June 21, 2026 · Rev. Rick Spalding · Exodus 32:1-20; Matthew 22:15-22
In a final week with the congregation, Rev. Rick Spalding takes on the golden calf: frightened people melting down their jewelry into a god they can make themselves, and Moses smashing the tablets. Set beside Jesus' answer about Caesar's coin, it's a call to 'rethink our people' and to see God's image, not Caesar's, in every face.
Transcript
We've been making our way through some stories in the book of Exodus, the long journey of the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt and toward their land of promise. We've been doing this out of a sense that churches sometimes go through challenging journeys of their own, from the known into the unknown. And it must be said in this season that nations do that too. Sometimes doing this, marking this path also out of a sense that while you're trying to get to where you can be who you are meant to be, it's good to pay attention to the things that you learn along the way, so that when you get to where you're going, you can live more wisely and deeply with all that you learned while getting there.
So we began two weeks ago with Moses at the burning bush. And then we met him again in the desert last week, where the people cried out, fearing that God had abandoned them in their thirst. There are so many other Exodus stories we could tell. Crossing the Red sea, manna in the wilderness, the giving of the Ten Commandments, and eventually the story of crossing the River Jordan into the Promised Land. I only have this week left with you, so I had to make a tough choice among all those stories. And I took a deep breath and I chose a tough story. One of the most brilliantly told stories in the whole good book, and I think one of the most timely.
So as I read the story now of the Golden Calf, I invite you to consider again the remarkable fact that tradition chose to preserve this story at all in the collection of sacred stories that we tell about ourselves and God. As this story begins, the people Israel are encamped at the base of the mountain that we've learned can be called either Sinai or Horeb. And this is after they've all heard the voice of God speak Thunderously the Ten Commandments. Moses, we're told, then climbed to the top of the mountain by himself at God's invitation, presumably to gather strength from God for leading the journey onward from there. What happened while Moses was gone has inscribed itself permanently on us.
From Exodus chapter thirty two. 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 your ears, the. The ears of your wives, your sons, your daughters, and bring them to me. So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he took the gold from them and formed it in a mold and cast an image of a calf. And the people 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 made a proclamation and said, tomorrow shall be a festival. 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 then 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. But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say it was with evil intent that he brought them up to kill them on the mountains, and then to consume them from the face of the earth. Oh, 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, I will multiply your descendants like the stars of the heavens. And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he had 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, the work of God, the writing, the writing of God engraved upon the tablets. As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hand 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. The word of the Lord. I guess.
Like Moses, I often find that having had only one chance to hear something that seems likely to end up being really important, it helps me to see it in writing. So I sympathize with Moses's trip up the mountain after hearing God speak the Ten Commandments allowed to get a hard copy, but he's gone for a full forty days and forty nights long enough that the people encamped at the base of the mountain start to worry, and then their fear metastasizes to anger as fear. So often does this man Moses. We do not know what has become of him. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last that they feel suffocatingly alone on this dangerous journey of theirs, but this time moves them to a new level of desperation.
If you remember from Sunday School or somewhere else, the first of the ten precepts that God gave them, it was I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of slavery, and you shall have no other gods before me. If you remember that, then maybe you gasp when you hear the people redirect their fearful distress at Aaron, their priest, and say, up, make for us gods who shall go before us. We're tired of absence. Do something.
Now I think you have to feel for Aaron and the spot that this puts him in, in the heat of the moment. He forges an astute political maneuver. Give me whatever you've got. That's precious, he says to the people. And when they hand him their bits and pieces of jewelry, he melts them together to form something that he hopes can be enough, bigger than the sum of its parts, to stand as a tangible emblem of their self-sufficiency. That says back to them, we've got this. We have it within ourselves to make as much of a god as we need.
Well, we're not just at the bottom of the mountain of God. We're at the bottom of their whole religious history. To many faithful Jewish readers, what happened there at the base of the mountain makes the business in Genesis with Adam and Eve and the apple look like small potatoes.
When I was old enough to start noticing things in the Presbyterian Church of my childhood, one of the things I remember was being prickled by a prayer that we often used to say together in unison as part of the service. In retrospect, now I understand that it was what we called the prayer of confession, though at the time I hadn't yet figured out that that was a thing. Some of you may recognize this prayer. Even to this day, I think I can say it by heart.
Almighty and most merciful father. We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults, restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto humankind in Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.
If it makes you feel a little more comfortable as Presbyterians to look as as Congregationalists. Sorry to look at the Presbyterians over there saying that prayer. So be it. There are some harsh turns of phrase, aren't there? Miserable offenders? No health in us. And I think there are phrases that hit the target in a way that kind of takes your breath away. We have left undone those things which we ought not to have done, which we ought to have done. Well, I didn't learn it well enough, did I? We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.
That prayer, which, by the way, comes from the sixteen sixty two Book of Common Prayer. So it really speaks from the heart of the same Reformation where our roots lie. That prayer started lumbering around in my memory as I worked through the story of the Golden calf, how the people had indeed succumbed to desires to do those things which they ought not to have done, and ended up worshipping one of their own devices, an all too familiar temptation for soothing insecurity, or prosecuting an anger or filling a chasm in the soul. There, in the Exodus wilderness, the freedom seeking people have been given in the providence of God, manna to sustain them, and water from a rock, and precepts to live by. Ten of them, in fact, to teach them to keep their eyes on things that matter, to tune their hearts to each other. To trust things worthy of trust. And then, no more than the turn of a page or two later. There they are, cashing it all in for whatever value they can melt out of their jewelry.
And there's no turning away from the horror show that follows. We have to watch Moses try to talk God out of giving up on us all together, and then watch Moses take the hard copy of those words God gave us to live by and listen to. How poignantly the literary genius Robert Alter almost literally translates these particular verses the two tablets of the covenant written on both their sides. On the one side and the other, they were written, and the tablets God's doing they were. And the writing, God's writing, it was inscribed on the tablets. So we have to watch while Moses lofts those tablets tenderly written in God's own hand into the air and smashes them in a fit of despair. And then finally. And isn't this incredible? Watch as Moses grinds the golden effigy that they thought would save them into powder, and sprinkles it on whatever sparse water they've got and makes them drink it? If this is all the God you need, think again.
A tough story takes a tough church to think about it. The contemporary theologian Willie Willie James Jennings has written that the purpose of our religious engagement together ought to be to enter the struggle to rethink our people, which is to say, to think critically about who we've become and to think hard about who in God's name we want to be. Remembering the story. Standing again among the shards of the broken tablets so tenderly engraved, we enter the struggle at the point of noticing the perennial human tendency to worship things that are not worthy of worship. And we can all name some, can't we? And the pattern of following too much, the devices and desires of our own hearts, and the habits of indifference lately to bearing false witness as though lying were a completely legitimate strategy for staying one step ahead, or for holding on to the power that you've coveted, or the wealth or the status and the perilous failure to recognize that hatred can be another, more accessible form of the murder, that the commandments prohibit, commandments that still lie in shards. We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. And it is time, says the Exodus journey. It will always be time to re-enter the struggle to rethink our people.
There's a little moment in Matthew's gospel that you heard just now, when some of Jesus's enemies come to him to entrap him. They've thought up a trick question is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? Either. They figure Jesus will incriminate himself as a traitor to the Jewish people by saying that it's fine to acknowledge the tyrant emperor who claims to be divine. That would make him a blasphemer, or else that he'll make himself a traitor to the Empire by saying that it's blasphemy to pay because only God rules. Jesus asks to see one of the coins they'd use, and they fish one out of their pockets, a coin that would have had stamped on it. Not only Caesar's likeness, but Caesar's title. It says in the text Caesar's title, August and Divine One. The adversaries lean in. Are you a blasphemer or a seditionist? But in the heat of the moment, Jesus forges an idea for an astute ethical maneuver. He hands the coin back and asks them, well, whose image do you see here? And then pulls out his brilliant line, rendered to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.
But there's another question that we're meant to hear in the background of that exchange. It doesn't get written into the narrative, but we need to remember to hear it. The question and whose image do you see? Everywhere else, you look in every face, in every life, in every moment. Whose image do you see? Oh, Caesar can stamp his golden picture and pedigree far and wide. But that doesn't come anywhere near the true commerce of our moral economy. True, many or most of the coins will end up passing through Caesar's little hands, and he'll be flattered as they go by how well his likeness is rendered in the medium of cold, hard cash. But before too long, Caesar's empire, too, will lie in shards of its own at the foot of the mountain of history. Meanwhile, Jesus is trying to say, the coin of the realm of our flesh and blood is the image of God, a truth about us that we need to rethink time and time again. So we meet here each week to read the writing inscribed on the world, and to recommit ourselves to living the godly, righteous and sober life that he called us to when he called us blessed. Blessed are you. Baptism is the watermark of our true spiritual currency. And Jesus stands behind it with full faith and credit.
In the end, Jesus says, each one of us has to consider the things of the world, the things that the world and our faith are trying to inscribe on us. And each one of us has to re-enter the struggle to rethink those things as at the foot of the mountain. So also here and as way back then in biblical times. So even now, in semiquincentennial times, if the aggregate of what we have in our pockets. Is God enough for us? Well, then, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the bitter taste left in our mouths when we've drunk our fear, drunk our fill of fear and anger, as the Israelites learned at the foot of the mountain, staring at the broken shards of the first copy of the covenant that ended up saving their lives. And as we keep recommitting to learning here together week by week, it all depends on who we decide we belong to. When we rethink our people.
So the journey winds on. It began and it begins again. When we ask ourselves, who am I? And continues when Jesus calls us blessed and reminds us to see the divine image in every face around us. The journey is our calling, all of ours, and it is yours now, particularly in this important year ahead for your church to keep re-entering the struggle to govern ourselves and our institutions by the precepts that inscribe life and equality and generosity and empathy. Not all of the journey will be smooth. I need hardly tell you. And the future doesn't belong to us as a possession. It belongs to God and we inhabit it as a blessing. Blessed are you. We remember him saying. And our gratitude for that blessing isn't how the story ends. It's where it starts.
The freedom and equality that we have longed for since the days of bondage and tyranny, and have set our sights on all this time. Those gifts are still out ahead, and as we make our way along the road home, the prayer is still as the first hymn had it. Oh Lord, make us free. And our true freedom begins. When we open our eyes to see each other the way Jesus saw us. That's the work we've been chosen for. You've been chosen for in this, our piece of God's sweet time. And may God bless us in that time. Amen.