Holy Cow!

At our 150th anniversary celebration, I was struck by the video that Kris put together, that we watched in the social hall following worship. It was like going through an old family photo album – literally, two, three, four or more generations of some of our longtime members have been members here, so for them, the old confirmation photos and such were photos of grandmom and grandpop or mom and dad when they were little.

Going through our own old family albums can bring up lots of memories - we may feel sad, or wistful, or we may find some old photos really funny, or even embarrassing. For those of us –like me - who grew up in the 70’s, where long hair and pastel colors were the fashion, we may wince a bit looking at our high school graduation photo. And then some of us have those photos we hope nobody else will ever see, the photos we pray nobody will ever post to Facebook. Sadder but wiser now, we may look back on some of our old photos and ask ourselves, “What on earth was I thinking?”

Today’s Old Testament reading is like one of those embarrassing photos in the family album of God’s people, one of those moments in the journey of the Hebrews where you just want to smack your forehead and say, “What on earth were they thinking?” The old movie The Ten Commandments had a lot of fun with this Scripture, conjuring up all sorts of wild ceremonies as part of worship of the Golden Calf. Fortunately for us, the writer of Exodus and those who preserved this book over many centuries, did not feel an obligation to try to gloss over these moments when God’s people fell flat on their faces. The Hebrews are presented, warts and all, and so perhaps in looking at those times when they went astray, we can recognize ourselves.

Last week Ralph, our organist, read, with great gusto, the Ten Commandments. I’d joked with Ralph that last week was Ralph’s Charlton Heston moment. But Moses did not immediately come down the mountain – along with the Ten Commandments, God gave Moses all manner of other instruction about how God was to be worshipped and how society was to be organized. In Exodus, God’s instruction to Moses covers more than 10 chapters. Some forms of Jewish tradition hold that on Mt. Sinai, Moses received not only the written Torah – what we call the first five books of the Old Testament – but also what Jews call the Oral Torah, the traditions of interpretation that would not be written down for centuries, but that helped God’s people make sense of the written Torah through changing circumstances – in Jewish thought, Moses was thought to have received all of that at least in seed form. And all of this took time.

Meanwhile the people are at the bottom of the mountain, wondering what happened to Moses. They saw him go up the mountain, but he hadn’t come down yet. And so they became uneasy. Perhaps God had struck Moses dead up on that mountain. Perhaps Moses had abandoned them. Meanwhile, there they were. How long were they supposed to hang around, waiting?

So the people went to Aaron, Moses’ brother, and asked Aaron to make gods for them. And Aaron complied, making a golden calf. The people sacrificed to it, and as Scripture memorably says, “they sat down to eat and rose to revel.” God threatened to wipe them out on the spot, but Moses interceded with God and the people were spared.

Why a golden calf? Some scholars tell us that Aaron’s intent was not to worship a different god, but to create an image of the Lord for them to worship – after all, Aaron did say that their sacrifice would be “a festival to the LORD”. A calf would have reminded them of youth and strength, perhaps also of fertility and new life, and would have expressed the conviction that God is all these things. But certainly such an image would say nothing of God’s justice, God’s mercy, God’s love, God’s holiness. This is the reason that God commanded his people never to try to make an image of God, because God is so great and so far beyond our comprehension that any image would inevitably leave out much that is important about God. This prohibition is still followed in Judaism and especially in Islam. In Christianity, while we don’t literally worship images, there’s a broad range of tradition about the use of images of Jesus and the saints in worship, from the Eastern Orthodox traditions, where icons are everywhere, to the Protestant traditions, which may accept images such as the empty cross or pictures of Jesus, but is not as receptive of portrayals of the saints – and in some traditions the worship space is almost completely unadorned.

This Exodus passage is not the last we hear of a golden calf in the Bible. Many centuries later, following the breakup of united Israel into the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, the golden calf makes a return appearance. Since Jerusalem was located in the southern kingdom of Judah, for those in the northern kingdom, Jerusalem was essentially located in foreign territory. Those in the northern kingdom could not go to Jerusalem without leaving their country – and it was feared that if people from the northern kingdom went to Jerusalem to worship, they might stay there, or they might turn against the northern kingdom. The solution was to set up alternate worship sites at historic holy places in the Northern kingdom, such as Bethel and Dan. And at each of these alternative worship sites in the north, in the temple was a golden calf. And Jeroboam used the same words used by Aaron – “Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you forth from the land of Egypt.” Prophets from both north and south spoke out against these worship sites, calling their worship idolatrous.

We may look back on these stories, these very old snapshots from the family album of God’s people, as relics of a long-ago past, as evidence of thought processes that today we would consider primitive. Today we don’t literally create golden calves or totem poles and bow down to them. But let’s remember what was behind the creation of the golden calf – impatience, fear that God had abandoned the people. God’s promises of God’s presence weren’t enough, and so the people asked for an image to reassure themselves that God was still with them. And later on during the time of the northern kingdom, a king’s insecurity for his throne led him to create golden calves for his worship sites. In a word, behind the creation of the golden calf was a feeling of insecurity.

It seems that most of our very secular society doesn’t bow down to much of anything. But secular people still feel insecure. It’s part of the human condition. Even a secular society will find ways to act out its insecurity. Given the extreme divide in our society between the fantastically wealthy and the miserably poor, where investment bankers and CEO’s of major corporations earn hundreds of times what their average worker makes, where corporate leaders use their wealth not to create jobs but to outsource or automate or otherwise eliminate them – and given the resistance among some in government to putting any restraint whatever on corporate greed – it would seem that worship of the golden calf is alive and well – and is even blessed and encouraged by some clergy on TV and radio who give lip service to God but whose real religion is worship of the almighty dollar. And how is idolatry to wealth, to the market, working out for our society? How’s that working out for us? Adam Smith, in his long-ago economic treatise The Wealth of Nations, said that if each person was allowed to pursue his own economic self-interest, the invisible hand of the market would work to the benefit of all. But these days, the invisible hand seems to be punching the poor in the gut. The very wealthy sit down to eat and rise up to revel – and if you want to watch, you can turn on Wealth TV - while the rest of us struggle and the poorest of us starve. I suspect that decades from now, we’ll be looking back on this time, smack our heads, and ask, what were we thinking?

In our Bible study of the minor prophets that we’ve had after church, we’ve seen that during times when the very wealthy in Israel and Judah looked out only for themselves and abandoned the poor to their fate, prophets such as Amos and Micah and Habakkuk and others came forward to denounce their greed and call them to account. And in our time, there finally at long last seems to be the beginnings of some movement to call our corporate and financial leaders to accountability. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has spread to many cities, including Philadelphia, where City Hall seems to be the gathering place. Thus far, these are peaceful gatherings. I can only pray they stay that way. Two weeks ago, at historic Tindley Temple Baptist Church on South Broad Street, an interfaith coalition of churches and synagogues, called POWER – Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild – was formed to speak from a position of faith to government and corporate leaders about the need to return jobs to our city. These gatherings are not coming from a place of rage and hostility, but thus far have been surprisingly gentle, coming from a desire to remind those in leadership that with power comes responsibility, of calling government and business leaders to a better way of using their wealth.

Psalm 23, which appears in our call to worship, and our reading from Philippians give us ways to deal with insecurity that rely on God, not golden calves. Psalm 23 reminds us that the Lord is our shepherd, no matter what. In a passage often read at funerals, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” But God’s care is not only for the dying, but for the living. The Psalmist sings of God setting a table for us, even in the presence of our enemies – even in a dangerous place, God cares for us. In his letter to the church at Philippi, written at a time in which both Paul in prison and a church undergoing internal division were experiencing insecurity, Paul tells his readers, of all things, to rejoice. “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice! Let your gentleness be known to everyone. Don’t worry about anything,” Paul writes, “but in prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God.” And, Paul assures his readers – and us – “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Our Gospel reading, even with its violent imagery, reminds us of the vision of God’s reign, a vision which goes back to Old Testament times, not as sitting through a sermon droning on through all eternity like this one, but a heavenly feast. Not a boring lecture, but a banquet, where there is more than enough for all. It’s a banquet to which we’re all invited, at which we’re all welcome. Many in our society turn away from this banquet in order to feast at the world’s table, where plenty for a few means starvation for many. But at God’s table there is room and plenty for all. God continues to invite us to the wedding banquet, and urges us to invite others. So may we go out into the highways and byways with the invitation to God’s love and grace. Amen.