What got into Israel that they would do such a thing? And Aaron, what was he thinking? Frederick Buechner takes a stab at it: With Moses lingering so long on Mt. Sinai that some thought he’d settled down and gone into real estate, the people turned to Aaron for leadership, and in no time flat – despite an expensive theological education and all those years at denominational headquarters – he had them dancing around the Golden Calf like a bunch of aborigines. Nobody knows whether this was Aaron’s way of getting even with his kid brother [Moses] for all those years of eating humble pie, or whether he actually believed with the rest of [us] that a God in the hand is worth two in the bush. [Peculiar Treasures, “Aaron” (Harper &Row), pp.1-2.]

Now, I’ve been quail hunting only once in my life, and the quail had nothing to worry about. But I get the saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Bad a shot as I am, if I’ve got one in the bag, I’m not giving up a small meal at the risk of no dinner at all. You stick with the sure thing. If you’ve got a good stock that’s only lost about, oh, a quarter of its value in the last two years, well, you hold on to it instead of throwing all your dough into some hot scam your neighbor says is a lock to make you rich.

When you apply that logic to God, however, things get a bit catawampus. God will never be a sure thing that we can fully understand and hold on to. God will always remain elusive and invisible, no matter our many attempts to pin down a deity for ourselves. It will always require faith rather than sight to worship the true God. It will always require faithful living rather than superficial worship to please the true God.

Let’s replay the Golden Calf story and see if we can find ourselves in it. The children of Israel are out in the wilderness. They’re not in Egypt any longer; they are free. But sometimes freedom feels like being naked in public, you feel vulnerable, overexposed: you want a blanket or something to cover up with, to make you feel secure. (Sounds too much like I know what I’m talking about; let’s change the analogy.) It’s like how you thought when you left home for college, you were free. But then you started realizing how good it felt having your bills paid, sleeping in your parents’ house, mom washing your clothes and cooking your meals, dad … well, dad doing whatever dads do. But when you get that intoxicating, thin-air feeling that you are out there on your own with your newfound freedom, you may also get anxious in your lightheadedness and want to grab for something to make you feel secure, something you can put your hand on and hold on to. It’s not just college students and naked people in public that feel that way, is it? We all do at times.

Israel had put faith in Moses and Moses’ God of the bush. But Moses had gone off to the mountain to talk with God and the people were getting anxious in their empty-handedness. God had given them the prescription to cure their anxiety attack – “take two tablets and call me every morning.” The Ten Commandments on two tablets were just what the doctor ordered. God wanted a few basic things like having no other gods or graven images, like honoring father and mother, remembering the Sabbath, not killing each other, telling the truth, respecting other people’s property and families – mundane things like that. In exchange they get security greater than pharaoh’s army.

The people don’t want righteousness that requires rigor, though; they want religion that permits revelry. They don’t want an invisible God that makes demands on their everyday lives; they want a visible God on demand that leaves their everyday lives alone. They want a god in the hand, in other words, a god they can handle.

So they run to Aaron, the leader on hand. Moses is an aloof figure, head in the clouds, always running off to the mountain to talk to God, leaving the people waiting below. Aaron is a people person, a people’s priest, a people pleaser. He’s the slick-talking brother, the one who can negotiate whatever comes along. They like him better. So Aaron sees his chance. He gives them what they want. Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us, they say. This man, Moses, who brought us up out of Egypt, he was good for that job, but we don’t know what’s become of him. Aaron gets it. He sees that they attribute their freedom to Moses and not to Moses’ God. They are really saying they want Aaron to lead them now. And all he has to do is make them a little Golden Calf and he can be THE MAN.

But Aaron knows he can’t turn away from the true God without consequence, so he negotiates the thing. He makes the idol but tells them that it represents the true God who got them out of Egypt. Then he calls for a festival to the Lord the next day. Pretty slick. But by the next day, Aaron would see the folly of his ways. The people do not bow down to God by bowing down to the calf. With their god in hand now, they bow down to each other and – let me say this delicately – they bow down with each other. They tie one on, break all the commandments at once, and feel better that they have a god that can’t talk back to them. Don’t we all?

We have a controversy brewing over a court ruling that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional. Now, I am going to let the courts sort this one out, but I think we can ask whether this is a Golden Calf for Christians. President Eisenhower signed this bill into law in 1954 during the hysteria over fighting godless communism. Ike wanted America to be more religious, and he actually believed that it didn’t matter what religion, as long as Americans were more religious. The pledge assures, according to the former president, that from this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty. But who is the Almighty that we are dedicated to? Is it the God of Moses and the God of Jesus? Or isn’t it more likely some generic god that is meant to be an amulet about the neck of America, like a religious good luck charm? Can this god talk back to us, call us to account, do anything but make us feel good for adopting him or her as our national deity? A Golden Calf cannot talk back. It is an idol, a fake god made with good intentions at the hands of human beings. It’s a god that can be enlisted to whatever policy our government wants endorsed, to whatever behavior our people want approval for. It is not the God of the bush that Moses met in the fire.

The church also worships a Golden Calf, though, when it substitutes a desire for a simple and easy to understand faith for the faith that must grapple with the elusive and mysterious God that God really is. The true God won’t be handled or pinned down. The true God hands out knowledge to us as God chooses rather than being handled by us. You’ve seen the bumper stickers God said, I believe it, and that settles it? Wouldn’t it be great if it were that easy? If it took no work to understand the will of God?

I suppose this happens in other professions too, but one of my least favorite things is when I tell people I am a Baptist minister and they launch into a sermon of their own which I am expected to agree with. I was recently at a hospital preparing for a “procedure.” (Everything turned out fine, thanks for asking.) So I’m sitting at the check-in counter, where the woman is making sure they know where to send the bill if everyone I know died suddenly or the insurance company changed its mind while I was on the table. Well, she saw that I listed my occupation as minister. I am careful not to put “Baptist minister,” don’t you know?! That would be asking for it. But she had to know, and before I could clear up what kind of Baptist minister, she told me she was a Baptist too, and she commenced her sermonette on going to a Bible study by some non-Baptist minister who didn’t believe the Bible. He apparently questioned whether a fish actually swallowed Jonah or the story was meant to make a point, one she was missing. The whole point of Jonah, it seemed to her, was that her God could do anything, including make a fish that could swallow a man. After all, the Bible means what it says and that is that. If you question part of it, you can’t believe any of it, right? Well, what time is my procedure? The Bible doesn’t mean what it says, it means what it means; our job is to work to understand how the words point to what it means.

Too many Christians who say they want a simple faith mean they want a simplistic faith that doesn’t require that they engage their minds in the search for the will of God. I prefer the bumper sticker I saw the other day that reads: Christian. Not a Closed Mind. When you have a Golden Calf god, you don’t have to think. Your god is in your hand. Everything is settled: no expectations, no surprises. Problem is, the true God is a jealous God that won’t be melted down. God will not be manipulated to our own ends. God handles us; we do not handle God.

When God tells Moses what’s happened down below, it sounds like a husband who says to his wife, Do you know what your children have done? They are a stiff-necked bunch. I can’t do anything with them. They’re all yours. I’m about to blow my New York uber-urban image here, so pay attention. My late Uncle George was a real horseman – Sheriff’s Mounted Posse and all that. Trick rider. He taught me how to ride horses as a kid and even entered me into a barrel race in a rodeo. Anyway, if a horse is stiff-necked and you can’t turn it with the reins, it won’t do the will of the rider. It won’t be handled.

So when God turns away from Israel because they are stiff-necked, God is saying that they will not repent, not be turned – the word for turn and repent is the same. So God turns away and is ready to send Israel to the glue factory. God turns away in anger, but Moses has the gumption to talk back to God’s back as God is turning his back on his people. Why are you burning hot against your people. You know who they are. They are your children, made in your image. You made them capable of this. And if you don’t want to be a laughing stock in the eyes of the neighbors, then walk away, but cool down. Repent yourself. Don’t be stiff-necked with your children. Give them a different example; give them another chance.

Feel like I’ve heard a woman’s voice at my back like that before. Either way, isn’t it amazing to think of it? God changes his mind and doesn’t give us what we deserve. We get a picture here of the inner life of God, of the heart and the emotions of God. God repents of the backhand he wants to give us and gives us a hand back. What God gives us really is … God’s own self, again and again and again – a self full of brokenhearted, but never-ending, unconditional, burning love.

Golden Calves can’t talk back, but neither can they love like that. Which God do you really want?