Sunday, September 15, 2019 ~ Fourteenth Sunday of Easter

Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

 Scripture Lesson: Exodus 32:7-14

© 2019, Dr. Tamilio

You know the story.  Moses goes up the mountain to have an audience with Yahweh.  This is when he receives the tablets on which God etched the Ten Commandments and provided Israel’s leader with other instructions.  While he is on the mountain, the people approach Moses’ brother and second in command, Aaron, demanding that he make them new gods (or a new god — in the singular — depending on the translation).  Now this may sound somewhat strange to us, because (we are prone to ask) how do you “make” a god?  In any event, they wanted something tangible and valuable that they could worship.  Aaron takes the gold earrings that the people were wearing (male and female alike) and used them to construct the infamous Golden Calf.  The people held a festival where they ate, drank, and made merriment.  They made sacrifices to the calf, dancing around and worshiping it.

As bizarre as this seems to us, it was not uncommon among Pagans to worship animals made of stone, wood, or precious metals.  The Hebrews certainly would have seen such practices when they were enslaved in Egypt.  Worshiping a calf or a bull was not unknown.  Look up the ancient religion of Mithras as just one example.

But the problem at the heart of this story is blasphemous idolatry.  These people already had a relationship with a god: the one, true God — the one who liberated them from slavery.  They turned from Yahweh to worship an expensive statue.  Symbolically, they put their trust in money instead of where it belonged: in God.

But why did they do this?  Were they bored?  Did they think that Moses died on the mountain?  Maybe they felt that God had abandoned them in the wilderness as they made their way to the Promised Land?  Maybe that’s it.  “That doesn’t explain the Golden Calf,” you may be saying.  “How was a statue going to lead them out of the wilderness?”  That’s not the point.  The real problem, as I just mentioned, was idolatry.  Warning against idolatry is one of the Ten Commandments, after all.  Reflecting on this well-known passage, Nancy Ortberg writes the following:

Have you ever felt that…God’s presence was gone, that no matter how hard you reached out for it, you couldn’t find it?  And when you have, have you ever felt tempted to turn to something else other than God?  If so, you like me are guilty of idolatry.  When times of stress or fear or boredom or crisis come, and God seems far away, what is it that you turn to?  Because the truth about you and I is that we all have a golden calf.  You and I have an idol.  And some of us, if we’re absolutely truthful, have a whole herd of golden calves.[1]

Part of the problem is that we live in a culture that encourages us to have a herd of golden calves.  We live is a world that worships the almighty dollar and it goads us to do the same: to put our trust in all that glitters, not trusting that God will provide whatever we need.  Remember Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which he rhetorically asks his followers why they worry about food, and drink, and clothes?  He then proclaims, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”[2]  He also declares, “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you — you of little faith?”[3]

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “That’s all well and good, Dr. John, but simply trusting in God is not going to pay the mortgage or put food on the table.”  You’re right, but Jesus wasn’t encouraging his followers not to work, to loaf around all day.  Rather, he was saying that their ultimate trust needed to be on God, not money.

But money isn’t our only Golden Calf.  As Ortberg wrote, there are many things that we turn to when we do not feel as if God is within arm’s reach.  The list, which is quite long, includes drugs, alcohol, sex, entertainment, sports teams, celebrities, politicians, social media, reality TV, and, of course, insurance companies.  Don’t get me wrong: having a glass of wine, following the New England Patriots, or being a political junkie are not sins in and of themselves.  The question is do we trust these practices and institutions more than we trust God?  Jack Alexander puts it nicely in saying that, “Idols are the things we feel are too important to give to God.  They are, even when we know better than to use the words, the things that are more important to us than God.”[4]

Trusting fully in God is difficult, especially when we do not feel as if God gives us everything we want, everything we think we should have.  All too often when we pray to God, we do not ask for his will to be done, as much as we provide him with the answers to our prayers.  He just needs to do it.  Is that not the height of idolatry?  When we tell God what we think he has to do, are we not putting our thoughts, our desires, our very selves above God?

Trusting fully in God is difficult.  We want instant gratification.  We want what we want and we want it now.  Trusting God requires us to fully surrender our will to his, believing that God will do whatever is best for us, be it what we think is best or not.  Placing that trust elsewhere is the definition of idolatry.

Martin Luther once said, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God…”  There are plenty of idols out there.  They come quick, and fast, and cheap.  In the end, they are empty.  Only God is worthy of our worship.  Only God should be the object of our trust.  Moses ends up burning the Golden Calf, suggesting that we should do the same: not so much destroying the things that pull us away from God, but to put them in their proper place.  It’s a matter of prioritization.  God is God.  It’s that simple.  He is the only one who should occupy the utmost of our devotion.

One last thought: when God sees Israel’s idolatry and wants his anger to “burn against them,” Moses intervenes.  He pleads on their behalf.  How lucky are we that even though we place other people and things before God, Jesus (like Moses with Israel) intercedes on our behalf!  Jesus reconciles us with God.  Even when we stray, when we put our faith before God, God, through Jesus, places us before all us.  It is then that we discover the real gold: a God who loves us and forgives us no matter what we do.  Thanks be to God.  Amen and Amen.

[1] Nancy Ortberg, “Modern Golden Calves,” taken from the online publication Preaching Today, 2010.

[2] Matthew 6:26a (NIV).

[3] Matthew 6:30 (NIV).

[4] Jack Alexander, “Where Do You Put Your Faith?” taken from the online publication Cross Walk, 2017.