Sermon — October 11, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“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!’” (Exodus 32:8)
The story’s almost comical. These are the same people, after all, who, just a short time ago, saw God part the Red Sea. They’ve seen God hold back the waters on either side as they walked across on dry land. They’ve seen the smoke as the fiery cloud of God’s presence descended on the holy mountain. They’ve heard the voice of God speaking to them out of the cloud and fire, and been afraid.
And now, just a few days later, it’s like a ’90s teenage comedy: Father Moses goes away for the weekend and takes too long coming back, and the kids throw a house party. Uncle Aaron, Moses’ own brother, is left in charge, and he’s kind of a pushover. Moses has been gone, communing with God for forty days and forty nights, and the people are over it. “We don’t know what happened to Moses and his ‘God,’” they seem to say. “But—you can make us a god!” And Aaron, inexplicably, does.
“Give me your jewelry,” he says, “Your earrings, your bracelets, your necklaces. I’ll make you a god.” And he melts them down, and casts them in his handy idol-mold—which he just has lying around—and out pops this little golden calf.
And the people go nuts. “Oh my God!” Literally! “This is our God! This is the one who brought us up out of Israel!” And they build an altar, and they offer sacrifices, and they sit down for a Gathering-Sunday Welcome-Back Cookout. And God is not amused.
But we are!
It’s often hard to hear the humor in the Bible through the millennia, but the Bible’s parodies of idolatry make a certain amount of sense. The Prophet Isaiah, to take just one example, teases the idea of worshiping a wooden statue of a god. A craftsman, he says, cuts down a tree, and saws it in half. One half he chops into firewood, and uses it cook his dinner; the other half he carves into a god and worships! (Isaiah 44:16–17 ESV) How did you know which half of the log was supposed to be which? Are you sure you didn’t burn your god by accident and start worshiping the firewood? This simplistic kind of idol-worship was so easy to mock that even the ancient Greek philosophers got in on the game. Sophisticated Greeks and Romans, even pagans, didn’t really believe that idols were gods. And so it’s baffling to see the Israelites make this kind of mistake. The medieval Jewish commentator Nachmanides even thinks this is proof that the people didn’t really worship the golden calf. Something else must have been going on. After all, he writes, “no one in the world could be so stupid as to think that the gold in their ears brought them out of Egypt.”[1] More recently, of course, these kinds of satires may bring up a certain discomfort. After all, we live in a world of religious pluralism. We want to respect difference, not mock it. Why should it matter to me whether another person’s religion has statues of their gods?
Well, to be honest, it shouldn’t. And indeed, God’s commandments about creating idols were also for God’s own people, for our own religion. But on a much more important level, I think this focus on literal idolatry, on the literal worship of statues of the gods, makes it harder to see the problem of our own, deeper idolatry.
It’s too easy for us to think like this: Idols are statues of gods; Worship is a religious ceremony; I do not perform religious ceremonies to statues of gods; therefore I do not worship idols. Check. Second Commandment accomplished. Sermon finished. See you next week.
But “worshiping idols” means a lot more than that. The word “worship” itself originates as the smooshing together (that’s a technical term) of two older English words: “worth” and “-ship.” “Worth” as in “value”; “-ship” as in “citizenship,” “discipleship,” “fellowship.” (Not a sailing ship.) Worship, first and foremost, is “worth-ship,” the state of being worthy, of being valuable. So we sing hymns, and give thanks, and we pray to God, and we call these things “worship”; but we do them because God is worthy of them, and that’s what worship really means. We believe God to be worthy beyond measure; and we believe that God is the measure of our worth. If God is what is ultimately good, in other words, then our own goodness is measured by how God-shaped our lives are.
You could say, then, that there are lots of things we worship in this world, lots of things to which we ascribe ultimate value and from which we derive our own value. They’re different over time. Very young children “worship” their parents. A parent’s word is the highest law of the land—even if it’s hard to follow the law—and a parent’s love is the fundamental source of a child’s own sense of self-worth. For older children, and especially for teenagers, worship shifts from parents to friends and peers, whose opinions and tastes are extremely important; and in turn, the ins and outs of those relationships determine what we think of our own value. As we grow and change, we pick up other measures of our worth—the right college or the right job, the right home in the right neighborhood, the right schools for our kids or the right vacation destinations. Like the Israelites melting down their earrings into gods, we take the things we value and turn them into values. We pursue them because they’re worthy and worthwhile; and, in turn, our nearness to these things of worth begins to shape our own worth. They begin to become gods.
Of course, we do this in the church, as well. We take things that are means to an end, like measurements of worship attendance or of financial giving2, and turn them into ends in themselves. We pour our energy into upholding our traditions and maintaining our buildings, and sometimes we forget to ask whether they’re helping us grow in faith. We measure ourselves against the church decades ago, and we sometimes forget that a smaller congregation in a building that needs repair is no less spiritually vibrant than a comfortable collection of Christians in, you know, a watertight church.
That’s not to say these things are bad themselves. A parent’s love, a friendship, an education; meaningful work, a comfortable home, a relaxing trip—these are good things. Like rings of gold in the ears of the Israelites, they’re beautiful things. They’re good to have, so long as we remember that we are us, and God is God, and these things are things. The problem comes when we blur the lines, when we melt our earrings down and shape them into gods, when they become the goal and ultimate value of our lives. The problem comes when, like the townspeople in Jesus’ parable, we receive an invitation to God’s magnificent banquet and turn away worship other things; to tend to our own fields, to go about our own business.
The parables in the Gospel of Matthew often use a kind of exaggeration to make their point. God always seems to be destroying people or burning down their cities, casting them into the outer darkness for RSVPing “No” to a wedding or showing up to a black-tie affair in business casual. Fair enough. Maybe that’s another Sunday’s sermon.
But buried within this parable is a taste of God’s remarkable love. “Go,” God says, “into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” And God’s servants go and gather “all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.” (Matthew 22:9-10)
God doesn’t measure us in the ways we measure ourselves, by any of the ways we compare and judge and distinguish between one another. Instead God goes out into the streets and calls everyone, “good and bad,” and fills the wedding hall. God does have other laws and other measurements, this “wedding robe” in which we must be clothed. But the “wedding robe” isn’t something you can buy in a store. It’s love. Love, after all, as the sixth-century Pope Gregory the Great wrote, “is what our Creator himself possessed when he came to the marriage feast to join the church to himself.”[2]
These days, we all face problems of discernment and prioritization. Every day, we prioritize. As individuals and as a society, we rank things in order of importance and urgency: restaurants or schools? Playdates or grandparents? The subway or the supermarket? But there are larger questions, too. What are the things we valued and chased after before the pandemic that weren’t worthy of our worship? What were the standards by which we once measured ourselves that we ought to leave behind? What are the new practices and new priorities we’ve discovered that are shaped like love, shaped like God? What are the beautiful things we can’t wait to see again? What, in other words, are the idols—and what are the earrings? What are the parts of our lives that have distracted us from the love of God and love of neighbor—and what are the things of which we’d be proud to say, “This is our God”?
[1] Michael Carasik ed., Exodus, The Commentators’ Bible. Accordance electronic ed. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2005), paragraph 5317.
[2] Manlio Simonetti and Thomas C Oden, eds. Matthew 14–28. vol. 1b of Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. ICCS/Accordance electronic ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 146.