March 1, 2026 - Second Sunday in Lent: A Defense of the Golden Calf

March 1, 2026  Second Sunday in Lent
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Exodus 20:22-23, 24:1-3, 32:1-6
“A Defense of the Golden Calf”
Douglas T. King

This morning, I invite you to join me on a little journey of heresy, in favor of the golden calf.  But before we begin this journey I will acknowledge what we heard read from Exodus, chapter twenty.  “The Lord said to Moses: You shall not make gods of silver alongside me, nor shall you make gods of gold.” So, yes, the actions of Aaron and the Israelites are directly disobedient to the God who liberated them from slavery.  Idolatry is bad.  I repeat, idolatry is bad.

But…forty days alone in the wilderness without God or Moses is a long time and we are not all Jesus, because if we were, we would not need Jesus.  

Jewish scholar, Avivah Zornberg makes the case that the Golden Calf fiasco originates in the people’s idolatry of Moses himself, who is conceived as in himself fraught with divinity.  She writes, “So great is the human desire to adore, that the screen through which the light radiates is worshipped as the source of the light.  In Moses’ absence, this failure of perception leads the people to react with desperation.  Any object or person, however sanctified—the Holy Land, Jerusalem, the temple, the very stone tablets inscribed by God’s finger—is meaningful only in its symbolic expressiveness.  But what happens when your one and only conduit to the divine is no longer present among you and you have yet to receive the sanctified Holy Land, Jerusalem, the temple, or the very stone tablets inscribed by God’s finger?” (Zornberg, p, 41)  I will tell you what happens.  What happens is you do your best to fill it in with something else, like a golden calf.

Religion scholar Karen Armstrong offers a word of challenge to the idea that pre-modern people actually worshipped inanimate idols.  “Being, rather than a being, was revered as the ultimate sacred power…A stone or a rock (frequent symbols of the sacred) expressed the stability and durability of Being.” (for you philosophy folks, in the Heideggerian sense of transcendent, fundamental being).  “None of these symbols was worshipped for and in itself.  People did not bow down and worship a rock tout court; the rock was simply a focus that directed their attention to the mysterious essence of life.” (Armstrong, p. 11)

For all the talk of making a God there is actually some debate about what exactly the golden calf was supposed to be.  But there is a reasonable argument to be made that it was not understood as a god in itself but as a throne upon which god could sit.  

And, here is the thing, while the Israelites are at the bottom of the mountain, worrying and devoid of any sign of God’s tangible presence, God is instructing Moses to fashion the ark of the covenant, a home for God, that has more bells and whistles and intricate, glorious details, than any golden calf.  Is this not an acknowledgment that the people need a dwelling place or throne or some form of embodiment by which to recognize God’s presence in their midst?  Yes, it is clearly different, as one is directed by the divine and one is humanity directing the divine but this demonstrates the need nonetheless.  

Yes, God had done great things for them.  But particularly after years of captivity, uncertainty in the wilderness is a frightening thing.  As liberated people they are in the infant stage without the comfort of the physical presence of their mother. (Moses or God, take your pick).  In the end, this entire generation will not be the ones to enter the Promised Land because they are not prepared.  In fact, God intentionally takes them the long way because of their lack of preparedness.  Immanuel Kant once said, “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built.”  So, yes, perhaps seeking out a tangible crutch is not a bridge too far.  One of my favorite quotes from the poet Ezra Pound, “Go in fear of abstractions.”  And a God who lives up on a mountain can feel pretty abstract at times, particularly when the only one allowed to speak with the divine is up on the mountain with them.  

So…everybody should hurry home right now and build their very own idol.  Okay, perhaps not.  But we do need to own the reality that we need some embodied sense of the divine.  We do have the sacraments but they do not occur in every worship service.  Let this story be a cautionary tale, not of cartoon-like idol worship, but of our collective need to embody the relationship between the boundless One and those of us who are limited bodies in every way.  If not, we will find more embodied and less worthy things to worship.
 
One could argue that the divine responded to this human need for embodiment throughout the remainder of scripture.  From the ark of the covenant to the two temples, to Jesus Christ, to the church, the divine goes on an embodiment spree.  Yes, the people royally screwed up.  But in the end, God’s response is a recognition of who we are and what we actually need.  

During the pandemic, the practice of faith became rather disembodied, and, apparently for previously active church-folk across the country, less relevant.  Pre-pandemic isolation, all of us have stories of four year olds speaking of church as “the place where God lives.”  And we are beginning to hear those sentiments expressed again by our littlest ones.  In the past, our reaction has been to immediately quash such notions.  No, God is everywhere.  Yes, God is in the church but no more so than in any other corner of creation.  All incredibly theologically accurate.  But in Matthew we hear, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  Surely where two or three are repeatedly physically gathered in worship, education, fellowship, and mission the divine is particularly present.  The church as the body of Christ?  From a certain angle it sounds idolatrous.  And yet, we boldly claim this form of divine embodiment.  

In the movie “The American President” there is a debate in the oval office about frustrating opinion polls and public support for an empty suit political rival.  The Michael J. Fox character challenges the president(Michael Douglas) to take the fight to the empty suit and embody leadership.  He says, “They want leadership.  They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.”  When the church fails to offer people an embodied sense of God’s immanent presence people will find something else to worship.  

This text of the Golden Calf is a clarion call for us collectively as the church and as individuals to create opportunities for an embodied faith with an embodied experience of the living God.  Karen Armstrong writes that prior to the Enlightenment “Religion was a matter of doing not thinking.” (Armstrong, p. 25) Embodied rituals and actions informed understanding.  Today, often the first step of faith is intellectual ascent to some set of principles of the nature of divinity.  Beginning the journey in this direction runs the risk of a faith that is insubstantial in the face of the embodied challenges of life.  

We need a faith that lives beneath and beyond the rational life of the mind.  And we need a church that nurtures and feeds that faith. Otherwise, we will find ourselves idolizing the wrong things.  Such as,  “Oh my Gosh, we cannot move coffee hour from “insert name of room here!”  We have always served coffee there. That is where we served coffee the day my child was baptized!”  Sometimes we idolize random tradition.  A clergy colleague of mine has a thought for a drinking game.  Every time a parishioner begins a sentence with the word, “historically” you have to drink a shot.  My friend, Michael Lindvall tells a story of a congregation whose members would gently genuflect toward a blank wall every Sunday.  No one knew why they did it, but the tradition persisted.  During a renovation it was discovered that beneath the white paint was an iconic image of Mary.  At some point in the church’s history it was decided that such images were not appropriate but the psychic muscle memory persisted for generations.  If we do not embody our faithfulness we may find ourselves worshipping something more closely tied to our bodily being.  Idolatry, so much more elusive, subtle, and dangerous than anything fashioned out of gold.

This Lent I encourage all of us to pursue an embodied presence before the divine.  Perhaps it is walking the labyrinth, or choosing a specific new place to pray like Woods Chapel during the week, or praying in a new posture, on your knees or standing up or engaging in mission, recognizing Jesus in the faces of those we serve.  Or you could join us as we gather on Wednesdays at noon as we break bread together for both lunch and communion and discuss the biblical narratives of “Meeting Jesus at the Table.”

We are, one and all, vulnerable to worshipping that which is not what we should worship.  In this Lenten season let us step into an embodied faith that we may indeed worship the one who took the form of a human body, that we may find our home in God’s loving presence.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Armstrong, Karen, The Case for God, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
 2009.
Zornberg, Avivah, The Particulars of Rapture, Doubleday, New
 York, 2002.