Moses has been gone way too long. That’s how it all
starts. The people camped at the base of the mountain.
Somewhere up there, hidden in the clouds and the fire,
Moses is with God. At first, that must have been thrilling
to imagine. Their leader, Moses, communing face-to-
face with God Almighty. But then some days pass.
Weeks. It’s all quiet on the mountain. No word. No sign
that Moses will ever come back.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that waiting does something
to people. Patience eventually gives way to dis-ease.
Unanswered prayers provoke uncomfortable questions.
What if he isn’t coming back? What if we misunderstood
the whole thing? What if we are out here all alone?
Aaron! Make us gods who will go before us. As for that
man Moses, the one who brought us up out of the land of
Egypt, we don’t know what happened to him.
They don’t disavow God. They don’t abandon the
exodus story. Not altogether. They’re still using the
language of faith. They just need something. Something
solid. Something they can see with their eyes.
Something they can touch. And perhaps most of all,
something that will stay right where they put it.
Aaron—who should know better—doesn’t even hesitate.
He collects their gold. He melts it down. He shapes it
into a calf. And then he says the most chilling words in
the whole story: “This here is your god, who brought
you out of the land of Egypt.”
The words are chilling because they are the same
words, the same story, the same name, Elohim, used to
describe a lump of gold.
The shift is sly and subtle. Aaron simply meets the
demands of his people, a god you can see. A god that
stays put. A god made with human hands that will go
where you take it, that will silently assent to all your
sin, and never once will this god make you wait.
The late theologian and beloved Wabash
College professor William Placher called it the
“domestication of transcendence,” or the slow taming
of a wild God. I think in Exodus 32 the sin is not
atheism. I think it is domestication.
Aaron didn’t lead his people away from religion. He
simply shrank God down to a size they could manage.
He gave them something to hold, something to cling
to. And they were grateful. They held a festival in
honor of this idol god and Aaron.
Perhaps this is how the faithful always lose their way.
Not outright rejection, but reduction. Not “there is
no God” but “this is our God.” The one we possess.
The one that’s useful, predictable, and manageable.
Confirms our arrangements. Will never surprise us or
ask us to change.
But let me tell you something about the golden calf.
It wears many disguises. They are rational. They are
respectable. They even look like religious devotion. You
don’t set out to build an idol. You set out to feel a little
safer. You set out to belong. To know the future is going
to be okay. And slowly, quietly, the thing you built to
secure your life begins to seduce you. And without even
noticing, you stop ruling it, and it starts ruling you.
I watch it happen with political tribes. People I love—
good people, faithful people, people who pray—who
have slowly allowed a political identity to become the
lens through which they read scripture rather than the
other way around. Who find themselves defending
things they once would have condemned because their
team is doing it now. Who have stopped asking what the
gospel requires and started asking what my side needs.
The writer Anne Lamott says you can safely assume you
have created God in your image when it turns out your
God hates all the same people you hate.
We craft gods who hate what we hate and bless what
we bless. And the trick is that it doesn’t feel like idolatry.
It feels like loyalty. It doesn’t look like a lump of melted
gold. It looks like faithfulness. It is God, domesticated.
I’m watching it happen with this desperate need for
certainty that fashions faith into a kind of fortress or
turns scripture into a weapon. I’m listening to preachers
who brick over every mystery, who treat every honest
question as a threat. And I do not hear them proclaim
the wild, free, mountain-shaking, untamable God of
scripture. Their God is too small.
Friends, if you find that your God never challenges you,
never unsettles you, never asks more of you than you
are willing to give—your God is too small. And a small
God cannot save you. You are bowing to an idol.
Different shapes. Same move. We all have our idols. We
take the gold we love and twist it into the shape of God.
We build these things because we think we need them,
but they own us.
Someone wrote to me recently. He’s been sitting in our
pews off and on for a couple of years. And I can tell by
the words in his email that he’s been paying attention.
Here’s what he wrote: “I’m still waiting for one church
leader to say the thing they believe. Not the careful
version. The real one.”
I read his words, and I felt something I didn’t expect. Not
defensiveness, but a kind of recognition because I knew
what he meant. And I could point to the places where
I had softened the edges, or changed the subject, or
told myself it was pastoral wisdom, sensitivity, a matter
of timing. And maybe that’s true. But could it be Aaron
casting a calf to calm the crowd?
Placher wrote that Christian faith is not usually a call to
caution. So let me try to say the thing.
Followers of Jesus Christ are those who believe that
the God of all creation took on human flesh. That in
Jesus, God walked among the poor and the outcast. He
taught in parables that turned the world upside down
and upset the authorities of his time. We follow a God
executed by empire. And we believe that the cross is
not a symbol of power’s triumph but a repudiation of
it. That the resurrection is God’s verdict on what we
call strength. And if we believe this, it means that faith
cannot be recruited to bless power’s violence when our
Lord condemned it.
We follow the Prince of Peace. He is our truth, our life,
our way. This means that for those of us who follow
Jesus, for those of us who belong to the Church, our way
of being in the world must show that violence is never
the Christlike answer.
When the name of God is used to justify the brutality
of conquest, when the cross is planted in the soil of
supremacy, when the bombardment of homes and
displacement of families and sacrifice of sacred life is
blessed in Jesus’ name—we do not get to look away or
turn down the volume. We do not get to choose a gospel
that costs us nothing.
The church that falls before false gods where it is
called to bear witness, the church that trades prophetic
proclamation for cultural influence, the church that
makes its peace with power because the alternative is
too costly—that church has not only lost its way. It has
lost its God.
Back up on the mountain, before Moses ever comes
down, God sees what is happening below. And God is
furious. God says to Moses, “Leave me alone. I’m going
to consume them.”
And that’s when Moses does something truly
extraordinary. Moses pushes back on God. Specifically,
he reminds God of the promises made to Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. In fact, as you read the chapter, in the
whole story, Moses is the only one who gets the history
exactly right. “Your people, God, whom you brought
out of the land of Egypt, with your great power and
your mighty hand.” In other words, Moses points the
covenant back at God. You promised. By your own name,
you promised.
And then, as if it is the most natural thing in all the
world, the writer of Exodus simply reports, “And the Lord
changed his mind.”
The living God was moved. Changed. Responsive to the
prayer of a stubborn man on behalf of a faithless people.
Now this God, this is the God that no idol can imitate.
This God is not static. Not predictable. Not managed.
This God is alive. This God is in relationship. This God is
capable of surprise. And most of all, this God is defined
by grace.
So, Moses comes down the mountain. The calf shining
in the sun. The people dancing in the field. And Moses—
who has just fought for these people with everything he
has—sees for the first time what they’ve been building
in his absence. And the tablets he is carrying shatter on
the ground. They are a symbol of a devastating truth.
You cannot hold the covenant and the calf. You cannot
serve two masters. You cannot worship God and your
own creation. One must go.
And thank God this is not the end of the story. Those
shattered tablets are rewritten. The people who danced
are not consumed. They are forgiven. Like us, they are
still stubborn. Still rebellious. Still prone to build new
calves every time the mountain goes quiet.
And always held by a God who refuses to let us go.
The God Moses argued with on the mountain. The God
who heard. Who changed. Who kept the promise. Not
the mascot of our preferences. Not the chaplain of our
comforts. Not the patron saint of our side.
God Almighty. The wild, mountain-shaking God of the
exodus, who keeps covenant with wandering people.
Who will not be put in a box or carried into a battle or
bless what God opposes.
That God is still alive. Still calling. Asking us right now to
keep the covenant. To refuse the gilded calf, whatever
shape it takes—our tribe, our certainty, our comfort,
our conquest. To bear witness in this moment to a Lord
who finds the excluded, the vulnerable, the victims of
violence whose names we will never know, and says,
“You, child, you belong to me.”
This morning, we baptized two babies into that very
story. You heard the words. Child of the covenant. Grace
embodied. And all of us, held not by what we build with
our hands, but by the God who refuses to let us go. That
is the covenant. And you just promised to keep it.
Now, it’s time to choose. Amen.