Fr Peter Helman

Dear friends,

For quite some time now our Old Testament readings for Morning Prayer have come from my favorite portion of the book of Exodus. As you may remember, the book tells of a people chosen and loved by God, delivered from enslavement, and made children of divine promise. It’s fitting to read Exodus when we do because the Church connects these stories so intimately to the celebration of Easter and the sacrament of Holy Baptism. We find in the deliverance of the Israelites a prefiguration of God’s saving work in Christ.

The prayer of Thanksgiving over the Water for the rite of Holy Baptism is familiar to us and lovely in its summation:

We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. […] Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

By now the plagues of Egypt and the Red Sea crossing are well behind us in the timeline of Exodus. We’ve long meandered through the wilderness with the tribes of Israel and are come, after months, to Mt. Sinai, where God gives the covenant of the Law, the Ten Commandments. We read last week of God’s terrifying appearance to Moses atop the mountain. And today we read of Moses’ descent again to the people with the Law and what he find there: a people already run aground of their idolatry.

With the Law, Moses descended to the people to find them quacking before an effigy of gold, a sightless, strengthless, inert bull-calf idol. They so quickly disavowed what had been given as the first commandment, to have no other gods before God, no graven image, no idol in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. And they cast the idol and worshipped it and sacrificed to it, not so much, I suppose, to supplant the God of their fathers but to construe what was incomprehensible in light of what they knew.

As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the calf, he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.

It is a heart-rending account in the midst of our celebration of Easter. And so I wonder what we are to be put in mind of today. I wonder if, on some level, we are called to remember the very thing from which we have been delivered, the power of sin and our own hearts prone to wander, and what is more still to render God thanks for his enduring mercy. We are no less prone to sin in the season of Easter than we are any time, and God's mercy calls us back. The matter is simply that God has acted and not counted our sins against us. And so we come to prayer this morning and begin the Office so fittingly with the officiant's joyful invitation:

Dearly beloved, we have come together in the presence of
Almighty God our heavenly Father, to render thanks for the
great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth
his most worthy praise, to hear his holy Word, and to ask, for
ourselves and on behalf of others, those things that are
necessary for our life and our salvation. And so that we may
prepare ourselves in heart and mind to worship him, let us
kneel in silence, and with penitent and obedient hearts
confess our sins, that we may obtain forgiveness by his
infinite goodness and mercy.

If we have found our hearts wandering from God, even this morning, we repent (again and again!) and return to the Lord, for with the Lord is plenteous redemption.


Yours in Christ,
Peter+