Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 32:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9
October 12, 2008

Gathered Round Whose Altar?

Even if you are too young to remember the movie "The Ten Commandments," you probably know something about the setting of the first reading. Having been freed from slavery in Egypt, the people of Israel spend a good deal of time in the wilderness of Sinai, learning what it means to be a people not only set free from service to Pharaoh, but also set free for service to God. Their guide on this journey is Moses, who more than once pleads for God to give him another assignment.

The problem with the children Israel is that they too much resemble children in the back seat of the car on a long journey in the days before I-pods, videos, and cell phones. They keep asking Moses "Are we there yet?" and when he tells them to quiet down, they whine, grumble, and remind each other how great things were back in the good old days in Egypt.

Matters come to a head when Moses climbs to the top of Mount Sinai to converse with God, and the people grow tired of waiting for him to come down again. Forty days and forty nights is a long time to wait, so the people decide to take matters into their own hands. They go to Aaron, the brother of Moses (who, like a lot of leaders, "leads" by giving the people what they want). They ask him to fashion for them a more reasonable god, a god they can relate to, a god they can get their arms around.

"Alright," said Aaron, "Give me all your gold jewelry and I’ll see what I can come up with." Aaron takes their earrings and armbands, and of course, their piercings and belly-button rings, and melts them down. He pours the gold into a mold and produces a golden calf. All the other tribes in the area have huge bull statues to worship – really impressive creatures with huge hoofs and horns called "Baals" -- but the best Aaron can come up with is a this little calf, which he also calls a "Baal."

"Alright," he tells the people. "Forget all that business about the Lord being ‘immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.’ From now on this is your god, the god who brought you out of the land of Egypt."

It’s a lie, of course, and everyone knows it’s a lie. But when you’re in the wilderness and everyone around you is worshipping some kind of Baal, and God doesn’t seem to have done anything for you lately, even a pitiful little golden calf looks pretty good. So the people build an altar to this freshly-cast deity, offer it burnt offerings, and party hardy all day long and well into the night.

This story, as we well know, isn’t just about worshipping a golden calf. It’s about one of the most fundamental sins of all, the sin of idolatry. When Moses finally does come down off that mountain to deal with the mess down there, he delivers the Ten Commandments, the very first of which is, "You shall have no other gods before me."

Patrick Miller, who taught me Old Testament at Union Seminary, and was so traumatized by the experience that he moved to Princeton for the rest of his career, maintains that the most prominent idol before us these days is still Baal. Baal is the idol’s Canaanite name, but Jesus called it by its Aramaic name: Mammon. "You cannot serve both God and Mammon," said Jesus (Matt. 6:24).

The word Mammon itself probably comes from the Aramaic wore ‘aman, which means "that in which one trusts." Sometimes Bible translators leave the word alone. Other times they translate Mammon as "wealth."

Call it what you like -- "Mammon," or "wealth." Stick with "Baal" if you prefer. The point is, this is the god you and I tend to worship, no matter what we say or sing or say on Sundays, no matter what our formal creed. As with the Israelites, our loyalty to this god comes out most clearly when we are worried and anxious, even when we know what that this paltry deity is a pitiful substitute for the true and living God.

Biblically speaking, Mammon is not just "wealth" in the abstract. It’s the entire machinery of production and consumption that creates both wealth and poverty. You could say that "Mammon" is any economic system, regardless of whether it’s called socialism or capitalism or something in between.

The prophets Amos and Jeremiah denounced the economic system of their day, in which the super rich lived in luxury while the poor were sold into slavery for the price of a pair of sandals. The people were so focused on buying and selling, on getting and keeping, that they could hardly wait for the religious holidays to end before getting back to business. They lost sight of the God whose special concern is the poor, the powerless, and the dispossessed. To serve the true God, maintained the prophets, is to pay attention to who’s ground down by the system.

"Mammon" writes Dr. Miller, "is what it takes to make the system more productive and provide more possibility for consumption. Most of the worship of other gods that goes on in the Scriptures is a communal enterprise. It is systemic because it has to do with the systems of making and spending, of getting and having." (Patrick D. Miller, The God You Have: Politics, Religion, and the First Commandment, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. pp. 28-29).

In the past few weeks we have seen how fickle the god called Mammon really is. All that money I thought I had put away for retirement – guess what? Thirty percent of it isn’t there any more. So instead of saying my prayers the first thing in the morning, I open my laptop to see how much more damage there is. My idolatry couldn’t be any more blatant if I were bowing down to a golden calf every morning.

Notice, too, how the prophets of Mammon keep reassuring us that there is no need to panic. Financial planners have become counselors, priests, and gurus. I keep getting e-mails passed on from brokers assuring me that the market always recovers, given enough time. "Don’t loose heart," the message is. Underneath is the true message: "Don’t loose faith."

I’m not suggesting that there’s nothing to worry about. You and I can always find something to worry about. I’m saying that you and I had no business putting our faith in Mammon in the first place.

We can’t escape participation in some kind of economic system. Even cavemen had an economic system. But we don’t belong to any economic system – not us. You and I belong to God. As the children of Abraham, we have already been delivered from the clutches of Pharaoh. As the baptized, we have already died with Christ and been raised to new life with him. God has put his mark on us and we belong to God. Not to our 401k. Not to "the powers and principalities of this world." Not to Mammon.

Despite the fact that everyone seems to be hanging on his every word, Ben Bernanke is not Moses (even though he does have an impressive beard.) The first word from God through the genuine Moses is, "You shall have no other gods before me."

If you want to know what true anxiety is, try spending your golden years in a Roman prison, awaiting an audience with the Emperor that never materializes. Try waking up every morning in chains, each day bringing you closer to the realization that you’ll never see physical freedom again. That was the Apostle Paul’s reality.

To that source of anxiety add the knowledge that the little churches Paul had founded in his missionary journeys were struggling. Corinth, Galatia, Philippi – they all had their struggles: personality clashes from the inside, pressure from the outside, anxiety about the future. Had those Christians made the right decision when they decided to follow Christ? Should they listen to the prosperity preachers of their day? Should they raise an altar to some other god – Mammon perhaps, or Caesar -- anyone or anything that promised relief.

In response, Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say rejoice. . . Don’t worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Phi. 4:4-6).

Paul didn’t promise the Philippians that their investments would recover. He didn’t urge them to put their trust in the economy to restore to them everything they had lost when they became Christians. Instead he told them to rejoice and to give thanks and to pray to the God who had been revealed to them in Jesus Christ.

Doing that won’t change the economy, but it will change us. It will bring us closer to our Lord who told us in more ways than one, "You can’t serve both God and Mammon."

Mammon didn’t die for us. Mammon didn’t rise for us. Mammon didn’t call us to new life. That was Jesus Christ. Remember? The Word who became flesh, pitched his tent among us, and taught us where to put our trust.

We buried Christina Odum last Friday. Most of you didn’t know Christina. She was 97 when she died, and she had lived the last few years of her life in a nursing home. Christina was born in Scotland and came to live in Lakeland, Florida, when her parents immigrated in 1922. She married an attorney named Ralph Odum, who served in the Navy during World War II. After the war they moved to Tallahassee with their son David. Ralph died suddenly of a heart attack in 1966. Three years later David was killed in action in Viet Nam. He was on his fourth tour of duty.

If anyone had cause for anxiety, if anyone had cause for despair, it was Christina. But she did not despair. Neither did she triumph in a worldly sense. She simply lived, from day to day, trusting in God. Her friend Frances Irvin helped her. Her brothers and sisters in this congregation stuck with her. She was a tiny person in stature, but standing by her grave last Friday, I kept thinking that I had it all wrong. I’m the pipsqueak. She’s the giant.

You’d have to say that, compared to a Wall Street banker, Christina was an innocent. But she knew where to put her trust, and she was right.

Finally, beloved, writes Paul, "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you" (Phil. 4:8-9).

We might not need to tear down the altar to Baal (a.k.a. Mammon). It seems to be falling apart on its own. But not to worry: That god was never real in the first place. We know who is real and who is worthy of our worship. We’ve known all along. It’s just that sometimes we forget and we need a giant like Moses, or Paul, or Christina, to remind us.

"Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen . . . and the God of peace will be with you."

 

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