Exodus 32:1-14
Tossing Out Our Idols
James Sledge October 9, 2011
Just prior to graduating from seminary, I attended a kind of pastor’s job fair called “Face-to-Face.” This two day event brought together scores of search committees from congregations seeking a pastor and matched them up with well over a hundred pastors and seminary students who were seeking calls. It was a hectic enterprise where you interviewed with a different church every hour. There was some sort of matching criteria that was supposed to put compatible churches and pastor candidates together. Seminary students like me didn’t get matched with big churches looking for experienced pastors, and so on.
But no matching system is perfect, especially in an event like this one where there were so many search committees and pastors. And so I had my share of interviews with congregations where I knew 60 seconds into a 50 minute interview that this was never going to happen. But being new to this searching for a call business, interviews were good practice.
In one of those interviews that clearly would not lead anywhere, the conversation somehow turned to the topic of biblical literalism. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I recall that they were a conservative, rural congregation. And when my answer to their question about the authority of scripture included a few comments about the Bible sometimes becoming an idol, perhaps one of the more popular idols in some Christian circles, I could see a look of horror on some of their faces. I had clearly committed a terrible act of sacrilege, and the interview turned decidedly colder. The idea that I would compare the Bible to something such as the golden calf was clearly disturbing to them.
I’ve heard about the golden calf since I was a small child. There was a picture of it in the Bible Story book my father used to read to us. And like other idols I heard about from the Bible, it was clearly something people chose rather than God. Idols are competitors with God, which helps explain the reaction of the members on that nominating committee.
Now some idols are alternatives to God, competing gods if you will. But Aaron, the person who conceives, designs, and builds the golden calf, does not seem to understand this idol in that manner.
After building the calf he proclaimed, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to Yahweh.” To Yahweh, not to some other Near Eastern god such as Baal, but a festival to Yahweh, the God who had brought them out of Egypt, the God who worked though Moses. But Moses had disappeared and had been missing for over a month. Clearly the Israelites needed a more reliable way of invoking God’s presence, of insuring that God was there for them when they needed help. Moses had skipped out on them, and so they turned to his brother Aaron, the priest, to provide a stand-in.True, Aaron is breaking the Commandments spoken by Yahweh only weeks earlier. “You shall not make for yourself an idol (the word can also means an image), whether it is in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is is on the earth beneath, or that in the water under the earth.” I’m pretty sure that a calf is in the image of something on the earth. But these were desperate times. Moses was missing. God was nowhere to be found either. The Israelites had to have something that would guarantee God’s presence. I’m not sure of the symbolism of the calf, but apparently it fit the bill.
Most all of us have been there with the Israelites. We may not have been worrying about dying in the wilderness, but we’ve felt the need to keep God close, to have God on call and available. Golden calves are a bit out of our repertoire, but we still know how to make God both manageable and accessible. As I told that church nominating committee, some folks carry a Bible around with them, God at the ready, a quick answer for every situation.
However I do not think this the typical Presbyterian idol. I think that most of us are more prone to come up with a synopsis of God that we carry with us. This is less tangible than a Bible or a golden calf, but it is very functional. Whether our synopsis of God is a no-nonsense deity who judges folks with clear, black and white standards – “Believe this, do that, and you’re in; don’t and you’re damned.” – or if our God is a kindly and benevolent deity who wouldn’t hurt a fly, either way we know just what to expect from our god. Either god is a cafeteria style idol, a god selected from those attributes that appeal to us. Either sort of god can be found in the Bible. But either sort of god is constructed by us, to suit us.
When Israel and Aaron construct a god to suit them, Yahweh, the real deal God, is not pleased. God is ready to disown them saying to Moses, “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely… 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.” Yahweh wants nothing more to do with them. They are Moses’ people now, not Yahweh’s. And God proposes to transfer the promises made to Abraham all those centuries ago to Moses. God will start over.
If we take this story seriously at all, we must wrestle with some real difficulties. The God we see here is all set to wipe out Israel. But Moses is in the way. Even before Moses intervenes on Israel’s behalf, begging God to remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Yahweh says, “Now let me alone…”
Moses seems to function as a Christ-like figure, standing in the breech between humanity and God’s wrath. But do we really think God is all set to destroy Israel when Moses somehow convinces God otherwise? And the same problem exists with mechanical formulas for salvation where Jesus stands in the breech. God is all set to nail us, but somehow Jesus comes in between. Is this the true picture of God, a God itching to destroy but somehow dissuaded by Moses or Jesus?
Let me suggest that what we witness in the story of the golden calf, and in the story of the cross, is a profound tension within the heart of God, at least insomuch as we can know God. The God of the Bible does not finally let us settle on a god of mercy or a god of judgment. Walter Brueggemann writes, “This tension of mercy that forgives and sovereignty that will not be mocked is an endless adjudication for the God of the Bible, who permits no final or systematic resolve. It is a tension that we all know in our most intimate and treasured relations. In Exodus, the crisis is kept raw, alive, and unresolved. It must be kept so for Moses and for Israel, as it is even for God’s own life.”[1]
This God Brueggemann speaks of is a little unsettling, a little hard to pin down, and problematic for those of us who want a god who is predictable, dependable, and logically consistent. But this God we find in Exodus and at the cross is a living, dynamic God with an exciting vitality missing from our idols, whether they be golden calves or well-crafted theological constructs that conform to our particular inclinations.
If a non-Christian who had never visited a church decided to take in congregations covering a fairly wide theological spectrum, she could be forgiven if she concluded that we worshipped different gods. We don’t of course, but we do have different idols, different pictures of God that we have constructed from various elements borrowed from Bible and other sources. But what might happen if we considered tossing out our idols?
I sometimes wonder if the lack of vitality in many American congregations in recent decades isn’t because too many people have seen that our idols have no life. The images of God we have constructed for ourselves have proved inadequate for people’s spiritual longings, and so they have gone looking elsewhere. But what if we tossed our idols and settled images, and embraced the dynamic and somewhat unsettling God of the Exodus and the cross?
All praise and glory to the God who rescues Israel from slavery, who commands faithful covenant obedience, and who comes to us in Jesus on a cross.
[1] Walter Brueggemann in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Vol. I (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1994) p. 935.
I was raised by parents who fit the description of those for whom the prevailing images of God "became inadequate for their spiritual longings". Yet, they instilled in me, mostly by their own example, ethics and values which I later learned are known as Christian. My mother would say that that she had "lost the faith when she was 8 [years old]". At that time, her parents were members of a Presbyterian church in McRae, Georgia, which I attended once, and they were until they died. But but my mother's loss of faith somehow didn't keep her from sending me to a Quaker summer camp when I was 14, and later to a Quaker boarding school, (as a high school junior). Among the 'Friends', as they are called, I learned of an immediate God, one who is revealed in bible text, but one whose Truth is ultimately uncapturable in any text. For these Friends, the bible was not an idol, though it, (like George Fox, John Woolman, & Lucretia Mott), served as a bright light. For these Friends, the surest vessle for truth was a life lived, not in the letter "which killeth".
ReplyDeleteFor 14 years worked for a business peopled predominantly by Christians who, for all their zeal for legitimacy through "bible based" Truth, seemed to draw very different conclusions from the texts than I did. Their greatest passion was reserved for conservative economic ideology at a time when ideology was considered the sole preserve of "the liberals". They seemed far more focused on "doing right" than on "doing good". Their God appeared to be one purposed to make life simpler and more congruent with their politics. This was not the one I saw in the bible that makes life more difficult and complicated. The mission to "win the loss [of souls] to Christ, seemed more to do with filling church pews, and with their own salvation, than actually modelling the actual life of the biblical Jesus. The stories of God's rage and vengefulness seemed more intended to inspire adherence, less to suggest our bulging material attachments and inconstancy.
If "The truth that can be told is not the eternal truth", (attributed to Coptic Christians) then, what IS the bible? For me, at least, it serves as a lamp and looking glass; referent and record, but utterly useless a shield against hard questions or any of God's other demanding intrusions.