Other Scripture used:
Exodus 32:1,7-14
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Psalm 51:1-18
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. God, grant me the Serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the Courage to change the one I can, and the Wisdom to know it’s me.
Naval aviation training includes an indoctrination session in what looks like a ride from some amusement park. The device takes up an entire huge room, and has individual containers attached to a larger wheel, allowing the person inside to be spun in multiple directions as the main wheel spins around. It’s also pitch black inside, except for a tiny pinpoint of red light you’re told to focus on so you can report whether the light moved left or right. And most of the time, we get it wrong.
The official name of the training mechanism is the “Multispatial Disorientation Device,” but no one ever calls it that. Everyone refers to it by the more popular nickname: “Spin and Puke.”
Its purpose is to let you feel what it’s like when your eyes and your inner ear, which controls your balance, are fooled either by darkness or clouds or g-forces. The future pilots learn that if they trust their own eyes and ears and instincts, they will crash and die because our bodies are easily fooled. Flight instruments are not so easily fooled. So the students learn to trust their instruments and live, or trust themselves and die.
Our reading in Exodus today shows what happens when we rely on ourselves instead of the instruments of salvation that God provides.
The Israelites had witnessed ten plagues while they were slaves in Egypt. After the final plague killing the first-born of everyone who did not follow the guideline the Lord gave Moses for Passover, the Egyptians even gave the Israelites gold and jewels as they sent them out of Egypt to be free.
When Pharaoh changed his mind and sent his army after them, the Israelites saw the waters of the sea open up so they could all pass through on dry ground, and then saw the sea close back up on top of the Egyptian army.
They had seen God’s presence when they were instructed in building the tabernacle, a portable temple in the wilderness to worship God. They had seen the consecration of Aaron as their priest and the offerings and sacrifices each day.
As Moses went up the mountain, receiving the Ten Commandments from God, these same Israelites became anxious because they believed Moses was taking to long.
So they went to Aaron to explain the situation and find a way to calm everyone down. And like a typical human leader, Aaron chose the path of least resistance.
The Lectionary leaves out verses 2-6, but I think it’s important for us to realize that Aaron’s actions had a disastrous effect on God’s people — and he was the highest ranking clergy member there. Verses 2-6 read,
"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 the gold from them, formed it 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 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."
Aaron wasn’t trying to do something evil, he was actually trying to keep God’s people quiet and at peace with each other until his brother Moses could come back down the mountain with a better idea.
The people were used to worshipping golden statues of various animals in Egypt, so this Golden Calf could focus their attention again. And if they were all focused on worshipping something, even if it’s the wrong thing, at least it’s worship — and that means their hearts are in the right place doesn’t it?
We hear the same thing today, don’t we? “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe in something,” “all religions are true and lead to God,” “being a good person is all that matters, not what you believe.”
But those ideas, just like Aaron’s idea about the golden calf, are examples of following our own idea of what’s good or bad, instead of obeying God’s idea of what’s good and bad. The Book of Common Prayer, on Page 848, defines sin as seeking after our own will instead of the will of God.
On our own, we get it wrong every time. When we let God lead us, we always get it right. Aaron wasn’t the only one who forged a golden calf. We create our own today as well.
Try finding someone without a television today. There are a few of them, but not many. We spend more time watching television than worshipping God, reading the Bible, singing praise songs, and talking to our family combined. It’s not even close.
We create a golden calf of fashion — does anyone not competing in the Olympics really need sneakers that cost $140? Besieds, the winner of most of the marathons is usually some barefoot guy from Kenya, yet we buy Johnny his $200 Nikes with the air pump and DVD player in the heel.
All along the highway we see BMW’s, Mercedes, and similar luxury cars. They used to be a rare occurrence, but as more people get more disposable income, these cars have become more popular status symbols to shout to the rest of the world how important we are. Just how much car do you really need to go from “Point A” to “Point B”?
The BMW 7-series, for example, costs about $125,000 fully loaded. Mercedes CL is about $140,000.
Luxury cars comprise about 13 percent of the new car sales market. In about half our states, you can buy a house for less than the price of a luxury car. Is that really what God wants us to do with the resources he provides us?
It’s been said that our checkbook shows what we really worship. We all probably have some good-sized golden calves of our own listed in our registers.
Like the Israelites, and like Aaron, when we do things on our own without listening to God, we wander off, away from what he intends for us. But when we let him into our hearts, he leads us back to where we should be, following his will instead of our own. Being willing instead of willful.
Our Psalm today asks God to wash away our sins and create a clean heart within us. None of us are beyond his reach and none of us has a heart so blackened that God cannot clean it.
The Apostle Paul was a high-ranking Pharisee who imprisoned Christians and even helped execute them. Yet as soon as he accepted Jesus as Lord, his heart was changed and he became one of the most dedicated evangelists in the Bible, writing 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament, more than half, and four of them from a prison cell.
God is continually reaching out to us, but we have to stop wandering away from him and let him carry us back to the fold. He loves each of us so much that he will not drag us back against our will. But the first step is admitted we’re lost, just like the sheep in our Gospel reading. Sheep wander off and get lost because they’re stupid. We know better and still do it anyway, so I’m not sure just how smart that makes us.
Daniel Boone was one of our nation’s pioneers who explored the great wilderness of Tennessee and Kentucky. Boone marked the Wilderness Road that brought settlers into the new land. He often wandered through the woods, living off the land and dodging arrows and other dangers. Someone once asked him if he’d ever been lost.
He replied, “No. I was a mite confused once for about three or four days though!”
If our pride keeps us from admitting that we are lost without Christ, we become stuck in our sin, following our own way, further and further away from Jesus.
As soon as we turn to Jesus, he is there. He came here to search for us; to rescue us. To bring us back to life with our heavenly Father who loves us so much. Even though we rebelled against him, and violated his laws, he forgives us and welcomes us back home. Paul’s statement in his letter to Timothy is really the heart of the Gospel: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”
So we see first the searching, followed by the saving, and then the singing.
The Pharisees were willing to damn anyone who didn’t meet their standards of what a follower of the Lord should be, even though they didn’t meet the standard themselves.
The tax collectors paid the taxes to the Roman Emperor for their town or village in advance, and were free to collect whatever amount they wanted from the people there, and most of them opted to get a hefty profit for themselves.
The Jews hated the tax collectors for two reasons then: first, for even helping the Roman oppressors by collecting taxes, and second, for stealing money from their fellow Jews in addition to taking the legitimate taxes.
The tax collectors were so hated, they were forbidden to enter the Temple. A Jew who couldn’t enter the Temple couldn’t provide the required sacrifices and offerings, and no priest would ever atone for his sins. Other sinners were also barred — likewise for lepers and people with any physical deformities.
Also, sharing a meal or eating with someone was a spiritual event to the Israelites, something that created a bond of strong fellowship. That’s why the Pharisees were so particular about whom they ate with; they would never create a spiritual bond with the same people they prohibited from entering the Temple.
Yet these were precisely the lost people Jesus came to reach. The Pharisees, like Daniel Boone, were also lost but refused to admit it even to themselves. But Jesus came for each and every one of them — and for each and every one of us.
Jesus mentions the joy in heaven over the repentance of just one sinner. Choirs of angels singing praises for each person who has chosen to join them in heaven for eternity. The sheer unmitigated, absolute happiness that reverberates throughout heaven whenever one of us stops going our own way and lets our shepherd lead us home.
In an article for Christianity Today (10/6/1997) Philip Yancey wrote:
A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts.
They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. “I hate you!” she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.
She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, drugs, and violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her.
California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.
Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay.
He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before.
She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun. The good life continues for a month, two months, a year.
The man with the big car — she calls him “Boss” — teaches her a few things that men like. Since she’s underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse and orders room service whenever she wants.
Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there.
She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline, “Have you seen this child?” But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child.
Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit. After a year, the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name.
She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and all the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores.
“Sleeping” is the wrong word — a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.
One night, as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry. She needs a fix.
She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat.
Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.
God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.
Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”
It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them?
Even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.
Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault, it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?”
She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.
The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the road, and the asphalt steams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard, a sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.
When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life.
She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice — if they’re there.
She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect, and not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepares her for what she sees.
There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of 40 brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot.
They are all wearing ridiculous-looking party hats and blowing noisemakers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads “Welcome home!”
Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad.
She looks through tears and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know . . .” He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home.”
There’s a party going on for us also. A banquet awaits us in heaven. “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” That’s us. Christ Jesus came into the world to save each and every one of us. He wants to save every single one of us. If we will just turn toward him, we’ll see that he’s reaching out to us.
None of us is so bad we can’t be forgiven; and none of us is so good we don’t need to be.
We, like sheep, have gone astray. And it doesn’t always have a happy ending. There are many wolves out there, and they just love to get lost sheep in their midst. Sheep who are not rescued are lost to the wolves. They die because they can’t save themselves. Sheep against wolf is guaranteed defeat for the sheep every time. Yet some sheep still think they can succeed without the shepherd.
God became human and died among the wolves in our place, so that we can return to the pasture. Our shepherd is calling for us. Listen for the sound of his voice and turn to him.
We don’t have to stay in Detroit.
God Bless You.
