Welcome
So glad you are here, in person, and so glad you are here virtually. It is a joy when we can worship God together. Take some time to gather things that will enhance your worship. Light a candle, open a window, find something to share communion with us.
While you are doing that, just some reminders about what’s coming up: Tonight, on zoom is our book study at 7 p.m. we are looking at the first chapter of “Dear White Christians.”
Three important events in the life of our church are just around the corner. Maybe four:
Next week we are starting a new worship series. Which means we have a worship dream team by zoom on Tuesday evening. Love for you to join us.
Wednesday evening, October 28th, Trunk or Treat in a unique way, watch for details.
On November 1, in the evening, we are planning an all saints worship, more to follow
Saturday, November 7 is the Ordination service for Pastor Ashley
And then Sunday, November 8, after the election, no matter how you vote, no matter the outcome, we will have a morning worship service of prayer and meditation. Using some music from the Taize community in France, we won’t have a sermon, just music, prayers, meditation and communion. I think it will help us set the right tone moving forward. Today we finish our series: “Things are different now.” I know we haven’t wandered in the desert for 40 years …. It just seems that long.
Call to worship
You spoke to Moses, Lord, from a burning bush
You spoke to Elijah, in a still small voice after the earthquake, wind, and fire.
Speak to us, we pray, that we would know your love and grace. Speak to us and we will respond with praise to you and blessings for our neighbors.
Commissioning of our Apprentice Minister
Nancy: This church has a long history of calling people into ministry, both to serve here and to serve on our behalf. Today we call Ashley Dargai to be our Apprentice Minister for the next several months. As a soon to be Ordained Minister, her role will be to learn as much as possible about us, about ministry, and about serving God, in order to lead this church in the coming years as our next Senior Minister.
So we ask you, Ashley, do you accept this call to ministry in this role for a season, seeking to learn and grow with us as we all seek to serve God in the best ways we know how?
Ashley: With the help of God, I do.
Nancy: One role of a minister is to pastor the people like a shepherd cares for her flock. Do you accept the challenge to care for this congregation; to walk with us through our joys and trials?
Ashley: With the help of God, I do.
Nancy: One role of a minister is to lead us in our relationships with God; to teach us and help us create deeper relationships with the divine among us. Do you accept this call to guide us as we journey together with Christ?
Ashley: With the help of God, I do.
Nancy: The prophetic role is often the most difficult. We call you to challenge us when we take our eyes off of the calling we have from God; to remind us of the love of God for all people and to help us find our way back to God. Do you accept this call to remind us of who we are and what we are called to be for the world.
Ashley: In all these ways, I pledge to love you, to care for you, to teach and learn with you, and to help guide this church in ways that will be pleasing to God and be helpful to our neighbors beyond these doors. As we grow together in ministry, I look forward to the ways God’s spirit will move among us.
Nancy: By God’s grace, we welcome you to this new position.
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you. And also with you. (Sign language)
If you have concerns you would like shared with our prayer ministry, please reach out to us through Facebook or email.
For our prayer today, I invite you extend your hands out, palms down, with some jazz fingers.
Join me in prayer:
Holy One of the Mountain, we admit it would be easier if you were the Holy One we could see. If you were the Holy One we could apprise and take stock of, we might feel a little more settled in this wilderness. If we could just get you nestled into something more familiar, something we get our hands on or take a good look at, perhaps we could feel more secure and less like things could change at a moment’s notice. Surely trying to shape You into something recognizable is not such a bad inclination.
Now church, I invite you to put your hands together in a traditional prayer pose, but keep the jazz fingers going, as if something sneaky is afoot.
Yet, Holy One of the Cloud, we realize how easy it is for men and women to think they are doing the right thing and then find themselves at the bottom of the Red Sea, having followed a leader, an ideology, a loyalty into disaster, not feeling the rising tide before it was too late. And we admit how easy it is to forgo the mystery of the One who calls us to liberation for the little domesticated gods who enslave us once more. We confess that these little gods calling for our loyalty often parade as religious, pious, righteous things.
Now church, still your fingers.
Help us to wait just a little longer for You to make Yourself known among us. We’re not asking for patience to last us a lifetime or even a steadfast year. Rather, help us wait until the next piece of daily bread to find Your mercies with the morning dew.
For our final posture, bring your hands to your heart in a posture of devotion with your head bowed.
And Holy One, we pray softly the prayer together that Jesus, our brother and redeemer gave us to hold onto:
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen.
Children’s Message
*Set up little shrine*
My daughter Annie has been setting up these little shrines for a long time. A shrine is a special space we set up to someone or something we love. Her most recent set up is this little lamb from a nativity set on top of a wooden block, behind a plastic block. With the top of a acorn on it as a hat.
I loved finding this construction because it made Annie so mysterious to me. Like what made her arrange her toys this way? Why is she so obsessed with acorns? What made her leave this shrine as is and not tear it down for playtime?
In today’s story, we hear about how Moses was meeting God on the mountain and the Hebrew people were getting impatient. Then finally asked Aaron, Moses’ brother, to help them build a golden calf to worship.
Of course, this made God very upset because remember the 10 commandments? No images of God, no idols! Already, the Hebrew people were breaking the rules.
I think sometimes we think of idols like these little shrines Annie sets up. Like if I said instead of worshiping God, we’re going to sing hymns to this little lamb with an acorn and pledge our loyalty to him and bring our offering to him.
But these days, our idols don’t look like that. Maybe what God is trying to say with the commandments of no idols and no images of God is that we can’t fully understand or explain God. God has a lot of energy and a lot of ideas. God is like the kid in your class who is always moving and probably gets in trouble for talking. Maybe that’s you. God always meets us, but God is on the move. God was teaching the Hebrew people to be on the move because not settling down means you have to trust the person who is leading you.
Jesus will say much later that the Holy Spirit is like the wind—you can’t catch her or predict where she’ll go next. You just have to follow wherever she blows like a wild goose chase.
This doesn’t mean you can’t try to draw God or set up a place in your room that helps you think of God. Those can be really helpful! It just means that we can’t control God and we should be suspicious of those who try to.
Let’s pray.
For our prayer, I want you to spread your arms like a tree and move them around like wind is blowing through them.
God of the mountain, your movement is so inspiring! We love that You are a creative, energetic God, always on the move. Help us learn to love to be surprised by You rather than trying to tame You. When we start to miss You or church or normal times, help us to close our eyes and let the wind remind us Your Spirit is always near us. Help us to love You, our wild God, who knows our name. In Jesus name we pray, amen.
Scripture
Our scripture is from the 32nd chapter of Exodus. As you listen, I invite you to count the number of times this specific phrase occurs: “Brought us up out of the land of Egypt.”
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.” 2Aaron 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.” 3So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. 4He 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!” 5When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” 6They 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.
7The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8they 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!
9The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.” 11But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. 13Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’“ 14And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
This is the word of God, for all the people of God, … Thanks be to God.
Sermon
I feel like we’ve come into the story in the middle. Dana hates it when I come into the room in the middle of a show she is watching. I usually sit quietly for a few minutes, trying to catch up to the plot as it’s unfolding, … but inevitably, I’ll ask, “Who is this person?” “Why are they going down that road?” Isn’t it obvious he has nothing to do with this investigation?” At which point, she will pause the show, slowly turn to me, and echoing the immortal words recently spoken she will say, “Will you shut up, man?!”
I do it less often than I used to.
I feel that way as we approach this story today. I have to admit that I don’t remember preaching about the Golden Calf before, so thank you?, I think, for this challenge. But before we get to this passage, we need some context.
All the way back in Exodus 5:1, Moses told Pharaoh that they wanted to go into the desert to worship God. And the problem for the Israelites from that moment to now, is that they haven’t seen the Lord. God has been invisible. Sure, they have seen The Lord’s work. mana, quail, water from a rock, but they haven’t seen God. God has led them by a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night … but smoke clouds things, hides things, and fire is unapproachable. Even here, at the foot of this mountain, they were promised they would hear God’s voice. Something any of us would crave on a daily basis, Exodus 19
Verse 9: Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after.’
Verse 11: and prepare for the third day, because on the third day the Lord will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.
Verse 16: On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled.
And just when you thought they might see something or someone, we have verse 21: Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down and warn the people not to break through to the Lord to look.’
They’ve come a long way, and still, they do not get to see the Lord.
Moses goes up the mountain, there’s lightening, there’s thunder, and … a month goes by. And then … ten days more. … “Aaron,” the people call out, “Where is this Moses, who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, in case you were wondering which Moses we meant.”
“We were promised a private audience with this God, and it has been several months now.”
“We don’t know this Moses. But we know you. Make us something that we can see and touch and we will follow that through the desert.”
Who brought them out of the land of Egypt? At first we read Moses, then Aaron says, “behold the gods who …” God reminds Moses that Moses brought them out, but finally Moses said to God, “you brought them out.” Perhaps the emphasis on the last words “Land of Egypt,” is there to help them make a clean break. Maybe the original intent of collecting the jewelry (which they had taken from their Egyptian masters) was to help them make a final break with the past. The golden calf was an unfortunate result of something that might have started off well.
“You, O Lord, brought them out, not to perish, but to flourish,” … What is the purpose of this little thing called Exodus? “You brought them out, O Lord, to be a nation of priests so that all might come to a relationship with you.”
If you meditate on that phrase, brought us out of the land of Egypt, You begin to internalize. I’m not there anymore. Things are different now. I belong to God and to God’s people, and I’m never going back to the old me and the old way of life.
The golden café is symbolic. They are no longer tied to Egypt by chains, not even gold chains. However, they are not yet fully formed into followers of God. The golden calf is the transitional moment, when they break with their past and begin a different journey through the wilderness, learning to trust God. They believed in Moses, who said he spoke for God; But now, they will relate to God without the intermediary.
Things are different now. I am different now. My identity now is rooted, founded, committed in my relationship with God.
One summer night at church camp, several years ago when I was in middle school, my small group headed out to our home in the woods for our last group time. We would head back to the real world the next morning. Phil Campbell was one of our group leaders. He led our small group in communion. I’d had communion dozens of Sundays before this, so that wasn’t unique. I still remember the words he said, but they weren’t as important as him just being there. Phil wasn’t a minister. He took vacation time off from his job so that he could be at camp with a bunch of crazy, wild, hormonal, off the wall, painfully awkward, barely teenagers. Sometime, during those words, things became clear to me. This wasn’t the faith of the people paid to lead us on Sunday mornings. This wasn’t a relationship with my parents’ faith. This wasn’t just something I would do one hour a week.
This God presence is 24/7, waking sleeping, it affects and aligns everything about me. I didn’t need to be standing at the foot of a mountain, or kneeling before whatever 70’s version of a golden calf looked like (It looked like a sting ray bicycle with a banana seat). This unseen, invisible God was working through ordinary people, calling them to care, to love, to offer themselves in service to something greater. I’d been baptized a few years before, but it was at that summer camp where my baptism started making sense for me.
Think with me for a moment, of the person who introduced God to you. Someone took you to church for the first time, someone read a bible story to you. Maybe your parents, maybe grandparents, maybe a friend. Someone said, “You should consider …” And at a certain point this Jesus, became real for you.
Please pray with me.
Communion
In communion with Christ, we are joined with the trials and sufferings of all. This morning we pray that through Christ we too would be with those who endure the wind, rain, and flooding from Hurricane Delta. As we come to this Table in spirit and we pray to the Lord: Protect those in the path of danger, open the pathways of evacuations, help loved ones find one another in the chaos, provide assistance to those who need help. May Christ’s presence be known to all those who are fearful and discouraged, just as He makes His presence known in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup – at this Table and around the world, in every nation, among every people. These are the gifts of God for God’s people! Let us come with joy and gratitude and hope.
As we journey through the Old Testament, reminded of God’s presence on the journey to freedom, his steadfast love and patience, he reminds the Israelites to take care of themselves and each other. He reminds them to observe the Sabbath. We gather each week at this table to honor the night Jesus was betrayed. He broke the bread and said, “This is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
And then he took the cup also and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Drink it in remembrance of me.
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” All are welcome at the Table of Christ.
Join in me prayer.
Holy One of this table, loving God, protector. Time presses on and we continue to see crime and disaster occur. If we feel overwhelmed, frightened, or empty may we remember to turn to you, to turn to this table, to fill us with a reminder of your unending love and acceptance. May we use these gifts from you to persevere. In Jesus name we pray, amen.
Sharing our resources
Your gifts make this ministry happen. Pastor Ashley and I met a woman Tuesday, who was looking for groceries. Your gifts allow us to share this worship with the world. We are in touch with people around the world through your gifts. But more than the money, your presentation of Christ to your neighbors brings a word of hope, a moment of encouragement, you are planting seeds of kindness where ever you are. So my encouragement to you is “Keep it up.” You will find ways to give financially in the comments listed below. For those of you here, we have an offering plate as you leave. And I challenge you to find a way to minister to one of your neighbors this week.
Benediction
Lightening, and the thunder that follows, remind us that there are forces in the universe greater than our own. Help us find strength in our relationship with you, in order to weather the storms of life, and in order to help our neighbors find their way back to you. Amen