It’s Hard to Wait
Sermon — October 11, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
“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.’” (Exod. 32:1)
You know, I can’t help but think that this all would’ve turned out differently if the ancient Israelites had only had smartphones.
In our reading from Exodus last Sunday, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, including the second one: “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” (Exodus 20:4) And this Sunday, we read about the people doing exactly that: making and worshiping a golden calf. This is typical, in a way. When someone tries to tell us what to do—even God—we often respond by pushing back. So perhaps this is a theological account of a common tendency: No sooner do we hear the law than we begin to break it.
Or perhaps, some scholars say, it’s part of a debate about proper religious practices happening within the world of ancient Israelite religion, an attack by writers from the southern kingdom of Judah against the northern kingdom of Israel. The golden calf, they say, is a not-so-veiled reference to the golden calves set up by King Jeroboam of the north in the cities of Bethel and Dan. (1 Kings 12:25-33) This story of idolatry turns a proud tradition into a story of ancient disgrace.
Or perhaps the story of the golden calf is a timely lesson about how we should relate to wealth. Churches all around the country are launching their fall pledge campaigns, this time of year. A story about what people do with their gold? Surely someone somewhere has turned this into a church fundraising pitch.
But I’m sorry to say to our stewardship chairs, and to our historians of ancient Israelite religion, and to our theologians—I actually think the ancient Israelites were actually just kind of bored.
After all, it was way back at the end of chapter 24 that something exciting happened: “Moses went up on the mountain, and [a] cloud covered the mountain, and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai…for six days.” Now, Moses has been up there for forty days. (Exod. 24:15, 18)
God’s been giving him instructions on how to build the Ark of the Covenant (make it from acacia wood, two and a half cubits long by one and a half cubits wide); about the priestly vestments that should be made for his brother Aaron to wear (a breastplate, an ephod, a robe, a checkered tunic, a turban, and a sash); about the number of bulls and rams to be offered at the ordination of priests (not how we do it any more); and about the precise blend of spices and of oils that should be used for anointing—and all in extraordinary detail. You can see why it’s taking forty days to get it all straight.
But the Israelites have been waiting all this time with nothing to do. They don’t know what’s been going on; they are, understandably, anxious and afraid. But I live in 2026, so I know the best way to occupy your time when you’re bored, or anxious, or afraid: Looking at your phone. So I just think this whole thing would’ve gone very differently if, instead of coming down from the mountain after forty days with the two stone tablets of the Law, Moses had come down after forty minutes or so with, you know, some tablets. Just to give them something to do.
Okay, the problem with all this waiting wasn’t really that they were bored. It was more that they were anxious and afraid, in a situation that felt beyond their control. After all, the prophet who had led them out of slavery in Egypt had disappeared, and the God whose words he spoke was a mystery to them. And so they did what many of us do, when we begin to worry about the future, and they tried to create a way to control over the situation. They didn’t know what Moses was doing up there with God. But they thought that if they could make a new god for themselves, maybe that god would sort things out. This is a classic example of what a wise man once called “controlling what you can when things feel out of control.” (Technically he wasn’t a man so much as an animated magical snowman, but people start worrying when I attribute all my psychological insights to Frozen II.)
Anyway, waiting with uncertainty is hard. And yet Christianity is mostly about waiting around.
We live in the middle of the story of our faith. The Biblical story of God’s relationship with humankind is essentially divided into two parts. There is a whole long narrative arc that begins with Adam and Eve, that stretches through the story of the ancient Israelites, that tells of the prophets who call the people again and again to turn away from worshiping idols and to return to God, that culminates in Jesus’ proclamation of the coming kingdom of God. Jesus inaugurates that kingdom. He dies and rises again. And he says that he’ll return to finish the work, to bring about a new heavens and a new earth. But in between, there’s a gap between the part of the story that has already happened now and the part of the story that has not happened yet. And we experience that “now and not yet” tension every day.
In the face of grief, God comforts us with the promise that we will rise again to eternal life; but we’re not in heaven yet, and so we still mourn those whom we have loved and lost. In the face of the injustice and cruelty so common in this world, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God has come near; but that reign of peace and love is not fully established yet. In the face of our anxieties about the future, Jesus reassures us that there is a God of love who cares enough about each one of us that he has counted even the hairs on our heads—and yet here we are, still worrying about the future anyway, because we are still waiting for it to be revealed.
In many ways, we share the condition of those ancient Israelites who’d been waiting for forty days with no word from Moses or from God, and began to worry about how things would turn out. And, like them, we fill the time by making golden calves.
We may not literally melt down our jewelry to make a statue of a god. But we spend a lot of our time and energy trying to come up with ways to cope with uncertainty while we wait for the future to arrive. We bounce around between different exercise programs and dietary supplements in the hope that there are concrete steps we can take now to ensure that we’ll be healthy then. We diligently read parenting books, in the hopes that someone, somewhere has discovered a way to exert some control over the messy and chaotic experience of being a parent. (I’ve heard that this year maybe it’s the French?) We read the news and check election polls in the hope that if people just elect our preferred politicians just one more time then the problems of the world will be resolved.
And none of these things are bad in and of themselves. But none of them is going to work. None of them can solve the problem we face, which is precisely that we live in a world that is beyond our control.
But there are things that we do control. And so I find myself encouraged and comforted and challenged by the words of the Apostle Paul today. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he says (Phil. 4:4); and that’s a choice. We can’t choose for life to be easy. But we can choose to rejoice, to celebrate what’s good, whatever else is going on. “Let your gentleness be known”; we can do that while we wait. “Do not worry about anything” may be easier said than done, but “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (Phil 4:6) This isn’t a finger-pointing thing. I don’t do a good job of this myself. But we can actually cultivate practices of gratitude and prayer. These are available to us.
There’s an awkward tension, I think, between the intense urgency of so much of Jesus’ message and the huge span of time that we spend waiting around. It’s a little weird that Jesus can tell a parable in which it’s so important to the father of the groom that you show up to this wedding that if all you people RSVPed and there’s an empty seat at Table 13, then God help me, I will burn this city to the ground (Matthew 22:7)… and a few days later, Jesus can say, “I am with you always, to the end of the age,” and then immediately ascend to heaven, while we wait two thousand years for his return. (Matt. 28:20) We live with uncertainty and waiting and yet God demands urgent action.
But it occurs to me that this isn’t a tension at all. It’s precisely because the future is so far off, and so uncertain—it’s precisely because we can’t control it, however many golden calves we cast—that it’s so urgent to “come to the wedding banquet” today. (Matthew 22:4) The farm and the business will be there tomorrow; but the time to celebrate will have passed. So what can we do now, given how little we can control what happens then? “Rejoice in the Lord always… And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Phil 4:4, 7)
