FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST SEPTEMBER 16, 2001
Exodus 32:7-14
Title: “Idolatry”
This text is part of the Golden Calf story, a story more complicated that it looks at first blush. To understand it we need to fast forward to the time after Solomon’s death when Jeroboam led the rebellion that resulted in the split up of the Kingdom united under David and Solomon. The northern kingdom, now called Israel, was established over against the southern portion, now called Judah. In order to sever ties with the south- including Jerusalem, the Temple and the cult- and strengthen the new state, Jeroboam had golden calves, or bulls, made and enshrined in the very ancient holy places of Dan and Bethel in the north according to 1Kings 12: 24-33. He thought that would keep people in the north, Israel, from going to the Temple in Jerusalem in the south.
Now Jeroboam actually intended these molten images to represent Yahweh, not the Canaanite god, Baal. Bulls or calves were a common representation of either the god or his throne, the god was thought to stand or sit on the back of the strong animal as on a throne. Jewish religion forbade representing Yahweh by means of idols or icons, and wisely so. It was a short step from “seeing” Yahweh as a golden calf or bull to Yahweh “being” one or, at least, the idol being worshiped. All this was soundly and roundly condemned, especially in the Book of Deuteronomy whose slogan was: one God, one Law, one cult, one people, one Temple. That editor then re-wrote the more ancient desert rebellion story and inserted enough details about a “golden calf” to make it impossible to miss his point. Both Jeroboam now and Aaron then were wrong and both contributed to the destruction of God’s people. There is but one God who is to be worshiped as he has revealed he would like to be and not as humans would prefer. Whether the desert generation was worshiping another deity or worshiping Yahweh by means of an idol this apostasy nullified the covenant and became a model for future generations like Jeroboam’s to avoid.
In verse seven, go down at once to your people: Ex 24: 18 tells us that Moses was gone forty days and forty nights, a long time. During his absence, Aaron, Moses’ brother, up to this point a relative unknown, supervises the construction of an idol and leads a feast with holocausts and peace offerings to it.
In verse eight, Making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it: “Molten” is the past perfect participle, archaic, to be sure, of “melt.” Metal is liquefied by heat and poured into a cast for shaping. It stretches the imagination to suppose that this traveling band of escapees had enough golden jewelry on them and with them and the technology, skills and equipment necessary to actually make a golden calf of any proportions, let alone one which would have an altar before it. Verse four, says that Aaron used a graving tool. In other words he carved or sculpted an idol. Perhaps, this idol was carved from wood or even stone. The writer was not bothered by the questions such “advanced technology” in a desert setting would raise.
This is your God: Actually, the text reads “These are your gods.” While the plural form, Hebrew ‘elohim, can refer to “gods,” it is used to refer to the one God, Yahweh, over two thousand times in the Old Testament. It is clear from what is said that the reference is to Yahweh, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and not to some other deity. It is the form their worship took, the worship of an idol, a molten calf, which offends Yahweh. They are not really, intentionally worshiping another god.
In verse nine, I see how stiff-necked this people is: Despite the prohibition in the first commandment or second in the Hebrew and other Protestant traditions against idols the people have insisted on worshiping Yahweh the way they prefer rather than the way Yahweh has revealed he wants to be worshiped. Remember Moses was absent for so long because God was giving him instruction on building and maintaining his dwelling to accompany them on their journey and how he was to “conduct services” or “preside at the liturgy.”
In verse ten, let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them: Even the Deuteronomic Redactor has inserted details into the story from the time of Jeroboam, the Yahwistic tradition of picturing God in anthropomorphic terms has remained. God is pictured like a human being, talking with Moses and having human emotions. He is saying, in effect, “Do not talk to me anymore. My mind is made up.” What the author wants to convey is that both God and Moses realized the consequences of the people’s behavior. The introduction of idol worship would spell the destruction of the people. There is no point in maintaining a covenant between God and his people if the people are going to ignore so a basic tenet as manner of worship. Disputes over worship, its forms, its functionaries, will tear the fabric of unity apart.
Then I will make of you a great nation: Moses had been faithful. So, God, as in the cases of Lot and of Noah, would start over again. This time Moses, the faithful one, would form the basis of a new people.
In verse eleven, why: Again, as the story is told, it appears as though Moses is instructing God or at least dickering with him. In fact, the author is putting truth into the mouth of Moses to intensify the story. Moses reflects the truth that God is not boxed into one and only one position or solution. He does not have to go the route of starting all over again to accomplish his plan. He does not have to annul the covenant, which would result in the destruction of his people. Moses, in effect, says, “Lord, you have come this far, brought your people out of Egypt, do you really intend to quit?” True, God’s justice demands it, but what about his mercy? But the storyteller is too clever to allow the story to become too theoretical or theological. So, he uses human tactics to make his point.
In verse twelve, why should the Egyptians say, “With evil intent he brought them out…”: So, Moses reminds God about what the neighbors will say, how it will “look.” Does Yahweh want his enemies to say he did what he did in order to kill his own people himself? Ridiculous! While, on one level, it may look like Moses is appealing to God’s pride and vanity, he is really saying, “You would never give such ammunition to those who would discredit you.”
Relent in punishing your people: Moses is not asking God to change his mind so much a reminding himself of God’s unchanging character. While God’s justice would justify destruction, the other side of his character, mercy, would allow for leniency. Thus he can pray to God in this way.
In verse thireteen, remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel: After reflecting on the effect annulling the covenant would have on God’s reputation among the nations, like Egypt, he turns inward to the effect upon the Israelites themselves. He reminds himself of God’s promise and God’s fidelity. Annulment of the covenant is not characteristic of this God who keeps his word even when his people do not keep theirs. While the form this point takes in order to be made reveals the intimacy Moses shared with Yahweh, the details should not be so pressed as to think God needs to be educated, reminded or chided in any way. The author wants to explain the outcome, the next verse, why God did the merciful thing rather than the strictly just thing. The answer is simply because God is that way.
In verse fourteen, so the Lord relented: The Hebrew naham means “to change one’s mind or purpose here.” So, it means “to repent.” The word is used often enough of Yahweh when he is said to change his mind as a result of intercession, as here and in Amos 7: 1-6, or the repentance of the people (Jer 18: 3ff; Jon 3: 9f) or his compassionate nature (Jdg 2: 18; Dt 32: 36; 2Sam 24: 16). It is a human way of explaining a situation which clearly calls for justice but which results in a different outcome because of mercy. Human language is limited and must be stretched when speaking of God and his actions and motivations. More to the point here, God is not some static, immobile idol. He does not have to be picked up and carried around. He is not fashioned by human hands or minds. He does not have to be dusted, cleaned, polished, etc. He is alive and decisive.
Sermon
This text is about the forms worship should take. It is not really about intentionally worshiping a god other than God. Now, such false worship of the true God will lead to worshiping something other than God, even if it is only the “form of worship” that gets worshiped. But, as the text stands, minus its inevitable consequences, the offense of the people was that they ignored God’s express wishes and preferred to worship him as they preferred not as he did. This text opens up a can of worms. It can apply to every body.
The folks who excuse themselves from communal liturgy use the excuse that they can pray to God in their heart, in their room, in the woods, etc. They are right, of course; we all do that. This text reminds them that God wants to be worshipped in a way consistent with his nature not ours or natures’ nature, good as both those may be. They are not good enough. Worshiping through human preference or even through nature runs the real, indeed, inevitable, risk that one will worship the creature instead of the creator. If the private form of worship keeps one or is used as an excuse to stay away, from the public, communal form, it reduces God to merely my God, not our God, the God. That is idolatry and will lead to selfish behavior on our part, behavior justified and fortified by a worship-form that ignores an important aspect of God.
The folks who do enter into communal worship are not off the hook. Disputes about the form that worship should take are not simply to be dismissed as inconsequential. True, some people who read about the minute details of the Tent of Meeting construction and Temple construction and the details of liturgical action concluded that God wanted them done in such strictness, what about justice? That there was not room for leniency, no flexibility, no mercy?. That results in a liturgy as stiff, dead, immobile as an idol, an icon, a statue. The living agents become calcified, imprisoned by the letter of the law, unable to apply common, communal? Sense to a living reality. Disputes over furniture and where to put it, music and when, where and how to sing it, functionaries and lectionaries are not as inconsequential as some believe and not as consequential as others do. We all must be careful to worship God and not the form of worship we prefer naturally. Some like this and others that. Neither is real worship. What does God like? That is the question. It is not inconsequential to God how and how often we worship him. He has revealed some things in scripture, not in the Middle Ages, not in a particular dated book of prayer, but in scripture. If we do not get worship right we will destroy the fabric of unity, just as surely as God knew that would happen to the Israelites. The answer is not found in human preferences- no matter how pious seeming or sounding. It is found in the revealed character of God. Either in church or out of church we are all in danger of substituting our own personal preferences for God’s. When we do that, we begin the slippery slope into idolatry, unintentional at first but inevitable. Just because a person piously rues the loss of the good old liturgical? Days or dismisses them does not mean such a person truly worships the true God. We can manufacture more than idols, icons and statues as substitutes for the real thing and convince ourselves that it is the real thing, in love with concoctions of our own making. How does that differ from the golden calf in the desert? How we worship God and under what form does matter- to God. This text tells us that much.
More than anything, God wants us to worship him by the quality of our lives. He wants our lives to reflect his very own character. When we come together to worship him he wants lives that reflect and reveal the divine character. He wants us to use the words he has revealed to us to reflect the truth that he lives in and among us. He wants us to use the very words to worship him that we use to live by. The details of our common worship should reflect and reveal the truth that we love one another and thereby love the God we are worshipping. The details are therefore not inconsequential, unless they are not connected to and do not flow from love of both God and neighbor. The prophets of the Old Testament and Christ in the New Testament have made this truth abundantly clear. If we end up worshipping the details or giving them more importance than they deserve we will end up formally idolizing something less than God and be no better off than those who worshipped the golden calf of their own making.
We do not have to formally reject the true God before we can worship false gods.
Anything or anyone other than God –an idea, a value, a time period, an idol, a hero, money, sex, work, etc.- can become a substitute for God and be worshipped in his stead.
Adoring something other than God makes humans less than human.
Idolatry can be inherited as well as acquired behavior.
Inheriting Idolatry: When we are born we are born not only into a family but also into a culture. Culture is simply human environment, the totality of the technology, sociology, and ideology of a given people at a given time. Culture is a given for the most part. While environmental changes can cause a people to totally reconstruct their culture, most of us simply inherit the culture we are born into. Our particular culture is particularly complex in that it has pretty much one technology which we would call “advanced, “ compared to that of the third world or times past, but several social systems and conflicting ideologies. It is impossible for individuals not to be adversely affected by the inherent conflicts of our inherited culture. Therefore, the opportunities to worship, that is, to hold in highest esteem and to behave in deference to, more than one “supreme” are many and manifold. Thus, one can be born into a very serious Christian family who at the same time worship money. One can be a child of a rather morally strict family who are rife with sexual addictions and worship the objects of those addictions in living secret or double lives. In a teenager’s bedroom there might be found pictures of saints and rock idols side by side on the wall, conflicting values symbolized in conflicting lifestyles, yet ‘worshipped” by the same person. The people in the desert who worshipped the golden calf had regressed. They were born into Egyptian polytheistic culture, even though they were Hebrews. While the Egyptian culture was moving toward an apprehension of God as one, the popular culture was still polytheistic. Their worship of the golden calf, even after their commitment to Yahweh, the One God, shows how difficult it is to cast off ones roots for any period of time. It is always tempting to ‘revert to form,” to backslide. We do that in our own culture. Look at how many people try to stop worshipping the food idol by dieting, only to ‘revert to form” and begin worshipping again the very value they had formally denounced. It is not surprising that the desert people complained that their worship of and commitment to Yahweh had deprived them of their familiar Egyptian diet, pomegranates, meat and bread, and they were reduced to manna and quail, manna and quail, day in and day out. The price of worshipping only one God seemed too high for them when they saw the practical consequences. So, they thought they could make an accommodation with God and their surrounding environments. They would “domesticate” Yahweh and make him fit in better, syncretism, with the world they knew and those aspects of the world, Egyptian culture, that they liked. They were idolatrous without even knowing it, much like Christians in our culture who see no problem with being money-grabbing, money grubbing devotees and, at the same time, claim to love their neighbor at all costs.
Forms of Worship: The same schizophrenic inconsistency we experience as inheritors of culture and religion evidenced by inconsistent behavior and conflicting attitudes can be seen in the forms our worship of God take. In the Lutheran Christian community there is a fight going on, really a “culture war,” between those who accept the changes in the external forms of worship and those who want to maintain the older forms without the historic episcopacy and those who do accept the historic episcopacy. Both camps accuse each other of “idolatry,” worshipping an external form rather than expressing in sacred ritual and myth the lives they live in their secular culture. There are “golden calves” in both camps, but neither can recognize them as idolatrous because they both come out of a culture comfortable with inconsistency- the germ of idolatry. To the outside observer this fight seems rather petty and inconsequential, not to mention easily resolvable by means of a steady diet of humility, yet beneath it all there is more to it than language, gesture and vesture. The issue is idolatry- on both sides. Amen.
