The Golden Calf
Exodus 32: 1-26 (NIV)
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.” But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “ Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and 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 wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’ ” Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, “There is the sound of war in the camp.” Moses replied: “It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear.” When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it. He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?” “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied and came to him.
Matthew 22: 1-14 (NIV)
Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. “Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’ “But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. “Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. He asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless. “Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
Friends, in a way, this week's sermon is like the sequel to last week's sermon. I didn't plan it that way, but a combination of providence and our Revised Common Lectionary are at work here. You never know what God will put on your heart to deliver to his people.
Last week I titled my sermon "wait for it". We talked about Moses receiving the Law from God, and we talked about how we don't always see the blessings of obeying God's Law and respecting our covenantal relationship with him right away, but if we wait, we will in time. This week's Old Testament passage makes us question, what happens if we can't "wait for it"? What happens if we get impatient with God? What happens when we get tired of waiting for God to provide for us, so we start making up our own rules?
It's easy to see how badly the Hebrews are disobeying God in this morning's story, but I also really sympathize with them. God's promises were just on the horizon for them, but they had no reason to believe that. They were liberated from the bondage of slavery to a tyrannical, foreign ruler, and Moses was leading them to the Promised a Land, where God would provide a great and prosperous future for them. But that future was very far away, and the Hebrews were getting fed up. They'd been wandering around in the middle of nowhere with Moses for practically forever, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel as far as they could see. And they were right to feel like this journey was taking forever, and to fear that they may never see the end of it. After all, they were out in the desert for forty years. Given how short your life expectancy was in those days, the Hebrews knew enough to foresee that nearly all the people who left Egypt with Moses would die in the wilderness, and that, at best, it would be their children who saw the Promised a Land, not them. When you don't trust your leader, that doesn't sound like much of a promise.
They pleaded and argued with Moses to just let them go back and be slaves in Egypt, but Moses trusted God too much to give in, so here they are, stuck in the wilderness with nothing but the few things they left Egypt with. And if that wasn't bad enough, now even Moses is gone, off to some mountain to go talk to some God who calls himself YHWH. And he's been away now for a really, really long time. So long that even his own brother, Aaron, was starting to wonder if he was ever coming back.
Meanwhile, we're starting to see the exhaustion of leadership taking its toll on both Moses and Aaron. Moses hasn't had to deal with it during this time that he's been up on the mountain, but since he left Aaron in charge, now Aaron has been left with all of the responsibility of taking care of this angry mob. And they're getting angrier every day that they see no progress, no leader, no home, and no god.
Sometimes, even when we know better, and even when we do have the patience to wait through a difficult time, we still find ourselves bending over backwards to peer pressure. This is one of those times for Aaron. He can't take all the complaining anymore, and he'll do anything to make it stop. And if he can make all these people happy then he can feel like a leader, even if he's really betraying Moses' trust.
So Aaron and his company of thousands of Hebrews disobey God, and revert to a very familiar old lifestyle: idol worship. Before Moses came along and started telling them about this YHWH character, they belonged to a culture that believed that there were many gods, one for every purpose and need, and that any one of those gods was as worthy of worship as any of the others. Aaron collects everyone's gold jewelry, turns it into a gold calf, makes an altar for it, and says, It's ok, everyone, you have a god again. Worship this thing and everything will be fine. So you can all stop yelling at me now.
This was not Aaron's finest hour as a leader, and when God and Moses catch wind of what's going on at the bottom of the mountain, neither of them are too happy about it. The lectionary cuts out Moses' reaction, maybe to preserve our image of Moses the stoic leader. The truth is Moses looses it.
He comes down from Mt. Sinai, Law in hand, ready to intervene and spare his people from God's anger. But then he sees all the Hebrew people partying around this false god, led by his own brother, and he throws one of the biggest temper tantrums we see in the whole Bible. He smashes the tablets that had the Law of God inscribed on them. Then he takes the golden calf, grinds it into powder, puts the powder in water, and makes everyone drink it. Moses is very angry.
Then he asks Aaron to explain just what in creation he was thinking letting this happen. Aaron just sputters, it wasn't my fault, honest! You know how easily these guys get tempted! We threw our jewelry into the fire and this calf just came out!
The Bible doesn't say what Moses said back, but I'm sure some unChristian words were exchanged.
We can laugh at this story, and we can remove ourselves from this text, and assume we would never find ourselves in a situation like this one. And we'd be half right thinking that, we probably never will take off all our jewelry and melt it into a golden calf and start worshipping it.
Unlike the Hebrews, we know that there's no other god in the world but our God. But that doesn't mean we're without our golden calves.
What are our idols? We may never take it this far, but we're all human and we're all tempted by them. And as much as idol worship is a specific cultural and historical act, idolatry, in itself and by definition, means giving excessive attention and adoration to something that isn't actually that special or worthy.
What are our idols? What do we find ourselves giving way too much attention and praise to? Or, what do we find ourselves turning to to feel good and happy and fulfilled right away when we get too impatient to keep waiting for God? What's your golden calf?
For some people it's money. For some people it's technology, or the internet, or social media. For some people it's a material object, it's stuff. For some people it's their job. For some people it's drugs or alcohol. For some people it's even a relationship--someone that they lean on way too much to try to fill a void that only God can fill.
Some of those things aren't all that bad, and can even he helpful to us, in moderation. Where do you draw the line? The key is that we start worshipping an idol we we use any of those things excessively. What's excessively? When we think any of those things are more important, or more special, or more worthy of our attention and praise than God. And when we find ourselves starting to bend or break the rules God asked us to follow all so we can give way too much of our attention to something else, then we know we've found our golden calf.
God knows we're human, and that we get tempted. And God shows us grace when we stray, just like he extended grace to his Chosen People, the Hebrews.
But during our trying times, when we can't understand why God hasn't helped us out yet, or why God hasn't revealed his plan for us yet, or why God hasn't answered our prayers yet, instead of turning to that golden calf, that quick fix, that thing that we hope will fill the void but can't, let's turn to a friend, a brother or sister in the faith, someone who can support us during our time of trial and remind us that, even when we can't see it, and even when we don't believe it, God has a plan and a calling for us that we will see when the time is right and we're ready for it.
Amen.
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