(Psalm 80, Isaiah 64)

This weekend was the Calvin Oratorio Society’s 104^th annual performance of Handel’s Messiah, and Rebekah was in the orchestra on violin.  I took off work a little early, Sara and the kids picked me up on the way, and up we went to Grand Rapids.  Rebekah was feeling lousy—she figured it for a case of food poisoning—but God sustained her through the afternoon, and she played through the concert without a hitch.  It was a joy and a blessing to be able to be there, both for her and for the music.  I’ve heard the Messiah I don’t know how many times and sung a number of the choruses in choir, but this was the first performance I’ve ever attended.

If you’re familiar with the work, you know the text is a montage of Scripture passages, beginning with Isaiah 40:1-5; the opening command, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” filled the auditorium literally and spiritually.  As it should, for it introduces an extraordinary promise of extraordinary deliverance.  I don’t want to get too far into this, given that Isaiah 40 is a passage for next week, not this week, but that promise also introduces a puzzle which has challenged Jews and Christians at least as far back as the twelfth-century rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra.  Isaiah was a prophet in the southern kingdom of Judah in the eighth century BC, during the period in which the Assyrian Empire obliterated the northern kingdom of Israel and nearly conquered Judah.  Isaiah 40-55, however, are clearly addressed to the people of God in the sixth century BC, after Judah has fallen to the Babylonians—which might not be a problem, except it seems equally clearly to be addressed from the sixth century BC as well.  The exile is not prophesied as a future consequence of Judah’s unfaithfulness, it’s the starting point for the deliverance which is prophesied as an expression of God’s faithfulness.  What do we do with that?

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(Matthew 25:1-13)

As we’ve been spending this last quarter of 2023 considering what it means to worship God, Emily has kept us oriented by keeping us focused on the Hebrew word avad, which in some places in Scripture means “to worship,” but in others means “to work” or “to serve.”  This is a good thing to keep before us as we think about worship, because it counters our natural tendency (which is reinforced by our individualistic and hedonistic culture) to see our worship as ours, something which exists to serve us and our purposes.  Intuitively, however, it may still feel like worship is something over here while work and service are over here and they don’t have much in common.  Cue Sesame Street:  one of these things is not like the others.

Now, when we study the meaning of biblical words, we generally look at the Hebrew and Greek, since they are the primary biblical languages.  In this case, though, I think a bit of English word study can be helpful.  You see, our English word “worship” is one of those words which used to be longer and got shortened up to make it easier to say; the original form was worthship.  It’s the word “worth” plus the “-ship” ending, which we see in words like professorship—having the position and responsibilities of a professor; seamanship—referring to the skills and training needed to carry out the responsibilities of a seaman, a sailor; and friendship—having the connection and intention of being friends with another person.  “Worth-ship,” then, is about someone or something having worth or being worthy.  If I worthship God, it means I see God as having worth, being worthy, being important, and that I treat God accordingly.

What, then, do work, service, and worship have in common?  All three are things we do because we believe they’re worth doing.  I may go to work because I ascribe worth to our customers at the BMV or because I ascribe worth to the money I receive in return, but if neither were true, I would quit.  If I serve others, I certainly hope I’m doing so because I believe they have intrinsic worth as human beings and deserve the best I can give them; doing my job at the BMV may be service to others, or it may . . . not.  I might do the same things whether I’m worth-shipping my customers or worth-shipping my paycheck, but I won’t be doing them in the same way, or in the same spirit.  The job is the same; the work is different.

If the Hebrew Bible uses one word, avad, for work and service and worship, it might just be because with all three of those things, God cares less about our outward actions than about the heart reality that powers them.  Each is an answer to the same question:  what or whom do we treat as worthy of our time and attention?  What deserves our focus, our preparation, our effort, our commitment?  Remember Jacob and Rachel:  he served his uncle for seven years and felt it as no time at all because she was worth every day of it.  Who do we see as worth waiting for?

Let’s keep those questions percolating in the backs of our minds as we turn to our text this morning.

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(Exodus 32:1-24)

If you’re familiar with William Goldman’s book The Princess Bride, you know it’s supposedly the “good parts” version of an original text by one S. Morgenstern.  If you’re familiar with the lectionary, you might be tempted to think of it as Princess Bride Scripture, since as Emily noted last week, it has a tendency to give us the “good parts” version of the Bible.  Thus, from one Sunday to the next, we’ve taken a flying leap from Exodus 20 to Exodus 32.  I understand the impulse, since the thought of reading four chapters on the construction of the tabernacle is only slightly more thrilling than that of sixty pages on Prince Humperdinck’s ancestry, but we do lose something important in the gap.  The dramatic story of disaster and redemption we read in Exodus 32-34 doesn’t exist on its own, it’s an interruption of a lengthy set of instructions regarding the tabernacle, the priests, and the Sabbath.  In other words, what we have here is God telling Moses how to set things up for Israel to worship him in truth, interrupted by the reality of Israel’s false worship.  The contrast is important, as we will see.

The other key piece of context here comes from Exodus 24:18, which tells us Moses went back up the mountain and stayed there forty days and forty nights.  In other words, he’s been gone for over a month, and they’re getting anxious.  For one thing, they had begged him to stand between them and God, and he’s not around to do that—either to connect them to God or to protect them from God.  So they’re waiting, hoping nothing bad happens . . . and nothing does, but nothing good happens either.  In fact, the other reason for their anxiety, there’s nothing but nothing happening.  They’re waiting, and all it’s getting them is more waiting, and how long are they going to have to sit around in this boring camp at the foot of the mountain doing nothing and going nowhere?  You can only stand so many card tournaments, you know, and if you play Trivial Pursuit enough times, you end up memorizing all the answers.  They don’t know when—or if!—they’ll see Moses again, and until they do, they can’t move on.  They’re stuck . . . waiting.

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(Exodus 3:1-15)

Does anyone else think this story is deeply weird?

Familiarity and expectations can be deadly to our ability to see things as they are.  I literally cannot remember a time in my life when I didn’t know the story of Moses and the burning bush.  If the word “flannelgraph” means something to you, please raise your hand.  For the rest of you, to borrow a line, when I was a kid in Sunday school, videos were called flannelgraphs.  The flannelgraph was a flannel-covered board on a stand—ours were a medium green—and the teacher had all these paper cutouts of people and animals and other things, clip-art style, which had the backs treated with something so they could be stuck to the flannel and taken off again.  I don’t know how old I was, but I can remember the little drawing of the burning bush on the flannelgraph as the teacher told us the story.  Which is a good thing, on the whole—but it does create a challenge:  can I see the burning bush as more than just a paper cutout?

This is a place where the wisdom of the late Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner resonates:

When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read.  And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring.  So that is exactly what very often they do hear.  Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.

There truly is no telling; and there is no telling what you might see if you really look; and if either happens, there is no telling at all what you might do.  But for any of that to happen, we need to be jolted out of our expectation of familiarity—from “Oh, yeah, the burning bush” to “Wait, what?”  God could show up as a person, or send an angel, and he does both at various times.  Here, he shows up as a fire that’s in a bush, or around a bush, but just sort of co-existing with the bush, and waits for Moses to wander by with the sheep.  This is like God doing Rube Goldberg, choosing this roundabout way to strike up a conversation; we need to let it rock us back on our heels a bit and make us ask, “Why?”  Thing is, if we do that, I think the question points us to the answer:  after forty years of meandering through the wilderness with a rabble of dirty, smelly, hapless, stupid sheep, Moses needed his eyes jolted open.  This isn’t Rube Goldberg at all, this is God anticipating Flannery O’Connor:  “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

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(Genesis 29:15-35)

Two weeks ago, I played tour guide on an aerial survey of the family dysfunctions threaded through the Old Testament.  It was far from an exhaustive tour; it’s sort of like the Grand Canyon—even in an airplane, if you want to see everything there is to see, you’re going to be up there long enough for your brain to overload and shut down.  Even the curated version was a lot to take in, and I know a few of you were surprised at how much is there, and how bad it is.  That’s a perfectly reasonable response, and quite unsurprising.  For one thing, churches generally aren’t in the habit of focusing on the ugly stories; one of the times I got myself in trouble was for preaching on Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, on the first Sunday of Advent.  I’m still proud of that Advent series on the women named in Jesus’ genealogy, but I admit having that as the main Scripture passage on a Sunday when the reader was a 13-year-old boy was not good judgment on my part . . . even if, given his family circumstances, I suspect he was rather less shocked by it than a number of adults wanted to believe.

There’s another consideration here, though, which I suspect is just as significant, and this is one which is nobody’s fault:  the cultural difference between us and the ancient Israelites, and particularly as it comes to how we do narrative.  Ours is the culture that created the soap opera, the stream-of-consciousness novel, and the third-person-omniscient narrator.  We’re used to a lot of detail about what the characters are thinking and feeling.  We can do all that, and we can make all that work, because we are a written culture—we have words on a page to do the remembering for us.  Ancient cultures depended on oral transmission, which meant narrative form was determined by the strengths and limitations of human memory.  As such, ancient narratives—including those we find in the Old Testament—are, by our standards, plot-heavy and sparse on emotional detail.  You get what’s in the dialogue and that’s about it.  As a consequence, the text isn’t going to open up the emotional world for you.  You have to feel your own way in.

That’s part of our task this morning.  It’s also the reason I sent out the links to Rich Mullins’ song “Jacob and 2 Women”—which I guess didn’t go out until last night; sorry about that.  No doubt some appreciate the song more than others, and it’s only a three-minute song so it’s obviously incomplete, but it’s more about feeling the story than telling it.  If it shapes you a little as you hear and think about Jacob and his family this morning, that is well.  If not, no doubt that is also as the Lord wills.  However you come to our text this morning, I encourage you to listen with your imagination and try to put yourself in the story.

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