The Rev. Dr. Leah Schade
Texts:
Exodus 32:1-20; Matthew 21:12-17
View the video of this sermon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-PgLhyaIr4&feature=share
Your assignment last
week was to think about which one of the Ten Commandments is most difficult for
you to keep. Let’s first see if we can
remember them. As you’ll recall, the
first three have to do with our relationship with God: 1. No other gods. 2. Taking God’s name in
vain. 3. Honoring the Sabbath. And the rest have to do with our relationship
with other people. 4. Honoring parents. 5.
Honoring life. 6. Honoring covenantal relationships. 7.
Honoring personal property.
8. Honoring integrity. 9/10.
Not coveting, being satisfied with what you have.
I promised that I would
reveal the commandment that is most difficult for me to keep. For me, it’s #3 – honoring the Sabbath. It is very difficult for me to take an entire
day off to rest and focus on my relationship with God and the people I
love. Even if I say I’m taking a day
off, I find ways to fill it with work – preparing for a class, grading papers,
writing a sermon, working on a newsletter article. Just checking my phone for texts and emails
eats away at my time for walking, prayer, meditation, and spending time with my
family.
You could say that,
in a sense, work is my “golden calf.”
Now what do I mean by that?
Remember that the golden calf was the image Aaron made out of the gold
from the Israelites that they carried out of Egypt with them. On the night of the Passover, they asked the
Egyptians for their jewelry, and it was freely given to them for their journey
– after all those plagues, they just wanted the Israelites out of their land.
After crossing over
the Sea of Reeds and going through the desert, they came to Mt. Sinai where
Moses went up to its peak to meet with God.
He told the people that he would be back after 40 days and nights. But he was delayed on his return down the
mountain, so the people panicked. Their
leader was gone. No text from on high,
no phone call, no email – just disappeared.
They figured he must be dead.
Which would mean that God had either forgotten about them, did not care
about them, or was for whatever reason cut off from them. So they implored Aaron, Moses’ brother, to provide
for them an image of the gods they knew from Egypt.
We as the readers of
this text see the problem right away.
Here comes Moses down the mountain carrying the tablets, and the very
first commandment is to have no other gods, to make no graven images. And what are they down there doing? Melting down all their gold and making it
into a graven image of a calf.
My friend, Ben
Hollenbach, made an interesting point to me about this story. He said, “Most people think the calf is an
idolatrous distraction from worshiping God.
But the Israelites asked for the calf because they were more comfortable
with it. It was a familiar image from
their time in Egypt.”
So why was it a
bull-calf that was made? Why not one of
the other Egyptian gods like the frog or the sun? In Egypt, the bull was a well-known deity. Ka in
Egyptian is both a religious concept of life-force/power and the word for
bull. But it’s not an actual adult bull
that is made – it’s a calf. Why?
Raymond P. Scheindlin,
professor of medieval Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America, described the situation this way:
The
calf is “a sweet little thing, a mascot, almost a pet — something that would
seem in need of the people’s care as much as something that could care for the
people. Aaron’s calf was a god the people could identify with, a god that
reminded them of themselves, a vulnerable, comfortable, available god, rather
than Moses’ difficult, remote, normally invisible God hidden behind the clouds
on Sinai.
(This is a)
miscalculation. The soft god that reminded them of themselves was such a relief
from the demanding God of Sinai, with His thundering voice and His scowling
prophet, that they fell in love with it at first sight, fell to their knees,
and worshiped it. They knew it wasn’t God, but they worshiped it all the same,
for it was helpless like them, and cute, a god on their own scale and to their
own measure, who told them that they were all right as they were — a god whose
vulnerability enhanced their self-esteem. It was a god who mirrored themselves,
not the absolute God mirrored by Moses’ absolute faith.” (http://forward.com/articles/9323/the-golden-calf-as-a-symbol-of-desire-for-a-knowab/#ixzz3wh9n35wT)
Our students learned that a god is anything to which you devote your
time, money, or attention. It’s what
gives your life meaning. It is that
which you worship. The problem, of
course, is that these things or ideas are actually not God. They are what’s known as “penultimate” – not
quite the most important. The
penultimate leads to the ultimate. But
if you stop at the penultimate, you’re stuck in idolatry.
How do you know if
something (or someone) is an idol for you or not? Observe what happens when you are deprived of
it, or it’s taken away. If you believe
you cannot live without it, would do anything to get it (including breaking one
of the other commandments, like lying, cheating, stealing, or even murdering),
then it’s become a penultimate god for you.
So for some people, gambling becomes their god – it makes them feel good
and promises great riches. For others,
it’s using drugs – again, it makes you feel good and gives you a feeling of
escape or power. Even technology has
become a penultimate god in our society.
We spend our time, money and attention on it. It gives our lives meaning. And if you take away a person’s device, or
cut them off from a wi-fi signal, what happens?
They go through withdrawal symptoms!
The penultimate god can devolve into an addiction – whether it’s a
person, an item, a practice, or an idea.
So for me, doing work
is my penultimate god. I spend my time and
my attention on my work, and it leads me to break other commandments – even,
ironically, the first one. It’s
especially difficult for pastors to honor the Sabbath because leading worship
is their work! Their work becomes their
identity, and they confuse leading
the Sabbath with honoring the
Sabbath. The penultimate god is really
the stop-gap measure to keep us from having to face our fears and live with the
demands and ambiguities of being God’s people.
Because here’s the secret fear that my addiction to work covers up – I
fear that I’m actually a lazy person, so I overcompensate by working all the
time. Work is my golden calf because it
makes me feel better about myself.
So Moses comes up with
an interesting way of getting rid of this penultimate god. He grinds up the calf into a fine gold powder
and sprinkles it into the water and makes the Israelites drink it. Gross, right?
Take it a step further – what happened after they consumed the
gold? What form did it take as it left
their bodies? Yes – it came out in their
excrement. Gives a whole new meaning to
the word bullssssshine!
It’s actually a very
appropriate punishment, because it teaches them a veritable truth about the futility
of worshiping a penultimate god. It
ultimately leads to a stinky mess. And
it’s why the students put money right here on the calf’s butt!
Worshiping that which we consume is a
pointless exercise. It may fascinate us
for a while. It may comfort us. It may distract us from our fears,
temporarily keep us from feeling lost or abandoned or forgotten. But the God of Moses is not interested in our
temporary feel-good measures. This is a
God of truth and justice. Yes, this God
is asking a lot of them – and of us.
That’s why Jesus was so
furious at the Temple when he saw the moneychangers. Like Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai to the
place where the people are supposed to be in prayerful expectation of a Word
from God, Jesus finds a raucous revelry of rampant idolatry masquerading as
preparations for worship. The people at
the Temple, just like those at the foot of Mt. Sinai, were turning to the
penultimate gods of money and wealth. Buying
and selling sacrifices for the temple felt good. It was the comfortable
fall-back in a time of terrible oppression and poverty when it seemed God was
nothing more than an idea hidden within the Holy of Holies.
So what are we to
do? When you’ve realized what your
golden calf is, then what?
The answer is: metanoia. Repent.
Practice letting go and turning back to the ultimate – not the
penultimate – God. That’s why we have these rituals built in to our religious
calendars and weekly worship. We have
confession at the beginning of each service.
You know when we have that time of silence before saying the words of
confession together? That’s the time for
you to bring to mind – and bring to God – your golden calf and give it to
God. When we come to Ash Wednesday and
the season of Lent in a couple weeks – that’s the time for you to practice
giving up your golden calf. Maybe you
pick one day a week to go without technology.
Maybe you forego sweets during the 40 days of Lent. Maybe you refrain from making any unnecessary
purchases during those 5 weeks to put down your golden calf of
consumerism. Perhaps you make a
commitment to come to Bible study on Sunday mornings during Lent, instead of carrying
around your golden calf of excuses for why you won’t engage in God’s Word with
your fellow Christians.
For me, honoring the
Sabbath and putting down the golden calf of work once a week will be my Lenten
discipline. For 12 hours (usually on a
Friday), I will commit to a day of walking and exercise, playing games with my
kids, going to lunch with my husband, and spending time in prayer and
meditation.
As we re-commit
ourselves to God, we know it will not be the easy way. It will mean sitting in the bullshine and
realizing the messes we have made. But
through that process, the impurities of our sin are washed away by the waters
of baptism – the water from the rock – renewing our spirits, our lives, our
communities and our world. Amen.
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