I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to relate to this Golden Calf story. I realize that it is an absolutely HUGE moment in Biblical history, dealing with the first and most important commandment – “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” While there is and always has been plenty of sin and sinful impulse in my life, I can honestly say that I’ve never – literally NEVER – felt like grabbing a bunch of precious metal, melting it down, and building an image of something that I would then bow down to instead of God. Of all the commandments and their various prohibitions, I’ve always felt pretty safe from this first one….At least until very recently.
What’s happened recently to make me reconsider my formerly rock solid confidence that I could never build a Golden Calf is that I realized that our own opinions and religious beliefs can be Golden Calves. I realized that the things we say and believe about the world, about politics, even about God and Jesus just might be the 2011 versions of the Golden Calf story.
Look at what has transpired in our national government lately. And if one thing is completely clear from this heinous and debilitating debate, it is that both sides are so completely locked down and trapped inside their own ferociously held opinions that they truly have no interest in and no access to what is best for the greater good. What has happened in this debt debate is what always happens when two people or two sides become so attached to their own ideology that they can no longer listen, change, grow, nor serve in any effective way.
And let’s be honest…it ISN’T only our government that does this. We religious people – and, more specifically, we Christians - are pretty darn good at doing the exact same thing. We get so overly attached to our own words and views regarding God and Jesus. We stop listening…we stop thinking…we stop allowing any new information or even any new ways of speaking about God to enter our hearts or minds. That is sad, and also arrogant.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel cautioned us that “Religion – ALL religion - consists of God’s questions and MAN’S answers.” But I believe that most of us mistakenly operate out of the assumption that “our” religion is uniquely made up of God’s answers. And once we stick those man-made answers on our hearts, convince ourselves that God both authored them and stuck them there, then we have entered the dangerous ground of idolatry. We bow down to these man-made words like idols or golden calves, words attempting to describe a God who is beyond description. How often we forget that ALL our words and thoughts about God – even those in the Bible – came from man, not from God.
What I’m here to tell you today is that I believe that our attachment to our own religious views has become idolatrous, a sin that is no less dangerous than building an idol out of molten gold. The great CS Lewis came to understand this shortly before he died. He wrote: the true disciple “must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of God that we ever form, we must in mercy shatter.” Lewis concluded, “I suppose it was at such a moment of realization that Thomas Acquinas said of ALL his own theology: ‘It reminds me of straw.’”
So what are the religious slogans, bumper stickers, and sayings of Jesus or Paul that have stuck themselves onto your heart? What have you latched onto and clung to, thinking that your faithfulness to God will be measured by the tightness of your grip? What theological quip or biblical quotation has become your golden calf? What piece of your theology and views might need to be smashed in order to open yourself – REALLY open yourself – to the living God?
I know a lot of Christians who are wedded to the idea that in order to be “saved” – whatever that means? – one must “accept” Jesus as “Lord and Savior.” Never mind that Jesus never said such a thing. Perhaps he was gone or up the mountain for a spell, when that bit of Christian interpretation and particular lingo came into being. And when Jesus came back down the mountain, he found millions and millions of people bowing down to it…
What if words and beliefs about God can become idols?
I know some people who say and believe and teach that only followers of Jesus will be admitted into heaven. Where do you suppose that little gem came from? The only people Jesus ever said anything about not entering his father’s kingdom were – guess who? – the religious people who thought they were right while everybody else was wrong. Jesus told those people – those religious know-it-alls - that prostitutes and tax collectors would enter his father’s kingdom before they would. Perhaps Jesus told them that because he could see that their beliefs – and their arrogance about their beliefs – had become idols, golden calves that they were bowing down to. What if our words and beliefs about God can lead us into the sin of idolatry?
The older I get and the more I learn about Buddhism, the more I realize that our Christian problem with arrogance about our beliefs might be a problem of attachment. If there’s one thing Buddhists totally grasp, it is the idea of NOT getting attached to things, including their own ideas. In 2001, while I was teaching at Exeter in New Hampshire, the academy was visited by a small band of Tibetan Buddhists, who had come to construct a sand mandala. Have you ever seen one of these things or how they are made. These six or seven little monks in their maroon robes, sat uncomfortably on the cold, tile floor of our cylindrical library with tubes of colored sand, straws, and not much else. And for 12 hours a day for nearly a week, they created this beautiful, colorful design, the likes of which I have never seen. It was so complex, so unique, so artistic, so stunning in its beauty, that students and faculty alike would come to the library between classes, after meals, instead of meals, before bed time, and climb up to the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th floors to hang over the railings and watch in wonder at these patient, painstaking monks. Each day the design took on new dimensions and complexities, as the monks worked from before sun up through sunset. And then, do you know what they did? As soon as the week ended, as soon as the mandala was “completed,” do you know what they did? They swept up the sand into a container, took it down to the Exeter River, threw it up into the wind, and watched as it settled into the river unceremoniously.
We were all stunned, even heartbroken! All this work! All this beauty! What were they thinking? How could they just let it all go so quickly? They weren’t attached to it, and THAT was the point. The Tibetan monks were completely unattached to their own work. The point of the mandala was precisely to see how focused, how careful, how artistic and how giving they could be without becoming attached to their creation. Tibetan Buddhist monks do not serve nor invest in their own egos. They serve and invest in a God who is all about reducing, even relinquishing ego.
I wonder what would happen if we Christians learned a little something about detachment from our Buddhist brothers and sisters? I wonder what might happen if we Christians came to the same conclusion that the great Thomas Acquinas did, when he saw ALL of his theology and beliefs as nothing more than straw? Are you willing to do that? Am I?
I have a dear and intensely spiritual friend who recently asked me a profound question: What’s more important, Toby… for you to defend your words and ideas about God, or for you to experience the spirit of God, particularly in and through someone else?”
I want to ask you and all Christians the very same question this day: Is it more important to you to defend your view of God than it is for you to experience God? For if it is, then you will definitely reap what you will sow. If it is more important for you to have everyone use YOUR favorite words and expressions for God than it is for you to genuinely experience the real and transforming presence of the living God, then you will surely reap what you sow. But if you are willing to embrace the fact that God is ineffable, utterly beyond our biggest and best words – even beyond those words penned in the Bible – then you just might be open enough to meet and experience the resurrected Jesus in a way that smashes your idols, makes a mockery of your words, and shows you what love can do.
You know, all that God ever really wanted with any of us is an authentic, living, breathing, dynamic relationship. That’s probably why he protested every time some well-intentioned, devoted disciple tried to build him a temple or a church building. As Acts 7 says, “God doesn’t dwell in temples made with human hands.” And I’m here to tell you that He doesn’t dwell in our words or in our theological systems either. God is ineffable, indescribable, and the fact that we are now fighting and further dividing ourselves over the question of which human words, which theological paradigms, and which man-made religion is the “best” or “truest” expression is a tragedy of Golden Calf-like proportions.
So, my brothers and sisters, I invite you today, this day, to lay down your arms, to turn the swords of your beliefs and the weapons of your theologies into ploughshares. I invite you to choose this day whom you will serve…Will it be the God of our own making, a God who has been reduced by our small minds and our myopic verbage? Or will it be the God who is Wholly Other, Unfathomable Mystery, Ineffable Wonder?
I’ll give CS Lewis the last word. In an amazing moment in his Narnian Chronicles, Lucy re-encounters Aslan after a long time away. The dialogue is as follows:
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That’s because you are a little older, little one,” answered he.
Lucy replied, “Not because you are?”
“I am not,” said Aslan. “But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
(Prince Caspian, Chapter X, p. 117)
Amen.
