This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 10/11/20, at Berkeley Friends Church (via videoconference). The scripture readings for this sermon were: 1 Exodus 32:1-14. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)

Listen to the Sermon Now

We are living in a golden age of TV. I’m old enough to remember back when you actually had to turn the television on at a particular time if you wanted to catch your favorite show. And if you missed it, you’d have to wait until it was on reruns.

Now, everything is at your fingertips. Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+ – everything streaming, on-demand, immediate.

And it’s so good. Let’s be real. There’s more good TV coming out every year or two right now than came out in whole decades in the age of traditional TV.

We are living in a golden age of TV, and I’m loving it. Especially during this pandemic. I’m probably spending an average of an hour or two a night streaming a show or a movie. After work is done and the kids are off to bed, it’s such a relief to just turn my mind off, lay back on the couch and watch some of the best entertainment the world has ever seen.

Entertainment is the name of the game. It’s not just TV and movies. Social media, of course, is an extremely potent and addictive form of entertainment. How many of us have found ourselves scrolling through your social media feed, liking and sharing things, flitting from post to post, only to wake up an hour later, astonished at the time that has just disappeared?

Entertainment. That’s where it’s at. Video games. When I was a kid in the mid to late nineties, the best video games were things like Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo and Sim City 2000 on PC. Those games were amazing, and consumed countless hours of my childhood. But they look like digital chicken scratch by comparison with the depth and quality and sheer number of digital titles we have access to today.

Video games today are deeply immersive. Some of them feel like being inside a movie. Others are social, and become like a second job for many of the players. It’s easy to spend twenty hours a week in the game world, and many of us spend far, far more than that. Especially now, in an age of economic desperation, chronic unemployment and under-employment, millions of people are getting their sense of place, their sense of accomplishment and status, from massive multiplayer online video games.

Entertainment. It’s amazing. It’s so good. We love it, right? Who doesn’t have their favorite delivery system? Who among us can live without the sweet release of digital entertainment?

Certainly not me.

Have any of you read the book or watched the movie Ready Player One? It’s set in the near-future, in 2045, where the earth is a sprawling wasteland of ecological destruction and growing poverty, while the super-rich gate themselves away in fortified enclaves.

In this world of climate destruction, massive income inequality, and loss of any meaningful government beyond profit motives of corporations, most regular people spend their lives plugged into virtual reality. The real world is a total nightmare, so billions of people – everyone who can possibly afford to – escapes to a better world, inside a digital fantasy land called the OASIS.

I remember when I first read the book shortly after it came out, back in 2011, the author’s vision seemed a little far-fetched. Certainly on the wacky side of the possible.

Doesn’t sound too implausible now, does it? Sounds downright prophetic to me.

Our society is falling apart – politically, economically, ecologically – and billions of us spend our leisure time plugged into various modes of electronic entertainment, engaged with ersatz worlds that are easier, more beautiful, and more satisfying than the real world we inhabit.

When was the last time you felt sustained boredom? Not just for a minute, but for hours, or even days?

I remember boredom. I remember it vividly. It was one of the primary experiences of my childhood. I was bored all the time. I was constantly looking for some outlet, some way to engage my frustrated imagination and express myself. To discover, to explore the world around me. To make sense of it all and gain a sense of mastery over my environment.

I read tons of fiction and non-fiction. I sketched. I made music. I wrote poetry. I tried to write a novel at the age of 12. (It was awful.) I got politically engaged and worked to get a socialist candidate for president on the ballot in Kansas. I yearned. It hurt.

I haven’t been bored in a long time. I can’t remember the last time I endured boredom for an entire hour, much less a day. Always at my fingertips are streaming entertainment, social media, an endless series of pithy articles to read, immersive video games to play.

The moment the itch of boredom sets in on me, I can reach for my phone. My laptop. The TV remote. The OASIS is at my beck and call. I don’t have to endure this world we live in, with its slow progress and frustrations. Out here, I am so weak and small, but in the OASIS, in the digital world, I can be whoever I want. I don’t have to feel bad. I don’t have to ask permission. I don’t have to wait. I can have it all now.

When Moses went up on Mount Sinai to meet with God, he was gone for forty days and forty nights. That is to say, he was away for a really long time.

Moses was the leader of the Hebrews. He was their prophet. He was the messenger from God who told them what they needed to do and where they should go. It was Moses who spoke on their behalf to Pharaoh. It was Moses who led them out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, and into the wilderness of Sinai.

But now Moses was gone. Not just for a day or two, but for a long time – more than a month. People started getting nervous. People’s minds started to wander. People got bored.

So they went to Aaron, the man that Moses had left in charge while he was away. And they said to Aaron:

“Hey, Aaron: Moses has been away for a really long time. We’re not sure where he’s off to, but that storm has been raging on top of the mountain since before he left. Maybe he fell off a cliff. Maybe God struck him with lightning Zeus-style. Maybe he ran away. We don’t know. But bottom line is, we’ve got to do something.

We’re aimless. We don’t have a sense of direction anymore. We’re bored. So we’ve got an idea. Since we don’t have Moses to follow anymore, why don’t we make some images of gods to lead us forward. They can show us the way, just like Moses did. If Moses can mediate God to us, maybe some beautiful images can do the same.

We know the Caananites have Baal, the bull god. That seems to be working out pretty well for them. Maybe you can make us a bull, too. Bulls are a sign of strength, and we need some strength right now, if we are going to make it through the wilderness.

So make us some gods, Aaron, to show us how to follow the LORD. Moses is gone, and we’re bored. Give us something to do!”

Now, you would expect Aaron, as Mose’s right-hand man, to put up some sort of objection. But to our surprise, he immediately goes along with the demands of the people. He tells them to gather up all their valuables made out of gold, all the petty wealth they had brought with them out of Egypt. Aaron fashions it into a golden calf. A bull. A sign of power and strength.

And Aaron unveiled the golden calf to the people and said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” And he built an altar for the calf – a site where the people could come and worship – and he declared that the next day would be a festival to the LORD.

I find this really interesting. Because most of us, when we think of the story of the golden calf, we imagine that this was a complete abandonment of God by the Hebrews in the desert. But that doesn’t seem quite right. Aaron made the calf, and set it up at a site for worship, but then announced a festival to the LORD, the same LORD that Moses had gone to meet up on Mount Sinai.

It seems that the calf wasn’t really meant to be a replacement for God, it was meant to be a replacement for Moses.

The calf was more exciting than Moses. It was present while he was absent. It offered them a chance to perform tasks and religious ritual. The calf relieved anxiety and boredom. It told them that everything would be OK, and it gave them agency to be able to improve their situation without having to wait for Moses endlessly in the wilderness.

And so it says that the people, “rose early the next day, and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.” And it seems the the word that is translated here as “to play” or “to revel” has a sexual connotation. It is very likely that this is referring to sexual orgies, which were quite common in Canaanite religious practice in those days.

Who says worship can’t be fun? Am I right?

This is really interesting. Because this means that Aaron and the people thought they could worship God while ignoring God’s plan. They thought they could create a world of their own choosing, a world that was more psychologically safe for them, a world of bulls and strength, a world of wealth and fertility and sexualized religious rites. A world where they could make God in their own image.

And we can relate to this, can’t we? Because we, too, like to be entertained. We, too, believe that we can follow the God of Moses and Jesus while also conforming ourselves to the practices of the culture around us. We think we are Christians, followers of Jesus, inheritors of the promise, lovers of God. But where is the evidence in how we spend our time?

If I were to do a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation, I would say I spend probably two to three times more time watching streaming TV than I do reading the Bible and participating in worship. If I were to count all of the entertainment activities that I engage in – TV, social media, games, entertainment masquerading as “news” – the ratio would be much worse.

Are you in the same boat as me? Am I an outlier? Are the rest of you spending more time in prayer and Bible study than you are in entertainment? If that’s the case, then praise God, and pray for me!

But I don’t think so. I think most of us are a lot like the Hebrews in the wilderness. We’re in uncomfortable, unfamiliar territory. We’ve been forced out of the familiarity of Egypt: America-as-usual. We’re looking for anything to hold onto. 

In these circumstances, we are very susceptible to the lure of the Canaanite culture around us. The golden bull of Wall Street. The orgies of Netflix and Facebook. Pouring our wealth and attention into frivolous things rather than the service of God and neighbor. “These are your gods, O Israel.”

We are a lot like the Hebrews. We think that we can embrace both God and the calf. Both the way of Jesus and the culture that surrounds us. We think that we can walk that line. We say, with the little girl from the El Paso hard and soft taco commercial, Por qué no los dos? Why not have both?

Why not?

Moses is here this morning to tell us that we cannot hide behind our entertainments any longer. The LORD is here this morning to say that we have to choose between the illusions of this world and the reality that God sees. We are called to embrace the discomfort and boredom that comes from living in the wilderness with God. Because that’s what it means to live as finite creatures in the real world.

George Fox is here with us this morning, too. The early Quakers had something to say about entertainment and distraction. 

A lot of us today are familiar with the Peace Testimony, and the values of simplicity, equality, integrity, stewardship, community, and so on. But the old Quakers had a lot more testimonies than these, and they weren’t general principles. They got very specific. 

One of these testimonies was their testimony against vain and worldly amusements. Early Quakers would not attend plays. They would not gamble. They would not participate in sporting events. They most definitely would not have watched Netflix.

Now, that’s not to say that we all need to stop watching any TV, or playing any games, or participating in any sports. The early Quakers weren’t right about everything. And you’ve probably noticed that this sermon is full of movie references. There is room in God’s world for creativity, art, theater, and fun.

But we can’t allow these things to distract us from the truth. We must not fall into the trap that the surrounding culture has laid for us, to draw us into entertainment as an alternative reality to be immersed in. 

God gave us creativity so that we could engage more fully with the cosmos that God has made, so that we could become co-creators with him. Unfortunately, this society that we live in has twisted our God-given creativity, using it to construct a false reality that numbs our hearts and blinds us to the truth.

God is calling us to turn away from the systems of entertainment that this world uses to keep us pacified. The rulers of this world have created a whole system of entertainment to keep us disconnected and powerless. They’ve forged a new sort of golden calf to provide us with false comfort, to keep us plugged into the Matrix and ignorant of the Desert of the Real.

Whether we like it or not, we do live in that desert. The golden trinkets of vain and worldly amusements have no power to deliver, only to distract and diminish.

This morning, we stand at the foot of Mount Sinai. We’re waiting to hear God’s word together. And even now, the temptation to distraction is with us. Our hands itch for our telephones, and all our false gods.

What would it mean for us to wait on Moses to come back down the mountain? What would it look like for us to reject the false idols of passive entertainment? What would it look like to turn away from syncretism and compromise with the surrounding culture; the voice that insists that we can follow God while also participating in the false worships of this world?

The good news is, we are not alone in this wilderness. If we will look up from our false gods for a moment. If we put away the screens. If we will turn off the stream of easy wins, dopamine hits, and fantasies, we will see real people – our brothers and sisters in Israel – standing here with us. We will see life as it really is, and say together with God who created it: “This is good.”

This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 7/12/20, at Berkeley Friends Church (via videoconference). The scripture readings for this sermon were: Genesis 12:1-9 and Hebrews 11:8-12. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text)

Listen to the Sermon Now

A couple of years ago, Faith and I were living in Washington, DC. We had a pretty good life there. We both had work we enjoyed. Our kids had school and childcare that met their needs. We loved our home and had some good friends. We felt comfortable.

We were at rest in our lives, but we were uneasy in our spirits. As well as things were going for us, we felt a yearning for more. More life. More spirit. More of God’s presence leading us, guiding us, flowing through our words and actions.

Even when everything rational told us that we should feel full, something gnawed at us, telling us we were empty. Our feet were firmly planted, but we could sense that God was calling us to take another step.

So when Dorothy Kakimoto reached out to us, asking us if we were open to exploring coming to serve as pastors at Berkeley Friends Church, we were ready to have that conversation with you. And as it became clear that God was clearing a path for us to join you here in California, we were prepared to embrace that invitation.

It would have been easy to resist that call, to turn away from the opening. There was a temptation to choose the easy, safe path – to continue doing the things that were mostly working and hope for the best. But we could sense that, in the words of Frank Herbert, “that path leads ever down into stagnation.” We could be safe, or we could be faithful; we had to choose.

In our readings this morning, we hear about Sarah and Abraham – back when they were still called Sarai and Abram. They had a choice to make. On the one hand, they had their safe, stable, predictable life in Haran. That’s where their family was, where they had gained their wealth and security. But they heard God calling them to set out on an adventure.

God said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Go from everything that you’ve ever known. Go from those things that make you safe and comfortable, into a place you’ve never seen. Go, because you can trust me. Go, and I will be with you. I will bless you in every way. Go, and all the families of the earth will be blessed, too.

That’s a big leap of faith for anyone. But especially for Abraham and Sarah. Because they were very old, and they had no children. As far as they could see, their family had no future. They thought they were the end of the line. Yet they could hear the call of the Spirit of God. They felt the hunger for more. They could sense that there was a great adventure that they were being invited into.

God told Abraham and Sarah to go, and they went. They went out of the land where they had lived their whole lives, into a new place. The Lord showed them where their descendents would someday live – not as a wandering family, but as a great nation. 

And here’s an interesting part. They got to pitch their tent in the promised land. They got to drink from the rivers and eat from the fruit trees of Canaan. And while they camped in this land, God promised them that it would someday be a homeland for their family.

But then God called them to keep moving. It says that, after building an altar to God in the land he had promised, Abraham moved on. First to the east, and then south towards the Negeb. Abraham and Sarah had taken the big risk, and they had seen the promised land. But now they had to keep moving, because the promise was not only for them, but for all their descendents, for the next generation and on, and on.

I see this story in my own life. I see how God has called our family to uproot and travel to a land we don’t know, so that we will be blessed, and others will be blessed through us. I know that we haven’t reached the promised land yet, but we are on the path. We are living the adventure, with God leading us day by day.

We had something good in Washington, DC. We got to pitch our tent there, and we ate some of that promised-land fruit. But God wasn’t done with us. We had to keep moving, to cooperate with the grander, more beautiful vision that God has for us. 

If we wanted to be faithful, we couldn’t cling to our own comfort; we couldn’t accept just getting by. We had to let go of our own personal experience of the promised land so that we could become a blessing to the world. Because the promised land is not just for us; God wants to invite the whole world. God is giving us a hope and a future beyond our own little family as we know it today. God is expanding the circle, blessing all the families of the earth.

Can you see yourself in this story? Can you see Berkeley Friends Church? How are we, as a community, like Abraham and Sarah? Can we hear God calling us to a new adventure, a risky path of going where God calls us and discovering the promised land where God will lead us? Could God use Berkeley Friends Church to bless all the families of the earth, just like Abraham and Sarah?

I believe so. Because we’re a lot like Abraham and Sarah. As a community, we’re wealthy. We’re successful. We’re comfortable. We’re old. And, let’s admit it: we’re afraid that maybe we don’t have a future.

Abraham and Sarah thought that their family would die with them. That they would have no children to carry on their story. They were living their lives in a defensive crouch, waiting for the end.

So it must have come as a big shock when they discovered God calling them into a new adventure. At the age of 75, God was telling them, “Go! Try something new! Take a big risk, and I will walk with you. I will bless you. I will give you life, a hope and a future.”

Where did they find the courage to do this? What vision did they see that energized them to set on this long journey – a journey that still to this day is not over? 

The author of the Book of Hebrews says that Abraham and Sarah perceived something that no one else around them could. They experienced a hope that, at the time, must have seemed totally unrealistic. But on the basis of faith, they acted. They took the big leap and found that the God who spoke to them was trustworthy. 

God filled Abraham and Sarah with a powerful vision. He gave them eyes to see the future glory of God’s kingdom. A chain of events that God would use them to set in motion. A family history that would culminate in the savior of the world, Jesus Christ. 

And so in this hope, they set out on their great adventure. Hebrews says that they “looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” They knew that they would not personally reach the end of the story, but by faith they knew how the story ended.

Even more than Abraham and Sarah, we know how this story ends. We know that the Lord Jesus has sat down at the right hand of the Father. We know that, in spite of all the terrible shakings we are witnessing right now, that the God we worship created the entire cosmos, and he sees ahead to the end. He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

This is the reality that Abraham and Sarah experienced, leaving their home in Haran thousands of years ago, back when the Middle East was still the Fertile Crescent. This is the faith, hope, and love that gave them the courage to risk abandoning everything they knew – even in their old age – to embrace the great adventure that the Spirit whispered in their hearts.

Do you hear that whisper? What is the adventure that the Spirit is beckoning us to discover together? What are the risks that we must take, the safety that we must abandon, to be reborn in our descendants and become a blessing to our city, our nation, our cosmos?

You are not an accident. We are not an accident. It’s not random coincidence that we’ve been drawn together at this point in history. God has called us to be Berkeley Friends Church, to be this particular community in Jesus Christ. The Spirit has called each one of us here. God has a purpose for us, and he is ready to guide us together.

2020 is a time of shaking, the likes of which we’ve never experienced. In times like these, it’s natural to want to retreat to the beforetimes. It can be tempting to say, “Oh, boy – I’ll sure be glad when this is all over. When the pandemic ends, we get a vaccine, and we can all go back to the way things were before. Lord, take me back to 2019!”

There’s no going back to 2019. Things will never be like they were before. 

If we’re honest with ourselves, that’s a good thing. We knew in 2019 that our community needed a change. We knew that God was calling us to something deeper. We had that hunger that Abraham and Sarah experienced, that deep desire for more of God, more of his life and power and spirit in our lives. We wanted more, and we knew the status quo couldn’t get us where we wanted to go.

Well, good news: The status quo is gone. 2020 has swept all of that away. We are in brand-new, uncharted territory. We don’t know what comes next. All we do know is that we serve a God who sends us out. We serve a God who invites us into the risky path of vulnerability, discovery, and adventure.

We stand with Abraham and Sarah on the border of Haran, looking out at the road ahead. We stand with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee as he calls our name. We stand with the apostles, as the Holy Spirit fills the whole house and joins us into one body, one community. Together with all the saints, we “look forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”

Do you hear that voice? Do you hear the call? Do you feel the hope breaking through the fear? Are you ready for the adventure?

The years to come will not be like those that came before. Our community will change in ways we can’t even imagine right now. This is a good thing. We are blessed – and God will make us a blessing to the world.

Let go of your fear. We don’t have to die without descendants. God has given us a future. The future will be different. We will have to change. But God will care for us. Open yourself to the adventure. God wants to bless us and make us as numerous as the stars.

Say “yes” when God says “go.” Say “yes” to God’s adventure. Say “yes” to the stretching and struggle and upheaval that stands before us. Because we will pitch our tents in the promised land and eat from the fruit trees there. We will set up our altar and give praise to God in the land where he is leading us. We will journey onward, led by the Spirit and trusting in Jesus to prepare a place for us. There is a home for us, and many are yet to be gathered.