Margie Quinn
The story of the Golden Calf is filled with a whole bunch of bull.
Last week I spoke of my best friend and roommate’s dog, Olive. For those of you not here, we honored the Feast Day of St. Francis, a saint known for his love of animals. Madeleine’s church hosted a blessing of the animals and as she preached in front of her congregation, Olive sat obediently next to Madeleine. What a good girl! Olive ain’t always a good girl, though.
One day, when Madeleine went out of town, she left me to watch Olive, which I done countless times. Unfortunately, I had one of those days where I left home early and didn’t get back until late. When I got back to the house that night, I found that Olive had climbed up on a chair and reached up for the kitchen counter and taken a full loaf of bread and eaten the whole thing, not to mention a few other carbs in our pantry. I freaked out and called Madeleine immediately. “Ugh, she must have gotten anxious that no one was there and started snooping around.” Olive didn’t know what to do in our absence, so she picked something out of desperation to give her comfort when she couldn’t see us—a loaf of bread.
Now, Olive gets fed every morning and every night like clockwork, so don’t get it twisted. But on this day, she seemed to have forgotten the promise her mother and auntie had given to her: we will provide for you, and sometimes you gotta wait.
In today’s passage, all the way down the mountain, there’s a whole bunch of bull going on. Just like Olive, the Israelites have been waiting around for what seems like a long time and have seen no sign of Moses or God. They start to wonder if he has forgotten them. Despite this being the same man who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, who advocated on behalf of them for manna, quail, water (and more water), and the man who threw away his class privilege as an Egyptian to return to them in solidarity and liberate them from their oppressors, they begin to whisper again. “He didn’t grow up with us,” they grumble, ‘he doesn’t understand our lived experience; he doesn’t know what it’s like to wait and sometimes he even speaks for us to God.’”
They see that he has been delayed (he is a tiny bit busy up there) and they go to who we might as well think of as their Associate Pastor, Aaron, Aaron is, relatably, a people-pleasure and a guy who gives into peer pressure. “We don’t see our God!” they shout. “We don’t see our leader! We’re desperate out here! But we see you. Make something for us that we can use for security, comfort and adoration in place of God’s presence.”
They’re doing it, as Karoline Lewis writes, because of an absence of Moses and an absence of God. To what do we resort when we experience that absence or when we question God’s presence?
So, Aaron takes their jewelry and molds it into a golden calf. They worship it and remind each other that these are the gods who brought us out of the land of Egypt, right?
Up on the mountain, God’s blood is boiling with anger. Get back down there, Moses and fix this mess, God commands. Your people are believing a whole lot of bull. They are stick-necked people who raid the pantry like a desperate dog, gorging themselves on bread instead of remembering my promise: that I would be there in the midst of them and provide for them every step of the way. Leave me alone up here so that I can stew up here in my wrath. You know what, I’ll go ahead and consume all of them but with you, I’ll make a great nation.
What a bunch of bull God tempts Moses with. It’s everyone’s dream to clone a nation exactly like us, where we take all of the people who hold different opinions, political beliefs and we toss them aside to create a whole army of Margie’s who go around with their clones, voting the same way, worshipping the same way and thinking the same way. God, Moses says, I see right through your bull.
Moses implores God: turn away from your wrath, change your mind, and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember my ancestors, who you made a promise to—to multiply their descendants like the stars, not to consume them with your anger, even if they are down there with all of their bull.
And church, we are here with our bull, too. The bull I’m tempted to worship is the bull of whiteness, blame, money, fame, power, revenge, and violence for the sake of violence. The bull of knowing that I’m right and you’re wrong. The bull of worshiping other people’s opinions or getting jealous of their possessions. The bull of worshipping people who don’t love us or even respect us. We devote our time, our money, our resources and our passion to everyone and everything but God.
Sometimes, America’s bull has become the church’s bull.
We worship anthems and flags idolizing patriotism, sometimes even in church. We prioritize them over God and God’s priorities and over the flourishing and wellbeing of God’s children, as Reverend Will Gafney writes.
Yet down here in our bull, there is a guy up on the mountain who stands up to God and defends his enemies. He defends the very people who keep turning away from him, despite his constant provision. Up on the mountain, a man of slow speech and of slow tongue stands face to face with God, as Exodus 33:11 says, and makes his case. Change your mind, God.
I’m so jealous that Moses gets to see God face to face. While I don’t know what God looks like, I’ve read a lot in the Bible about who God is. God isn’t a manipulative object, made from gold. God can’t be produced. God isn’t stagnant or unchanging. God doesn’t expect perfection or blind conformity from God’s people. God doesn’t reward our golden calves of exhaustion from working too hard or committing to too much; doesn’t reward our greedy accumulation that keeps us further isolated from the least of these; doesn’t boast when we equate our worth with the titles we hold or the grades we make. God knows that’s a whole bunch of bull.
While I don’t know what God looks like, I’ve read a lot in the Bible about who God is. God is willing to change her mind. God is a Shepherd, a soul-restorer, a comforter like Psalm 23 says. God enfolds us in her wings as Isaiah remind us, allowing us to take refuge from the harshness of life. God has compassion on the suffering, has inscribed us on the palms of his hands—each of our names. God is love, 1 John says, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in them. God is a still, small voice as 1 King says. God is a man who took all of our bull to the cross and was executed by the state so that we may feel the sting of liberating love. God forgives us, even when we create things to worship in the absence of God’s love.
Even what I haven’t read about God in the Bible, here is what I imagine God to be:
God is that cardinal sitting on the telephone wire. God is when someone hugs you longer than you think they will, and it breaks your heart open that they held on for a while. God is right there with us when we fumble or fail. God is when you hold a baby and stare at its fingernails. God is when you feel seen, known, heard; when you hear a chord and then another chord and put your hand to your face and realize you’ve been silently crying.
God is un-nameable and free and uncontainable and never ever leaves us. God is an old woman in a rocking chair, smiling contentedly at us, eternally. God is whatever makes you suddenly, surprisingly, reach out toward the other.
God is the realization that things like money, success, or career are just nouns that may nestle you to sleep but won’t be around when your dad dies or when your friends gets sicker than sick. God is the best artist out there, painting the sky with a different watercolor palette every morning and night.
God isn’t he or she. God is bigger than language and softer than silk.
God is the oldest friend you’ve got, who just knows you and knows what to say. That’s God to me.
So Moses changes God’s mind and reminds God and us of the “hard way forward,” as Anatheia Portier Young puts it. The hard way forward, she writes, reckons with a divine presence who continues to elude us. The hard way forward is the most honest prayer we can pray that gives God a piece of our mind. The hard way forward trusts, however reluctantly, in the slow work of God. The hard way forward, church, invites us to keep the pantry closed, to put down the bread and to set our bull aside; to believe in God’s forgiveness and to believe that goodness and mercy, as Psalm 23 says, will follow us all the days of our life in the house of God forever.
May it be so.