Exodus 32 "Memory's Power" Scott Hoezee

Although I am not a big fan of Jay Leno, I am familiar enough with his Tonight Show to know that one of his regular comedy segments is called "Jaywalking." Leno goes out into the streets of Los Angeles or Burbank or some other American city and he pulls people aside to ask them what are, all things considered, not terribly difficult questions. So he may ask one person to name the vice-president and then another person will be asked how many dimes there are in a dollar. And, of course, the joke is that with relative ease Leno can find people who are either clueless on simple facts or who give ludicrously wrong answers.

According to the Tonight Show website, one man recently had no idea what year the bicentennial quarter had been issued. The wife of an Air Force pilot was asked who the current Commander-in-Chief is, and she said she had forgotten (and found no help when Jay gave her the hint that his first name is George). A college student was asked where people from Appalachia live and was sure it was either Africa or Chile. A man asked who Germany's leader was during World War II correctly said "Hitler" but had no clue as to his first name. In the end he said it was just "Hitler" without any first name, kind of like with the singer Cher. Finally, a couple of people were asked how long ago Jesus lived. One said 500 years ago, another said millions of years ago. Yet another had no clue as to what the Friday before Easter is called or what it means. "Well, it's a really good Friday," Leno hinted hugely, "so what is it?" "I just don't know," the man replied.

It's hard not to laugh at some of those things, but in the long run, it is difficult to resist the thought that the source of this humor may well be an example of that Neil Postman talked about in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the kind of world-class ignorance that people so routinely display, we may discover something that is in the end no laughing matter at all. We may discover the demise, in also Christian circles, of a good deal of what is wrapped up in our very salvation and in our identity as followers of Jesus.

If you think that is an overstatement, look again at Exodus 32. As this chapter opens, it has been just over a month since Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive from God the full corpus of divine laws. Moses went up alone because the people found they just couldn't take it when God thundered at them directly. But before Moses left, in Exodus 24:3, the people had heard the first portion of God's Law and with one voice had responded by saying, "Everything Yahweh has commanded, we will do."

That was forty days ago. Not a long period. But in this case forty days was enough to introduce among Israel a grave calamity. Indeed, if you paid close attention to this chapter when we read it a few minutes ago, then you may have noted something that crops up again and again: namely, the phrase "brought out of Egypt." Had there been an ancient equivalent of Jay Leno to go through the Israelite camp, he could have asked lots of people, "So tell me, who was it that brought you out of the land of Egypt?" Alas, he would have heard lots of different answers, none of which was very funny at all.

"I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." That is the ringing opening line of what has become known as the Ten Commandments. It is the place to begin because knowing who God is, what God has done, and how that properly motivates us to worship this God alone is the linch-pin in all true discipleship. Yet here the phrase "brought out of Egypt" pops up six times in the span of just 23 verses but there seems to be no consensus on who did this mighty deed. Was it Moses? The golden calf? Is there an outside chance that the right answer is Yahweh?

The people don't seem to know. Beyond the tragic events confined to just chapter 32 there is an even sadder tragedy to note in the larger sweep of this entire book. In general the Book of Exodus stands as one giant answer to the question, "Who is God?" As we noted earlier in this series, in chapter 5 Pharaoh himself famously asks Moses, "Who is Yahweh that I should listen to him!?" Pharaoh asked the question, and God then took matters in hand to answer it. Pharaoh got the education of a lifetime in learning the hard way who Yahweh is. But the people of Israel were supposed to learn right along with Pharaoh and for the most part, it seemed as though they had. Their song of jubilation at the Red Sea surely looked for all the world like testimony to the fact that they had discovered who their God is and why he is worthy of praise.

Yet now it comes to this sad business in tonight's reading. The people get bored. Their attention span isn't worth much. They figure Moses had gone on holiday, maybe permanently, and so they go to the man Moses had left in charge, brother Aaron, and demand a god. Arrestingly enough, Aaron seems not even to hesitate. He asks for all the gold they can muster, melts it down, gets some metal-working engraver's tools, and handily fashions the image of a bull calf. Earlier the people said they wanted such a thing because Moses "who brought us out of Egypt" had disappeared. After the calf is created, Aaron and the others say that this calf now is the God "who brought us out of Egypt."

But then Aaron says something curious in verse 6: he announces that the next day they would (in front of this calf) hold a festival to Yahweh. Having just made an idol, why would Aaron turn right around and start talking about Yahweh, again? Apparently because he had convinced himself that there was no disparity between Yahweh and the calf. The people could serve Yahweh through the golden calf. Before the sun had set that next day, however, Aaron should have had a pretty good clue that he was wrong. The moment you make a god out of something blind, deaf, and dumb, it becomes easy to indulge yourself, do whatever feels good, because after all, this god isn't going to scold you in any event.

Meanwhile, up on the mountain, Yahweh knows what's happening and so dispatches Moses back to the camp. But notice in verse 7 that even Yahweh says to Moses, "the people you brought up out of Egypt are corrupt." Even God is so fed up that he is putting some daylight between himself and Israel. Later in verse 11 Moses will boldly come right back at God and say, "Now wait a minute! These are not my people. These are the folks whom you, O God, brought up out of Egypt!" If this were not a scene filled with so much gravity, this exchange could almost be funny. God and Moses are like some married couple, embarrassed over the antics of their child at the church picnic and so saying to one another, "Dear, your daughter just kicked the minister in the shins. Fetch her, would you please!" "Well, honey, she's your daughter, too!"

But beyond the oddities of God's and Moses' exchange, notice what is the key that unlocks this chapter: since the people had forgotten God, God now returns the (dis)favor and forgets them. In verse 10 God says to Moses, "Let's ditch the whole lot of them. Just you and me will head to the Promised Land and I'll make a great nation out of you, Moses!" In short, forget Israel! At the end of the chapter, in verses 32-33, we find an even more chilling conversation that centers on God's literally blotting out of the book of life those who have sinned. Moses once again stays Yahweh's hand by saying, "If you blot them out of the book, then blot me out, too." God relents, but notice what the stakes are here! This is not just a matter of life and death, it is a matter of existence and non-existence, of being remembered by the God whose memory spells life or forgotten by the God whose forgetting of anyone is the equivalent of his or her being banished to the hell of divine amnesia.

But before we pursue that grim theme a bit more, let's note one other wrinkle in this story. As much as anything, the role played in this sordid scenario by Aaron that is most distressing. Moses charges straight at Aaron, eyes ablaze, and Aaron says something that is either one of history's lamest of excuses or something that contains a scary truth. Moses asks, "What in the world happened here!?" and Aaron recounts events very accurately, right up to the end when he implausibly says, "So I took all their gold, just threw it blindly into the fire, and--presto, poof--out popped this calf!" Now, of course, we as readers already know that Aaron himself formed this calf. It did not appear out of thin air.

So Aaron's reply looks hardly better than the school boy who when the principal asks how the chemistry lab blew up, shuffles his feet, looks down at the ground and says, "I dunno. Just happened." But suppose Aaron is not merely being immature and evasive. Suppose that from his vantage point, this is pretty much what happened. Oh, not that he had really forgotten the hard work he devoted to forming that calf. It's just that he had never intended it to become a false god. When in verse 6 Aaron stood right in front of this idol and declared a festival to Yahweh, he was serious. But before he could blink twice, presto, poof, the silly thing turned into a false god after all.

But, of course, the only reason Aaron made this calf in the first place is because he himself was suffering from a bad short-term memory. Aaron forgot that in the Ten Commandments, following God's declaration that it was He who had brought the people out of Egypt, immediately Yahweh went on to forbid not only the worship of false gods but also the production of any graven images. Aaron was shocked at what the people did with his golden calf. Truth is, this should not have been even mildly surprising for Aaron. God said this would happen. That's why he forbade it to begin with.

The role of sacred memory is key here. You surely noticed in verse 13 that Moses saves the day not by mounting up some grand argument but when he jogs the divine memory. "O Lord, remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!" No sooner does Moses remind God of the covenant and we read that Yahweh relented. Just like that. The people whose memories were like a sieve were saved because God's memory is so very good!

Remember. From this point forward in the balance of the Pentateuch, this will become the rallying cry for Israel. By the time you get to Deuteronomy and Moses' last great swan song of a sermon, the phrase, "O Israel, remember and do not forget" pops up over and over like a kind of holy refrain. That cry echoes down along the centuries as we see Israel repeatedly forgetting, then remembering again for a time, and then forgetting all over again. Finally in the biblical story it takes no one less than the very Son of God himself to come down here in person, hold up some bread and wine, and say once and for all, "Remember!" And so each time we baptize a baby, we promise to remember and to nurture a holy memory bank in also this little one. Each time we come to the Lord's table, we not only jog our memories all over again but vow to re-commit ourselves to an ongoing sacred remembrance of all that has gone into our great salvation through Christ Jesus the Lord.

In one sense, it is vaguely shocking that so much depends on memory. But given the current state of the culture, having to lash so much to the mast of memory is also frightening. We may laugh at the Jaywalking sequences on the Tonight Show but hidden within the ignorance Jay exploits for laughs are the seeds of our own destruction.

We are a society afflicted with both amnesia and what someone has called "neomania." We're impatient to ponder the past, we chalk up as useless that which is "outdated." In terms of technology, it doesn't even take long (say, less than two years) for something to become obsolete. If you've ever gone to one of those warehouses that takes in used computers in order to scavenge them for parts, then you know how mind-numbing it is to see ceiling-high stacks of computers stretching out hundreds of yards in front of you. That is an emblem of society generally. Use it up quick, get rid of it, and then move on.

We are the culture of "And now this . . ." in which the Tom Brokaws of the world have no difficulty pivoting lightly from a terrible news story about the murder of a child to the next cutesy segment on the mother in upstate Washington who is creating a splash by selling designer earrings for dogs or something. All we need is for the news anchor to say "And now this . . ." and we can forget about what came before. Meanwhile so-called "reality TV" continues to probe the sump level of existence in a kind of dire competition to see who can generate the next shock. But if it's "new," then people watch without thought.

We have no memory by which to anchor our lives to something more secure than this moment. Maybe that's why our culture has never produced a movie about Leonardo da Vinci but we've made at least three films about Joey Buttafuoco. Having no sense for the past is why we have no common sense in the present, which is why people can ponder the prospect of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and treat that possibility as if it meant no more than a curious TV episode of Friends.

But enough about the culture generally. Our concern should be more in-house than that and when we look at the contemporary church, we notice some accommodations to the culture. If people say they get impatient with sermons on the Apostles' Creed or other overtly "doctrinal" matters, many churches say that's just fine and so preach sermons that rarely advance much beyond the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books. If you did a theological Jaywalk through the church and asked people, "What does it mean that we confess Jesus 'descended into hell'?" or "How would you define the concept of 'atonement?'" well, if people can't answer or come up with loopy wrong answers, this elicits little more than a shrug. Sadly, some churchgoers may know more about the recent plot lines on The Sopranos than they do about the story of Exodus or the work of Paul.

Recent surveys of Americans who attend church regularly revealed that over half could not name the four gospels (and a significant percentage had a tough time naming even one). Ask people to find the book of "Hezekiah" in the Bible, and they'll scramble for a long time (not realizing there is no such book!). A few years ago 40% of people surveyed in England could not say what happened on either Good Friday or Easter. This is the air we breathe and it requires no small amount of diligence to protect ourselves from what this can do to our collective Christian ability to remember the God and Savior who loves us.

Now, of course, this is not a gnostic sermon. We are not saved by what we know (as though being intelligent with a good memory made a person closer to God than the one who isn't quite as smart). We're not saved by what we know but by the grace of the One who knows us and whom we know, too. But to know God is to love God, and so our love should make us want to remember all that we can. So we would do well to ask ourselves how well we know the faith. Could we pick out most any article from the Apostles' Creed and be able to explain it to someone? These are not academic exercises. Remembering God's truth is what innoculates us against idolatry. The human heart is a perpetual factory of idols, John Calvin said. And as Aaron learned the hard way, even mistaken notions about God that we at first thought were innocent have a way of swelling into full-blown idolatry.

In Exodus 32 the people are saved when Moses asks God to remember his promises. This is not the only place in the Bible where memory spells salvation. The thief on the cross knew what he was doing when he asked, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." But even before that, it was Jesus who looked at his disciples to say, "Remember me!" The question that echoes down along the ages, burning with an intensity no other question could, is whether or not we do, as a matter of fact, remember him. Amen.