We become what we worship.
It is an old theological adage.
We become what we worship.
So we should be careful who or what we worship.
Worshipping the living God is good for us.
Worshipping anything or anyone else is bad for us.
It seems strait forward.
But why is it never that simple?
We still make our golden calves and sacrifice to them, prostrating ourselves to them, reveling before them.
The problem is that we just aren’t aware that we are doing it.
Idols ultimately enslave and devour all that worship them.
They usually demand that we sacrifice truth in order that we may feel safe or to make the world less complicated.
Worshipping the living God leads to the opposite: freedom, truth telling, the risk of faith, and the acceptance of complexity as an adventure and a challenge.
Ultimately all idols center around self worship or self loathing, resulting in the closing down of human awareness, in the ever narrowing tunnel vision of obsession or despair, rather than the ever widening embrace that rises from true worship.
One is a faith that ignores or scorns and strikes out, the other is a faith that reaches out.
That is a sort of summary of the spirituality of idolatry. Much of it is common sense, and that explanation can be found in shorter or much expanded versions.
But what catches my attention is not the golden calf of the exodus lesson but what happens after the idolatry has begun.
The Exodus passage shows God pronouncing a dire judgment against Israel for their worship of the golden calf.
They are to be destroyed.
Only Moses is to be left alive, and the children of Moses will be God’s people.
And Moses argues with God.
Moses reminds God of his promises.
And the mind of God is changed.
We worship a God who can be argued with, who can change, who can relent, who can change direction.
Israel, the name that means to strive with God, and Moses joins in on that long tradition of his people of striving with God.
Of coarse Moses changes as well in that wrestling match.
It is both disturbing and comforting that God changes.
The high transcendent deity, immutable and eternal, unbending as a golden calf, may be the God of philosophers, but not the God of scripture.
The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Miriam and Moses, is a God who sits at table and visits, who wrestles in the night, whose wrath can be argued with.
The God of scripture is the God of people, of The People, and they share a relationship of covenant, of promises, that takes The People and The God to a new place, out of slavery into freedom.
It is a marriage of a sort. Marriage changes us. That relationship reshapes us.
We share that sort of intimate relationship, that sort of commitment with the creator of heaven and earth.
It is a humbling thing to worship the God who wants to wrestle, it can be comforting, but not comfortable.
God won’t let us settle for less, for some empty idol, God disturbs us out of complacency into a living, striving, arguing relationship.
“And the Lord changed his mind.” What a fascinating verse of scripture.
If we become what we worship, then I suppose that we will change as well.