September 12 sermon

Text: Exodus 32:7-14
Preached September 12 and 15 at First Lutheran Church in Kenyon, MN


Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

So we’re talking about lost things today. I can certainly relate to Jesus’ story of the woman who lost a coin. I just moved here, and I’m slowly getting settled in my new apartment. As we all know, moving involves living in a sea of boxes, at least for a little while. I’ve been doing my fair share of searching for misplaced items, trying to remember which boxes they might be in.

But sometimes I’m not the one searching. Sometimes I’m the one who’s lost.

I’m from a small town, but I’ve lived in bigger towns and cities for the last 12 years. In those places, there are street lights and building lights everywhere. It is so dark here in comparison! The other night we had an intern committee meeting at Hegre. When I walked outside afterward, I was totally disoriented by the darkness. I could hardly tell where the road was, much less which way I should turn onto it to go home!

Darkness was also a factor once when two of my friends and I got lost on the way to our own church in Roseville. We’d been going there for almost four months, but took a different route that night, on our way to mid-week Advent worship, and we missed our exit.

What got us into trouble was the faulty assumption that the next road would parallel the one we missed and would therefore get us where we needed to go. We forgot was that all bets are off when there’s a lake in the way! So we just drove and drove these windy roads, getting more and more lost, until we finally stopped to ask for directions. We got to enjoy some pretty Christmas lights along the way, but we didn’t make it to church until the service was ending.

In all of our readings today, we hear of lost people and lost objects, but of course they are all lost in much more significant ways than my friends and I were driving around.

In our first reading, the Israelites had lost sight of who the true God is. The story really begins a few verses before our reading. Moses had gone up Mount Sinai to speak with the Lord. This is when he received the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. But after Moses had been gone a while, the people started to worry that he wouldn’t return.

So they went to Aaron and said, “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.” Can you hear the big mistake the people have made here? Was it really Moses who brought the people out of Egypt?

I just mentioned that the Ten Commandments weren’t written down yet at this point. But just a few chapters before our reading, Moses had spoken the commandments to the people: “Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do’” [Ex. 24:3].

So the people had heard the Ten Commandments, and the very first one goes like this: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”

Moses may have been their visible leader, but it was God who brought the people out of Egypt. The people lost sight of this. They confused God with Moses, and they lost hope when Moses was no longer immediately present among them. So they brought their gold jewelry to Aaron, and he made them an idol in the form of a golden calf.

The Israelites confused the eternal, infinite, almighty God with a created, finite, powerless statue. Only eight chapters after promising to obey all the Lord’s commandments, they broke the very first one!

We may think this sounds like a very obvious sin, a big mistake we would never make. We know better than to worship statues. But Luther says in the Large Catechism that “to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. Anything on which your heart relies and depends…is really your God” [LC 10Comm 3, BoC 386].

Certainly there are things other than God in which you trust and on which you rely. I know I have many such things! I rely on my bank account for a sense of security. I rely on my own accomplishments for a sense of purpose. I rely on other people’s opinions of me for a sense of identity and self-worth. In reality, I should be relying on God for all of these things.

There are many things that can define us apart from God. There are many ways our culture and our relationships and our work or hobbies can tempt us to put our trust in something other than God.

Our sin may not be as obvious as worshiping a golden calf, but every one of us is just as lost as the Israelites were. We can see it in how we spend our time, in how we spend our money, in how we treat one another. This world is broken, and we are broken with it.

Well, God was furious when he saw what the Israelites were doing with the golden calf. God said to Moses, “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from all that I commanded them….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.”

God practically disowned his people! He called them “your people,” rather than the usual “my people.” Does this sound familiar? When your child has caused some kind of trouble, how many of you have found yourselves saying to your child’s other parent, “You’ll never believe what your child did today…”? The people have distanced themselves from God, and God is so angry that he wants to distance himself from them as well. In fact, God wants to wipe them out and start all over with Moses!
But this God, the God who brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, is the same God who had made a promise to their ancestor Abraham. God promised Abraham land and descendents. More importantly, God promised to be faithful to those descendents.

In Genesis 17, God says to Abraham, “I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” God had promised to set the Israelites apart as his people, and to be their God forever.

In the same way, we have a promise from God. In our baptism, God claims us as his own. In the gospel reading we heard about a shepherd who left 99 sheep to search for one lost one, and a woman who searched her entire house to find one lost coin. Baptism is the ultimate seeking and claiming activity of God.

In baptism, God comes to us with his promise and makes us his children. When we were baptized, someone spoke these or similar words: “Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” And no matter how lost we each may get, no matter how many things may draw our faith and trust away from God, we are always found in Christ. God has promised that we are his people and he is our God. Forever.

In our text, Moses reminds God of God’s promise and puts the people’s identity right back where it belongs—in God’s hands. Moses says, “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?...Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendents like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendents, and they shall inherit it forever.’”

God had promised to multiply Abraham’s descendents and to be their God forever. Moses understood that if God were to destroy the Israelites, God would be breaking that promise. And God understood this too, so he changed his mind and spared the people. God keeps his promises.

The same is true for God’s promises to us. In the waters of baptism, God made us his own and promised to be our God forever. And God will always keep that promise.

Perhaps Romans 8 says it best: “…neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This is risky, lavish, foolish love. The shepherd who went looking for his one lost sheep left 99 others at risk in the wilderness, where something could have happened to all of them! The woman who lost one of her 10 coins probably spent more than the coin was worth to light her house while searching and to throw a party when she found it! How impractical and silly of them both!

But God does the same thing. God sent his very own Son in the form of a vulnerable baby. And that baby grew into a man who endured humiliation, suffering, and death, all to make sure that we will never again be hopelessly lost. No matter how far we stray—and we certainly do stray—we are, finally and forevermore, found in Jesus Christ.

This is how much God loves us, and this is how faithful God is to his promises. Every time we gather at this table, God brings us back into his flock. In Christ, we are no longer lost, and God rejoices in our return. Amen.