Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, October 11, 2026, The Rev. Angela Compton-Nelson

Israel made a bull calf at Horeb and worshipped a molten image, and so they exchanged their glory for the image of an ox that feeds on grass.

They forgot that God their Savior who had done great things in Egypt, wonderful deeds in the land of Ham, and fearful things at the Red Sea.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

I had to explain to the earlier service that I wasn't actually intentionally avoiding the gospel text today by turning our attention back to Exodus.

But it felt like we had a theme going here.

And I wanted to follow it through a little bit.

The desert is a dangerous place.

There is little food or water there.

The heat of the day, the cold of the night, and the sting of sand-filled wind make it downright uninhabitable at times.

People require access to food and water and shelter and layers of clothing to protect them from cold, sun, and sand.

The desert changes shape with the wind, and it is easy to become lost.

The people of God made their way from the precarity of their existence in Egypt, the site of many generations, a home which was no real home, but was instead the site of their enslavement and still all they knew.

And they moved from this precarity into a life in the wild desert wilderness.

As they look for a gentler place to settle, a true place called home.

The danger of where they are as they follow a god they cannot see begins to settle into their bones.

They are tired, hungry, and thirsty.

While each of these needs is satisfied in turn, it is so in such strange ways, mana collected from dried dew and abundant little birds.

After a very short period of time, the people wonder if trading their precarity in Egypt for precarity in the desert is worth it.

Might it be that they have exchanged one unsafe place for another place more difficult and unsafe still?

What does their freedom mean if they remain always on the edge of life?

While God provides through Moses, God's presence remains difficult to identify and comprehend.

The pillar of cloud and fire both obscure God from the sight of the people at the events of the Exodus.

They have experienced God primarily through God's acts, provision, wonders, and signs through the prophet Moses and through their freedom.

But when God attempts to speak to the people directly from the top of the mountain, they are terrified by what they hear.

The very sound of God's voice rattles the bones, and the people ask Moses, tell God not to talk to us directly again, for we might die.

There's a necessary different distance between the people and God, and it becomes mediated almost entirely by Moses.

But it also obscures God's relationship to the people, in shrouded as it is in a kind of fundamental unknowability.

What does it mean for the people of Israel after living for generations calling out to God seemingly unheard?

And how do they know how to make the transition to being a people who can rightly be called God's own?

After their rescue from Egypt, you might think the people of Israel understand something of what it means to be God's people.

The task of making sense of this, however, will encompass and become the task of generations and lifetimes.

The people of Israel were languishing in Egypt for generations, crying out to God, but when God shows up, they cannot see or touch God and they are not certain what to make of it.

What does it mean to know God, to be in relationship?

Is this God knowable at all?

Can this God even be a companion?

Can this God illumine the dark years that lie ahead?

Are searching in the desert for a place to reside?

What are we to make of the presence of God?

How are these people to learn to live in trusting relationships?

People are looking for a God they can see and touch, a God they can witness, where they can observe cause and effect, a God who can be carried by them, who can accompany them, a God they can worship and love, a God with whom they can celebrate their liberation, a God like the gods of Egypt.

While Moses is away and continues to be away longer than the people can stand, the people turn to Aaron and ask for such a God, and he provides.

Collecting gold from Egypt, from the people's ears and wrists, Aaron casts for the people a calf, an image of a god they can see, touch, and worship.

Aaron casts their desire with the plunder of their enslavement and captivity and makes a God who is visible, knowable, categorizable and controllable.

In short, a God who is made.

This God is an object, not even a creature, and certainly not a creator.

But this is about the furthest thing from the God who brought them up out of their enslavement in Egypt.

The I am who I am, the God who is free, who is known only in action for the people, uncontrollable and invisible to them.

In attempting to make a God they can see and worship, they make a God who can neither see or hear them.

But the irony is that the book of Exodus opens with the God of Israel hearing the cries of the people and turning God's attention to them.

But instead of this God, they recreate their captivity to the imagination of Egypt.

And Exodus, so brilliantly, sets up this paradox for us, a paradox in which two realities about God are just as true for the people of Israel as they are for us.

God is near and unknowable, revealed and hidden.

God acts in ways that make God known while remaining distant, uncontrollable, indescribable, holy other.

This paradox is key for us.

God is made known to us in the incarnation, in bread and wine, in the people of God.

And still mysterious and beyond comprehension.

You can see with some sympathy why Moses steps in to assuage God's anger when the people step out of line.

This mysteriousness is the gift of divine freedom.

But with it comes a tendency and a need to search out or create idols, visible manifestations of security.

For a long time in our own day, that's been just so clear in the context of something like nuclear weapons.

And more recently, I think we're starting to see a kind of similar conversation unfolding around artificial intelligence and other forms of technology.

While searching for something that might free us from the tyranny of labor and the awful tyranny of sickness and disease and in our most extravagant dreams, even death, we've created a technology that now threatens our security and parts of our life which feel deeply human, even good.

But we're too afraid to let go of it because the future that we imagine without it somehow feels worse, playing as it does with our anxieties about geopolitical realities like competition with China or the problems of human life that we might fail to solve.

What if we fail to solve them?

But the answer was always there on the table in our grasp.

And as true as this is for all of these big things like war and artificial intelligence, it's also true for some of the most innocuous tendencies that we have in our lives.

Our lives are ordered in ways that point us away from weakness and inefficiency and slow attention to God.

For some reason, I had a conversation with one of our students at Holy Family who has long since graduated some years ago, and it just has stuck with me.

This student was burdened by an after-school activity that happened every single day for a lot of hours.

And I looked at them and said, So like what would happen if you just stepped back from it?

Impossible.

I absolutely couldn't do that.

Why?

Well, if I step back from it, what will I have then?

What do you mean?

Well, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid that if I don't do this after school activity, or if I step back and do it part way, I won't get a letter.

And that letter won't be the thing that gets me into college.

And it won't be a good college that I get into.

And when I get into that, don't get into that good college, I won't get a great job.

I won't be secure.

I don't highlight this young person because this is like an egregious mistake or anything.

I mean, I ask these questions myself all the time.

What happens if you let this go, Angela?

But I highlight it because I think we recognize it in our own lives.

We grasp for things that secure our future and assure us of safety and stability and security.

There's always something of which we're afraid.

For my student, for our student, it was security and the possibility of financial stability promised by upward mobility in a society where there is little social safety net or sense of common cause, where one's life is not bound to others.

It makes total sense to be afraid.

The problem is that this kind of anxiety is a way that we center things that do not bring peace and stability.

While trying to insulate ourselves from harm and risk, they just don't do that.

Our student felt frazzled and a bit lost, worn out by expectations that weren't really about the thing that they were about.

The existence of these things, it's so inconspicuous and persuasive that it's insidious.

This week, take a few moments and wonder about the patterns that exist in your life that might be just like this.

The patterns that are born of these same questions, a need for answers and security, a need to see God or control outcomes.

Where can we not imagine that God is acting?

So we attempt to direct outcomes out of fear or anxiety.

These are places in our lives where we might find that idolatry is taking hold.

It's a way of naming our reality and securing our future apart from God.

It purports to offer freedom and fear, but in the end, it does no such thing.

It only re-entrences our captivity.

The people of God seek the security of being able to identify and see their God, but in so doing, they find themselves recaptured by the imagination of Egypt.

The beauty and power of this golden calf god, it's an illusion and a lie.

Plundered gold becomes their God.

The wealth generated that depended on their labor that they did not previously have access to, it's been taken up by them and made into a God.

And yes, a God they can see and worship, but a God who cannot see or hear them, and which it must be said finally cannot save them.

Amen.