Sin is a loaded word. For those outside the faith, it’s a funny and dated religious term. For Christians, we repeat it so often that it loses its bite. Scripture reveals that sin is worse than we know. Jesus is so serious about it that he says, “If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.” What is it about sin that’s so fatal it would require Jesus to go to the cross?
This Lent we do a soul examination, studying all the ways God describes the complex of sin. Lawlessness, adultery, rebellion . . . The cancerous nature of sin means that we need to go deeper than surface confession. The problem is worse than we know, which makes our Savior greater than we can imagine.
Invocation
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, who delivers us from all evil.
Invitation Prayer
Lord, evil often comes from those closest to us. Peter denied you and Judas betrayed you. You know the pain of evil that comes from your friends. Comfort us when we are hurt by those we love. Lord Jesus, without you we fall. With you, we stand. Stay with us, Amen.
Word
Exodus 32:3-4
“So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden[a] calf. And they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”
Meditation: Why I’ll Never Eat at Olive Garden Again by Susan Becher Schultz
In the year of 1998, a Sabrina the Teenage Witch computer game was released. This wasn’t just any game—it came with a Salem the cat GigaPet. I knew, as soon as I saw it on a Nickelodeon commercial break, that it had to be mine. I had a plan. I knew my Mom would take me to run errands with her the following day. All I had to do was convince her of how essential this Sabrina combo item was to me.
As soon as the automated doors of that unsuspecting Office Depot parted, my brother and I took off racing. We knew exactly where to find our favorite aisle. As always, it was filled with the latest beautifully-packaged desktop computer games. I found the Sabrina game almost immediately. I held it up to the fluorescent lighting in awe, memorized each word on the cover, and after begging my Mom to buy it for nearly a half an hour, she folded. I cried out in victory. It was everything I ever wanted, on a small keychain I could clip to the belt of my flared jeans.
Fast forward a few weeks later. My family went to an Olive Garden for dinner. I had been inseparable from my GigaPet since the day I got it. I kept Salem alive, fed him, treated the toy better than my living and breathing cats at home. Yet somehow, when I arrived home after our meal, Salem was nowhere to be found. I was in shambles. I ran to my mom to contact Olive Garden immediately. Relief washed over me when they reported it was in the lost and found. All hope was not lost! My mom told me she would stop by after work the next day.
All day I anticipated her arrival home with Salem. When her Astro minivan rolled into our driveway, excitement coursed through my veins. But my mom’s face was not a happy one. She sat me down in our living room to tell me my GigaPet had been taken out of the lost and found. I wouldn’t be getting it back. I spent the remainder of the evening crouched in a corner of my bedroom, crying in agony. It sounds silly, maybe, but to my seven-year-old self, it was devastating. And that is why, to this day, I still won’t eat at Olive Garden.
Like my obsession with a Gigapet, this passage in Exodus also seems a bit silly. The obviousness of the idolatry is cartoon-like. Actual worship of a statue calf made out of gold? We’re smarter than that now. No way would modern-day people do something like that.
Yet I think of the little hope they must have had, walking endlessly without knowing exactly where they were walking to. I think they may have been looking for something tangible to look up to. Something tactile to hold. Something that felt like their own. Anything to help them feel like they had some ounce of control over their lives. Which is something I can’t help but relate to.
My sister-in-law bought me a new Salem GigaPet after she heard my story. It was a wonderfully thoughtful gift, but it didn’t bring me the same happiness it did as a child. Instead, it was a reminder of how things quickly lose their meaning. As humans, we are always chasing the next glimmer of artificial hope. Time after time, we fail to acknowledge the promise God gives us, one that has outlasted generations of restless sinners and meaningless things.
Lord, help us to acknowledge where we grip tightly onto the things we own and glorify the people we look up to. Remind us of the beauty of your promise amidst aisles of shiny things. Amen.
Sending
Lord, in the face of evil, you call us from death to life, from silence to speech, from idleness to action. Go with us now. Send us with your gifts. Sustain us by your promise. Amen.