Special Guest: Dr. Justin Walker
Special Guest: Dr. Justin Walker
1 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.” 2 Aaron 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.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. 4 He 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!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the LORD.” 6 They 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. (Exod 32:1-16 NRSV)
There are few things more difficult to abide in a life with God than God’s freedom. We’d rather God be predictable than powerful, intimate than infinite, understandable than untamable.
The wild God who once rescued us seems too wild to lead us, so we take His name and write it on the well-polished images that keep us safe but cannot save. Tragically, we fail to see that our prayers become nothing more than a talking to ourselves.
7 The LORD said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8 they 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!’” 9 The LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10 Now 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.” (Exod 32:7-10 NRSV)
“Prayer is a grace, an offer of God.… Let us approach the subject [of prayer] from the given fact that God answers. God is not deaf, but listens; more than that, he acts. God does not act in the same way whether we pray or not. Prayer exerts an influence upon God’s action, even upon his existence. That is what the word ‘answer’ means…. Perhaps we doubt the sincerity of our prayer and the worth of our request. But one thing is beyond doubt: it is the answer that God gives. Our prayers are weak and poor. Nevertheless, what matters is not that our prayers be forceful, but that God listens to them. That is why we pray.” – Karl Barth, Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition, ed. Don E. Saliers, trans. Sara F. Terrien (Louisville: WJK, 2002), 13.
God is free of us and yet, in His freedom, has freely chosen to suffer us. While we corrupt ourselves with gods that are not God, the good news is that God keeps speaking.
“Let me go,” God tells Moses, and thereby preaches the gospel: “I’ve held you so tightly,” God says, “that you in turn have taken ahold of Me.” God has so gotten us that He has been gotten by us. As God holds us, prayer is nothing less than holding God back.
11 But 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? 12 Why 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. 13 Remember 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.’” 14 And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people. (Exod 32:11-14 NRSV)
“A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another, or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner…. As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife, that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day. We may struggle with one another in intercessory prayer, but that struggle has the promise of achieving its goal…. Offering intercessory prayer means granting other Christians the same right we have received, namely, the right to stand before Christ and to share in Christ’s mercy.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. Baniel W. Bloesch, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Reader’s Edition [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015], 64.