High in the Desert (Exodus 32:1-14)

When I was 19, the woman that I was dating at the time threatened to steal my watch. She felt like I spent all our time together checking said watch and worrying about arriving late to my next thing. This probably should have told both of us something about the state of that particular relationship, but looking back, she captured something about my character at that moment in my life. I spent up to 20 hours per day in a hurry. And, my reaction to her criticism also captured something telling. I didn’t get what she was so worried about. I had a run from the age of 18 to the age of 30 where my work life balance didn’t exist. I rushed from place to place. I would fail to balance a college prep high school, undergrad, and six years of graduate school with a heavy extracurricular load, jobs, and a personal life. I still work and rush too much now. The day before I wrote this piece, I was up for over 20 hours, working all but two of them. However, the real height of my workaholism came in that 12 year stretch – high school, college, teaching, grad school, international missions, and founding a church.

When that run ended, I moved to be a solo pastor in Lexington, Texas, and I looked back at that period with the regrets of an addict. The human brain can be a surprisingly simple machine at times. It doesn’t differentiate causes of stress. Stress is stress. The human endocrine system sees no difference between a hyper programmed 20 somethings and running from a lion. I essentially spent that entire season of my life high on adrenaline and cortisol. My lifestyle deliberately flooded my system with those hormones, and I lived in the perpetual state of tunnel vision that they invoke. Any good 12 Step program includes a piece where you apologize to those that you harmed through your addiction. Looking back at my late teens and 20s, now no longer living so high on stress, I comprehend the wreckage – failed relationship, unfulfilled responsibilities, missed opportunities, and the overwhelming sense that if I could have done a smaller number of things far better. If I hadn’t rushed, if I took my time, I would have treated people better, accomplished less, and maybe found peace in greater focus.

The story of the Golden Calf is about idolatry, an idolatry born of impatience, of being in a rush.

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘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.’ Aaron said to them, ‘Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’ (Exodus 32:1-2 NRSV)

Moses goes up the mountain to receive God’s law. How long did that take? However long it takes for the finger and voice of God to dictate 11 chapters of Exodus. The people, including Moses’s brother and right hand man, dislike the lack of immediacy and rush to make their own item for worship. At this point, we usually start dunking on them. After all that God has done, how could they give up so quickly? They saw the parting of the Red Sea. Moses leaves their sight for a little while, and they lose the script entirely? We marvel at their failure or simply use this scene as emblematic of humanity’s innate idolatrousness. One can sum up the entire Exodus cycle with: “The people cry out, wondering where God is. God moves. The people praise God. The people cry out again, wondering where God is.”

Out there, in the wilderness, far from civilization, with nothing but desert and mountains as far as the eye can see, the Hebrew people didn’t exactly live in comfort and peace. They lived as slaves. They fled. They got attacked by the Egyptian army. They watched God beat them back in a truly dramatic show of power. From there, they moved constantly, day after day, month after month, with no homes but their tents and no food except what fell from Heaven. The trauma of their previous life and escape and the strain of constant movement in hostile terrain left them with huge amounts of stress and adrenaline. Moses’s delay found them at a moment of weakness – not one of strength. They too were high on stress, and believe me, one doesn’t always make the best choices in that situation.

I don’t want to create the excuse that you can do whatever you want and blame it on being high at the time. Got caught in idolatry? It’s okay. I was high! No. Instead, I wonder how the increasingly overstuffed nature of modern life impacts the human soul. I approach this as perhaps the chief among sinners in this regard. I see it even in the life of my own family. We managed to avoid major kids’ activities for the first 7 years of our son’s life, but now, the shuttle service from Scouts, to choir, to run club operates in full force, every week. No one has time. Work, kids, family, whatever pulls us all from place to place to place. The combo can kill us, mind, body, and soul.

In that perpetual state, it can be hard to summon the patience to wait on the Lord and far easier to offer up our own expedient. For me to end this by saying, “slow down,” would constitute hypocrisy in the extreme and serves no one. We cannot withdraw from the world. Bills have to get paid. Kids have to get to soccer. Aging parents need care. I merely want us all to know the spiritual risks that our world creates for us. Maybe, despite our run and gun way of life, we can see God through the miasma of stress.