own casted image of God and coming to terms with it as not quite congruent with whom God actually reveals God’s self to be. “Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than it does God,” and I think Moses is standing up to his idea of the Divine in a moment of miraculous self-awareness. Perhaps, then, is not the mind of the Almighty that changes in this story but, rather, Moses’s mind that changes regarding the nature of the Almighty.

As Moses is reminding God of God’s covenant, Moses is really reminding himself of God’s covenant — that the nature of the divine is marked not by violence but by steadfast, enduring love, which has always been the case. To quote theologian, Walter Bruggemann, this text calls us to remember that “Justice is only justice when tempered with mercy.” Hearing the words of God through the filter of his own suffered experience, Moses remembers: confronting a coercive, controlling, and forceful image to make way for the covenantal, compassionate, and forgiving nature of God to reflect itself back to him.

This walk of faith calls us into an awareness of our direction of reflection — rather than God being a reflection of our own image, we are created as and called to be a reflection of God’s own image. The former will always be a crude and incomplete sketch, casted in the limited light of projection. Whereas the latter presents itself as a masterpiece of the most transformative quality — calling us back to a God who is love and to a life reflective of that love.

That’s what Jesus did. At the dinner table, He said do this in remembrance of me. In other words, as the incarnation of the divine, do this in remembrance of who I am and who I have always been — a God who interrupts the cycle of violence with an ever continuous brush stroke of love, a God who risks vulnerability and relationship, a God who ever opens God’s own self to us. Christ is not the revelation of a new God, but the revelation of the God that has always been: a God who answers violence with love and who privileges personal relationship over personal vendettas.

In Moses’s moment of self reflection, God reveals God’s self to him in his own capacity to challenge his preconceived notions and to choose compassion. May we, too, be courageous enough to stand up to our ideas of God that do not serve the purpose of love — a love that is liberated from any conditions of lovability we might place upon ourselves, a love that liberates us so we might participate in the liberation of all.