on golden calves

I doubt anyone is counting, but I can’t remember when I last attended an entire Sunday church service. I’ve made it to two Bible study classes and a couple of prayer meetings, and that’s all. Some of it is the summer busyness that is inevitable when one half of the extended family lives hours away; some of it is the standard scheduling mess that’s inevitable when one half of the parenting team is a shift worker; some of it is the reality that after 30 years of fairly automatic weekly attendance, simply going to church has become an activity I feel a lot of internal conflict about.

I had another uncomfortable realization last night (while lying awake with insomnia for the second night in a row) that I’ve often used church as a way to quiet the constant fear in my subconscious that I’m not really, truly following Jesus. After all, even when there is little genuine substance to my everyday relationship with God, I can fall back on the tangible reality that I go to the place and do the thing to make me feel better.

This is Pharisaism at its finest, and it comes very naturally to me.

And Pharisaism is a form of idolatry.

One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is when, while Moses is receiving the Law on the mountain, Aaron quiets the Israelites’ fear and unrest by helping them create a golden calf. He doesn’t say to them, “Here is a new god for you to worship, since the old one abandoned you!”—he says “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4, emphasis added).

At the very moment when the God of Israel was meeting with Moses on a mountaintop cloaked in cloud, Aaron and the assembly reduced Him to the tangible, accessible, visible form of a calf made out of gold. Their small minds needed to be able to go to the place and do the thing—to see “proof” that they were still blessed and protected and led by God, even if it was proof they literally created out of their own ornaments of slavery.

They made for themselves an idol.

Now when Aaron saw [the golden calf], he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” So the next day they rose early and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

Exodus 32:5-6

If the act of “going to church” is my tangible metric for whether I’m walking in step with God, have I not done the same?

God may be high above on the mountaintop, inviting me into the wonders of His presence and longing to teach me His wisdom, but I’m too busy bringing offerings to a false version of Him—created from the golden chains of legalism—to notice.

Or He may just feel distant and inaccessible right now, and this is a time to wait for Him to speak when He sees fit, and stop filling the silence with counterfeit worship to a counterfeit god.

I don’t mean church itself is bad or idolatrous, but I wonder if I’m the only one who’s guilty of shrinking the glory of relationship with the true God down to a measurable set of religious actions, or trying to contain His presence within the four walls of a three-dimensional building?

If we took those religious actions away and quit going to the building altogether, would there be anything left? If the answer is no, was there any relationship with God there to begin with, or was it all a carefully managed mirage?

Part of me has always felt a little guilty that my richest times of communion with God usually happen far away from church: on horseback rides, in my flower garden, wandering through open fields, at Twenty One Pilots concerts, in conversation with beloved friends or family over cocktails, in times of immense pain and grief, or watching while He shapes the minds and hearts of my two little girls in our most mundane daily activities.

But perhaps that’s exactly as it should be. Is He not in all of these things at least as much as He is in church? These are the real things that make up 98.9% of our lives, the things that go on between Sunday noon and the next Sunday at 10am. Going to the place and doing the thing once or twice a week is fine—and ideally it’s supportive of the goal—but going and doing are hardly the same as being and dwelling. Following the rules is not the same as living out a reborn heart. Feasting before a golden calf doesn’t mean you are worshiping the One True God.