Sermon 2022.09.11
Rev. Wesley Menke
Finding the Face of God
There may come a time in your life when you will yearn to see the face of God, but God’s face will be hidden from you sight: nowhere to be found. This happened to Moses. It used to be that Moses would talk to God face to face; like friends. God first spoke to Moses directly from the burning bush on top of Mount Sinai. Then God would speak to Moses in other ways, including from a pillar of smoke outside of his tent. You could imagine something between a tornado and dust devil from which God would appear and speak to Moses. Then one day it all changed. Moses was no longer able to see God face to face. God said to Moses that nobody could look on the face of God without dying. So God explained that the closest Moses could get would be to look at God’s back.
So why the change in Moses’ relationship with God? Why was the closeness and intimacy cooled? Well, the thing is, Moses had a bit of an anger problem; and sometimes his anger would get the best of him so that he would lash out and hurt people. Moses even killed people. You will remember that he killed an Egyptian when he was a young man living as an adopted prince. Then there was the incident with the golden calf of which we read about in Exodus 32.
So Moses is up on the mountain with God, talking face to face for a long time. The people get restless and maybe a little jealous. So Aaron, Moses’ brother makes a golden calf as a focal point for the people to worship. In the movie The 10 Commandments, which bears a strong influence in our collective imagination, we envision idolatry, but it’s not that simple. There is archeological evidence to suggest that a calf or bull could have been used as a kind of “mount” on which the invisible God would have stood or sat; not unlike the cherubim mounted on the ark of the covenant. Either way, God doesn’t like it, and God gets angry with the people. God threatens to punish them. But what does Moses say? Moses pleads with God not to punish them severely. So God relents and Moses goes back down the mountain. What happens next?
You remember how Moses had an anger problem? Well no sooner after he gets down, he makes the people drink the pulverized gold from the calf. Then he rallies a group of people with swords to go out and slaughter their own people. It’s a kind of civil war: brother against brother. It’s completely brutal. It’s also totally hypocritical. Moses did the very thing he pleaded God not to do. When the dust settles, and the blood stops flowing, the people of God have to regroup and start over. They suffered terribly not from the hand of God, not from a foreign army, but from within. It was after this incident that God took a break from showing their face directly to Moses.
Psalm 51 says, “Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my wickedness.” You, like Moses, are without a doubt, saved by grace through faith, and not by works. God is patient with Moses, never tiring of teaching him, of believing that he can keep growing and becoming a better person. God believes the same thing for you.
1 Timothy 1:14 is a testimony to that apostle’s growth by Grace. They write, “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” Moses wasn’t the first or the last human to be called to peaceful faith in action inspired by God’s grace. You are called to have faith that each living human being is a sacred creature made in the image of God to which you devote your life to care for, even when they make you angry and at a loss to understand their motives.
The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin are an ethical teaching of Jesus about this very thing. You are to see yourself both as one who has been lost; and the one who searches out. When you lose your way God won’t abandon or punish you, but will seek you out. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind but now I see.” So if you see, if you have been found, you are now called to let go of your anger; and take up the calling to search, to find the lost, and to bring them back, and to rejoice. You will see the face of God again or maybe for the first time in those whom you find; and perhaps even in your enemies. Amen.
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