The Reverend Todd Townshend, Grand Prior

Exodus 32:7-14 and Luke 15:1-10

I cannot imagine the look on God's face when he saw what they had done. Or the look on the face of Moses when God said to him, “your people! Look what they have done!” Get down there. Leave me alone so that my wrath may burn hot against them.

What happened? God is up on top of the mountain with Moses, giving the people the great gift of the law. After bringing them out of slavery in Egypt, and being with them in the wilderness, these redeemed people were being given the gift of divine guidance.

But down at the foot of the mountain, at the foot of mount Sinai, wrapped in the smoke of God’s presence, the mountain that shook while Moses was up there face to face with the LORD -- the people got impatient. They couldn’t see what was going on up there! Moses had been up there a long time, forty days, forty nights. Maybe Moses was lost. Maybe God was gone.

They couldn’t see that one of their own was actually speaking with God. Face to face with the one who created the heaven and the earth. Face to face with the one who could send plagues, and defeat armies, and part water, and redeem a whole people out of slavery. But they couldn’t see it. So they let their insecurity get the best of them. They lost sight of the real God and his promise to them. They did what they knew they ought-not-do.

“You shall not make for yourself an idol ...You shall not bow down to them or worship them”

Well, they couldn’t wait. They gave up on Moses and they said to Aaron, “Come make gods for us... gods who shall go before us.” And Aaron, priest and interim minister, didn’t want the people to be mad at him,
so he said, OK bring all your gold over here. They did. No problem getting them to donate. Heat up that fire a bit. And they did. No lack of fuel for this project. Bring me that casting in the shape of a calf. And they brought it to him. Into the fire went the gold, and out came this calf. They held it up, they worshipped it, and they partied all night. I cannot imagine the look on God’s face.


One could not count all the times since the incident of the golden calf that people of faith have been caught up in the same kind of idol-making. Sometimes our lives look a bit like those ancestors of ours. We behave as though God has left us, as though God is not around anymore. And we need something to put at the centre of our lives, so we start making things to put there.

Some of us put work at the centre of life and value it the most, and soon productivity, profit, and personal position become the way we measure our lives. Or if work is not our idol, we put leisure and entertainment at the centre of life. And soon our lives are organized around the scheduling of TV shows, or entertainment outings. Some people live from one vacation to another, waiting and pining for the next chance to get away.
For some people money is at the centre of life, and all else is measured by amounts of money. For some it’s winning – satisfaction in life come from victory over others. For some it’s church – even that can become an idol. Anything that’s not God – if it’s at the centre of your life and if it’s not centrally related to God, it is an idol.

And it’s not just things. We make other people into idols. We make Idols out of people who win singing contests on TV. We make idols out of the people who walk red carpets and inspire explosions of flash bulbs at the Toronto Film Festival. In this town, people make Senators into their idols – not the ones in the upper chamber over there, but the guys who wear Senators sweaters on the ice.

My idols wear a blue leaf.

Idolatry. It’s a tricky one. It kind of sneaks up on you. It’s seductive and subtle. No one thinks that they are an idolater, but most of us are, or we have been. And contrary to what many people think, this makes God really mad. Impure thoughts, moral lapses, slow minds, stiff necks . . . these don’t make God as mad as idol-making.

Why? What’s wrong with idols? Why does God get so mad? Maybe because idols end up killing us. If we get to the point where we really value stuff that has no ultimate value, if we actually start to worship – to ascribe worth – to things that have little worth, then we have traveled a long way down a path that will squeeze the life out of us. We’ve traveled down a golden-looking path that turns darker and dingier with every step. At the end we find ourselves up against a wall – they are dead ends. They lead away from God. And they don’t give life.

So God says, stop it, I can’t stand to see you do this to yourselves! I want you to have life!

What can we do? What can we do to counteract our tendencies to idol-making? Two things: recognize our idol-making for what it is, and start imagining our lives another way. This shouldn’t be all that hard to do, because we are made for this other way, we have experienced another way. If we want to stop making everything – including ourselves – into idols, simply try this. Start seeing yourself – your life – as an icon. I think you already are icons.

When Christians think of icons, usually, the first thing that comes to mind is a sacred image. An icon is Orthodox Christian liturgical art. An icon is “theology in colour”. An icon is an image of what God has done, is doing, or what God promises to do. Often it is an image of a person who has been part of a God-event, or in the case of Jesus, is a God-event.

But for most people now, however, this is not the first thing that “icon” means. Type “icon” into Google and if you pass over the links to dictionaries and encyclopedias, the description of icon that I just gave you is not found on the first fifty sites listed. Instead we can go to the “Fashion Icon” website, where you can buy “cosmetics committed to the power of colour, aroma, and positive thought.” On many of the other most frequently visited sites, the word icon refers to famous people who take on symbolic significance, like the idols I just referred to -- people who articulate longings, exemplify ideals, exuberance, superhuman ability. People like Che Guevara (icon of revolution), Marilyn Monroe (icon of the Hollywood bombshell), Muhammad Ali (icon of the warrior athlete), Princess Diana (icon of how celebrity trumps royalty), Wayne Gretzky (icon of Canadians winning) etc. These famous people have a certain “image”, but it is not necessarily an image of God. Therefore, they’re not really icons, but idols.

Thankfully, most of you are not that type of icon. What you are is closer to this. As you know, the word icon is used for those little “buttons” which appear on computer screens as a portal to a program – to take you from the electronic desktop to some inner world of word processing or spreadsheets or the internet. These icons “refer” to something, they take you somewhere else, and they must be able to serve a very important purpose. They must be recognizable. They must symbolize, and be sign, of the place where you are going. Here icon is the right word for their function, but the place you go certainly is disappointing. I don’t need to gaze for long at a little blue “W” on my screen to know that this icon will only lead me to a blank page. These are portals to nothing real, or to a pseudo-reality at best.

The traditional icon of the religious art world is never meant to be a reproduction of the real nor are they meant to contain what is real. They are meant to be a place where heaven meets earth.

You are – or can be – a place where heaven meets earth. Your life . . . a lens through which people come to know God. An imperfect lens, an imperfect place, for someone to meet God.

In order to see this as possible in your life, you have to know the difference between idol and icon. If your life is like an idol, it is a construction. You’re a self-made person. The meaning of your life is “graven” not “given.” Idols cannot speak, they cannot communicate anything new. The idol is a mirror in which one sees only oneself. So if your life is like an idol, all we see is you. All we get is you. And great though you may be -- you may have made yourself into something pretty marvelous -- you are not God. And, no offense but we seek God. And you, as an idol, might be standing in the way.

If your life is like an icon, however, the marvelous you becomes translucent. And “you” can be the place where we meet God. You are not in the way of God, but you become a way TO God. Christians believe that Christ is the perfect icon (Gk: eikon) of the invisible God. (Col. 1:15) We do not project divinity on Jesus, but divinity shines through him. Perfectly.

Imperfectly, your life is like that.

Moses found that his life was like that too. Moses, you’ll remember, was face to face with God, and he acted as an icon, for people who would make idols. He was face to face with the LORD, who said, “You better get down there man, to those stiff-necked people. Leave me alone so that my wrath can burn may burn hot against them.”

Now, you’d think that if God was that mad, you’d do what God said. But . . . God had put in Moses a certain kind of righteousness. God had put in Moses a memory. And God had put in front of Moses a promise.

God had just recently made Moses a free man, leader of a liberated people. God had welcomed Moses into his presence. So there was no way that Moses was going to let go of that! And in this moment, Moses the lawgiver, became Moses the intercessor. He speaks on behalf of the others. He didn’t have to. God had just said, I’m going to consume all those people, but I’ll spare you, Moses. You’re the only one of the whole bunch who can keep a covenant. Of you I will make a great nation. Moses was set, personally.

But God had also put in Moses a love for his people. So Moses risks all, and implores the LORD his God.
Why does your wrath burn so hot against the ones you call your own? The ones you brought out of the land of Egypt. . . remember? Why would you bring disaster, when you are the one who brings freedom? Why would you abandon your own promise for us? Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel? All transformed for this promise. This promise you made. This promise that only you can keep - and help us keep.

Moses asked God to change his mind.

He asked God to look up, the same way that Abraham looked up. Look up. See those stars? You know those stars. . . you made them. . . and you swore to Abraham and Sarah that you would multiply their children like the stars. Look down there. Those stupid people dancing around the calf, they are the children. And they are going to be a light to the nations. Look at those people way off in the future. Look there, in Ottawa Ontario, September 2007. They are the ones who will need that light, and will radiate the light. They will never know you, if you don’t keep the covenant. Change your mind, implored Moses.

And God changed his mind. God allowed himself to be persuaded by his own story, his own promises,
and God’s face turned from wrath to forgiveness and restoration.

I wonder what it must be like to see that. To see what Moses saw - God’s face turning from anger to restoration. Clearly it has an effect on your own face. Because later it says that when Moses came down the last time, with the renewed covenant, his face shone. His face radiated God’s restoration. The face of Moses became like an icon, it opened to an infinite depth, so that all people could see the merciful face of the LORD.

I don’t know what you see when you gaze on the words of Holy Scripture. I don’t know what you see when you hear the words, the rituals, and the prayers, or when you meet and look at one another, or look at the world you’re trying to serve. But all of these things can become for us one of two things. They can become like idols, projections, dumb objects, through which nothing can pass. Or they can become like icons, revelations, places of infinite depth, through which something can come from beyond.


Stacey and I have a four year old girl, Tyne, and a two year old boy, Seth. Recently, I was playing with them on the TV room floor, wrestling and rolling and laughing. We did horsy rides and we hid under blanket tents. After all this, we were resting, all three of us lying on our backs on the floor, and looking over at them, I noticed how beautiful they are. They both noticed me looking at them like that. Tyne said, “you know what Daddy? I love you.” Seth climbed up on me – I thought he was going to give me a hug –but he climbed right up on my chest and put his face right up to mine. Forehead to forehead, nose to nose, he looked into my eyes. We were eyeball to eyeball, so that his two eyes looked like one. And because that’s too close for me to focus for long, my gaze seemed to open and I saw the entire universe, through his eyes. I saw all those stars and I thought of God pointing them out to Abraham. Through the eyes of our little boy, my gaze settled on the One who created all that is, including these two little ones.

Isn’t that just like God? God had wrestled his way into our playtime and turned our two little kids into icons of grace.

You don’t need to know you are an icon of God, to be an icon of God, but it helps. The life of an icon is a witness. Somehow, you find ways to graciously get in people’s faces, so that through the things you do and the things you say, through your eyes, people can come to come face to face with God and remember His promises for them.

God has put a righteousness in you that shines when you do what Scottish Rite Masons do best. When you use your combined wisdom, and resources, and strength, your combined power of brotherhood (philadelphia) to serve the weak of this world . . . there is joy in heaven.

There is joy in heaven when you arrive with wheelchairs and walkers to get people moving. There is joy in heaven when you building learning centres to get people reading. There is joy in heaven when you support research and build hospitals to help with God’s healing. You are icons of life. And these are the meeting places of heaven and earth.