American Idols
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
October 9, 2005
Exodus 32:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
Exodus 32 1 ¶ 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.” 2 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.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. 4 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!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the LORD.” 6 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.
7 ¶ The LORD said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8 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 worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”” 9 The LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10 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.”
11 ¶ But Moses implored the LORD his God, and said, “O LORD, 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? 12 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. 13 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.”” 14 And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.Philippians 4 1 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.
2 ¶ I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.
4 ¶ Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8 ¶ Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.Matthew 22 1 ¶ Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2 “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ 5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6 while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. 8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ 10 Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
11 ¶ “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12 and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. 13 Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 For many are called, but few are chosen.”
I. BEGINNING
Have you ever had occasion in a class or on a job to watch an instructional video? You know, the kind where your teacher or human resources director trots out some video that’s going to teach you some skill or vital information. So often those videos are produced decades ago, in the fifties with guys in white shirts and thin black ties. Or, I guess, for your generation they’re produced in the seventies or eighties with all the rediculous hairstyles of those eras. Often, the films make assumptions that you no longer share or are ignorant of recent developments (like computers that don’t use punch cards). And you watch the film and realize you haven’t really learned anything new and that the film seems hopelessly out of date, irrelevant to your particular circumstances.
II. TEXT
Tonight’s lesson from the Old Testament strikes us in the same way. It seems to have so little to do with our situation. Moses is atop the mountain, receiving the law of God. The Scripture lesson tells us that “he delayed in coming down” and so the Israelites became impatient. They implore Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make idols for them to go before them, since they didn’t know what became of Moses. And so Aaron tells them to gather all their gold and then he melts it all into a golden calf. The Israelites say “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” Aaron builds an altar before the calf and declares the following day a solemn assembly to the Lord. God informs Moses of this and Moses is able to talk God out of annihilating the people.
It is a story we are certainly familiar with. Especially if you’ve ever seen Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. (I have always liked how DeMille interpreted the Israelites revelry: basically people running around half dressed like at a frat party throwing grapes at each other and getting drunk). We have come to understand the image of the Golden Calf as symbolic of the very worst of idolatry. But there are questions that come up as we look over this story.
III. QUESTIONS
A. The Golden Calf
The first: why on earth would people worship a Golden Calf? This is such a strange part of the story to us. We are so removed from the days when people would bow down to carved idols and pray to them that we have a hard time imagining that this story ever made sense. Our modern, post-enlightenment thinking agrees with the prophets’ declaration that it is pointless to worship something you have made with your own hands, as though it had power over you. And so, we are perplexed by the Israelites’ behavior, because it seems so odd and unusual.
B. The Timing
Another major question is the timing. Wasn’t this just after the exodus from Egypt? I mean, hadn’t the people just seen the God Moses proclaimed do wondrous things for them? Hadn’t they just seen ten plagues, a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, and most impressively, the parting of the Red Sea? And so Moses is a little late coming down from the mountain and they decide that this God isn’t impressive enough and want a new one—so they make idols for themselves. This may go on record as the greatest case of “What-Have-You-Done-For-Me-Lately” syndrome ever. It makes the story hard to believe—it just seems so sudden.
C. The Relevance
And thus, comes the most vexing question: what does this story have to do with us? How would you even attempt to make a story like this relevant to us today?
IV. OUR IDOLATRY
In the movie Dogma, they make a fairly good effort at updating the golden calf story. One of the back stories of that film is that there is a multinational corporation called “Mooby” (it looks a lot like a certain entertainment company that we all know that rhymes with Gisney). Instead of a mouse as its corporate symbol, the Mooby corporation has Mooby the Golden Cow. Matt Damon, playing the angel of death, decides to punish the Board of Directors of Mooby for being idolators. It is a fairly amusing—albeit violent—scene and it shows one filmmaker’s effort to depict idolatry in a modern setting.
But even that story seems kind of remote. The board of directors may have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about their corporate symbol and all the money it made them, but they were hardly bowing down and worshiping it. When do we ever find idolatry that blatant?
A. Subtlety
When I was a student studying abroad in the Soviet Union, one of the things we used to entertain ourselves with was reading the propaganda banners that would hang from the buildings: “Long live the great communist party of V.I. Lenin!” “May the words and deeds of the great V.I. Lenin live throughout the ages!” And it was always fun to buy a book like one I found called “The Founding Fathers of the USA” in which it told the story of the bourgeois capitalists who had their so-called “revolution” against other bourgeois capitalists but did nothing for the rights of the workers (unlike the proletarian revolution in Russia). It was fun to find that kind of stuff. What was interesting to me was how few Soviets actually believed that stuff. The propaganda was everywhere and yet no one really believed it. Such was the scope of their unbelief that it was even found in a popular saying. They had two major papers—Pravda and Isvestia—their names meant “The Truth” and “The News”. The Soviets would often say, “There’s no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.” Given the pervasiveness of the propaganda in Soviet society, I was stunned to discover how few Soviets believed it. They may not have known what the truth really was, but they didn’t always believe the propaganda.
I, on the other hand, kept having to confront new realities that I was not expecting. I discovered that the Russians did not all seek our annihilation. They did not hate us—in fact, if they found out you were an American, you would be guaranteed not having to pay for anything or having to wait on line anywhere. Much of what I had believed about the USSR simply was not so. And here was the bigger problem: I didn’t know where I got all those wrong ideas. There weren’t on great banners that hung from downtown buildings. They weren’t in cheap books published by the U.S. government. They had just filtered in. Subtly.
One of the great things about American culture is that it is capable of great style and subtlety. What makes for slick advertising and effective moviemaking can also make for very subtle propaganda. One case in point: the Bush Administration never actually came out and said there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11th attacks—and when pressed will admit that they cannot demonstrate one. And yet a great number of Americans believes that there is. That kind of subtlety is far more effective—and far more dangerous—than big screaming banners hanging from government buildings.
B. American Idols
It is no less so with our idolatry.
We are not really in danger of melting down all our jewelry and constructing a giant idol in the middle of the quad. At least I don’t think we are—that giant statue of the eagle over by Bender Arena has me a little concerned.
But in reality, the idolatry we are guilty of is far subtler, and far more insidious. We are far more likely to make idols of abstractions that can’t be seen rather than obvious statues.
We make idols of wealth and power. We make idols of our status, our prestige, our accomplishments. In Washington, status is by far the biggest idol we have. You can often tell the culture of a place by the first question you get asked at parties. In New York, they ask you “Where do you live?” At parties in Washington, you’ll be asked “What do you do?” It’s unbelievable. In Washington, you are what you do. And your relative value is attached to how prestigious/powerful/influential your work is. The most points for a position somewhere on the Hill or the White House. Then for large law firms. Then large non-profits and on down the list. Lawyer is a satisfactory (if a little common) answer. Sometimes, just for kicks, I like telling people that I run a local office for one of the largest non-profit organizations in the country. That usually impresses them more than ‘United Methodist pastor’.
But status is not the only idol we have. We make idols of sex. Of love. Of relationships. We make idols of our popularity and reputations—of what other people think of us. We make idols of the status quo. We make idols of our belief systems, often finding them to be more important than what it is we claim to believe in. Political affiliations, worldview, ideology, activism. We make idols of our identities. Sometimes we fall in love with the labels or the images we construct for ourselves and those become the idols we serve.
These are the idols that we have—the objects of our devotion that lead us away from worshiping God.
C. The real threat
Idolatry was the big sin in the Hebrew Bible. But it should be noted that the focus in the Law and the Prophets against idolatry was not based on the concern that people would abandon the worship of Yhwh in favor of worshiping some idol. Rather the concern was that people would worship idols in addition to worshiping God. Hedging their bets, so to speak.
That remains the big issue. It is not that we will abandon God in favor of the things that we idolize, but that we will incorporate those things into our faith. Such that we worship both God and our status, our relationships, our reputations, our work, our wealth. That, too, is far subtler and more dangerous. We can slowly convince ourselves of the acceptability of our idolatry within a Christian framework.
V. THE GOOD NEWS
And quickly we discover that the story of the Golden Calf is exceptionally relevant to us. Idolatry has everything to do with us. We, too, worship things that cannot give life. We, too, lend our devotion to things we have made with our own hands rather than the one who made us. We, too, abandon our trust in God all to quickly and turn back to the things of the world and hope that they can save us. It doesn’t seem to matter how recently God did something in our lives.
But the Good News is that Christ lived, died, and rose again for us—idolators though we be. God extends the invitation to the wedding banquet to all of us—good and bad alike—to come into the feast. This is the great act of deliverance that God has wrought in our lives. This is the Exodus that we have come through. We have been delivered through the waters of the Red Sea and the waters of baptism. And even though we all to quickly turn to the things of this world that we hope will save us, Christ awaits us.
VI. CONCLUSION
Idolatry remains our great peril. But in our acceptance of Christ, who first accepted us—idolators that we are—we are given the grace to put aside our idols, to melt our hearts of stone, and turn once again to God.
