The Party of God
Exodus 32:1-14 – The Golden Calf
Matthew 22:1-14 – The Parable of the Wedding Banquet
October 12, 2008
Most people I know love a good party. And this congregation, it seems to me, is no different. In the first few months of my being with you at Southminster there have been plenty of parties to go around. Indeed, on my second Sunday here you good folks had already thrown a party for me—which was wonderful, not only because I got such a lovely welcome, but because now that you know me better, it could be a long time before you want to throw me a party again!
Indeed, most of my engagements with church members the past few months outside of this building have been at parties. After our men’s softball games this summer, we could almost always count on ten or twenty people gathering for a little party—regardless of whether we won or lost, which is good because we lost so many times! And not even my ankle injury last Thursday night could stop the post-softball party, and for that I am thankful.
For choir kickoff in August, there was a party. In September we had the fall picnic with delicious barbecue for our party-time. For the youth of the church every single meeting seems like a party, with food and laughter abounding and music and games resounding through the halls of the church. November will bring forth the mass consumption of oysters at the Men’s Oyster Roast.
And though the Oyster Roast is an event aimed at the men of the church, I think the women of the church may be beating us on the party front—because when I recently attended one of our women’s Circle Groups that meets monthly, I realized that the women have it figured out that if you have a Bible study attached to your church gathering, you can have way more than one party per year!
Oh do we ever love to gather! We Christians have deemed our gatherings “fellowship” times, but I’m becoming pretty convinced that our gatherings at Southminster can more accurately be described with those famous words from the movie Wayne’s World: “Party-time! Excellent!”
Indeed, our proclivity for partying seems to be attached to an innate human desire for community. Let us not forget that gatherings of celebration and joy are sprinkled throughout our biblical witness. From the feasts that celebrate the Lord in the Old Testament to weddings and gatherings in the Gospels, and the communal meals described by Paul, our parties are part of our faith journey. And each time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper we are called to remember that it is a joyful feast. It is a table of hope where we look forward to the day when people will gather from East and West and from North and South in one gigantic celebration.
And each of our passages today has within them a party atmosphere. But the celebrations in these two stories are polar opposites. In Exodus, we are warned not to be distracted by the wrong kind of party. And in Matthew we are warned of the dangers of avoiding the party to which we are called.
First, our story from Exodus. The story of the Golden Calf cast by Aaron at the insistence of the people is very familiar to many of us. Moses and Joshua are up on the mountain with God at this time, and the Israelites wonder what has become of their leader. They worry what to do without a visible messenger from God. For the Israelites, Moses as been the communicator with God up until this point and they feel they need a physical being or structure that can be the conduit for the word of the Lord.
It is important to recognize that the calf in this story is not intended to be God’s own self, but is recognized as a representation of God that can communicate and support and nurture the people of Israel. The calf, we are told, will “go before the people,” the very same words that are used for the pillars of fire and smoke that led the Israelites out of Egypt.
And if we look at the text we can see that Aaron still calls their celebration honoring the Golden Calf a “festival to the Lord.” The Israelites feel that they need to see something; they need to be able to touch something in order to experience God’s presence. And this is not a unique occurrence. Let us remember that the Ark of the Covenant serves in a very similar way—to house, and to represent God among the people.
So the Israelites build a Golden Calf in which to ease their feelings of worry to give them a sense of power and of control. They want to believe in the power of the seen, in the power of the created. And they throw a party to celebrate the works of their own hands. We are told in verse 6 that the people “sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.” But the problem here is not the party itself; it is not the eating and drinking. It is the fact that the “rose up to revel”—to revel in their own creation, not in worship to God.
Earlier in Exodus there is a striking similarity to this passage and we are told there that Aaron, Moses and the 70 elders of Israel are up on the mountain with God and “they saw the God of Israel. Under [God’s] feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness…[the people] beheld God, and they ate and drank.”
In both instances the people ate and they drank. In other words, the party ain’t the problem. It is the focus of the party that is at issue. In the latter passage the people beheld God at their party. But in our passage for today, the people did not gaze upon God, but were distracted from God by their shiny Golden Calf and they “rose up to revel” in the glory of their own creation. And how tempting it is for us to try and impose the divine and eternal attributes on something human-made and transient.
And how powerful this message is today as the financial and economic systems of our country and indeed the world have been rocked over the past few months. One can’t help but wonder if too much faith has been placed in these human creations that are controlled and formed by people like us, certainly not by God, and because of the human input and construction are inevitably flawed and can be, indeed, dangerous.
Our salvation is certainly not in the stock market, though the impact it has on many of our lives seems to be God-like. And it is certainly tempting to grant great power to the economic machines of this world because they can be seen and touched and have such a powerful and immediate impact on our lives. It seems as if they are even worshipped at times, as if the markets themselves bestow both blessings of prosperity and the curses of damnation.
And we need to be wary of this. And this is what our passage reminds us of today. That as we eat and drink and party and live together in this world, let us remember to keep our gaze upon God and the eternal, instead of being distracted by reveling in the limited power of the things of this world.
And the same distraction on finite powers and human creations found in Exodus appears in our passage from Matthew. We are told in this parable that a king sent slaves to call people to a wedding banquet for his son. But the people who received the first invitations were more concerned with their own work than the work of the Lord.
We are told that the invitees, when asked to attend the grand wedding party, “made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized the slaves, mistreated them and killed them.”
Now for Matthew those people who are distracted by their own work are the Jewish elite who have ostracized and rejected Jesus. The Christians of Matthew’s day appear in this story as the people on the streets who were gathered after the initial rejections. They are the “good and the bad” who crowd the wedding hall as guests. The non-elite respondents to the call of God.
But I do wonder today if we are, at times, the ones who went to their farms, or the ones who went to their businesses, instead of the ones listening to the call to God’s party.
There is a song by Ray Lamontagne that speaks to this impulse that sometimes pulls us away from the wedding feast of God and pushes us towards the finite Golden Calves and party distractions of this world:
Can you see the corporate man
He's winning on the telephone
His possessions are his throne
Till the sun turns black
Can you see him in his lounger
Watching TV in the dark
Waiting for a spark
Till the sun turns black
Can you see the working classes
Trudging through their days
Time goes slowly when you're only waiting
Till the sun turns black
Can you see the wise man simply
Living, loving quietly
Every breath he takes eternity
Till the sun turns black
These last lines are so remarkable in their simplicity and are such a strong echo of the calls of Matthew and of Exodus to focus on the eternal in a world in which we tend to drift to the temporal. Can we live with the eternal wedding feast in mind? Can we live in a way where we don’t revel in the things that will disappoint, but where every breath of our lives is one of eternity? Can we be the wise men and women, the faithful followers who live and love quietly, and who eat and drink of the joyous gifts of a God who calls us to love ourselves, to love our neighbors, to love God in a way that celebrates the beauty of the life we have been gifted?
The call to God’s party is a call to act in a way that harkens our thoughts, our minds, our souls to the eternally significant mandates of God—to love our neighbors and our enemies, to care for all people who need it, to laugh with friends, to share time with our families, to participate wholly in the lives of other people.
We are not to be distracted by our own self-indulgences or by the material things that are often disappointing and certainly fallible. The party to which we are called requires that we live into the eternal mandates of God to love each other with our hands and our souls and place our hopes in the God who is always faithful in a sometimes tulmutuous world.
We are called to a feast of goodness and righteousness. And if we can celebrate the eternal by living lives of love and hospitality and welcome, then we will surely be partaking of the party that God intends for us. So may you eat with each other, may you drink with each other, and may you always keep your gaze upon God.
[The Israelites at this time are worried that their leader has not returned, and they find it easier to have faith in the seen and touched, rather than the unseen. Furthermore, we need to realize the culture the Israelites lived in. This text was written during or after Israel’s exile in Babylonia, where visual representations of God were the norm. And remember their time in Egypt as well, where the pharaoh and gods like Osiris, Ra, and Isis were represented by carvings, monuments and statues. It is hard to remain faithful in a world that pulls one in so many different directions and this is possibly how the Israelites felt.]
