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Exodus 32: 1-10,
15-20 October
18, 2009
THE GOLDEN CALF: This morning we continue our series of sermons on some of the old bible stories of our faith. Last week, our story was about how the Israelites had been slaves down in the land of Egypt and how Moses became the great liberator for his people, and how after they crossed the Red Sea, they began their long 40 year journey to the land of Promise. Now, please note that I speak of it as “the Land of Promise” and not “the Promised Land”, and by the end of this sermon, I hope my reason for doing so will be clear. Today’s story is a continuation of that Exodus narrative. The people of Israel are now encamped at Mt. Sinai – not the one down on Long Island, but the original one, a large, rugged mountain situated on the Sinai Peninsula, not too far from the modern resort community, known as Sharm El Sheik. Now, the 10 commandments that Moses found on Mt. Sinai have been a tremendous gift to civilization and our rule of law and the ethical standards by which we are called to live, but in addition these, what Moses really needed was a compass, or better yet, a GPS unit, for if you were to trace his route from Egypt to the Land of Promise or the Land of Canaan, as it was also called, you would see that it was incredibly circuitous, and indeed, if today’s story is a continuation of last week’s story, depending upon what body of water is defined as the “Red Sea,” we find the people even further away than they were before! Moses may have been a great prophet and a great liberator for his people, but he was a lousy boy scout. As you can see from the map in your bulletin this morning, a much more direct route would have been to have followed the shoreline of the Mediterranean Sea up through what is now Gaza. As perhaps you have heard, some have postulated that the reason it took them so long to get to the Land of Promise was that being male, Moses refused to stop and ask for directions. While there may be some truth to that, I think even an amateur historian or archeologist would find a lot of questions with the historicity of this story, the Exodus from Egypt. Indeed, just this last week, one of my Jewish friends sent me an article from the Haaretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, about how despite enormous efforts – for reasons we won’t go into today -- archeologists have not been able to substantiate the Exodus story at all. While there have been all sorts of bogus “archeological” endeavors that have “proved” that everything in the bible happened exactly where and when it says it did, the truth is, we do know. But, for me, the value of these ancient stories is not so much in their historicity, their historical accuracy, but rather in the way in which they say something very important about the human spirit and the human condition and our relationship with God. And so it is with our story for this morning, the story of the Golden Calf. For me, this story may or may not be historically accurate, but in terms of human experience, I think there’s a great deal we can learn from this story. After all sorts of adventures and misadventures, the Israelites are now encamped at the base of Mt Sinai. Moses had climbed to the top of Mt. Sinai and he had been gone for a long, long time, and the Israelites were getting nervous. Think again of this story not only as a journey through space but also a spiritual journey, an archetype of the human story, and if you think of it this way, perhaps you can see that for all of us, in the long journey from captivity to liberation, there are a lot of pitfalls along the way, a lot of wrong turns and bad decisions, decisions that keep us from getting where we need to go. “Two roads diverge in yellow wood” – to borrow the language of Robert Frost – and sometimes we take the wrong road, and so it is with the Israelites in our scripture lesson for today. As every parent knows, the true test of a child’s character and moral development is what they do when the parents aren’t around, and so it was with the Israelites. When Moses, their patriarch, their spiritual leader wasn’t there, the Israelites showed how childish and immature they were, showing very little “upward” mobility in Kohlberg’s scale of ethical development. Lawrence Kohlberg is the one who identified various stages in one’s moral and ethical maturation. For those who have reached full maturity, they do not need the fear of punishment or the guidance or admonitions of some external authority to do that which is right; rather they do what they do; they do that which is right because they are in touch with an inward moral compass, and so what they do and what they don’t do are in wonderful synchronicity with what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called “the Moral Law within.” But the Israelites clearly were stuck in a much more immature state of ethical development, for when Moses wasn’t around to give them the moral and ethical and spiritual guidance they needed, they quickly reverted back to their more primitive spiritual state. With Moses up on the mountain and with Aaron being the second in command, the people complain saying, Up, make us gods, 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. Aaron was the type of leader that unfortunately we see far too often. Their first and only concern is in their popularity, their electability, and so rather than give the people what they needed; Aaron, being the “good” politician he was, gave them what they wanted, something tangible, something that would seem to be a quick fix, something that would dazzle the eyes, but something in the final analysis that was totally useless, expensive, but useless. Aaron told them to take off all their gold jewelry. Apparently, gold back then, as it is today, was worth a fair amount of money, and the Israelites did what Aaron told them to do. They took off all their gold rings and gold bracelets, necklaces, and earrings, and maybe they even knocked the gold fillings out of their teeth, and we might think of this as the very first Stewardship Campaign. So far, there’s nothing wrong with this story; the problem is, the sin is in what they did with all that gold. Aaron took all this gold and melted in down and made for them a golden calf. Aaron made an altar, and all the people of Israel knelt down and worshipped this golden calf, and preparing a feast in honor of this large, inanimate piece of gold, they danced in honor of their new-found “god”, a golden calf. It’s got to be one of the most bizarre stories ever written, and it raises all sorts of questions about the historicity of the Exodus. I mean, why would a bunch of former slaves be in possession of so much gold? Why hadn’t the Egyptians confiscated all that gold for themselves, and how much gold would they have to have had in order to fashion for themselves a golden calf that would have any size at all? Furthermore, if you were to make for yourself a god made out of gold, surely you would choose to make a lion or a tiger or an elephant, but why on earth would they think of a calf, a baby cow? Now, we’ve had lots of famous people who have come from our community here in Old Lyme, but did you know that the most famous citizen of our town was probably a cow? Quite a number of years ago, the Borden Milk Company bought a young cow by the name of Elsie from a family here in Old Lyme, and so Elsie, the Borden Cow became quite a celebrity, and so when I think of the Golden Calf, I cannot help but think of the benign and beautiful Elsie, with long eyelashes, but hardly, what I would think as being a god. Some have speculated that this golden calf may have been part of the pagan religion of Baal for which the bull was a sacred symbol, but if that were the case, why not take all that gold and fashion a powerful bull such as what you see in that famous sculpture down on Wall Street? As a representation of God, a bull would at least remind you of how powerful God can be, but a baby cow, why on earth would anyone find any comfort or reassurance in that? But again, I would ask you to suspend your disbelief and think of this not as an historical event, but rather as a story, a story about the long, long journey from immaturity to maturity, a mythological story about the journey from captivity to freedom, a story about the foolishness of the human spirit, a story about our all too human propensity to make a god out of our possessions. When Moses finds out about all this, he is absolutely livid, and so he takes the stone tablets on which the 10 commandments were inscribed, and he smashes them to pieces, and then he takes the golden calf and he melts it down and then grinds it into a gold powder, and here is the most macabre part of the story, he mixes it with water, making sort of a gold cool-ade, ala Jim Jones, and then he forces the people to drink it. So, that’s the story, or at least as much of the story as we can swallow for one day. What do we do with such a story? What are its applications and interpretations? While there are many possible applications, this morning I would have us see what it says about what it means to be a church. The church is sometimes thought of as being “the New Israel” and so it is altogether appropriate that we think of the journey of the Israelites as being our story as well, the story of a church. With this being Stewardship Sunday, this is a day in which we are being asked to give our material possessions in the same way as the Israelites donated their gold for the common cause. And if this had been 10,000 years ago, rather than collecting pledge cards for the new year, your Board of Stewardship would be even now going around and collecting your gold rings, gold necklaces, bangles and maybe even a gold filling, which, as our Board of Stewardship knows, is probably quite appropriate, for getting a pledge out of some people is a little like “pulling teeth.” Now, if we the church, took those possessions to fashion for ourselves a golden calf – a monument to our materialism – I think that we also would be deserving of Moses’ righteous indignation. Or to put it in a more positive way, if the people of Israel had taken all their gold and given it to Aaron not to build a silly and useless golden calf but rather as down payment on the future, think of what a different story this would have been. Moses would have come down from the mountain and he would have learned that while he was away, the people had done a very good thing. They used this down-time as a time to think about what life was going to be like in the future, the Land of Promise. We sometime speak of strategic planning, but all of our institutions also need what might be called, “strategic dreaming.” What could they do to make that Land as promising as it could be? And so they began to think about the houses they would build and the schools they would start, and how this would be a place where all would have a decent and affordable place to live, and so they freely and joyfully divested themselves of all their gold saying, we want to use this, we want to set this aside; please put this in a safe place so that we can build a bright and promising future for our future generations. We have been in captivity and thanks to Moses, we are liberated and we want our future generations to be free as well – free from ignorance, free from depravity, free from deprivation, free from hatred and bigotry, free from being enslaved to their material possession, free from war, free from persecution. Here, take my gold ring and my gold bracelet, and please put it in a safe place,” and so they took all this gold and put it in a big chest – let’s call it a “Hope Chest” -- so that they would have it to build a new civilization in the Land of Promise. But instead, they built for themselves a silly and useless golden calf, a monument to their materialism. As I see it, this story is a way in which we can measure the moral and spiritual character of our congregation – the New Israel. And, as I see it, I think we as a congregation should feel enormously proud of how we spend our money. I don’t see any golden calves or sacred cows around here. I see a little bit of gold leaf, but not enough even to make a golden squirrel, let alone a golden calf. Rather I see a group of people, about 500 families strong, who have pooled their resources for the betterment of the human family and the restoration of God’s Creation. In just what we spend for our soup kitchen and food pantry ministries, in the wear and tear these have on our buildings, in the electricity it takes to run the refrigerators and freezers, in the amount of food you provide, in the leadership that makes these ministries possible, we could have taken the gold equivalent of those resources and fashioned for ourselves one heck of a golden calf. You, the members of this church, 15 years ago when our Parish House was built, you could have said, “this building is a sacred cow, and we don’t want all these poor people here messing it up, but you did not say this, and indeed, week after week, you have rolled up your sleeves and you have rolled out a red carpet (and a green carpet or two) for what Jesus referred to as “the least of these my brothers and sisters.” Furthermore, you have also pooled your gold rings and bracelets – or the monetary equivalent of these – and you have placed a high, high priority on the young people of our community. Over in the Holy Land, they have all kinds of ancient buildings and antiquities, but I love how many of the schools over there refer to their students as the “living stones.” When Jews and Christians and Muslims all go to the same school together, eat together in the same cafeteria, play together out on the tennis court and soccer field, they are indeed, in their togetherness and friendship the living stones on which someday a more peaceful civilization will be built. And I am enormously proud and I think you should be as well that some of the “gold” of our church is helping to support those schools. And so it also is in how we think and how we should think of the young people of our community. We have a narrow window of opportunity, really only just a few years, to help them to think of themselves as the “living stones” on which someday a new civilization can be built, and unabashedly we spend our gold for that purpose, in our Diversity Sunday programs, in bringing in visitors from all over the place so as to help our children to think of themselves as citizens of God’s neighborhood, citizens of the world. I’m proud that even now 14 young people and 14 adults are planning to use their “gold” to take part in a building project down in El Salvador where they will build houses for the poor in February. And then, shortly after that, in March, we already have over 25 who have signed on for our next Tree of Life Journey to Israel and Palestine, 7 of whom are under the age of 21. With great enthusiasm, these young people have shared with me how much they want to go over there to show support for those who are working so hard for a just and peaceful resolution. And these young people have shared with me how even now they are baby-sitting and raking leaves, trying to raise as much money as they can for this journey. Their enthusiasm tells me that you the parents and we the church must be doing something right in the way we are raising our children to think of themselves as the “living stones”, as voices of conscience, determined to make this a better world in which to live. I am proud and I think you should feel proud as well that our Board of Missions provides scholarship support to make it possible for those who otherwise would not be able to afford to take part in these journeys. Think of it as our investment in the future. Think of it as our Hope Chest for the Land of Promise. It’s our way of encouraging the idealism of our young people, an idealism that this troubled world so desperately needs. Now, if you think these are bad investments. If you would rather that we held onto your gold and fashioned for ourselves some sort of golden calf or sacred cow, some sort of beautiful but useless monument to ourselves, I would implore you to hold onto your gold. We don’t need it. Now, a critical part of this ancient story is the notion of the Land of Promise, and you will note that throughout this sermon, I have referred to it not as the “Promised Land” but the Land of Promise, for I don’t believe that this story is about any one particular piece of real estate or any one particular tribe in the human family. For me, all land is sacred, and the Land of Promise is not only on the far side of the Jordan River but also over here as well. And so, if you were to think of the Land of Promise not so much as a geographic location over there someplace, but rather think of it as the Future, as God intended the future to be, think of it as a time when all of God’s children finally learn to live in peace with one another, a time, a place, an elusive time and place that sometimes seems so far away and sometimes so very close, a time and a place where all have finally learned to share the bounty of God’s Creation, a place where all have a decent and affordable place to live, a time and a place where no one is hungry and no one is cold. That for me, is The Land of Promise. I forget her name, but there was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who wrote a poem entitled, “The Only Thing You Own Is What You Give Away.” There is tremendous wisdom in this, a wisdom borne out of the crucible of those horrendous concentration camps where people lost all of their worldly possessions, but for those who survived, they learned one of the great mysteries of life: “The Only Thing You Own Is What You Give Away.” Figuratively speaking – and that’s really the only way to speak of these ancient stories – Moses is still up on top of the mountain. There’s no one here to tell us definitively and authoritatively what we should and should not do, but like every generation, we have a choice. We can take our gold bracelets, earrings and gold fillings or the monetary equivalent of these and we can waste them on the god of materialism, or we can take those same resources and we can make a wonderful investment in the Land of Promise. As for me, I feel very proud to be a part of a community of faith that gives and works and works so hard to make that Land of Promise as Promising as God intended it to be. Amen
David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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