Exodus 32:1-14

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” They 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 revel.

The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ” The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, and of you I will make a great nation.”

But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people… 

Sermon Text

There was a time when idolatry was much easier to identify. Long ago, when people made gods out of stone and wood you could easily pick one out and say, “That’s a different God than the one I’m supposed to worship.” Idolatry then was done when a who made the conscious decision to worship a deity other than the God of Israel. Today, our idolatry tends to be more subtle, but I’m going to put forward the idea that it still has the same root and basic appearance of what we saw in ancient Israel.

We know from archaeology in the Holy Land that there was never a time where the people of God did not keep idols with them. One of the most famous examples of this is in a piece of graffiti which depicts the God of Israel standing beside his wife Asherah. Below them a bull stands circling on itself. Throughout the Old Testament we hear of Asherah, a fertility goddess usually associated with trees. We also see a repeated association of the God of Israel with bulls, likely another symbol of fertility. Alongside we find statues to Ba’al and to the female deities who are considered brides of either Ba’al or the God of Israel.

Some modernists take this to mean that the idea that monotheism was a myth in ancient Israel. They go on to say that God only became the one true God much later in the history of God’s people and that we invented the worship of a single God later on. The main refutation to that idea is that the scriptures we do have tell us, without reservation, that God’s people always found new idols to worship. What archaeology tells us is that they never gave up worshipping the God who they rightfully needed to worship, they just kept adding other Gods into the equation.

In our scripture today we see the biggest example of idolatry in the Torah. Yes, Jacob and his wife stole Laban’s house gods. Yes, we get other instances in which people who are descended from Abraham worship other gods. Still, nothing compares to the incident with the golden calf. God is on top of the mountain and has just given the commandments to Moses. Still, the people are worried. Yes, it is true that God up on that mountain is thundering down at them, but Moses has been gone for forty days. If Moses were to die on that mount, who would be their mediator? How would they worship God without Moses as their go between? So, they go to Moses’s brother, the high priest of the people of Israel, and they beg him to make them a God that they can worship in the camp while Moses is away.

We’ve already established that throughout the Old Testament and in archaeological evidence we see that people, when they chose to represent the God of Israel, often picked a bull. It is fitting then that Aaron takes the gold jewelry of his people, melts it down, and shapes it into the shape of a bull calf. The people dance around it in worship and Moses is told by God that there will be judgment because of his people’s indiscretion. It is only because Moses begs God for mercy that the people are spared.

The thing that stands out to me about this narrative is that the people are not worshiping an idol to get away from the God of Israel. They are worshiping an idol to make God more easy to understand. If God is up on the mountain thundering, and if God is up on the mountain such that Moses is the one they have to send up to speak with him, then they cannot control what God does. The second that they take a hold of God and put him into a little box or statue is when they get control of the situation. Idols need to be cleaned and fed and moved by other people. To build an idol is to limit the deity to the confines of wood and stone and, in this case, gold.

The idolatry that we as Christians commit is very rarely taking a hold of God and putting him aside. Instead, what we tend to do is take God and squeeze him into a nice convenient little box so that we can pull him out when he supports us (or we at least pretend that God supports us.). We then follow with the secondary thing that so many people in the history of Israel did: we add on to our deity other lesser figures who we decide are necessary to accomplish what needs done. We create other mediums by which we can control this world, and we do so thinking that that gives us more authority than we actually have.

I would say the most common place where we find ourselves generating idols is in identifying people who we can lift up as heroes. Heroes are the primary place in which we create idols because these heroes are often people who are doing things that we think need done in the world. I am in support of having people who we can look at as ideals to emulate.

I grew up with PBS. Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross, Julia Child, and Carl Sagan: all these people have things about them that I wish as an adult to emulate. Likewise, for all their faults I can look back in history and admire people like John Adams, Chromatius: the Bishop of Aquila, and, of course, our very own John Wesley here in the Methodist Church. None of these people, though, have the means by which the world could be saved, except insomuch as they emulate and proclaim Christ.

How often does a politician become, in our eyes, the only way by which God can redeem this world. We haven’t had a normal presidential election in twelve years. “Normal,” in the sense that we are trying to find somebody to fill the position that will do their best. Instead it has become this existential quest to find somebody who, once we get them in office, ensures we never have to do anything again. We seem to truly believe that these are the anointed ones who will set everything straight and so we forget that the whole political system requires us to constantly be at work if we actually want to bring about a good change in this world.

In churches, we often look to ministers, or particular Saints in the pews and say, “Well they do such good work, without them how could anything be done?” I was blessed growing up that I had an incredible minister in my home church for fifteen years. And, unfortunately, across those fifteen years, people turned him into an idol. They seemed to think that, alongside God, he was necessary to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven in our hometown of Berkeley Springs. The minister who followed him after those fifteen years had no chance, not because he was bad at ministry. In fact, he’s still, to this day, one of the most impressive ministers I’ve ever known. The problem is that he was not the one who had just left.

I have a test that’s very easy to administer, but it is still an effective way to figure out if you have demoted God to a little idol you can keep in your pocket for times of convenience. Close your eyes and think of something that you do, or that you think, or that you say,  that you earnestly believe is not something that God wants you to do, or think, or say. If you cannot think of a single way that your perspective and God’s perspective are different, either you are truly somebody who has been perfected in love in this life, and who only makes mistakes unintentionally, or you have deluded yourself about who God is.

Read through the scriptures and find for me a single saint, in the old or New Testament, who ever gets it right all the time. There’s always a place to repent, there’s always a chance to change perspective. God is bigger than us. God is not custom made for you and for me. God exists separate, and above, and for all people. We should have moments where we read scripture or we are in prayer and God reveals a truth to us and we go, “No, no! God I don’t want that.” Because if in scripture, and in prayer, all we ever find is God agreeing with us, I am willing to believe we are not reading or praying honestly. The people of God did not build an idol at the base of Sinai because they did not believe in God, they did it because they were afraid God had something different for them.

So, people of God I’m asking you today to break your idols. The people you’ve decided are necessary for the salvation of this earth, unless their name is Jesus Christ, simply are not necessary for the salvation of this earth. The God who agrees with you every day on all things, is not the God who we worship in this sanctuary, give him up to. Embrace the God who thunders from the mountaintop, embrace the God who demeans himself enough to come in human form and walk among us and die for us. Embrace the God who asks us to change and don’t settle for any lesser image that you can more easily control. We all will fall into idolatry if we are not vigilant, and people of God the scariest thing is the idol we build will be an imitation of the God we truly love. So, know who God is, love God with all your heart soul and strength, and don’t accept any imitation, and don’t put beside him any other mediation. Christ alone is our hope, our source, and our salvation. – Amen