Once in my youth group in Seattle, we were studying the story of Moses leading the liberated slaves out of Egypt, and Isaac asked, “Why did they have to wander in the wilderness for 40 years before they could come into the Promised Land?” The best answer I could give him was that all those who had known slavery were to pass away before the land would be claimed by those who had only known freedom all their lives. As the descendant of slaves – his mother is a Haitian immigrant and his father Jamaican – Isaac felt that this made sense.
During that time in the wilderness, a lot of things happened. The liberated Hebrews bemoaned all the good food they had to eat in Egypt – the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks. Now I like cucumbers, melons, and leeks at least as much as the next person, but I don’t think even that kind of cuisine would entice me to want to become a slave. In response to their groaning, God sent manna, and then quail, and gave Moses the power to release fresh drinking water from a rock.
The most significant occurrence during the Hebrews’ wilderness wanderings was the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai. Moses went up the mountain to commune with God, and the people stayed down below, with Moses’ brother Aaron left in charge. Under Aaron, the people started to fret, so Aaron instructed them to gather up all their gold jewelry and ornaments. He had the gold melted down and cast into a statue of a calf, which Aaron presented to the people as the god they could worship.
Moses is heading back down the mountain just as these proceedings are getting underway. When he sees the people practicing idolatry, bowing down before the golden calf, Moses becomes so angry that he smashes the tablets on which are written the commandments of the Law.
When I shared this story with my youth in Seattle, hearing about the smashing of the tablets seemed to rouse Danielle from her daydreaming. “Wait – Moses had an iPad?” she asked.
It’s funny, but what happened at Mt. Sinai was not funny at all. The people had chosen to worship a different god than the one who had liberated them from slavery in Egypt. Moses had to go back up the mountain and get a second set of tablets.
Our First Testament story for today happens after Moses’s death, when the people are finally, finally coming into the land. Joshua, Moses’s successor, assembles the people at Shechem – another mountain location, between Mts. Ebal and Gerizim in what would in Jesus’s time be known as Samaria. Joshua then gives the people a choice. “Choose this day whom you will serve,” he says. “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
And the people proclaim that they too will serve the Lord. But we know from how the story unfolds that their parents’ flirtation with idolatry in the wilderness – possibly with Marduk, the Sumerian god sometimes depicted as a bull – was not anywhere near the last time that the chosen people chose wrong. Generation after generation, judges and prophets were sent to cleanse the land of idolatry, of Ba’al worship and Asherah poles and probably more Marduk bulls. Failing to remain loyal to Yahweh, and failing to care for the most vulnerable members of their society, are the two besetting sins that the Hebrew/Israelite/Jewish nation commits over and over again.
Worshipping Marduk bulls and Asherah poles may seem like a quaint, long-ago practice to us. But is it? On Broadway, just north of Bowling Green in New York City, there stands an 11-foot high, 7100-pound statue entitled Charging Bull, also known as the Bull of Wall Street. Bull markets are when stocks are rising and everybody is making lots of money. Do the brokers of Wall Street worship the charging bull? Maybe not, but I think one could argue that they worship what he stands for.
Another of the gods that the ancient Israelites may have been tempted to worship was the Canaanite god Molech. Molech was worshipped by means of child sacrifice, and some biblical scholars think that the dramatic scene in which Abraham nearly sacrifices his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah was how God chose to make it very clear to Abraham and his descendants that child sacrifice was NOT the appropriate way to worship.
Our society has really come a long way from those barbarian times, haven’t we?
Well…
In the past few weeks, governors of at least four states have signed executive orders banning mask mandates in public schools. In other words, if a school district makes a rule that all students, faculty, administrators, and staff need to be wearing masks while on campus, there will be penalties exacted by the state. While a number of school districts in Florida have defied this order, and the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the order in Texas was not acceptable, it has also come to light that the top donor to the Florida governor’s election campaign holds significant amounts of stock in the company that makes Regeneron, a treatment for Covid-19.
To me, this sounds an awful lot like sacrificing children to the charging bull of Wall Street.
Many of you know that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on a pamphlet produced in support of the Lutheran Reformation in the sixteenth century. You may also be aware that many of the Protestant reformers were very concerned about idolatry, and that iconoclastic efforts, tearing down the statues and images of Jesus and the saints, were carried out in England, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany.
Luther, however, did not see a big problem with images of Jesus. He kept a print of the Virgin Mary near him all his life and felt that images could be very helpful to those who were unable to read, in helping them understand the story of the Christian faith. While Luther was in hiding in the Wartburg Castle, though, his second in command Karlstadt incited an iconoclasm in Wittenberg. Luther put a stop to it and published a pamphlet explaining why. First of all, according to Luther, the iconoclasts were the ones who were in danger of idolatry – they saw the images as being more powerful than did the people who liked them! The iconodules – a fancy word for the people who liked the images and statues – understood that they were not worshipping marble or painted surfaces, but the Holy One depicted in them – that which the image stands for.
Wall Street stockbrokers and investors may not literally worship the Charging Bull, but I think one could argue that they most certainly worship what the bull stands for.
And if the Israelites of ancient times, and brokers and investors of our own time, have such a hard time avoiding idolatry, maybe we should more carefully examine our own hearts for traces of idolatry too.
I suspect that one of the most insidious idols in the Church of the Brethren as a denomination is “the way we’ve always done it.” Try suggesting doing something new in Brethren circles, and watch people’s minds explode. Or, as the light bulb joke puts it, How many Brethren does it take to change a light bulb? Change????
It’s not just the Brethren who are like this, though. The church I grew up in, Hull Christian Reformed Church, was also very resistant to change. It made my mother crazy to hear the same excuse again and again, “But we’ve always done it this way!” She wanted to retort back, “You always used to farm with horses, too, didn’t you?”
Change is scary, and we cling to what is familiar, and yes, sometimes reify the familiar ways of doing things as the right way or even the only way to do them. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for the God who proclaims through the prophet Isaiah, “I am about to do a new thing!” or the one seated on the throne in Revelation who proclaims, “Behold! I am making all things new!”
We also cling to the security of jobs and homes and possessions and bank accounts, forgetting that our Lord sent the first group of disciples out two by two with the explicit instructions to take nothing with them, neither staff nor pack nor money nor extra clothes.
And, I think most often, we cling to the illusion that we are the ones who can change and fix and heal the things in our lives that are not working so that instead of offering up our prayers and leaving our concerns to God, we worry and fret and pace the floor.
Jesus instructed his listeners not to worry about anything, not what they would eat or drink or wear – but to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to know that they were more precious to God than birds or lilies, but look how God feeds the birds and resplendently clothes the flowers of the field.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul encouraged the church there, “do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”
Isn’t worrying, in a way, a kind of idolatry – deep down believing that no one is going to take care of us, but us? It’s even harder when it’s someone we love – a child or grandchild, a niece or nephew, a spouse or parent or beloved friend. We so want to be able to help and heal and fix, and it’s so frustrating and devastating to feel helpless and know that we can’t. Just yesterday I learned that a member of the Olympic View Church of the Brethren in Seattle whom I think of as my Japanese godmother may soon become a widow. Her husband Robert had a stroke serious enough that it may trigger his do-not-resuscitate order. And my first thought was that I needed to get on a plane and be there, even though there’s nothing I can do – I can’t heal Robert, and amidst their children and church family and friends, I would just be one more body crowding their house.
It’s hard, in moments like that, to feel like praying is enough. To even know what to pray. I don’t want Cathy to lose Robert, but if that’s what is to be, I would hope that he passes peacefully and that she receives all the comfort and space she needs to grieve.
God can do those things for Cathy and Robert. I can’t, and it’s kind of killing me right now.
So what can we do, in those moments that bleed into hours and days and weeks, watching a beloved person grow steadily and visibly weaker, or be unable to keep food down, or cough and cough until it seems they might just bring up an entire lung?
We pray. Oh, we pray, and sometimes we trust that even if we can’t form words, either aloud or even in our minds, that the Spirit prays in us in sighs too deep for words. That when we don’t know what to pray – heal him? Let him go peacefully? – that God sees and knows even more deeply than the best doctors. That God loves our beloved even more deeply than we do and hates just as much to see them suffer.
God hates to see us suffer, too, even though it is an unavoidable and even sometimes necessary part of life. My friend Robb Glatz has put it this way: sadness, in a way, is a beautiful thing, because it means that we loved and were loved and it hurts to see our loved one hurting, it hurts to lose them.
And the incredibly beautiful thing is that we are part of a church family, part of the body of Christ, and just as when one part of our own bodies is hurting, none of our body feels well, when someone in this body, this church family is hurting, we all hurt. And we all surround that hurting person with our prayers and our love and our sighs and our tears and our hugs and our cards and our phone calls and our casseroles.
When something is going wrong in our lives, the temptation is to feel like we have to fix it or solve it all alone. There is something about pain that is very isolating, that can make us feel like we are the only ones on earth who are suffering like this, that no one will listen or understand. It’s especially hard when we open up social media and see all the smiling faces in photos from birthday parties and weddings and vacations.
But that sense that we are all alone in our sorrow is a lie, even a kind of idolatry. We are not alone. We are never alone. The One in whom we live and move and have our being is within us and around us always – Jesus promised that: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the earth.” Not only that, we do not worship or live in relationship with a God who doesn’t know or understand what it means to suffer. Jesus has suffered, in a human body, with us and for us. He cried out to God in mental anguish to let the cup pass from him if it was at all possible. He cried out in physical anguish from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He gets it. He knows. He’s here.
And sometimes, that’s just a little too abstract. So God gave us one another. That friend who calls and asks, “How is your nephew doing?” – that was God, using Cliff’s voice and fingers to dial the telephone. The friend that sends you a note on social media to say she’s been praying for you – that’s God, using your friend’s Facebook account.
In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the assembled folks that there’s a test, at the final judgment. The Son of Man will separate sheep from goats. The ones who have been taking care of others in need, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting those in sorrow – they get to join Jesus at his right hand, because, Jesus tells them, whenever you cared for one of the least of these, you cared for Me.
We’re called to see Jesus in those who are hurting and in need. And we’re called to be Jesus to them, too. It’s almost like Jesus is less a Person than a form of energy and light and love that we pass around and magnify and multiply and share.
Almost as though that picture at the front of the sanctuary isn’t what we worship, but that stands for what we understand the Person of Jesus to be and the body that we seek to be a part of.
When tempted to despair, remember this: it’s not up to you to fix and change and heal all the things, or even any one of them. It’s up to you to give those things to God and trust that God will show you your part in the healing work that God has already begun to accomplish. It’s your job to lean in and trust when you’re hurting and to reach out and hold onto those who hurt. It’s hard to be led to worship other gods when we’re wrapped up together in the love of Jesus. Amen.
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.