Banal Idolatry: The Twentieth Sunday After Trinity (October 22, 2023)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“This is the way the world ends; Not with a bang, but a whimper.” That’s how the masterful poet TS Eliot ends his rather pessimistic poem, “The Hollow Men”. It reminds me of a conversation I had with someone once who was asking me about what it’s like being a priest while hearing a Confession. “What if the other person confesses something scandalous??” Of course, the true reality is that sin is boring. It’s not exciting. It’s not titillating. It’s just boring and frankly absurd. Eliot’s poem is about where humanity found itself after the collective trauma of World War I, but I think it works as a generic description of our state in sin: not a bang, just a whimper. Today, we see a boring sin in Exodus: the sin of idolatry towards the golden calf. Israel might remind us of that great hymn “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; prone to leave the God I love.” They do this consistently.

The story of the golden calf is one of rebellion and punishment, but also intercession. The people of Israel force Aaron, their priest, to build them a golden calf, or more accurately, a young bull, as an idol. They do this from a place of seeming anxiety: they don’t know where Moses is. Moses is how God speaks to them and he’s nowhere to be found, so God must be hidden. And the fact that they want a calf built for them is not an accident; calves were worshipped in Egypt and, in the Ancient Near Eastern world, were viewed as symbols of fertility. Accompanying their idolatry is ecstatic and irrational behavior that was commonly paired with the worship of pagan deities.

And as Israel is in the midst of this worship, Moses comes down from the mountain where he had been with God and sees what’s going on. He gets so angry he shatters the tablets which contained the Ten Commandments, a symbolic action signalling that the covenant between God and Israel had been broken. Then Moses destroys the idol with fire, melting the gold, and casting it upon the water, forcing the Israelites to drink it. This action is a punishment, but also a polemic. The easy destruction of the idol proves that this false god has no real power; Israel has traded the worship of the living and true God for a statue that can’t see, hear, speak, or even defend itself. They wanted a god who they could see and touch, and so Moses makes them consume it. In many ways, this act is the opposite action of receiving the Eucharist: when we receive the Eucharist, we receive the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the living Christ. Rather than punishment, this is a gift that sustains us from the God who dwells among us.

Given this situation though, Moses does something surprising: rather than leaving Israel to their own devices, or abandoning them to the judgment of God, he goes to God to intercede for the people. He confesses their sins and asks for forgiveness, going so far as to offer himself as a sacrifice for the nation: “if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” God still punishes the people, promising to visit their sin upon them, which comes in the form of a plague. But this is not necessarily a failure on Moses’ part. We should understand God’s punishment as a didactic tool: a way of getting Israel’s attention, a way of purging them of their sin.

The Golden Calf story contains the Gospel in germ. As Christians, we believe in centering our worship around the sacraments given to us by our Lord. However, we should also be aware that the devil has his sacraments: those things that pull us away from God. The insidious nature of Satanic sacraments is that they substitute themselves for the worship of God in our lives. This is idolatry: when we adore something created instead of the Creator. In human history, the pagans tended to commit idolatry externally, directed towards an object, often some carved or chiseled statue. The Jews had more of an internal form of idolatry, placing an improper emphasis on the Law and their ethnic identity, both things that caused them to miss the fact that Christ was the promised Messiah prophesied by the Scriptures. The French Reformer John Calvin, and this might be one of the only times you’ll ever hear me quote him in a sermon, once said that the human heart is an idol factory, constantly manufacturing things to put in God’s place as that which we adore. This is a timeless truth that is at the heart of humanity’s constant unfaithfulness and failure to maintain the covenants given to us by God. Adam and Eve broke the covenant when they ate the fruit. The Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic Covenants of the Old Testament were all broken by Israel’s constant disobedience. And we think we’re special? No, we break the New Covenant all the time.

In today’s Gospel reading, all of us can identify with the rebellious tenants who kill the landlord’s representatives. But “we have a great high priest” in the person of Jesus Christ who does what Moses and the Law couldn’t do: he makes Atonement for our sins. We failed to give God the honor and worship we should have with our actions, and now the human experience is characterized by being crushed under the weight of an ever-compounding debt. The hope of the Gospel is that Jesus comes to us in the Incarnation to heal our wounded natures and gives to his Father the ultimate gift of a holy and righteous life, a life that we become partakers of. For those in Christ, punishment or chastisement from God becomes a means of restoration, a salve for the soul, that reorients us towards the Good. And so just as Israel’s unfaithfulness highlighted God’s justice and mercy exercised through the ministry of Moses, so our unfaithfulness highlights God’s justice and mercy exercised through the person and work of Christ and the Church that he established.

If their story is Christ’s story which is our story, then it’s true that we are guilty of the sin of idolatry in our lives. In fact, our forms of idolatry may be worse than the pagans because they’re more subtle and therefore harder to identify. For example, do you know why it is that most people stop going to Church? I was just listening to a podcast about this this past week that dove into the data: for most people, it’s not because of a grand falling out, it’s not because of abuse, it’s not because of issues like sexuality and gender. No, for most people, they stop going to church simply because they get out of the habit of going due to some kind of life change. They begin replacing their Sunday morning church attendance with something else: travel youth sports, brunch, golf, family trips, or whatever else. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with these things in and of themselves, but they’re not more important than Church and when we act like they are, we’ve committed a very subtle form of idolatry. And so for many of us, the covenant we have with God isn’t broken by some dramatic act of apostasy; “not with a bang, but a whimper.” It’s far worse: we break the covenant through little acts of carelessness and inattentiveness, whether those be liturgical, devotional, relational, or psychological. We’re not faithful in the little things and sometimes we don’t even notice it. We’re like the man who shows up to the wedding in the parable without the proper wedding garments: it’s a kind of carelessness that signals we don’t take our calling seriously.

But praise God that his property is always to have mercy. Jesus’ high priesthood means that he intercedes on our behalf to the Father, pleading his blood for us. And alongside him stands the whole company of heaven, angels, archangels, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and holy people from every generation. Not only should you feel bolstered by their prayers, something we will celebrate on All Saints Day, but also feel bolstered by the prayers of your priests. Fr. David and I remember each and every one of you at least once a week at the daily Holy Communion services. And further, we should feel bolstered by the prayers of other people in the Church: we ought to be bringing each other to God in prayer. Pray for your priests, pray for the people in the pews around you, and pray for the people who attend other services. When we understand that we occupy this covenant cut by the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, then it means we should rethink the trials and tribulations that come our way. These aren’t acts of retribution from an angry God who is deeply offended by us; he’s not a killjoy in the sky who wants to prevent us from having fun; rather, he is a loving Father who gently chastises those he loves for our benefit.

And so how should we then live knowing that what happened at the foot of the mountain with the golden calf happens in our hearts on a regular basis? The first thing we must do is to ruthlessly root out the idolatry that subtly plagues our lives. When Israel went into the Promise Land, and whenever they reformed the nation after lapses into apostasy, they were always called to completely and utterly destroy the idols. They weren’t supposed to co-exist with them or just worship them sometimes; no, complete and total scorched earth. It correlates well with what Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount: if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off because it’s better to enter heaven maimed than to be cast into Hell with your whole body. Don’t co-exist with your idols because peace is not possible. Your strategy must be total war, scorched earth, complete destruction of them because they’re attempting to wreck your souls.

Remember, who you are is determined not by your hobbies or various facets of your identity—your class, age, race, political ideology, or anything else—it’s ultimately determined by the fact that you exist in a sacred, covenantal relationship with God by virtue of your baptism. And so, as a member of the Church, you are called to exercise a priestly function to the world, to stand in the breach between the world and God. This involves praying for non-Christians, bringing them to God even if they won’t heed his call. It means engaging with them through relationships that care for them and reveal to them the love of God. And it means evangelizing them; it means giving them the reason for the hope that you have; it means proclaiming Christ crucified for the remission of their sins.

To us, God is either our all-in-all or he is nothing. He’s not something we pull out on occasion when it’s convenient or when we need him. The idols that we place over him in our lives will not save us; like the golden calf, they’ll be destroyed by the fire. So what will you do about it?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.