Sermon: Idol Chatter
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Sermon: Idol Chatter Text: Exodus 32:1-14 Date: October 9, 2011 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
Wait a minute. Wasn’t it just last week that the Israelites received the Ten Commandments, hot off the chiseled stone tablet press? And wasn’t rule #2 “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God…” Seems like it was an appallingly short time before they were dancing the hootchie-kootchie on top of those stone tablets as they reveled round their shiny new “god.” What’s with these Israelites? I’m not going to make excuses for them. I do want to understand them, and what led to what seems through the telescope of time to be an awfully quick turnaround from one form of worship to another. To begin with, although for us in the lectionary time zone it was just last week that the Ten Commandments came down off the mountain, more time had passed than a week. Moses stayed away from the people, up on the mountain conferring with God on the fine points of the new religion for “forty days and forty nights.” In ancient Hebrew lingo, this means “an indefinitely long time.” He was gone so long, hidden by clouds and thick darkness that signaled the Lord’s presence on the top of the mountain, that the people—legitimately—began to wonder if he was ever coming back. What if he got eaten by a cougar up there? Or was transported away by God’s chariot, or a passing alien spaceship? What if Moses had simply abandoned them? There had certainly been plenty of conflict on the journey into the wilderness so far. The people were at the very least impatient, and most likely very anxious. They were marooned in an unfamiliar wilderness, and wondering—legitimately—what on earth was going to happen to them next. They had put their trust, more or less, in Moses during the exodus from Egypt and the journey toward the as yet unidentified Promised Land. They had been awed by God, but I don’t think they had really put their trust in God. At the end of the Ten Commandments episode (which was accompanied by thunder, lightning, the disembodied sound of a trumpet, and a smoking mountaintop), the people say to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” Moses tries to reassure them, in effect suggesting that God was using all these special effects to put the fear of God into them so that they would not sin, but the people stand off at a distance, shaking in their boots, while Moses goes off for further instruction. So—uneasy people in an unfamiliar place with an unknown future and an unseen God, with an unconventional leader in an undetectable location for an undefined duration of time. It’s like a perfect storm of conditions for a group to try to get themselves out of an intolerable stew of uncertainty by any means necessary. I don’t think most humans deal very gracefully with uncertainty. Even though it is the condition in which we mostly live our lives, we just can’t get used to it! Most of the time, more than anything else, we just want to feel safe. That’s a natural outcome of a strong survival instinct that is written on the very walls of the millions of cells that make up our bodies, and naturally it affects how we perceive the world. I’m guessing the thing that led to the Israelites’ golden calf debacle was their very human yearning to feel safe. Since the whole suggestion that people should worship Yahweh without a physical representation was new in the world of tribal religions, they pretty much reverted to a more familiar form of religious practice when they clamored for a statue. The scholars who study the meaning of the calf itself differ on whether it represented Yahweh or was a holdover image from worship of an Egyptian moon god (which was also portrayed as a cow or calf) that had been “the faith of our fathers.” It’s interesting that they were called upon to sacrifice something—their gold ornaments—to make the thing. Stephen pointed out in our Bible study that people kind of like to make sacrifices in a time of crisis. It makes them feel like they have taken action, rather than remaining passive. In Noyuri’s family, they remember the day Grandfather put on his most formal kimono and took a precious metal clock that was deeply valued as a family heirloom down to the town hall to donate to the metal drive in support of the war effort. It is a story they remember with pride. The things we are willing to sacrifice when we are in a state of insecurity are not always so tangible. I was listening this past week to a lecture about a seminal historical work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. What stuck in my memory from listening to the lecture was the observation that the seeds of the decline of the empire were planted when the people gave up their political liberty in exchange for a military dictatorship which made them feel safe. The emperors Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus presided over this transition, keeping the democratic constitution in place as a straw man while garnering all the power for themselves and the Praetorian Guard, a permanent special class of soldiers which quickly began to abuse its powers. It seemed that this was accomplished with at least the tacit approval of the citizens, who relished the peace and prosperity that ensued for the upper classes. Gibbons was trying to write an objective history, but at the same time thought his own era (late 1700’s) could learn something from the patterns of the past. Was it Mark Twain who observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes”? I found myself thinking of our own time as I listened to Gibbon’s analysis of the last true world superpower before the United States took its place on the world stage. The lecturer opened his remarks by saying that when he asks students if the American empire will come to an end like the Roman empire did, few young people can imagine that it might. While I’m no historian (!) it does seem as though we might see a few parallels between the situation of the Roman empire and our own. We, too, have sacrificed not a few liberties in the last ten years in order to feel safe. And we have put a tremendous amount of our national treasure into military enterprises. Theologian Dan Clendenin believes that our national behavior can be interpreted as a kind of idolatry. He quotes Exodus 32:1, “Come, make gods for us who will go before us;” the clamor of the anxious people of Israel. Noting that idols lure us with powerful illusions and misplaced hopes, he suggests that we have plenty of personal idols like career, sex, and wealth; idols can come in all shapes and sizes. But, he says, “Personal idols are child's play compared to national idols. National idolatries are more global than personal, more public than private, and more institutional than individual. They wreck far more violence upon humanity than our household gods. The most vicious of these is the War God. C. Wright Mills used a suggestive description when he spoke of a "military metaphysic," by which he meant a way of construing every national aspiration or international problem in distinctly military terms.1 In the last hundred years, at least 200 million people, mainly civilians, have been sacrificed to the War Gods.”[1] Even those who have not literally lost their lives by this particular form of idolatry have paid a steep price. Jim Wallis wrote in Sojourners this week—in which we mark the tenth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan—that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be more than $1.259 trillion. It’s hard to get our heads around the figure of a trillion. A solid stack of one thousand dollar bills equal to a trillion is 67.9 miles high. Put another way, you could lay that stack of thousand dollar bills down horizontally next to the road and drive along at highway speeds without stopping for a little more than an hour, and the entire way the compact stack of thousand dollar bills would be next to you. Wait, don’t stop, our Afghan/Iraq costs are 1.259 trillion, so keep driving alongside those thousand dollar bills another 15 minutes at least. I learned yesterday that the cost of five hours of the Iraq war would fund the Peace Corp for an entire year. So--that’s a lot of resources going into our two most recent wars, which are still grinding on. Meanwhile, close to 14 million Americans are unemployed; one in seven American households won’t know where their next meal is coming from tomorrow, one in four American children will be living below the poverty line, and worldwide, three billion people will still be living on less than $2.50 a day.[2] But we “can’t afford” to address these social problems. It’s kind of crazy. The temporary insanity of sacrificing to an idol like the ubiquitous War God—which has been the “faith of our fathers” from time immemorial—is as good an explanation as any for this wacked-out behavior of humanity in general and Americans in particular. Actually I don’t know that the War God is the Zeus of the idols of our time. It’s probably the Almighty….Dollar. Why do people go to war most of the time? To protect prosperity, or territory that will yield prosperity. I know that’s a cartoonish generalization, but it seems true more often than not, starting with our ancestors, the chimps, going to war over a grove of fruit trees in the jungles of the distant past, and repeating and repeating through history. That’s why I wanted the image of the bronze bull from Wall Street on screen today. It seems like a very apt contemporary image to illuminate this ancient story of idolatry. As a nation, we have sacrificed a great deal that is precious in the interest of wealth—things like time spent with families, ethical integrity, a clean and sustaining environment, and so on and so on—all in the interest of what we ironically call a “Bull Market”. We could spend all afternoon naming precious values that have been sacrificed in an orgy of greed. The saddest thing of all is an apparent willingness to throw our most vulnerable citizens under the bus so that we can keep more of the money we earn. Harper’s Index in the October issue notes that the percentage of profits American corporations paid in taxes in 1961 was 40.6%; today, it’s 10.5%. Further, the portion of the increase in U.S. corporate profit margins since 2001 that has come from depressed wages amounts to three-quarters.[3] In other words, the gap between the rich and poor is growing exponentially because there doesn’t seem to be much interest in seeing to it that Joe and Josephine Average are paid a living wage. We might like to cast blame on faceless corporations (and that may be appropriate) but in truth, there is probably not a person in this room who has not sacrificed something precious to the god of prosperity. Because we are human. And behind the desire for prosperity is, of course, the more primeval yearning to survive and be safe. By any means necessary. No matter what or who gets hurt along the way. We all fall prey to this pervasive idolatry at times. Returning to the Exodus narrative, I have developed some sympathy for the anxiety-beset Israelites who were so willing to make an idol to worship in the vain hope it would keep them safe and give them some direction. I have sympathy for them in part because I see in them a type that looks back at me when I peer into the mirror (above my Italian marble sink!). We have more in common than I like to admit. Is that an excuse, either for them or for us? Not really. Just a reluctant admission that we, individually and collectively might have strayed off the path of faithfulness. You heard how God gets pretty mad at the scene unfolding at the foot of the mountain. In the NRSV, God bellows about how the people “have acted perversely, they have been quick to turn away from the way that I commanded them.” He calls the people stiff-necked, and expresses an urge to incinerate the lot of them. (Thank goodness Moses talks him down, reminding the Lord of the promises made to earlier generations of the faithful.) While I don’t enjoy contemplating an angry God, and generally believe that God’s patience and mercy are boundless, I think there is a place for genuine judgment in a faith system. If we never consider how we, too, have acted perversely, turning away from the Way God has commanded, and acting like a bunch of stiff-necked heathens, how will reform and renewal be accomplished within and among us? What is the way God commanded? Jesus boiled it down for us, summarizing the commandments in this way: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. This the heart and soul of our tradition. This is what must guide us in all our action. And truth be told, only a deep grounding in Love divine will help us trembling humans feel safe enough to turn away from the flashy golden calves our culture flaunts, recognizing their idolatrous promises of security as patently false. Daniel Deffenbaugh writes, “Though golden calves are better at attracting our attention and briefly satisfying our lusts, it will be the spiritual values of our faith tradition – forged over time – that will be the backbone of what sustains us through this present crisis. And though it may seem contrary to our way of being in the world, there are times, as Moses' commandments remind us, when our "thou shalts" of personal freedom will need to take a back seat to our "thou shalt nots" of communal responsibility.”[4] I had a few minutes to spend at the
“Occupy Seattle” movement at Westlake Park on Friday. Lots of different people were trying to make
themselves heard in a spicy stew of democracy in action. I was struck by one young man who instructed
those of us within earshot to “Occupy Yourselves!” I didn’t converse with him about what he
meant, but what I took away from that was the understanding that the values of
greed and violence that have captured our country have occupied a lot of souls
in addition to institutions. I suspect
he was yearning for people to come back to a truer humanity in which we guard
our own souls from being mesmerized by greed, rampant individualism,
aggression—the kinds of forces “Occupy Wall Street” and other mirroring “Occupy”
movements are protesting. I felt an
instant kinship with this pierced and bewhiskered young man, and would like to
pass on his message. Occupy Your
Selves! But I want to add to it, and
suggest that the one we really want to occupy our inner lives is not merely our
self—even a more generous self—but the indwelling Spirit of Christ. Christ can teach us the way of
compassion. Christ can help us hold firm
to the foundation of faith when change unnerves us. Christ can heal our deepest fears, the ones
that get us into so much trouble.
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