It starts out cute. “No!” Unless you are the parent, this little word can bring a bit of a grin when it first comes out of a child’s mouth. “No!” means the first step towards developing a sense of a separate self and is a natural part of a child’s growth.
BUT, it does not stay cute for long. Soon it can become a test of wills. Liquefied vegetables end up spit out on the plate. Sippy cups get tossed onto the floor. Little bodies throw themselves on the floor of HEB screaming and fussing. Homework gets shoved off the desk. Doors get slammed. Curfews get disregarded. Sneaking out happens. Cars get “borrowed.” Deadlines are ignored. Words get harshly spoken. Forgiveness withheld. Hearts get hardened and life gets unpleasant.
We were born to be rebellious.
“Go down, for your people, whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I have commanded them,” the LORD says to Moses. (Ex. 32.7-8a) The people turned aside by fashioning a golden calf towards which they offer worship and sacrifice. The people point to this calf as their “gods…who brought [them] up out of the land of Egypt!”
Like a parent with an errant teenager, God desires to throttle his rebellious children. “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.” (vv. 9-10) Thankfully, Moses is able to convince the LORD to show mercy to his people.
In our collect for today we pray that God “drive from us all weakness of body, mind, and spirit.” Most of us do not want to admit weakness – even when the evidence clearly shows we are weak. In fact, in order to deny the discomfort of weakness human nature seeks to lay hold of anything that feels strong. When uncertainty sets, we grab for anything that seems certain, be it money, power, a relationship, food or drink. In the case of Israel, they grabbed for their stock of gold and fashioned a golden calf to be their sign of certainty in a time of uncertainty in the wilderness.
Notice that God does not just call their action a poor decision from which they should learn and not repeat. He declares that the people, his people, have “corrupted themselves.” And when we hear this word, we might want to think beyond just a lack of ethics and morals among political, business and religious leaders the world round. We might want to grab hold of a more archaic definition.
To corrupt means “to altogether break and to decay.” In other words, the people have altogether broken their connection to God by their desire to connect with a false God and now they are in a state of decay. Picture, if you can, a people who exist as living beings yet in a state of physical decay. Think zombies. The price of human rebelliousness is not a spiritual “timeout” or “grounding.” The price of human rebelliousness is to become the “living dead.”
Thus we pray to be delivered from a state of weakness to “being restored to wholeness, [in order that] we may with free hearts become what [God] intend[s] us to be and accomplish what [he] want us to do.” The answer to our weakness is not power grabs but surrender. The remedy for being a spiritual zombie is to forget about a golden calf or anything else we might concoct in our frenzied uncertainty. We should remember who we are, whose we are and who has brought safe thus far. As we continue our march with Jesus toward Jerusalem and the cross, let us hold fast to the certainty of God’s desire for us to be made alive, truly, fully alive, in Christ Jesus our Lord.
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