What They Woulda Shoulda Oughta Do

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ - Exodus 32:7-8

When Moses went up on Mount Sinai to meet with God, the people of Israel got tempted back into idolatry. Perhaps there’s a way we can look at the story of the Golden Calf with a gentler appreciation for their stumbling. After all, they’d been through a lot of trauma. And after all, God was hard to see and hear all those years in the wilderness.

So the people decided on a more practical, obvious god to follow - this time in the form of a golden bull. But, as Wil Gafney points out, we have plenty of bull in our own lives.

Ponder her words and see if you can pinpoint some of the bull in your life today.

“We can say what they woulda, shoulda, oughta do. But we have our own bull. Our idols are not statues or icons... The bull we worship is whiteness and patriarchy and sexism and guns and money and fame and power and sex and our imaginations about how it used to never be and never will be again... We worship other people’s opinions and their possessions and our own. We worship people who don’t love us or even respect us. We devote our time, our money, our resources, our passion to everyone and everything but God, sometimes.” - Wil Gafney, The Bull in the Church isn’t Idolatry