Calfapolooza!

 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 the gold from them, formed it 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 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.

I love the story Ed just read from Exodus but, of course, they left off the best part!  When Moses finally worked his way down the mountain and saw the Calf-apolooza Party himself, he totally lost it!  He smashed the tablets on the ground, burned the golden calf, ground it up into a powder, mixed it with water, and made the people drink it!  The god they had made BY themselves and FOR themselves would literally be getting flushed down the toilet in the very near future!  

As a kid, this lesson seemed easy. I didn’t have any gold or a foundry and if my school clay projects were any indication, I wasn’t much of a sculptor either.  I figured I was safe from the dangers of idolatry!  

As I got a bit older I realized, of course, idol worship wasn’t limited just to golden calves.  Idols are the things we turn to when God is either NOT doing what we want, OR is moving much too slowly for our taste.  They are not literal golden cows but they are still pretty easy to spot… at least when they belong to someone else.  

Idols using the language of Christianity but without the unconditional love, grace, and inclusion that Christ was all about are all around us.  These modern idols allow their followers to claim, for example, they are pro-life and still hold children in cages.  These idols allow the follower to embrace racism and claim that poverty is the poor person’s fault.  People turn to idols because only idols will go along with their limited and conditional sort of grace.  Only idols allow their followers to tell a person to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and not care that they have no boots.  Only idols allow their followers to tell a person they should learn to fish if they are hungry and at the same time deny them access to a safe, clean, lake.  

Genuine Christianity is about following in the footsteps of Jesus, the One who gave EVERYTHING… both FOR us and TO us, without condition, as a free gift.  LONG before we were even a glimmer in our great great great grandma’s eye, this gift was completely ours!  Jesus didn’t conditionally die for only the ones who look like you!  Jesus didn’t rise on Easter for a few and stay dead in the tomb for all the rest!  Dying with conditions and rising only for some... that's a golden calf thing… not a Jesus thing, not a Christian thing.  

Back then they cast a calf in gold, proclaimed it to be the same God who led them out of Egypt and called it Lord.  They created a false god that would work on their schedule and used the methods they wanted to use!  Today we make idols for exactly the same reasons.  Is it an accident that a literal golden bull is Wallstreet's idol of unbridled capitalism? The God who gives gifts of love and grace is not okay with us hoarding them all for ourselves.  The idol of White Nationalism is made because only an idol can promise a salvation to just those who look like them.  The idol of American Civil Religion is made by those who are enamored with the words of Christianity but find living lives of compassion, grace and love not to their liking.  Others make idols of guns.  Idols which falsely promise them security.  Others make idols of money which give them permission to get rich at the expense of the poor.  Still others make idols of other human beings and demand if you’re not for them, then you’re against them!  People build these idols so that they can have a god in their lives that God and Jesus refuse to be for them.  Only these idols will promise them what they want, when they want it, and that whatever they can grab, they can keep for themselves. 

Idols and golden calves made by others are easier for us to see.  The most difficult golden calves to identify, of course, are the ones we make for ourselves.  Most people don’t sit down one day and say, “today I’m going to make an idol!”  But as we get frustrated and impatient with the One True God... as God feels far away, we slowly begin to decide that we need to take this god business into our own hands and we begin to shape an idol in a form of our thinking and our liking and our way of getting things done.  

So much hatred, a pandemic, denial of science, poverty, hypocrisy, racism, climate crisis, putting others at risk of sickness or death… AND even literal nazis for crying out loud!  THAT'S our world!  So it's VERY understandable that we ALL want God to BE HERE NOW... FIX IT NOW!  It is incredibly tempting to make a god who will fix ALL this the way WE want it fixed!  We live in very real and very desperate times!  Not at the base of a stormy mountain like the people of Israel, but in the stormy year of 2020!  We want… we NEED God to act!  NOW!

And still with all that understandable temptation, here is God's promise God's call for you and me.  God knows what we are enduring and God is acting.  Idols will promise to get you there faster but they never deliver.  Idols will show you another path filled with lies and tricks and force and anger, but following that path is not one of loving God or neighbor.  So be patient my friends.  Keep walking God’s path... loving God and loving neighbor.  God is working as you and I are walking.  God is even working while we take a day off every week!  God is working... working to fully include all of creation in God’s compassion, grace, and love... ideas of really living which idols know nothing about.  Stay with the path God has given us, because God knows, it's only on a path of love, compassion, grace and inclusion that we will get through whatever lies ahead.  Amen.