Well a lot has been going on in the financial world to say the least, and I will also say that I don=t really understand any of it.  I do know that gasoline is under three dollars a gallon for the first time in a while, and I do have a sneaking suspicion that somebody somewhere who is already very rich will get filthy stinking rich before this is all over.  I have heard this crisis called an economic 9/11, and Wall Street has been reeling this week.  I understand that my retirement date might just have been pushed back about five years, but I don’t know as I am afraid to look at my 401K.  I am sure that the economy is on a lot of people=s minds as it is difficult to find positive financial news of any sort.  I am also sure the close proximity of the crisis to the election makes for high drama.

It is also tough on those looking for good jobs, as it seems more and more companies are looking to layoffs as a means to stabilize the bottom line. As a result, people are getting a little creative in finding work.  I remember several years ago one of my chaplain residents was coming to the end of his time at Baptist and was looking for “secular” employment while waiting on a church job.  He became discouraged and starting checking into get rich at home schemes and some of them were pretty unorthodox.  One I remember was AMaking Money at Home for only $39.95.@  He was promised hundreds of dollars a day in return for his paltry investment, so he sent in the 39 bucks. He received in the mail a large bag of fuzzy stuff with the instructions of how to comb it out.  He was told that it was “mohair” and that is could be sold for a synthetic hair to doll makers.  The kit included a pic-like comb and it was suggested that he could sell it to doll makers at craft fairs and the like.  The funny part is his retelling the story of how surprised he was to open the large parcel to find what looked like a bag of dryer lint with a plastic comb worth less than the postage and that was the secret key to untold riches.  He did comb out some of the mohair, but as far as I know he never sold any of it to anyone.  He also looked into stuffing envelops at home, assembling assorted trinkets from home, and selling an assortment of miracle products to his friends and neighbors (or maybe I should say to his former friends and neighbors).   He did however stop at pyramid schemes and multilevel marketing schemes. He never sold Amway or Shaklee, I guess after spending a year with me he probably wasn=t Christian enough!

I am amazed at the number of infomercials on TV that promise unbelievable amounts of money, in some cases tens of thousands of dollars in just weeks.  My favorite is that guy on late at night all dressed up in green clothes with question marks all over him.  Have you seen him?  He sort of looks like the Riddler (from Batman fame) rip-off, and his name is Michael Lasko.   Lasko screams about free money just for the taking from the federal government.   We all want free stuff right?  I can tell you free government money only works if you are the CEO of AIG or Lehman brothers.  In 2005, he was named number 99 in Goldman=s book, A100 People Who Are Screwing up America.@ 

Well, I know many have fallen on hard economic times, but I also know that part of the problem on some level with America is our greed and sense of entitlement.  Most all of us hold the belief that we should be rich, and most of us worship our possessions.  So we make idols, if you will, out of stuff and our stuff is important to us.  So what is wrong with that?  For starters, idols make poor substitutes for what is really important enough to worship, as the Children of Israel learned in our lectionary text this morning.

You know the story.  Moses had ascended Sinai to receive the commandments and was gone longer than he said. The children of Israel grew inpatient or frightened or something and believed Moses to have died.  They demanded that Aaron build them a god out of gold in the image of a calf, so Aaron did with amazing cooperation.  He had them bring all their gold, their earrings, their jewelry, all the stuff that they had plundered from Egypt.  He fashioned the Golden Calf and built an altar in front of it so that they could worship it. They sang its praises that it would be the god that would lead them out of the wilderness.  Unbelievable.  But maybe not if your life story had been framed in Egypt, where graven images abounded.  It seemed to work for the Egyptians, at least until Yahweh showed up.

Dan Clendenin says of this account, “Idols lure us with powerful illusions and misplaced hopes. They make seductive promises. These false gods come in all sizes and shapes. They promise much but deliver little. We can idolize almost anything — career, race, gender, sex, wealth, age, and especially nation. Our personal gods are so petty and pathetic that they would be laughable if they weren’t so insidious and corrosive. The robust health of the advertising industry testifies to the power of our puny “household gods.”

 I think we all understand that idols are substitutes for God, and I think we all understand clearly the metaphor this morning, that many things including material possessions can become objects of worship.  We all know the lesson of the Golden Calf firsthand, and things are certainly not a replacement for the living God.  We also all know this morning that knowing this fact is not likely to change any of us or our ways, for after all, we have not traded our belief in the almighty dollar for our belief in the Almighty as they both co-exist peacefully in most of our lives.  So I guess the sermon this morning is simple.

But before we Americanize this text too much this morning, was this story about worshiping money or was it about something else?  In our easy hermeneutical jump to modern application we miss the point.  I find it difficult that the children of Israel had much money since they had been slaves for 430 years.  Sure they escaped with some booty, but it took all of it and then some to fashion one little cow made out of gold.  If they were that materialistic, or at least primarily materialistic, they would have never  sacrificed their gold to make a god; So I believe that something else was going on here that we need examine.

One Rabbi explains it this way:

Our ancestors were, in fact, not guilty of replacing G-d but of making a corporeal image of G-d. This behavior, though inexcusable, was, due to the circumstances, eminently understandable. Our ancestors lived in a world where all cultures related only to corporeal forms of deity. They believed that man must pay homage to G-d and win His grace, but could not relate directly to an intangible deity. Man must therefore deify objects of his own making that represent his highest idea of the world-directing G-dhead. These objects would then be invested by G-d with divinity and become the bearers of man’s fate. Our ancestors, schooled in the Abrahamic belief in an omnipresent, incorporeal G-d, were nevertheless influenced by surrounding cultures. Contrary to the heathens, they did believe that man could relate to an incorporeal G-d, but they clung to the notion that a concrete, tangible link is required. G-d’s corporeal instruments seemingly justified this contention. In the Israelites’ experience, the Divine presence often dwelled in tangible, or at least visible, symbols and, indeed, artifacts. At the Reed Sea it was Moses’ staff, at Sinai it was a cloud of glory, in the tabernacle it would be a sacred ark and its extending cherubs. The people saw these accouterments as deified links between an incorporeal G-d and a physical people. Their mistake was that while those objects had indeed been chosen by G-d to become a vehicle for his manifestation, they could serve as such only by as the result of the Divine choice and action.

OK, that makes some sense, but the Rabbi goes on and gets to the point:

After their Sinai experience, the people looked to Moses as the primary intermediary. When G-d uttered the commandments, the people found the experience overwhelming. They asked Moses to stand as their intermediary and transmit G-d’s message to them.  They saw Moses as endowed with deified properties and perceived in him a link to the true G-d, creator of heaven and earth. Again, their mistake was that they saw their “intermediary,” rather than G-d, as the initiative for revelation. For them, it was not G-d who had brought them out of Egypt by means of Moses, but Moses who had influenced G-d to redeem them. They had not yet absorbed the Jewish concept that man has direct access to G-d, but it is G-d, not man, who established the actions and instruments via which He can be reached.” (Why the Israelites made a Golden Calf. Rabbi Lazer Gurkow)

            So if the dear Rabbi is correct, then they were not trying to worship the idol as much as they were trying to gain access to god B something they had in the tangible person of Moses, but as a living being he was fallible and human and evidently either had left them or had died.  As a result, they were searching for something that could not be killed, something more durable to have access to God.  They needed a corporeal intermediary, someone who represented God to them.  They could not relate to God; they had Moses to do that for them. 

They were simply trying to do what we are always trying to do and that is we are always trying to get a handle on that we cannot graspB we need something tangible, we need a God who is evident to us.  They probably knew that the calf was not god, just as we know that what we cling to is often not god.  You see the truth is, they were in the desert and their leader had disappeared and was presumed dead. So now what?  They were afraid and needed to fill a void.  The calf was security for them; it was something that they could see tangibly.  And I am here today to say that human nature has not changed and we do the same thing.

We fill our emptiness with things as well, things that we fashion with our own hands because what we fear is a missing God.  You see, the truth is God is invisible, so we are always somewhat in the dark and we have to at times manufacture his presence in our midst.  Religion is often about conjuring up the presence of God in our midst.  Because what we fear is a missing God, that we are alone, that we are powerless, that we are victims of the human predicament at best.  We also fear that because we cannot see God or see God’s work in our life that we are not loved and we are somehow diminished as persons.  Because God is often a missing reality in our lives we fear that no one is keeping score, we fear that wrong will go unpunished, that justice is just a pipe dream and that everything we assume about reality is on shaky ground.  This leaves us very insecure as we are terrified of ambiguity that shakes the foundations of our faith.  So we do something about it.  We manufacture God’s presence in our midst because we too fear a missing God.       Rest assured this morning my friends that we also like to manufacture God’s presence in or midst because we are very scared of a missing God, and we look for ways to prove his presences in our lives.  We do our best to make the invisible God visible, because we need to know he is real.  All over town there are great monuments to the presence of God in our midst, as some of our cities most magnificent structures are church buildings.  We build bigger and bigger monuments to God as evidence that God is blessing our congregations with his presence.  We even say that things such as buildings and money and church growth are evidences that God is “doing something” or working or blessing our congregations.  So we spend millions, and in some cases tens of millions of dollars fashioning a palace where we can go once or twice a week to find God.

            We manufacture God’s presence in our midst when we try to seek or force conformity to our views, because that is when our faith is the least threatened and insecure.  If we all agree then we must all be right, and if we are all right then that give a face to the God that we cannot see.  You see, if we can pigeon-hole God and figure him out, in effect creating him with our own hands, then it lead to a sense of security on the street we live which is otherwise named ambiguity.  Where two or more have gathered becomes when many agree with my thinking, then God is in my midst.  We then in essence cover each other’s insecurities by the power in numbers trick.

            We manufacture God’s presence in our midst by listening to other voices, and that is what Aaron did.  The people were dependent on Moses to get a word from God, and we too listen to many voices today.  I am amazed at how popular some TV preachers are, but I also understand the need for someone to just speak for the God that we cannot hear, to just represent the God that we cannot see.  If we are in fact dumb sheep who will follow all kinds of voices, it is because we cannot stand an invisible God, and we earnestly seek God’s presence in our midst.  Other voices are a poor substitute for the real thing; they too are graven images of something wholly other.  The only problem of manufacturing God in our midst is that we are guilty of idolatry.

            So you know the story from here, Moses returns and all hell breaks lose and the children of Israel are harshly punished, except not Aaron for some reason, but Moses shields them from the full force of God’s wrath and eventually forgiveness and reconciliation come into play.  But in the mean time, we have another thing that we use to conjure God’s presence in our midst, and that is the belief that God is watching over us ready to punish us if we mess up. So fear becomes another tool in the God conjuring toolbox.

            So what are we to do?  Life is too tough to get through our own wilderness wanderings with a missing God.  Well, one thing that I do know, we cannot adequately conjure up God in our midst.  It just doesn’t work, and it always leads to worshiping the wrong thing. I believe that the cure for missing God is to simply obey the second of the 10 commandments, “You shall have no God before me and you shall not make for yourself and idol.”  

            Sometimes we cannot distinguish between a graven image and God, and that is the problem as we tenaciously hold on to our golden calves convinced that they are sacred. We have to get back to God and put away our idols and our graven images, and we do so by faith, not by fact or not by sight.  We do so by putting spirituality before religion, by putting people before rules, by putting service before piety, and by putting rightness before being right.  The truth is the only way to conjure God in our midst is to do so not through institutions, not through possessions, not through things, but through people.  In that sense the children of Israel had it right as they encountered God through Moses.  Because the truth is, the only way to see God in our midst is through other people.  It is the way our faith comes alive and it is the way that we see God. 

            You see too many things, often religious things, become our intermediaries and we only need one.  Our intermediary is Jesus Christ and he has not gone any where; but if it seems as he has we are looking in the wrong places.  I believe with all my heart that if Jesus Christ walked into Little Rock, Arkansas today he would not head immediately to the biggest church, maybe not any church; he would not head to a minister’s convention or religious assembly.  He might not attend any religious service, although to be fair he did so in his earthly ministry.  I think he would head straight for places like 12^th & Wolf Street for the Hour of Power, where alcoholics and Drug addicts try to regain their sanity and get their lives back.   I think he might go to the Granite Mountain Housing Project and talk with some poor folk, single moms working two full-time jobs.  I think he might be found at 21^st and Valentine, on the block where Lefel Jackson started the L.A. Crips street gang years ago.  I think he might visit the children’s hospital, the Cancer ward, The Centers for Youth and Families, the shelter for battered women and children, Our House and the Dorcus House.   He might spend time at the home for unwed mothers on Kanis road, and in the inpatient facility at Arkansas Hospice.  I think he would eat lunch at the Stew Pot at First Presbyterian Church with the homeless and the derelicts.  I even think he might walk down Scott Hamilton Road after dark where there are many meth labs and prostitutes on the streets, every single night.  If I haven’t offended your sensibilities yet, I also think he might visit the Discovery club, the Aquarium, or similar Gay bars.

Why do I think this way you say?  Because that is exactly what he did when he walked the planet and in doing so he turned convention upside down and forever changed our image of God, yet we still want to worship the wrong God.

Jesus said Himself that he came to heal those who were sick, because only the sick need a doctor.  I also personally think he preferred to be around these people, because they were more genuine, more real, less facade, I also think he hated all the hypocrites in the religious establishment.  To Him, they were the wrong crowd.   I think it would make him sick to go to a large rich church where the door knobs cost more than it would take to feed the hungry in Little Rock.  Am I knocking every big church in town?  NO.  Not at all.  Just the ones where self-righteous pretense is the dominant value.  Where arrogance and presumptuousness replace humility and false piety replaces true service.  That happens in little churches too, by-the-way, we are not immune.   It happens in churches where there is no tolerance of anyone and anything different than themselves, in churches where being right is more important than doing right, in churches where sacrifice is more important than mercy, because these were not the values of the carpenter. 

It seems to me that we do anything and everything that we can to restore the religious convention that Jesus came to overturn and in doing so we create God in our own image, and that always leads to idolatry, every single time.  We exchange the scandal of the gospel for respectability; we exchange a gospel of liberation for one of confinement; we exchange freedom for bondage, faith for fear, and love for guilt.  We fail to love our enemies, shoot we don’t even like those people in the other six churches on this street who are more alike us than not.  And we do those things looking to create God’s presence in our midst, and the sad thing is that it simply does not work any better than building a cow of gold here on this altar this morning.

I would suggest to you this morning that we need to worship the right God, and that comes by healing our image of God and that begins with the Jesus of the Gospels, not the one of the church as institution.  To worship the God that we created with our own ideas and theology, our own hands is to worship a graven image.  How do we destroy our idols and find the real Jesus and worship the right God? When we keep his commandments, really keep them and they are not 10 but two: by loving the Lord our God with all our heart and all our mind and by loving our neighbor as ourselves.  That my friends will heal our image of God and we might just find that when we put into practice his law of love he is always in our midst. And I will tell you something else that happens: when we learn to worship this God, we will know why they call it the Good News of Jesus Christ.  May it always be so in our lives and church.  Thanks be to God! Amen.