Home of Parrish W. Jones

The Quick Fix

by Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.

©2005. All rights reserved.

 

Psalm 106:1-23

Exodus 32:1-14

Matthew 22:1-14

I am beset with impatience. I'm not impatient with people. I've even had people tell me I'm too patient with people. I'm impatient with things and myself. I'm most impatient in traffic. If I did not consistently pray the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5, I believe I would be a perpetrator of road rage. I hate traffic lights and traffic, not a good problem when commuting 40 miles each way. Fortunately, I have about 5 lights on the District end and about that many on this end coming on 610 and only one on Courthouse. I am also impatient with being sick. I once had to take a pill a day for three months for a toenail fungus. I wanted a shot that would take care of it in one or two days.

Our culture nurtures and exploits that attitude in us. A large measure of advertising is geared toward selling us something that will eliminate our problems in moments and carry us immediately into a heavenly state. Yet, there is nothing new about that.

We find the people of Israel still camped at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Since our reading last week, they have received much more law from God who expands on the commandments to mark out more specifics about each. Moses also receives and begins the process of carrying out the instructions for an appropriate portable worship center that is called the Tabernacle. Those instructions include the Ark of the Covenant and mercy seat. To assure the liturgical life of the community God has Moses appoint Aaron priest over the people.

That seems odd because it is this priest, Aaron, who is to assure liturgical fidelity who succumbs readily and willingly to the first recorded call for departing from that fidelity. I guess that should be a comfort to ministers who have a similar call when they readily let worship become focused on consumer needs instead of divine office. We'll get back to that.

Notice that the transgression of the first two commandments takes place out of anxiety about Moses' absence. Indeed, 40 days is a long time to climb a mountain and talk with God. Who would not become anxious?

Moses is absent. Moses has been for the people the voice of Yahweh. His absence implies to the people the absence of God. Moses was for all intents and purposes the Golden Calf.

 We miss the point of this lesson if we focus on the Golden Calf which may not have been terribly imposing. It is the idea of creating a god to lead you that is at issue. That issue leads us to notice some things about these people and ourselves.

We are prone to create Golden Calves of the mind as John Calvin wrote. We often pray that God will give us something we have built up in our minds.A few weeks ago the guest preacher at the 11:00 service spoke of the idol of the family. We have a view of the perfect family that will bring us happiness. When our family fails to be what we had idealized, we are disappointed and inclined to flee. As I tell couples who are preparing to marry, in the past people had gotten married primarily for economic and practical reasons and hoped for romance. Now we get married for romance and are disappointed if marriage is not the romantic trip we expected.

We pray for children and imagine perfect children with bright minds and futures. We tend to worship that image instead of praying that God would grant children and help us be prepared for the children we get with all their warts and deficiencies.

We must be careful that we do not go down that road in regard to a possible minister. Ministers do churches a disservice when they build a climate of indispensability around themselves. As one of our members remarked a few weeks ago, the grave yard is full of indispensable people. Yet, our anxiety as a church over the need to call a new installed minister as quickly as possible may represent the Golden Calf syndrome. Please notice, I said "may."

We have to be careful about Golden Calf's because many of them as John Calvin liked to point out simply live in our minds. Ministers are not saviors. There is only one Savior, one Lord, one Redeemer, one Founder of the Church, one Messiah, and that is Jesus Christ. While we believe that churches need ministers, church members are more necessary to the health and vitality of the church than any minister.

I have been impressed at SPC more than any other church I have served at the number of articulate and biblically and theologically well educated persons there are here. There is also a host of well trained and equipped persons with other gifts necessary for the future health of this church. In short this church needs no Golden Calf in the form of a minister.

Since most Golden Calves are images, ideas, fantasies of the mind, we do not need those ministerial fantasies. No minister can fulfill them and they simply assure disappointment. Few ministers are as handsome as Tom Cruise is or Bryan Jennings was nor as beautiful as Penelope Cruise or Kate Kouric. Most cannot have my good looks but are doomed to sort of mediocre appearance.

As I've said to some, about 5% of ministers are exceptional and about 5% are sorry. The other 90% are about average. The five percent of exceptionable ministers are hard to find and harder to get. That does not mean you will get a bad minister, it simply means you will not get the Apostle Peter or Paul, but if you did you probably wouldn't like them. You already have Jesus and like the people of Israel you have trouble over that.

Just as with all other things, we often pray for our idealized idol of the mind instead of praying that God will send the minister that SPC needs and you may need for the kind of spiritual growth you still need to do.Then when a minister comes who does not meet our expectations, we are disappointed and let down, and we blame her or him for not being our idol. So I challenge you to pray that God prepare you and SPC for the blessing of the kind of minister that you need.

The other point I'd like to make this morning is to notice how easily the people fall back into tradition and cultural behavior when trouble strikes. Tradition is not a bad thing if it is a good tradition. However, the practice of idol worship was a bad thing. God did not command against idols and images for the fun of it. God knows that idols create false presence and false security.

But the people had lived for years in a culture of idol making. The way to represent the presence of the gods was through images. Now that the image of God, Moses, was absent the people resorted to this old tradition of doing things. They created an image and Aaron officiated.

We need to be careful about our Golden Calves of tradition. There are many of these in every church. Since this church has such a transient membership, the tendency is for our traditions to be a remembrance of a spiritually good place for us. One difficulty of this church is the capacity to build a rich tradition. That is also a blessing.

Another Golden Calf is our image of the future. Those of us who grew up in this culture have a thing about the Golden Age we call the future. Since our revolutionary spirit sought to cast off the past, our eyes became fixed on the future. Some of us still act that out all too strongly. Whatever is wrong now will work itself out in the image of a perfect future. One of my college professors counseled we ministerial students, "Do not charge churches because you are facing problems with your present church. All that will happen is that the problems will change names and faces." There is no perfect future. The only thing we can say about the future of the church is that it will be different than now and it will also be very much the same as now. Neither of those facts is bad and neither is good in themselves.

The challenge of the people of Israel is the challenge for the church today. That challenge is to fix our eyes on the Lord God Almighty, to follow Jesus and to seek the counsel of the Holy Spirit that we may test the spirits of this age. One of the most damning spirits of this age is that of the quick fix. The people of Israel looked for the quick fix and ended up wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. The Apostle Paul counsels us that one fruit of the Spirit is patience. That is a fruit well worth nurturing in ourselves in the culture we live in.