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 Holy One.’ 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.
God 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 worshipped it and sacrificed to it, and said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” ’ God 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 Almighty, his God, and said, ‘O God, 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 God changed God’s mind about the disaster that God planned to bring on God’s people. ~ Exodus 32:1-14
Today we continue on our journey through Exodus with Moses and the Israelites. They’ve been wandering and wondering, learning more about God and becoming a faithful people. In today’s scripture lesson, we find them having recently accepted the ten commandments and entered into a covenant with God. Moses is up on Mount Sinai still in conversation with God, and, as they have so many times before, the people are anxious and impatient. We have learned that many of these Exodus stories are long, with twists and turns. There are two parts of today’s story that I want to focus on today.
First, at the beginning of the passage, we learn that Aaron, the brother of Moses, has been left in charge. (You’ll remember that Moses was not a great public speaker. He had a stutter, and his brother, Aaron, often spoke for him. They were both leaders in this wilderness journey.) Aaron knows this group well, they’ve been traveling together 32 chapters at this point. The people start to complain about how long Moses is taking on the mountain—forty days and nights. Then they demand that Aaron make gods for them, they are tired of waiting. Hold on! What did they just say??? “Make some gods for us, Aaron!” Wow, what happened to the covenant promises they just made with God as God’s chosen people???
And Aaron, it seems, immediately gave in to their demands. “OK, give me all your jewelry,” he says. “I’ll whip up a golden calf idol for you and we’ll have a big party!”
What was he thinking????
I can’t speak for Aaron. Maybe he was tired of the complaining. Maybe he sought to gain popularity. Maybe the pressure from the people was just too great. In any case, it was a stunning reversal and a “failure of nerve,” to quote contemporary leadership guru, Edwin Freidman.
But those people! They are clamoring for something tangible, measurable…something they could hold onto, see, even control. That we can understand. We all have the same struggles, it’s our human nature.
Their leader was absent. They didn’t have any information. They didn’t know what was going on or what was coming next. We can relate to that. Remember back to the beginning of the pandemic when we were all worshipping toilet paper???
When anxiety overtakes us, we often revert to past practices, to familiar behavior. Perhaps that’s what was happening here. The practices and rituals of idol worship were something the Israelites would have experienced in Egypt. The notion of many gods, rather than the one God, was of the world from which they were coming.
But they were moving into becoming something else. This was a people in the midst of a journey of transformation, each turn in the road causing them to stumble and presenting another opportunity to learn more about who they were and whose they were. This time, they were grappling with being in relationship with the One God, who they could not see or touch, whose power and being was beyond their ability to fully understand.
I recently read the book, Proof of Heaven, by Dr Eben Alexander. Alexander is an eminent neurosurgeon who contracted bacterial meningitis and was in a coma for seven days, his brain attacked by E coli and so severely damaged there was little hope of recovery. Miraculously, on the eighth day, he woke up and has gone on to write about his life-changing near-death experience.
Before his illness, Alexander was a brilliant scientist and a religious skeptic. Now, after his near-death experience, his belief in God is unshakeable. As he grapples to describe what he experienced when his brain was no longer working, Alexander laments that human language is simply not adequate to describe all that God is. He writes, “because the awe and creative power I witnessed was beyond naming, I realized that the proscriptions of some religions against naming God or depicting divine prophets did indeed have an intuitive correctness to them, because God’s reality is in truth so completely beyond any of our human attempts at capturing God to words or pictures while here on earth.”
God is more than any of us can imagine or understand–omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and also intimate and unconditionally loving. Like Alexander, we are sometimes skeptical. Or, like the Israelites, we try to get our arms around God by making God like us, or putting God in a box, or shifting our worship to the things of this world…making idols and graven images that we better understand, measure and control.
The second part of the story is this: When God got wind of what was going on with the golden calf, God was very, very angry. So angry with Aaron and the people reveling around the golden calf that God wanted to consume them with God’s rage. But something very interesting happened….
Moses asked God to reconsider. Moses appealed to God, saying these are your people, not mine, and suggested that to kill them after just rescuing them didn’t make much sense, even implying that God’s reputation with the Egyptians would suffer! And Moses reminded God of the promises made, not only to the Israelites in the wilderness, but to their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In other words, Moses challenged God to keep those promises.
And the Almighty listened to Moses. God’s mind was changed.
That’s so remarkable on so many levels!!! First, Moses, who must have been pretty angry at these folks himself, loved them enough and was selfless enough to put himself aside and speak up for them. Second, clearly God and Moses had an authentic relationship. It wasn’t a master/servant kind of thing. Moses essentially went toe-to-toe with God, to persuade the Almighty– omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, remember-? And God, even through anger, could hear what Moses was saying. I think that’s the most important part of the story, because right here in Exodus in the very first chapters of the Hebrew Bible, we and the Israelites are learning about who God is, what God is truly like, and that God is an authentically relational, loving and forgiving God.
Friends, we cannot be in relationship with a golden idol. No sacrifices made to a graven image will bring peace or reconciliation. No golden calf will offer you love and forgiveness, healing and hope…remaining in covenantal relationship with us no matter how many times we mess up. Love and selflessness is the only sacrifice required from the God.
When Moses got down that mountain, Aaron has some serious explaining to do and the Israelites did pay a price for their foolish faithlessness. But the lessons of this story shaped the people in a way that changed them forever.
And the question for all of us this morning? What is it that we worship? As the Israelites, we, too, are forever learning to have greater trust and faith in God. Even when God seems absent, we don’t have information, and we don’t know what’s coming next. Our anxiety or impatience distracts and draws us to bow to the shiny treasures of this world, be they gold or silver, recognition or reward, power or privilege.
We can idolize almost anything — material possessions, gender or age, or even our nation. Idols come in all shapes and sizes. They lure us with powerful promises and misplaced hopes. But idols can’t love and forgive, they can’t be in authentic relationship. They’re false gods, as foolish to worship as a golden calf.
Just like Israel, when we make golden calves in our lives, what we’re really trying to do is domestic God and give ourselves a sense of control in the chaos and complexity of our lives. A sad attempt to make God small and portable, something which we can put at our disposal in times of anxiety and stress.
Having faith and trust in God isn’t always easy; it’s a lifelong lesson. Our measure always should be love and relationship. The One we worship should lead us to love, always. If it’s God that we worship, then we will always be learning about creative, restoring, forgiving, reconciling love. On the faith journey of our lives, through the wilderness and to the mountain tops, God ,who is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent beyond our imagining, and intimate, personal, and precious will be there and inviting us into relationship.
May it be so for all of us. Amen.