“Come make gods for us,” the people say to Aaron in today’s Old Testament lesson (Exodus 32:1-14). They give Aaron all their gold and he casts an image of a calf – the golden calf.

 So what are your go to idols these days?

Here’s why I ask that question. I don’t think we intend to make idols, or what a friend of mine calls surrogate gods, and I don’t think the people in today’s Old Testament lesson did either, but I think we all make and have them. I, however, can honestly say that I don’t have a single golden calf. I have a whole herd of them and I wouldn’t be surprised if you do too. But the golden calf may not be what we often think it is.

• What if the golden calf isn’t the problem but the symptom of a deeper problem?
• What if this idol is Israel’s attempt to alleviate anxiety, fear, and the ambiguity of life?
• What if we create surrogate gods whenever we deal with the external realities and circumstances of our lives rather than our internal conditions?

I don’t think the people of Israel woke up one morning and said, “Hey, let’s make an idol.” I think they woke up one morning and said, “Another day without Moses. What’s taking him so long? When will he be back? Is he even coming back?” I think they had just spent another night without the pillar of fire that assured them of God’s presence in the dark. I think they looked out of their tents but the pillar of cloud by which God had guided them through the day was once again not there. I think they woke up asking, “Where is God?” I think they had reached a tipping point with their anxiety and fear, with the ambiguity of their life, with not knowing what would happen to them. And that’s when they said to Aaron, “Come make gods for us”

You’ve had those tipping point kind of days, right? What are they like for you? What do you do when you reach the tipping point? Just like Israel most of us deal with what’s going on around us instead of dealing with what’s going on inside us. When we feel small and insecure, when life is large and overwhelming, when we feel untethered and threatened we turn to our surrogate gods.

For example, when I am consumed by questions of whether I am enough – good enough, smart enough, competent enough – I turn to work. I sacrifice my life, time, relationships to the god of work. I know others for whom food or alcohol are the surrogate gods they hope will lead them out of loneliness, emptiness, or depression. When we are afraid of others we build walls, physical or psychological, and call on our war gods. 

Maybe idolatry is our misguided attempt to alleviate our pain, find meaning, create security, provide certainty, in the midst of our anxiety, fear, ambiguity, loss, doubts, hurts, struggles. We turn to or make a golden calf that will give us what we want even if it is harmful to us or others.  

In some way every idol or surrogate god stands as a monument to how small, narrow, exclusive, and hardened our lives have become. We have lost the connection to something larger than and beyond ourselves. We have created a whole herd of golden calves in our own image – in the image of our fears, insecurities, prejudices, and wants. 

We don’t, however, call them golden calves. They go by different names. This may be a bit of an overstatement, preachers sometimes do that, but today many, maybe most, of our idols’ names end with the suffix ism, i-s-m. If you want to see a golden calf, look for an ism.

Fundamentalism. Literalism. Dogmatism. Legalism. Liberalism. Conservatism. Individualism. Narcissism. Hedonism. Alcoholism. Capitalism. Tribalism. Nationalism. Exceptionalism. Triumphalism. Militarism. Extremism. Chauvinism. Sexism. Ageism. Racism. 

Those and a thousand others like them are the golden calves of today. We see them in our lives, America, and the world. We turn to them, participate in them, and perpetuate them, as individuals and collectively as various groups, religions, countries. In each of them there is some anxiety, fear, insecurity, hurt, ambiguity we are either unable or unwilling to face and deal with. 

Look at what is happening to us. Look at our country and the world today. Look at your life today. The very idols we thought would save us are destroying us. There’s a reason God commanded, “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” The gods we create sooner or later always betray us. 

So let me ask you again, what are your go to idols these days? What are your isms?

God will not save Israel or us from our isms. And neither will Moses. God says to Moses, “Your people, whom you bought up out of the land of Egypt have acted perversely.” But Mosses tosses it back to God saying, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?” 

“They’re not my people they’re your people,” God and Moses say to each other. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and my mom would say to my dad, “That’s your son. My son wouldn’t do that.” Isms are hard to deal with. An ism is like a hot potato. It’s too hot to handle so we toss it around and in the process everyone gets burned. The golden calf is Israel’s ism to deal with, not God’s and not Moses’. We all have to face and deal with our own isms. It’s our work to do. No one else can do it for us. 

So how do you get out of your isms? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a question you and I each must answer for ourselves. No one else can answer it for us. I’m not going to tell you the answer. I don’t have your answer but I have some ideas and wonderings about how we might come to an answer or at least a direction for moving forward.

Maybe we can’t get out of our isms. Maybe we can only go through our isms. What if we stopped looking at our isms as something apart from and outside us and instead looked through them to see what is going on within us – fear, anxiety, insecurity, hurt, anger, guilt, shame, or whatever else is there?

What do you see when you look through the isms of your life? What do you see when you look through the isms of America’s life? What are you asking your surrogate gods to alleviate in your life today? What are we asking our surrogate gods to alleviate in our American life today? And what would it take to move through the isms, the golden calf, the big parent in the sky, and deal with that stuff yourself? 

It would probably be uncomfortable, scary, messy, and challenging. It would ask us to be self-reflective, honest, and vulnerable. It might be risky. We’d probably have to grow up and reclaim responsibility for ourselves, our lives, and our relationships.

But here’s what strikes me about all this. Israel’s idol was created from the gold in their lives. And I don’t just mean gold the metal. I mean the gold that is a part of every human being. Their gold, however, was deformed and misshaped into a calf but the gold was still there. What if each of our isms contains buried treasure, gold waiting to be mined and brought forth? 

I wonder what gold you and I might discover. 

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Image Credit: “Golden calf: part of Democracy Awakening & Democracy Awakening events at The Capitol” by Lorie Shaull is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.