Proper 23 -- Exodus 32: 1 - 14; Psalm
106: 1 – 6, 19 - 23; Philippians 4: 1 - 9; Matthew 22: 1 - 14
A homily by: Fr.
Gene Tucker
Given at: Trinity
Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; Sunday, October 9, 2011
“IDOLS, THEN-AND-NOW”
(Homily text: Exodus 32: 1 - 14)
Many people
know the account of the golden calf.
Perhaps they may know it from the vivid depiction of the celebration
that took place around the calf from the famous movie “The Ten
Commandments”.
This
incident is one of the most famous in the Old Testament. The account is full of drama:
·
a
faithless leader and a faithful one, both brothers, one leading God’s people
into idol worship while the brother is on the mountaintop, interceding with God
to save the people;
·
Idol worship which takes place while the Law is
being given by God to Moses, the first commandment, being “I am the Lord your
God….you shall have no other gods before me”;
·
Mixing of the worship of the Lord God with that
of idols (the term “syncretism”[1] applies
here).
Of course,
all these things exist side-by-side in the text, so the drama is heightened
considerably.
The making
of the golden calf is a classic example of idolatry. Here, we see a deliberate attempt to replace
the headship and the leadership of the Lord God with another god, one made by
human hands, in the shape and likeness of an animal. (Psalm 106 captures well the inane nature of
this folly, as it says, “And so they exchanged their Glory for the image of an
ox that feeds on grass.” Psalm 106:20)
Idolatry –
defined as the worship of anything that takes the place of Almighty God – is
alive and well. It was alive and well in
ancient times as God’s people made their way out of Egypt through the
wilderness into the land that God had promised them, and it is alive and well
today, too.
The pathway
to idolatry is quite similar, then and now, as well. We would do well to examine closely some of
those steps, in order that we might see a similar progression in our own time
and in our own lives.
Looking at
the Exodus text, then, we notice the following:
God seems to be absent, or silent: Notice that the text says that the people
said to Aaron, “Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses,
the man who brought us up out of Egypt, we do not know what has become of
him.” Here, the side-by-side comparison
to the first commandment is striking: In
the commandment, God says, I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of
Egypt.” (Notice that the same phrase - “The
Lord God/Moses who brought you/us up out of Egypt” - is used in the first
commandment and in the comment the people make to Aaron.) After deciding that they were pretty much
on-their-own, Aaron makes a calf out of the gold they’d given him, and the
people proclaim, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the
land of Egypt.” (Notice that the same phrase is repeated. Notice also that Moses is quickly
forgotten: earlier on, the people
claimed that Moses had brought them out of Egypt, now they ascribe that event
to the newly fashioned gods.)
The people revert to their old,
tried-and-true ways: Many
commentators will remind us that the golden calf idea didn’t come
out-of-the-blue, but was a fertility symbol in many Ancient Near Eastern
religious cults. It’s quite possible
that the people had encountered such a symbol during their time in Egypt.
Mix-and-match…religion to suit the
individual: Aaron’s role in all this
is curious: He deliberated fashions the
calf, using a tool to do so, and yet he says that the festival which will
accompany the celebration around the calf is to be a “feast to the Lord.” (We should remind ourselves that later on,
when confronted by Moses, Aaron will claim that he simply threw the gold into
the fire, and out popped the calf! See
Exodus 32: 24.) We get the impression
that the feast is to be “to the Lord”, but to the calf, as well.
Now, let’s
turn our attention away from the incident which took place some 3,500 years
ago, and cast our gaze on the 21st century. In doing so, we can see that not much has
changed with respect to the process which leads us into idolatry. Of course, the things that become idols, then
and now, have changed, but the process leading to the worship of any idol is
often the same.
We begin
with the first point that we made in our observation of the progression of
events with the golden calf. There, we
observed that the people seemed to think that God was silent, and that God’s
appointed leader was absent. “As for
this Moses, we do not know what has become of him,” they said.
The same
observation can be made about our contemporary culture. Faced with many serious problems, the world
we live in today encourages us to think that God is silent, and that we are
without direction and leadership.
In response
to the problems and challenges we face today, many simply revert to the
tried-and-true ways that were learned in Egypt….Of course, we might be saying
to ourselves, “But we’ve never been to Egypt.”
True enough (for most of us, I suppose), but most of us have lived in a
secular, pagan culture were idolatry is commonplace. (We’ll have more to say about contemporary
idolatry in a moment.)
The ways in
which our secular, contemporary culture operates, particularly with regard to
those things that it says are to be valued, offers a vivid template for
idolatry. We can be tempted, if we feel
that we are without God’s leadership and protection, that we are pretty much
“on our own” and therefore, ought to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of those
in the culture around us. After all,
those attitudes and practice constitute the “tried-and-true” of our time, the
“conventional wisdom” of our age.
The final
point we made about those ancient Israelites is that they seemed to be quite
willing to blend various religious ideas together, as if they were all of equal
value and usefulness. The same is true
today. How often do I, as a priest, hear
people say something that shows that they value another religious belief as
much as they do Christianity? Unfortunately,
I hear such things quite often. (I
shudder every time I do!). The bottom
line is that such comments demonstrate an attitude that says, in essence, “I
can believe whatever I want to believe, and I can choose to take whatever is of
value from one source, and I am also free to choose something else of value
from another source.”[2]
So if the
process leading to idolatry doesn’t seem to have changed all that much, we
should ask ourselves about the matter of the idols themselves as we might find
them today.
Here, we
notice that the idols have changed considerably. If the ancient Israelites chose to cast a
golden calf in the first recorded incidence of idolatry among God’s people, we
will notice that they continued to have problems with the blending/adoption of
idols from the Canaanite religions down through their time in the promised
land, until their deportation into Babylon in 586 BC (that experience finally
cured God’s people of their desire to adopt the pagan ways of the Canaanites!).
But our idols
aren’t like theirs. We are far more
sophisticated in the choice of our idols.
Remembering
that an idol can be defined as anything that takes God’s rightful and central
place in our lives, then we can see that nearly anything has the potential to
become an idol.
Let’s
enumerate a short list of possible idols that might be adopted from the
contemporary culture today: fame,
fortune/wealth, status, objects (cars, house, possessions, e.g.), addictions
(sex, drugs, alcohol, e.g.), guilt over past sins/wrongdoings (because we don’t
allow ourselves to accept God’s forgiveness, thereby making the past/forgiven
sin the powerful and controlling reality).
Any of
these things (and more) can become idols if they become the central
guiding/grounding reality in our lives.
But the
Lord God wants to be at the center of our lives. That means that we must relinquish that
central place to God, for – at its root – idolatry seeks to make us the center
of our lives, by allowing us to think that we can make the choices of what’s
important and what’s not….said another way, idolatry is really about control…we
want to be in control.
One final
comment is in order: This is all about
relationships. Three levels of
relationship are in view here. They are:
God
seeks to be first in life: “You
shall have no other gods before me,” the first commandment says. God wants to be in the first and central
place in life. If God is in that place,
then step two of our relationships will fall into place easily.
Everything else takes its meaning from God’s central place: All the other things we relate to in our lives will take their meaning from our relationship to God. This would include our relationships with family, friends and others, our possessions/wealth, our use of time, our priorities in daily living. (The homily could easily turn – at this point – into a sermon about the stewardship of our time, talent and treasure.)
Some things are off limits entirely: Those ancient Israelites had no business
making a golden calf, much less worshiping it.
For us, as well, some things are simply off limits to the Christian
entirely. Equal estimation of any other
system of religious belief would be one of those things, for in Christ, we have
seen the glory of God the Father (John 1: 14), and know Jesus Christ to be the
“way, the truth and the life.” (John 14: 6).
For another, watching things that are worthless (as Psalm 119:37 says),
or are damaging to our spiritual wellbeing, should be on our list, too. (Here, I think of pornography as an example.)
Idolatry,
then and now. Not much has changed down
through the years in terms of the process by which idolatry comes into our
lives, though the things we choose to worship have changed dramatically, making
the challenge to see idolatry when it exists harder to detect.
May the
Holy Spirit guide and enable us to see the ways we might be tempted to follow
in the footsteps of God’s people in ancient times, that we might be prevented
from following in their folly, as well.
AMEN.
[1] The dictionary defines syncretism this way: “The
attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles,
practices or parties, as in…religion.”
Essentially, in the religious context, syncretism seeks to have us
believe that all belief systems are of equal merit. In practice, therefore, syncretism seeks to
have us think that we can mix-and-match differing belief systems to suit our
personal needs and tastes.
[2] This attitude has been characterized by the
term “smorgasbord religion”, which is like walking through a smorgasbord food
line, choosing some items, while ignoring others.
