07/05/2026 - "That Time Everyone Lost Their Patience" (Exodus 32:1-19)

Scripture: Exodus 32:1-19

The people saw that Moses was taking a long time to come down from the mountain. They gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come on! Make us gods who can lead us. As for this man Moses who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we don’t have a clue what has happened to him.”

Aaron said to them, “All right, take out the gold rings from the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”

So all the people took out the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He collected them and tied them up in a cloth. Then he made a metal image of a bull calf, and the people declared, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf. Then Aaron announced, “Tomorrow will be a festival to the Lord!”

They got up early the next day and offered up entirely burned offerings and brought well-being sacrifices.

The people sat down to eat and drink and then got up to celebrate.

The Lord spoke to Moses: “Hurry up and go down! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, are ruining everything! They’ve already abandoned the path that I commanded. They have made a metal bull calf for themselves. They’ve bowed down to it and offered sacrifices to it and declared, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” The Lord said to Moses, “I’ve been watching these people, and I’ve seen how stubborn they are. Now leave me alone! Let my fury burn and devour them. Then I’ll make a great nation out of you.”

But Moses pleaded with the Lord his God, “Lord, why does your fury burn against your own people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and amazing force? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘He had an evil plan to take the people out and kill them in the mountains and so wipe them off the earth’? Calm down your fierce anger. Change your mind about doing terrible things to your own people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, whom you yourself promised, ‘I’ll make your descendants as many as the stars in the sky. And I’ve promised to give your descendants this whole land to possess for all time.’”

Then the Lord changed his mind about the terrible things he said he would do to his people.

Moses then turned around and came down the mountain. He carried the two covenant tablets in his hands. The tablets were written on both sides, front and back. The tablets were God’s own work. What was written there was God’s own writing inscribed on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, “It sounds like war in the camp.”

But Moses said, “It isn’t the sound of a victory song. It isn’t the sound of a song of defeat. The sound of party songs is what I hear.”

When he got near the camp and saw the bull calf and the dancing, Moses was furious. He hurled the tablets down and shattered them in pieces at the foot of the mountain.

~

This is a story of everyone losing their patience with each other in a tense situation. Including God.

Moses has been up on Mt. Sinai for forty days and forty nights. We know that he is talking to God and receiving what will become to be called the Mosaic law. But they are hidden in a cloud high up on Mt. Sinai, unable to be seen or heard by anyone else.

And the people below are starting to become impatient with how long their prophet is taking to come down from the mountain and reveal God’s will to them. They are losing patience with a distant God and a distant prophet, even after God had continually shown up in pillars of cloud and fire, in bread and meat falling from heaven, and water bursting forth from rocks and seas parting in front of them.

That’s all been well and good, but now God has gone silent and Moses has gone missing. And since Moses is nowhere to be found, the people turn to the next best thing - his brother Aaron.

Up on the mountain, God is giving instructions for Moses to anoint Aaron as high priest, putting him in charge of all the spiritual and religious practices of the Israelites. But down below, Aaron is right alongside the rest of the people in losing his patience with God and with his brother. He bows easily to the pressure of the Israelites, who are demanding a tangible leader for them to follow. One that isn’t able to run away up a mountain, one that isn’t up in the heavens where they can’t see or hear or touch them unless they choose to be seen, heard, and felt.

They want to know when, where, and how God will show up. So they create a bull statue. One that would’ve been familiar to them having lived in Egypt, which had multiple bull gods, the most prominent of which is Apis. Apis being a deity that often served as an intermediary between the people of Egypt and other members of the Egyptian pantheon.

A deity that felt more accessible, more controllable than Moses or God.

A deity that they wouldn’t lose their patience with, because they knew where it would be and what it would ask of them.

Which was nothing, really. It couldn’t ask anything of them. It was just a golden statue, easily contained, easily defined, and easily controlled.

And when God realizes what’s going on with that golden statue, God loses their patience as well.

While verses 7-8 and 9-10 are put together as both things that God said one after the other, when you read them, they kind of seem like two separate responses to the Israelite’s actions. And that’s because it’s likely that they could be. While scholars are still trying to figure out exactly how the book of Exodus was put together, one thing most scholars agree on is that the author is pulling from multiple traditions and stories and weaving them together into a single narrative. So God’s response in verses 7-8, where he tells Moses what’s going on and tells him to get down the mountain to put a stop to it, may come from one version of the story. While verses 9-14, where God says he’ll destroy the Israelites and Moses talks him out of it, is probably from another version of the story.

We don’t know why the author put them together like this instead of picking one over the other. But either way, they show that God had lost their patience with their people.

Because God has repeatedly shown up, through cloud and fire, through bread and quail and water, and yet still the Israelites want more. They want to be able to predict God’s actions and presence, be able to define what God looks like, and control when and how God shows up.

And that’s just not how God moves and works in the world as much as we desire it. Because it’s a lot easier to be patient with someone when you’re able to control them, and it’s a lot easier to be patient with someone when they’re not trying to control you.

And we all have been in both of these positions before. We have been the ones who grow frustrated and angry with coworkers and subordinates who may be technically doing things correctly, but with their own little quirks that make their work annoying to deal with. We’ve also been the people who hate being micromanaged when we’re perfectly capable of doing the job ourselves in the way we can do it best.

We’ve gotten into petty squabbles with our parents, spouses, or children, because we want them to put the dishes away a certain way or make the beds a certain way, while also not wanting them to tell us how to do those things either.

And we see this played out to destructive extremes in abusive relationships, whether in romantic relationships, parent/child relationships, or even friendships. 

On a societal scale we see this play out in governments all across the world and right here in our own country making laws and enacting policies and procedures meant to control people rather than protect them. We live in an incredibly impatient world, where people and institutions are quick to anger and grasping for control they’re not meant to have. Which in turn, understandably so, causes people and institutions that’re being unduly controlled to lose their patience with the way things are and fight back.

Which can then lead to more attempts at gaining control, and more attempts to push off that control.

And the cycle repeats.

Just yesterday we celebrated the 250th anniversary of our country declaring that we would no longer be controlled by an empire across the sea.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

And yet we also know that even as these words were being written and signatures were put to the Declaration of Independence, there were hundreds of thousands of people enslaved in the United States. The consequences of that hypocrisy wouldn’t crest until almost a hundred years later with the Civil War.  And in some ways, we’re still living with the consequences today.

Because each time we have tried to take a step forward towards ensuring that everyone, no matter who they are, has the ability to live out the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, somebody loses their patience and tries to reassert a control that they never had an unalienable right to.

And that can so easily cause us to lose our patience in turn and retreat from trying to make things better. 

We give up, settling for a golden calf instead of embracing the God of love, the Divine that cannot be controlled or easily defined. We reach for the immediate answers that make us feel better, protected, more at ease, rather than living with the discomfort of waiting, watching, and working for the solutions that may take longer and cost more, but will bring more and more of God’s kingdom to earth.

Friends, this is where we need patience; the patience to keep going, keep trying, keep working towards creating the world of love and peace we know it can be. Even if our first, fifth, tenth, hundredth attempts have failed, it’s the patience to take a deep breath and try again. It’s the patience to not give up and create a golden calf that we can control when God is just around the corner with bigger and better dreams than we ever thought possible. It’s the patience to keep going when things get hard, and the patience to not settle for the easy answers but instead work for the real solutions that bring life, liberty, and happiness for all.

May we keep our patience as we work for that world.