The Golden Calf and our Octo-Man

The other day I was listening to a pastor speak about this one fictional book that used a metaphor to describe God by portraying her as an old woman. The pastor called this idolatry and the equivalent to making a graven image. Which led me to start thinking about that story in Exodus when the Israelites create the Golden Calf to signify God. Which led me to start thinking about some recent conversations I had with an old friend where he stated that if certain events described in the Bible didn’t ACTUALLY happen, then he would stop being a Christian and renounce his faith. This of course made me imagine a statue of a giant, transparent man with long, writhing, octopus tentacles as arms with a small plaque at the bottom labeled “God.”

And we’re off.

Exodus 32. Let’s set the stage. YHWH (God) has delivered the Hebrew people from their Egyptian enslavers and is now leading them through the desert to “The Promised Land.” At some point, their leader, and the man most responsible for their release from captivity, goes up a mountain to convene with YHWH and get the law. But he is up there for a while and the people get antsy and decide to build an image of God to worship. So they pool together all the gold (where do slaves get gold?) and craft a golden calf to which they begin sacrificing. This, of course makes God super angry and Moses has to talk him down from total annihilation. But then Moses goes down and gets pretty wroth himself. (For the curious, he burns the idol, grounds it to a gold powder, sprinkles it in the water and makes everyone drink it. Then God sends a plague on everyone. He was mad, you guys.) Yada yada yada. God issues Commandment #1: You may not have any other gods. Commandment #2: You may not create and worship idols.

These laws were literally etched in stone. Twice. Serious stuff here.

But there are several crazy things here to think about. Firstly, God wasn’t called God, or any of the many words that people called gods back in that day. Earlier in the story, Moses asks this supernatural, powerful being that was talking from a bush on fire, “¹³If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” The burning bush responds, “¹⁴I am who I am.” Or “I will be what I will be.” “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” ¹⁵ God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’" (Lord here is the word YHWH which is connected to the word hayah which means “to be.”) 

So… God wasn’t even God. Or she wasn’t called God.

He just was. She was what would she would be. He is. Or maybe just… Be.

Secondly, God wasn’t completely invisible according to the myth. He led the Israelites through the desert in the form of a pillar of fire. A GIANT COLUMN OF FIRE! When they arrive at Mt. Sinai, the mountain Moses ascended for a time, he coalesced around the top of the mountain as clouds, thunder, lightning, fire, and loud trumpet blasts. Not to mention that they had just been delivered from Egyptian slavery by supernatural plagues and crossing a sea that swallowed the army pursuing them. Yet even still, they decided that a Golden Calf of their own creation was probably a better projection of YHWH, and worthy of their obedience and reverence.

These two things are important. We will return to them.

My friend. We are talking about the Bible and the claims it makes about the world, history, etc., and how we talk about those things with people who don’t share the same faith as us, especially faith in the Bible. I say it might be a more genuine conversation if we use language that concedes we can never KNOW whether or not any of those things actually happened, but that we trust they did. We have faith in that. I say, “Otherwise, we are playing some game of ‘Christian Chicken’ with history.” Nothing can be proved now, so we are comfortable betting the farm. And I challenge him. I say, “If tomorrow, as unlikely as it is, someone comes out and can without a shadow of a doubt offer proof that some major event listed in the life of Jesus did NOT happen, neither you nor I would forsake our faith because we have experienced something real, now, in our life. Here. Our faith is more than just a belief in history but an experience in the present.” He tells me that if someone could disprove the resurrection, he would “hang it all up.” Hang it all up.

Still chills me.

Hang it all up.

Anyway. This, of course, led me to imagine a giant glass statue of a man with octopus arms – with tentacles and all – hanging out in front of every church building in the U.S. Because this is our modern day “Golden Calf.” God is a man with tentacle arms that lives in the sky and reaches those arms down to deal with his creation in history from time to time. Is this the God we worship? Is this the God we are telling people is worthy of reverence and obedience?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian in the early 1900s and was executed by the Nazi government in the 1940s for his involvement in the assassination attempt of Hitler. He wrote during a time when the culture around him (Nazi Germany) and the Second Industrial Revolution and scientific discovery (including nuclear physics) were becoming the dominant narratives overpowering the Christian faith which had ruled Europe for thousands of years.

But Bonhoeffer didn’t blame science or culture. Instead, he saw that Christians had started using God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. God was only the mysteries, the unexplainable, the parts of our history and culture that only interacted with the fringes of our modern every-day thought and experience.

Bonhoeffer’s prescription:

“We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. … God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized at the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; it is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigour, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin. … Redemption myths arise from human boundary-experiences, but Christ takes hold of man at the centre of his life.”

What Bonhoeffer is saying is that God is something we experience every day. His presence intermingles with every small, seemingly insignificant moment of our life. As the prophet Isaiah said, “The whole earth is full of his glory.” God is not somewhere else. God is here, now. Christ doesn’t become relevant because of death; Christ is relevant because of life.

There are experiences in my life that feel so infused with the presence of God. Every night at dinner with my host family (my “apa” and “karandash”) in Kyrgyzstan – laughing and learning about each other and each other’s culture – sharing life in a very meaningful way. Giving rich people’s water and newspapers to my homeless friends when I worked at the fanciest hotel downtown. Having the honor of telling suicidal teens that they are worth living. Marrying my wife and getting to hear her laugh every(!) single(!) day(!). Watching my friends raise their children. Looking at the majesty of our earth and the diversity of life in it. Bumping into someone in public transportation and both of us responding with grace and a smile. Hearing an astrophysicist lecture about the beginning of the universe and the marvel of her research. Eating dinner with a monk, a priest, and several regular folks – all of us discussing the deepest parts of our human existence as equals in a way that invites understanding and introspection. Closing your eyes and being a part of a crowd of people all moving simultaneously to the most beautiful piece of music the world has ever heard. And a million other mundane, catastrophic, insignificant, or tectonically world-shattering experiences.

But the God I hear lately, and grew up hearing, was a God that lives far away and chose to come to earth thousands of years ago. Since then, he shows up periodically, reaching his tentacle arms down capriciously. Sometimes miraculous healing someone. Sometimes helping someone remember where they left their keys. But nevertheless, sitting somewhere else on his heavenly throne. Judging us. Waiting on us.

This is not the God of my experience. This isn’t the God that our spiritual ancestors described in the Bible. Look back and how the book of Exodus describes him.

I am. I will be what I will be.

BE.

I have profound objections to a god of history. One that I could “hang up” if history were proved to be different than the Bible describes. I also have profound objections to a god that is far away. One that is absent except in special circumstances when he reaches down to touch our lives. IF we are lucky enough.

But maybe more fundamentally, I might have profound objections to a god that is a person. I mean a noun. Xenophanes, ancient Greek theologian, once said something to the effect that if horses had gods, they would look like horses. We naturally fall into this notion that God is a he. And a being. Only.

But the Bible describes him as a verb, sometimes. God is I am. God is be. God is love.

I get this. A transcendent divine force that pervades my entire being. That exists at the centre of my life. That completely encapsulates and makes sense of the story of Jesus. That helps me understand the spiritual journey my Israelite forbearers stumbled through and wrote down for posterity. A cause for the world. FOR THE UNIVERSE! A movement that history clings to and that we either flow with or against.

God isn’t elsewhere. God didn’t pin everything in history and we are just coasting in the wake waiting for him to resurface again in some triumphant presence. GOD IS NOT THE OCTO-MAN.

God is all around us. In our everday. In the now. SHE’S A GIANT COLUMN OF FIRE. And instead we want to make up some golden calf so we can wrap our mind around him.

But, I think, she’s gonna be what she’s gonna be.