American Idol

This is a sermon that I preached on August 11th.  It is the second-to-last sermon that we are preaching in our summer sermon series about the book of Exodus.

The wandering Israelite community lays encamped at the foot of Mount Sinai. Moses goes up into the fire and clouds to converse with God. After the trials and tribulations that this community has faced – slavery in Egypt, fear of being captured, the spectacle of the Red Sea, the starving wilderness – these released captives wait at the bottom of the mountain. And what happens next? The Israelites construct an idol out of gold and begin to break God's commandments just as quickly as they can. 

Let's back up a little bit.

The Israelites come to Mount Sinai and Moses goes up on the mountain. We'll say that while Moses is on top of the mountain, he's upstairs, and the Israelites stay downstairs, at the foot. Upstairs, Moses is receiving the Ten Commandments. He's being given the laws of God and other information regarding the construction of the tabernacle.

15...10 Commandments.

So the Israelites sit downstairs, looking up at all of this fire and smoke going on upstairs, and they start to wonder if Moses is ever planning on coming back down. They think that maybe Moses had abandoned them, or he might have died. Whatever happened to Moses, he is not connected to the people, and therefore the people do not feel connected to God.

So they build an idol, and begin worshiping it.

The people understand Moses as their connection, their go-between with God. And now that they lost this visual representation of God, now that God became more abstract to them, they lose their nerve. They feel that there is an empty space in their lives which God no longer fills. They decide to fill that space up with something they can grasp, something accessible.

So the Israelites turn to Aaron, the second in command and convince him to build an idol in the shape of a calf. But this calf stand against everything that God is telling Moses upstairs. This idol is everything which God is not:

• This calf is a tangible object that the Israelites can touch and interact with. 
• The idol is visible, whereas the God which truly brought them out of Egypt is invisible. 
• Yahweh is capable of communicating with the community, while this idol sits there and does nothing.

These are the reasons God becomes angry when the golden calf is built. They try to domesticate God. They try to make God something that they can touch, and understand, but that is not who or what God is.

The demands by God are made into a world of unacknowledged polytheism. This is the world that we live in - a world of unacknowledged polytheism. We don’t want to admit that there are many gods present in our lives other than the Lord, but they are there. Whether we recognize them as such, we have many alternatives outside of God. We have many other offers of joy. Many other places we could turn for security. Many other demonstrations of love.

In our pursuit of joy, we may choose Bacchus, the god of wine. We may turn to material items. Things and stuff we can gather up. If we take a look at advertising, I think it's pretty clear that this is something we're very prone to. Rather than turning to God to derive our true pleasure, we may place the pursuits of this world - the distractions - first.

In the pursuit of security we may chose Ares, the god of war. We as a people so often resort to violence and mistrust. We seem more willing to cut our spending for education than to cut our spending for defense. Rather than trusting in God to protect us and learning what it truly means to love our enemies, we build our walls higher and our guns bigger.

 In the pursuit of true love we may choose Eros - the god of lust. We place ourselves in unhealthy relationships. We seek satisfaction in relationships of shallow, mutual benefit rather than trusting in God’s unconditional love as the model for our love.

The barrage of gods which assail us are not Roman or Greek figures, they are the lure of that which is not the Lord. They are the things of this world which stand in for the wonderful aspects of God's covenant. They are the things that we use to distract ourselves from serving God and fully engaging God in the covenant.

The reason these gods are so tricky, the reason that we are susceptible to making these things into idols is because they are not inherently bad things. They can even be good things until they stand in the place which is reserved for God.

We can become fueled by our desire to make more money for the sake of being wealthy rather than for the sake of supporting our families and being contributing parts of God’s kingdom.

We may care more about power for the sake of power, rather than the opportunity power gives us to influence others for the sake of good.

Yum.

Food can be one of the easiest gods to bow down to when we care more about how good it tastes or how fancy it looks than the fact that so few people have access to it.

As the Israelites sit downstairs at the bottom of that mountain, they discover something that we have also discovered, faith in God is not easy. With all of these other gods vying for our attention, with all of these other opportunities for worship presenting themselves, it is a risky thing to be faithful to God. The Israelites could not tolerate that risk of faith, and they succumbed to the god that they could control, the god that did what they wanted.

Our call is to tolerate that risk of faith. Our call is to trust in the true God, not the god we create. There will be times we will fail. There will be times when money is what we worship, or war is what we rely upon, or fragile human relationships are the connections that we trust. But the promise of the Lord is the promise to unconditionally love us, To encourage us to set aside the gods of this world, and to tolerate the risk of faith.