No Angel Will Do

Scripture:

- Exodus 33:3 - "...I will send an angel before you... but I will not go up among you, for you are a stiff-necked people, and I might consume you on the way."

- Exodus 33:6 - "Therefore the Israelites stripped themselves of their ornaments from Mount Horeb onward."

- Philippians 3:13-14 - "This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead..."

Reflection:

Here is the deal God offers - and it is, on its face, a good one: an angel to lead you, the promised land ahead, your enemies driven out, God's help at a safe and safe distance. "But I will not go up among you." Everything the people wanted, delivered by an intermediary they could survive.

The people refuse it. That is one of the most astonishing sentences in Scripture. They would rather wander in the wilderness with God than enter the land without God. Whatever the calf incident broke, it also clarified: they now knew what they could not travel without.

And so they strip off their ornaments - the gold of Egypt that had so recently become a calf - and they mourn. Letting go of what shimmers. Paul says something similar with different grammar: forgetting what lies behind, straining forward. Not forgetting who we are, but forgetting our grievances, our credentials, our status - the jewelry of the old life - because none of it travels. And his claim that "our citizenship is in heaven" was never a promise to escape the world; in Philippi, a Roman colony that imitated the capital, it was a political word: your true loyalty lies with another polis, and you live that loyalty here.

Prayer:

God who offers us success without your presence, teach us to say no to the angel. Strip us of our ornaments - the approvals, the securities, the golden things we melt down into substitutes for you.

Let your presence go with us, or let us not go. And make us citizens of the city you are building, residents of it in every place we work today.