Not Waiting Is Idolatry - Exodus 32:1-14

In 17th century France, the mathematician and scientist Blaise Pascal underwent a radical conversion. Known as a gambler, a party boy with a quick wit, Pascal came to the rock bottom point where he realized that he needed meaning and depth. He became a Christian, not in name only, but as a serious pursuit. That led him, eventually, to spending time near a Catholic retreat in Port-Royal, where he began to work on a philosophical defense of the Christian faith against an age of unraveling belief that we now call the “Enlightenment.”

Pascal wrote not with the discipline of a systematic writer but in fits and spurts, using scraps of paper that he put into a drawer as notes for a later polished work. As so often happens, he died before his masterpiece could be finished. Still, those scraps of paper were filled with such brilliance that they were eventually published as Pascal’s Pensees, or “thoughts.” To this day they are considered one of the great works of Western philosophy and they are well worth reading.

In all likelihood, you’ve encountered a quote from Pascal here or there. The most famous one goes like this: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room” (Pensee 136, pg. 37). This is an idea with which to sit with quietly in a room. If you’re like me, when the antsy feelings that make you want to do anything but sit still and be quiet come, you’ll recognize that Pascal was onto something. I think Moses would agree.

Our reading from Exodus today offers one of the critical incidents of Israel’s wilderness journey. It is one of those dramatic moments that find their ways into storybook bibles. I can think of the pastel colored illustration in my own childhood bible, with the people gathered around a cartoonish cow, shinning with mustard yellow. Because of those images, it can be easy to think of Israel’s idolatry as far from our own experience. We’re not people who have idols at our doorways, right? We wouldn’t think of worshiping the statue of a bull, would we? If we peer a bit more into Exodus, however, we’ll find that the Israelites aren’t so different from us. We too make idols, just not usually cast in gold. They start to form whenever we find that we just can’t wait any longer.

Let’s review the situation: The Israelites have journeyed to the base of Mt. Sinai. It is a tall, wilderness mountain, reaching up over 7,000 feet. For comparison, that’s seven times as high as our own Pinnacle Mountain. Moses had been called by God to have a retreat on the cloudy summit. A lot could go wrong with such a climb: a misstep on a cliff, a run in with a hungry predator, bandits looking for an easy mark. What’s more by the time our story today starts, Moses had been gone for 40 days. The math didn’t look good and the people began to be anxious. Moses had been big on Yahweh, but now that he was gone, was that really the best god to worship? After all, Moses was now gone. Anxious, rootless, wandering in the desert, the people were ready to move on to something, anything that could help ease the tension. So it was that they gave in and gave up. They went to the default of the wider culture—to make a god.

Maybe you know the feeling of giving in when the waiting has become too much. It can come in small ways and big. To provide an example that isn’t personal at all, say you’re trying to clean up your eating, and yet sitting in a coffee shop trying to write a sermon you keep looking at that nice piece of cake in the display case. It gets distracting. You can imagine the sweet, rich flavor in your mouth. Then the waiting is too much. You get up and buy it, sit down, and in five minutes you’ve destroyed your monthlong streak of good eating that had helped you feel more energy and sleep better.

That, as far as examples go, is pretty tame. But we all know those instances in life when we’ve given up on waiting and made much worse decisions. All of my major life mistakes came when I grew impatient with what I knew would be best in the end, and gave in to the easier option. For Israel, that option was a god they could see and control, an idol that could fill their need for worship and relieve the anxiety brought on by the seeming absence of Yahweh and God’s prophet Moses.

It turns out that idolatry is at its heart a problem of patience. That is the insight I learned from another French philosopher, this time a contemporary who lived nearly four centuries after Pascal. In his lectures on hospitality, Jacques Derrida, no doubt puffing on his famous pipe, spoke to a group of students gathered in a Parisian lecture hall. He said this: “Not knowing how to wait is idolatry, it is to produce from oneself what one wants to allow to come.” Not knowing how to wait is idolatry. We don’t need to make golden calves to be idolaters. All we have to do is be impatient. That is a bold claim, but like Pascal’s before him, it is one that goes deeper the more you think about it.

In the centuries after the Exodus, Israel’s poets reflected on the mistakes their ancestors made and sought a remedy. From the Psalms to the Prophets, they repeated a phrase like a mantra: “Wait on the Lord.” It is a beautiful call and a difficult one, but in it is perhaps the most important wisdom we could want for how to live.

So what does this mean for us? I’m not a great spokesperson for patience. Just ask my daughter Lucia about trying to help me at the self-checkout at Kroger. I get overwhelmed and snappy, I make an idol of efficiency. But in reading our scriptures, and learning from the wisdom of teachers and philosophers of the past, I do know that waiting is a powerful and life giving posture. It is in waiting that we are able to see, like Moses after 40 days on the cloudy mountain, the glory of God. It is such encounters that leave us radiant and alive in a way no god of our own making could.

For my part, I’m working on my waiting. It isn’t just about intention, about saying I’m going to do better next time. It is about practice. In this case that practice is prayer. Not the wordy kind, which has its place, but the silent sort. The theologian Sarah Coakley calls it a “defenseless waiting before God.” As many mornings as I can, or later on in the day if I can’t, I try to sit down and am simply silent before God for 20 minutes. Sometimes I use a knotted rope to keep my time, in the way of the Eastern church, at others I set a timer on my phone. Either way, the aim is to wait for whatever may come. I can’t say that I’ve had any major revelations. There have been no clear theophanies in my clouded, wandering mind. But I have seen my patience grow in small and subtle ways. When I do my morning sit I feel more present throughout the day, I slow down, I’m able to listen to the people around me a bit better. Most of all, I’m less prone to jump to the next thing without reflecting on it first. Which means, I hope, that I’m less likely to make idols. And that’s the best part, because like the golden calf, idols take our treasure, the best of what we are and have. When I can wait on God, I get to keep what’s most precious, the treasures of my life. They’re God’s gifts, after all, and he wants us to keep our treasures. Amen.