When the Gold Melts Away
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
That was a doozy of a Gospel reading, wasn't it? But lucky for you, we can explore that in three years, because we're looking at the Old Testament still. Or maybe it's lucky for me, because I don't preach on the Gospel—one of the two. But we do have a pretty full reading from Exodus today, don't we?
For those of you who were here last week when it was a little cold, and we were all outside, and there was lots of barking, you may know that we did not read from the same narrative that we've been reading from Exodus, because it was St. Francis Day. So I'm here to tell you what you missed: were the Ten Commandments. That's what you missed being brought down and read. That was the reading; it was a short reading. But today's was fairly long, which brings me to ask you a question: Have you ever had a serious, knockdown fight with a sibling?
If you grew up with a brother or sister, you know that sibling fights have their own distinct flavor of chaos, don't they? With a stranger, there's hopefully social boundaries. With a colleague, there's hopefully professional decorum. But with a sibling, you shared the same childhood bedroom, the same family trauma, the same kitchen table. You know exactly which buttons to press and how hard to press them, and which old grievance will draw literal blood. One moment you're a united front, perhaps against your parents, and the next you're ready to divide that living room with masking tape and disown each other forever.
I think that deep, destabilizing sibling rupture is sitting right at the center of our reading from Exodus today. Because on this particular morning in the wilderness, Moses and Aaron are on completely different planets. Moses is up on the summit of Mount Sinai, enveloped in this cloud, this thunder, this raw divine holiness. And Aaron is down in the dust at the base of the mountain, surrounded by thousands of panicked refugees, smelling of sweat and melted gold.
This split is jarring, because up to this point, Moses and Aaron have been the ultimate tag team. Think back to when they started, when God first ambushed Moses at the burning bush. Moses made every excuse he could think of: "I'm slow of speech and slow of tongue; send someone else." And God essentially said, "Fine, take your brother Aaron. He speaks well." From that moment on, they were side by side. When they walked into Pharaoh's court to demand the release of an entire enslaved population, it was Moses speaking and Aaron holding the staff. When the Nile turned to blood, Aaron struck the water. When the plagues came, they stood together. When the sea parted, when the manna fell, when the Amalekites attacked, Aaron was one of the men literally holding up Moses's tired arms so the people would not be destroyed.
They were partners. They had survived Pharaoh, the famine, and the Red Sea together. And then Moses walks up the mountain, and forty days pass. Forty days of silence down at the camp. Time stretches out, anxiety spikes, and the united front that Moses and Aaron had collapses. Moses is in the presence of the invisible God, but Aaron isn't. Aaron is down with the people trying to keep peace, and caves to the crowd's demands to build a shiny golden statue.
Now, when we modern Christians hear the story, we usually roll our eyes, perhaps, at Israel. We think, "How could they be so fickle? God just split an ocean for them." And forty days later, they're bowing to a piece of jewelry shaped like a farm animal. What is wrong with them?
But to understand why they did it, perhaps we need a brief crash course in the ancient religious world from which they came. Israel's ancestors came out of Mesopotamia, and they had spent four centuries steeped in the culture of Egypt. In the ancient Near East, the world was terrifying. Rivers flooded without warning, crops failed, plagues wiped out cities, armies invaded. Ancient peoples didn't always look at the universe as perhaps a predictable, scientific clockwork. They saw a turbulent battleground governed by a pantheon of erratic, temperamental forces. They needed gods. You needed the storm god to bring rain, but not too much rain; you needed the fertility goddess so your livestock didn't die off; you needed the sun god to rise in the morning.
An idol—a physical, cast metal or sometimes carved wood image—was not understood as the literal god itself trapped there. But it was a conduit. It was a tangible anchor. It was a local residence for that divine power that you could see, carry, touch, and maybe most importantly, manage. If you offered the right sacrifices and burned the right incense, you could appease that god. A physical image gave you leverage against the terrifying chaos that was your life.
Monotheism—this radical, scandalous revelation that there is only one God, the creator of all things, who cannot be depicted, contained, or manipulated—was brand new. It was in its infant stage at this point. And so, when Moses goes up into the storm cloud and vanishes for over a month, the people don't think, "Let's commit an atrocity here." I think they probably are thinking: "Our leader is dead. This invisible mountain God has abandoned us. We are alone in the desert with scorpions, thirst, and enemies. We need an anchor. We need a god we can see."
So culturally, building a golden bull—a common symbol then of vitality, power, and divine presence—was probably actually the most normal, rational thing an ancient person could do.
Except for one thing: Remember how I told you that what you missed last week was the giving of the Ten Commandments? They had just stood at the foot of that very mountain and made a covenant with the living God, which included the line: "You shall not make for yourself an idol."
Now think to what we just talked about with Mesopotamian religion, and imagine what this means in the logic of an ancient world. If you follow a local deity and then decide, "You know what? This god isn't reliable. This god took too long. Let's build ourselves a replacement to do the job instead"—what would any self-respecting ancient deity do? In Mesopotamian myth, many times when this did happen—and it did happen—the gods would wipe them off the face of the earth, just for making too much noise perhaps while they slept. And so an ancient god, replaced by a handmade knockoff, would probably annihilate you on the spot and never look back, right?
Maybe that brings the mirror now turned to our own faces, to ourselves. Because we may not melt down our hoop earrings to cast a bronze bull in the front yard, but the human heart has not necessarily changed its factory settings, has it? We still use the term "golden calf" today, but we usually reduce it to money or celebrity worship. The reality, I think, is much darker and much more intimate.
“For our idols are born precisely where Israel’s were born: out of panic, silence, and the unbearable feeling of being out of control. An idol is anything we run to when we decide the living God is too slow, too silent, or simply not up to the task.”
We look at the wreckage of our lives: our grief, our broken relationships, or our overwhelming stress. Maybe in the quiet of our minds, we start thinking, "I don't think God can handle all of this. God is too far away." Then, alcohol and numbness; a bottle can dull this edge, at least for tonight. "God isn't fixing my exhaustion, but a line of coke will keep me running."
We make idols out of substances because they give an immediate, predictable return. We also make idols out of bank accounts, hoarding resources because we trust that brokerage balance to secure our future more than we trust divine providence. And perhaps most painfully, we sometimes make idols out of people. We take living people—spouses, children, mentors—and we place the crushing weight of our ultimate meaning, security, and identity on their shoulders. We demand that they never fail us, never change, never once let us down. Or we make idols out of the dead, sanctifying rose-tinted glasses that have created memories that can never be lived up to, even preserving family grievances, worshiping a curated past so fiercely that the living God isn't allowed to do anything new in our present.
“Whenever we say, ‘God isn't enough to secure my safety, so I will build my own savior,’ perhaps we're standing right there at the base of the mountain with Aaron, helping gather the gold.”
Moving back to our story in Exodus, what should the God of heaven and earth do with people who continually replace Him with cheap handmade tranquilizers or a golden bull? The text here does not sanitize God's fury at all. God looks at Moses and says, "Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought out of Egypt, have corrupted themselves."
You may think—perhaps you're a parent, or perhaps you remember your parents—when you did something that really annoyed one of them, they go to the other and say, "Your child did this." In a sense, God doing this is essentially saying, at least for the moment, that God disowns them: "They are your people, Moses, not mine."
But then Moses does the most extraordinary thing: Moses stands in the breach. He doesn't start arguing and take Aaron's side, and he doesn't let Israel off the hook. Rather, he throws himself between human failure and divine holiness. He reminds God of who God is. He pleads with God: "Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self."
Moses doesn't plead Israel's innocence; they are guilty as charged. He pleads God's character. He appeals to an ancient promise made to a wandering nomad under the stars. And the text says: "The Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people."
Notice that. I think this is one of those times in the Bible that pronoun usage becomes very, very important. Because when God relents, the text stops calling them Moses's people. They are once again God's people. And mercy wins.
“The idols we fashion for ourselves always demand everything and end up giving nothing back that sticks. They are merciless masters, and when you fail your idols, your idols discard you. But the God of Moses does not discard us when we run foul.”
This is the scandal of the God we worship. The ancient Mesopotamian gods demanded blood and offered silence. And the idols we fashion for ourselves—the bottle, the pills, the career, the suffocating emotional expectations we put on each other—always demand everything and end up giving nothing back, nothing that sticks. They are merciless masters, and when you fail your idols, your idols discard you.
But the God of Moses, the God who met Aaron in his catastrophic failure, the God who we know is revealed fully in Jesus Christ, does not discard us when we run foul. While we are still down at the bottom of the mountain, surrounded by the wreckage of the things we thought would save us, God does not send down fire. No, He sends down an intercessor: Jesus, who stood in that breach and said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
“You do not have to build a god to save yourself. You do not have to manage the universe, or numb the terror, or construct an altar to your own survival. For the God who brought you out of bondage is not dead. He is not vanished, and His silence is not absence.”
His covenant with you does not rest on how faithfully you behave; it rests, rather, on how faithful God is to God's own promises.
And so, as we go about this week, let us allow the gold to melt away. And let us always remember that the Lord has remembered His own mercy.
Amen.
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