Growing Close to or Distancing Oneself from God?

Today's first reading, Exodus 32: 7-14, tells us the story of the chosen people's worship of the golden calf, believing that it was through the power of this molten image that they were brought out of Egypt, where they had been treated as slaves. Concerning the molten image, Aaron says to the people: "This is your God,  O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." 

Imagine God's anger! How insulting to God, who had worked multiple wonders to free them from being slaves to the Egyptians.  How could they abandon God so quickly?  How could they turn away from Him and sacrifice to a molten image? In His anger, God says to Moses, His confidante and personal friend: "I see how stiff-necked this people is. Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them. Then I will make of you a great nation." Moses intervenes! So God relents "of the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people."

To this very day, God is abandoned, turned away from, in a variety of ways.  Who, today, invites you to turn away from God, to worship false gods?

With what, I need to ask myself, do I occupy my time in such a way that I abandon building a relationship with God, nurturing my faith life, growing in love with both God and my spouse, my children, my community members?  What dominates or controls my life, to what am I a slave, to the degree that I abandon being a responsible spouse, parent, grandparent, community member, family member, priest, deacon, student, employee?

Called to be God's Praise, God's Renown, God's Beauty

In today’s first reading, Jeremiah 13: 1-11, the prophet is asked by the Lord to purchase a linen loincloth and wear it on his loins but not to put it in water. Later, the Lord asks him to hide the cloth in the cleft of a rock. Much later, he is commanded to retrieve it. It has rotted and is good for nothing. That, the Lord says to Jeremiah, is what will happen to the Chosen People. “I will allow the pride of Judah to rot, the great pride of Jerusalem….For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins, so had I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me,…; to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty. But they did not listen.” No, “they have provoked me with their ‘no-god’ and angered me with their vain idols, [and I] will provoke them with a ‘no-people’; with a foolish nation I will anger them.”

In Christ Jesus and through the apostles, God has chosen Gentiles, all non-Jewish peoples, “to be His people, His renown, His praise, His beauty”. Like the Chosen People of the Old Covenant, however, many persons of  the New Covenant are also “provoking God with their ‘no-god’ and angering God with their vain idols.” (Dt. 32: 18-21, today’s responsorial psalm).

In your baptism, confirmation, reconciliation and reception of the Eucharist, you and I are those Gentiles made into God's people, God's renown, God's praise, God's beauty. Are we, too, provoking God by clinging to “no-gods”? Are we angering God with our vain idols? Or are  we building God’s Kingdom by growing in God’s love, the love into which we were baptized and confirmed and are nurtured in the Eucharist, in the reading of the Word and in our efforts to realize our union with God and others. From “the Rock that begot…[us]” (Dt. 32: 18-21),  may we stand firm in our efforts to plant seeds of love, reconciliation, justice and peace into the world in which we live.