October 2026

Sermon 10/11/2026 – The Gods We’ve Built

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

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

Sermon 10/04/2026 – Words of Life

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Exodus 2:1-20 (NKJV)

And God spoke all these words, saying:

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

“You shall have no other gods before Me.

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

“You shall not murder.

“You shall not commit adultery.

“You shall not steal.

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

Now all the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. Then they said to Moses, “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”

And Moses said to the people, “Do not fear; for God has come to test you, and that His fear may be before you, so that you may not sin.”

Sermon Text

We talked last week about the need for us to honestly face the fact that we are responsible for the sins we commit. When we do wrong, we need to be willing to face the consequences on one hand and to fix the damage caused on the other. The thing this truth is predicated upon, however, is the concept that there are underlying morals that cannot be broken in this world. You cannot do certain things and when you do, there are consequences. Today, in honor of World Communion Sunday, I want us to look at the uniting moral framework that allows us to exist in Communion with other Christians. It is not just the agreement of what is good – the incarnation and resurrection of Christ or the moral need to care for one another – but the shared sense of right and wrong that allow us to cooperate across denominations.

We can become quite dour when we discuss sin in the Church. No wonder, sin is a horrible thing that gets between us and God. It is, however, a curable affliction. We do not need to be trapped within it, nor do we need to wallow in self-pity about our persistence in it – past or present. We are gifted the ability to free ourselves from Sin, and that is given through the grace of God through Christ.

Defining sin cannot be limited to saying, “all those things that hurt other people,” because there are sins that can hurt us each personally. They also cannot be called, “all thing that are unnatural,” because the most natural state of humanity is sinfulness. Sin, is best defined as an intentional opposition to God, manifested in acts that cause harm to people, creation at large, community, and the self. It is a mindset, a habit, a disease, and a choice all in one. It is that which works against good, but is very good at pretending to be in itself good. Sin is everywhere, but has no substance in itself. Destroyed with a single rebuke and yet taking a whole lifetime to master.

Today we read the “Ten Commandments,” or as they are known historically, “The Ten Words.” These are not the sum of God’s commands to God’s people – of which there are 614 – they are however the overarching moral framework that allows us to understand all the other commandments. They are the context and summary of God’s law, as much as Jesus’s summary of the Law in the form of “You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself,” are summaries of the Law and the Prophets. In these ten we do not find the fullness of God’s moral teachings, but we get a good idea.

Firstly, we see that God cares about our worship. Next week we’ll talk more about idolatry, so I do not want to belabor the point. However, the first thing God wishes us to know is that God is God, that God is a God who saves, and that we are not to make any idol to take place of God in our hearts and lives. Nor are we to take a hold of God’s name and use it like it’s nothing. Our worship matters our and talk about God matters… But I’ll leave that as a dangling thread, you have to come back next week for the full story there.

The final commandment specifically about holiness before God is the one that asks us to honor the Sabbath. We in the Methodist tradition believe that the Sabbath is not a concept that can shift as we need it to, a generic day of rest. If we cling to our doctrine, we acknowledge that Sunday is a day meant for rest, for study of scripture, and of fellowship with believers. I am willing to say we do not keep this well.

I do not mean that we are prone to do yard work or clean in a way that God bristles at, though I think we probably do that too much too. I mean, instead, that we do not take Sunday as a day to truly rest and to reflect on God. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but really think. When you leave Church on Sunday, how much of the day do you leave for God? Or is the Lord’s Day just meant to be an hour or two once in a while?

Honoring father and mother, the next commandment, is difficult for some people. However, I want to point out what it chiefly means. “Do not leave your family out to dry.” In the ancient world sick, old, inconvenient people would be treated as subhuman. God makes clear that, regardless of anything else, we need to make sure our family has their physical needs to live, as much as we are able. Specifics of how that happen are case by case.

Theft and perjury are not complicated. Don’t steal (or withhold what is rightfully someone else’s,) and don’t lie by commission or omission. Simple enough. The three commandments that underpin our relational life the most and that are where we can screw up are the three that remain. Murder, adultery, and covetousness. Those three are the killers because those three go beyond the action itself and include the mindset behind them.

We kill first by hating. If you look in your heart, you probably can find hate in it. Hate for a person or a group. A hate that desires they be removed from this world and that would not pull the trigger but also would not mourn someone else doing so. Hatred starts out as anger, and when left to sit a ferment, that anger blooms into death itself. Today, you may be hating someone. The altar is here for you to offer that hatred up, to put it off of yourself, and to turn to something better. We may say that hatred is protective, or that it is standing up for what is right, but the more we hate the easier it gets, and the easier it gets the less reason we need to do it.

Adultery, that’s the fun one everyone is always chomping at the bit about. Either we hate to talk about it or love to talk about, because in disgust and titillation – sex always sells. There are two key ways we sin through adultery, firstly through lust and secondly through inappropriate boundaries in other aspects of life. We all know we are meant to be monogamous creatures, not to sneak around or cheat. That does not stop everyone, but we know it all the same. The thing we forget is that to be truly monogamous, we must guard our hearts intentionally.

Jesus is clear that to lust after someone is equivalent, on your end of things, to having had relations with them. Perhaps he means spiritually, because certainly the consequences are different. It comes down to two things though – objectification and habit. Firstly, if you think of someone in your life – even your spouse – as purely a sexual object, you will think of them as less human over time. We are meant to be more to one another than a means to an end after all. Like anger, the more one allows themselves to view others as objects, the easier it becomes. Practically, the line in the sand is simple. You can think someone looks amazing all you want, but the second you follow that up with, “And what if…” you move to objectifying, dehumanizing, and turning your appreciation into carnaliziation.

In terms of inappropriate boundaries, I think most marriages fall apart here first. When we find we cannot be satisfied with our partners – either because they are uninterested in our life or because they do not listen fully when we speak – and so we seek that satisfaction elsewhere. The people I know who have left their spouses or partners rarely do it because they just thought someone else looked too good… They did it because they let someone else replace their spouse in one part of their life… Then another… Then another… Monitor your attachments, see that you are not giving to others what is owed to your partner, and likewise make sure that you are meeting your partner’s needs – so long as we do not loop pack to the previous lesson on the matter of adultery.

Finally, the green eyes monster. It underlines, more than most things, a true source of our sinning. Some people say pride is the original sin, but I am willing to say that it is some kind of envy. Eve and Adam wanted to be like God, and we want what we don’t have. We want connection so we cheat. We want to have money so we steal. We want to feel safer so we hate. We want, and therefore we transgress.

Today, as we have talked about sin, I hope a theme emerges. Yes, sometimes sin is born out of plain selfish interest. It is just as often, maybe even a little more commonly, born out of misplaced desire for that which we do not have. Absence, pain, a desire to be made whole is what motivates much of our sin. These commandments we listed, that we prayed we could keep, are just a few sign posts to show the ways we go astray in trying to fill the empty places in our lives.

This World Communion Sunday, we have pointed to the moral framework, or part of it at least, that undergirds all Christian morality. The point of this is not so we all leave here feeling worse about ourselves, counting our failures and licking our wounds. Instead, I want us to be able to see that much of what we try to fill our life with is empty. You can get all the stuff in the world, look at every pretty person on Instagram, hate everyone different from you, and you will still be sad when you’re done. Sin is emptiness, sin is the vacuous pit that seeks to consume our loneliness. Sin leaves you hanging.

The counterpoint to that is this table, set once and for all in Judea long ago. Christ offers us, not empty promises or shallow pleasures, but the fullness of life. The bread we eat and the juice we drink sustains us spiritually, but the grace they give goes on beyond this meal in itself. Christ, in Christ’s sufficiency lets us be fully faithful to God, to family, to community, to spouses and partners, to all the myriad relations that make up our community. We talk about the difficult state of sin, because its cure is right here – in this cup, on this plate.

Let us mark well our sins, but not beat ourselves up over them either. The wrong we’ve done, we cannot undo, though we might fix what is broken. All that is left is to do right today, to cast off our wrongdoing, and to embrace a right relationship with God and one another going forward. Take hold, dear people, of the goodness of God, and live it out all the same. – Amen.