Our very own golden calves

October 15, 2017, Middleton Community UCC

Exodus 32: 1-14

In the spirit of that scripture reading from Exodus about the Israelites gathering up all of their gold and shaping it into a golden bull-calf, I’d like to ask you to put all of your gold in this basket that Laura will bring around. You know – the gold rings, earrings, bracelets, watches…

Well, now that I have your attention…

There are good reasons you did not want to part with your gold this morning.

First of all, what the heck is he going to do with it? Take it all and run out the back door? Melt it down in here in violation of fire regulations?

Besides, that gold has more than monetary value to you. The gold rings may be a sign of your love. The gold bracelet may have been inherited from your mother. The gold watch may have been a retirement gift. (Do they still do that? My gold watch was a wonderful ordination gift from my wife, Ellen.)

There are many things in our lives that are precious. We do not necessarily turn them into idols – the things that we use as replacements or alternatives to God.  And it is easy to focus on money as an idol when there are so many other candidates in all of our lives.

Let me explore the story of the golden calf with you a bit because it turns out it is a pretty fascinating story. And then let me explore the idols in my life, ask you to think about those in yours and look at some of the potential idols in our nation. I hope to wrap up with a few thoughts about how we might deal with all of these idols in light of the story from Exodus and the words of Jesus.

The section of the Exodus story that we heard today is only slice of the drama.

The part we heard today is pretty straightforward. After escaping from slavery in Egypt, they are about three months out in the wilderness at Mt. Sinai. As the story goes, Moses has gone up the mountain. God has given Moses the rules to guide the Israelites in their freedom.

This takes awhile and the Israelites at the base of the mountain are getting restless. If you’ve ever had any experience waiting, you have a clue to how they felt. Moses was gone and he was their link to God. They wanted a new leader and they wanted their own gods.

They asked Moses’ brother, Aaron, of all people, to fashion the image of the new gods, portrayed as a calf – or, more accurately, a bull-calf – a potent and powerful young bull.

As Jonathan Kirsch writes in his book, Moses: A Life, “The bull was revered throughout the ancient Near East as the symbol of fertility, and the bull-calf was the sign of the supreme god in the pantheon of the pagan Canaanites.”

Meanwhile, up on the mountain, God has taken notice of what is going on below and God is not pleased. Remember, when the people were escaping from Egypt, they thought it was God who was leading them out? Now listen to how God addresses Moses: “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.”

No worries, Moses. God has a solution: “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.”

It sounds a little bit like the story of Noah and the ark, doesn’t it? God will destroy the rest of humanity and start over with Noah and his family. But Moses does not think that’s a good solution and appeals to God’s mercy. So the last verse we heard today was: “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”

A happy ending, right?

Except the story does not end there. In brief, Moses comes down the mountain, hears the singing and dancing around the golden calf and smashes the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments that included the first two that read: “I am the Lord your God, no shall have no other gods before me” and “You shall not make for yourself an idol…you shall not bow down to them or worship them.”

The furious Moses pulverizes the Golden Calf, accuses his brother Aaron of bringing a great sin upon the people and then calls all those who were on the Lord’s side to come and stand by him. Here’s where the story gets interesting…and brutal…and confusing.

Those from Moses’ own tribe – the Levites – come and stand by him. Then he orders them to slaughter everyone else. And they do, killing some 3,000 of the Israelites. So much for Moses’ mercy. In this story, only God gets to be merciful.

There’s another story of golden calves in the Hebrew Bible and it comes much farther along in the story of Israel. It involves Jeroboam, who ruled the northern kingdom of Israel, a rival to the kingdom of Judah in the south. Jerusalem and the temple and the temple priests – the descendants of the Levites and Aaron – were in the south.

Jeroboam said you don’t have to go to the temple to worship God. You can do it at sanctuaries in the north, where he installed figures of young bulls cast in gold and he told his people these were the gods who brought them out of the land of Egypt. Sound a bit familiar? You heard that same line from Aaron in our reading today.

So either Jeroboam decided to re-enact the worst sin in the history of Israel – worshipping the image of a false god – or as the competing factions gathered together these stories of Moses and Jeroboam a few hundred years later, the authors decided to make Aaron and the priestly class in the south look bad or other authors tried to make Jeroboam and his kingdom in the north look bad.

I’m not going any farther down that little trail, other than to note how we hear the stories of our faith has something to do with who is telling them and what their agenda is.  Whatever the political motives of the writers, there was a common theme – making a golden bull calf and worshipping it is a really bad thing. Idols are not good.

Which got me to thinking about my idols. And that maybe will get you thinking about your idols. I’m not going to ask to name your idols publicly – OK, sigh of relief! But let me give you two examples of my idols – one personal, one collective.

The personal one is technology. I love having a smart phone, a laptop. I love connecting with people on Facebook and reading clever tweets on Twitter. I can check with Alexa to get today’s weather and ask Siri to map my driving route.

So think about this for a minute. My phone is virtually always with me. I put my trust in it to wake me up in the morning with its alarm, to keep track of my steps, to map my routes, to connect me with family and friends in a variety of ways. When it is not around, I start to feel a bit lost.

Hmmm. Always present. Worthy of my trust. Does that sound like what we sometimes say about God? At least I have never bowed down and worshipped my phone.

My collective idol is the United Church of Christ. Bet that brought you up short for a second. So let me explain.

When Ellen – my wife – and I were trying to find a church home in 2000, we checked out a number of churches and denominations. Our visit to Lake Edge UCC on Madison’s east side went well, so I started learning what the United Church of Christ was all about. I was really impressed. We are a groundbreaking denomination, embrace people with a questioning spirit, foster a wide variety of worship experiences. We define ourselves by our unconditional welcome and our commitment to justice. I could go on and on – and so, perhaps could you.

So when I encounter people from other denominations, my inclination is to think that we are the best. In my less generous moments, it is to think that we have the truth and they…ah…still have a ways to go. So I settle into my theological silo. And that Golden Calf at the entrance to my silo gets a nod each time I go by.

Whoops. I think I have created an idol.

Now let me just pause for a moment to ask you to think about an idol or two in your life. No need to shout them out. Just hold them in mind. (Pause)

No stone tablets smashed here today. I won’t ask the people on the left side to cross over and kill all of you on the right side. But it’s still worth seeking recognition of the idols that we create.

The same goes for recognizing the idols in our society. Here’s where this sermon can get a little dangerous, because it gets into some of the hot spots in our culture.

Some are easy. The piling up of wealth through the exploitation of others certainly gets into idol territory. So does the abuse of power like the stories we have heard this year of men demanding sex from the women they think they can control.

Let’s take that another step. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This is a subject that I have spend a lot of time on in the past half dozen years. While both men and women can be victims of domestic violence, the overwhelming percentage of perpetrators are men.

For me, that raises the question about how we have made an idol out certain notions of masculinity. How do we stop worshipping an idol that leads to violence against others? What changes do we need in our own lives and in our culture around what it means to be a man – and a woman – as followers of Jesus living in the 21^st century?

I get to add another potential idol to my life. I’m not only a man, but I’m a white man. We have seen all too vividly in our nation in the past few months what happens when people who idolize being white try to claim supremacy over anyone different from them. And we know how Jesus pushed against those claims of supremacy in his times, crossing lines that separated Jews and Gentiles, Jews and Samaritans, men and women.

Here's another hot button. We as a nation are struggling with how we treat those who come into our midst from other nations, either through a convoluted immigration process or through a risky border crossing. In our history, we have demonized the Chinese and the Irish, the German and the Italian, the Somali and the Mexican. What idols have we created around what it means to be an American – and how do we as followers of Jesus living in the 21^st century respond?

And then there is football. Yes, I know we often create an idol out of sports. Churches routinely check the Packer schedule when planning events in the fall or on Super Bowl Sunday lest the lure of the game diminish attendance inside our walls. But there is another dimension of football that is in focus right now – how the players and the crowd  act during the singing of our National Anthem.

I don’t think it is going too far to say that some folks have made an idol out of the flag and the anthem. It’s not the ideals that they represent that are a problem – ideals we as a nation have struggled to achieve every year over the past two-plus centuries and that people have died to uphold. It is separating the symbols from the ideals and turning the symbols into idols and thereby missing the essential message of the protests, which is about how African Americans are still treated in a nation that proclaims equality for all.

So what are we to do with the idols in our lives?

The story of the Golden Calf makes it sound like we just smash the idols and move on. But the Israelites were still wandering through the wilderness. They were only three months into a 40-year journey. They may not have created other idols, but they continued to challenge Moses and question God.

Actually, the followers of Jesus were not shy about asking questions of him either, of challenging him. But they also listened to what he had to say, they pondered what it meant for their lives, they struggled together to find ways to live out his message of love and inclusion and service.

Like us, they were not perfect at it. They had to keep pushing aside the idols that sought to replace their trust in God and their commitment to the way of Jesus.

Maybe a place to start in confronting the idols we have is to put them back in their place. I don’t really think my iPhone is a divine being. I don't think that the UCC has a corner on understanding what Jesus’ message was about. Whatever your idols are, maybe take a little time in the week ahead to put them in perspective.

And another – perhaps even more important way - to start in confronting the idols we have is something as simple as renewing our own willingness to trust in God, to follow Jesus’ way.

There’s a song that can help us focus on that. It’s Hymn 416, “I Will Trust in the Lord.” Let us together sing the first verse.