Preached on Sunday, October 11, 2026, the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock.

“Aaron said to [the people], ‘Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’” (Exodus 32:2)

There’s a whole cast of characters gathered around this terrible scene. There are the people of Israel, scarcely removed from slavery and already restless beneath the mountain where God has drawn near. There’s Moses, hidden from their sight in the cloud, receiving the commandments while everything below him begins to come apart. There’s the golden calf itself, glittering strangely in the wilderness, made from the very wealth Israel carried out of Egypt and then praised as though it had delivered them from Egypt in the first place. But today, of all the characters gathered at the foot of Sinai, I would like us to consider Aaron.

Aaron, you’ll remember, is Moses’ big brother, appointed by God earlier in Exodus to be Moses’ assistant—Moses’ Associate Rector, as it were. So, when Moses goes up the mountain, Aaron is left in charge, and frankly, it does not go very well. We might be tempted to excuse him. Moses has been gone too long, the people are restless, and somebody has to keep the congregation together. Perhaps Aaron is simply trying to maintain order until Moses returns. But Exodus will not allow Aaron to disappear behind the anxiety of the crowd, because Aaron is the one who tells them to bring him the gold.

The people remove their rings and place the gold into Aaron’s hands, and Aaron takes it, works it, and makes the image of a calf. When the people look upon what he has made and proclaim it to be the god who brought them out of Egypt, Aaron does not object. Instead, he builds an altar before the calf and announces a festival to the LORD, wrapping the whole thing in the familiar forms of worship. That may be the most disturbing feature of the story. Aaron does not abandon religion; he accommodates it. He takes the anxiety of the people, the pressure of the moment, and the gold already in his hands, and he gives all of it a religious form.

In the Trinity Book Club, we’ve been spending a lot of time with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the 20th century theologian and martyr. Bonhoeffer saw in this story from Exodus two enduring possibilities for the Church. In May of 1933, only months after Adolf Hitler had come to power, the twenty-seven-year-old Bonhoeffer preached on this chapter of Exodus and contrasted the church of Aaron with the Church of Moses, the church of the world with the Church of the Word [1]. The distinction is severe—Bonhoeffer liked it that way!—but the question beneath it is one the Church must answer in every age: what happens when the desires of the age press themselves upon the Church, and accommodation becomes easier than obedience?

The church of Aaron is the church that cannot wait. Moses has disappeared into the cloud, God remains invisible, and the people have grown tired of living by promises they cannot see. They want something immediate enough to reassure them, tangible enough to carry before them, and manageable enough to move when they want it to move. Aaron understands the demand, and instead of teaching the people how to wait upon God, he gives them what they want. He takes good gifts already lying in their hands—gifts given to them by God Himself, no less!—and turns them into something smaller than God. The calf is attractive not because Israel has suddenly lost all interest in religion, but because a god we make ourselves is much easier to live with than the God Who summons Moses into the cloud.

That is what Bonhoeffer was beginning to see around him in Germany. The danger was not merely that the Church would close its doors and cease speaking about God. The greater danger was that the Church would remain open, continue praying and preaching, preserve its ceremonies, and slowly bend those things around the desires of the age. Nationalism, racial ideology, political power, and loyalty to a human leader could all be dressed in Christian language. They did not need to destroy the altar if they could simply place something else upon it. That is the church of Aaron: a church capable of using religion to bless what it has already decided to worship.

I find that image difficult to shake because I preach this sermon dressed as a priest myself. I stand at an altar week after week, speak the language of God for a living, and care deeply about the life of the Church. Aaron stands before anyone who wears these clothes as a warning that visible success, institutional security, public approval, or the wishes of a congregation can begin to matter more than waiting upon the Word of the Lord. Priests have no special immunity from idolatry; sometimes we simply have more vestments with which to clothe it.

But Aaron’s temptation is not only a priestly temptation. It’s a human one. We, too, prefer a god who moves according to a timetable we can understand and gives us enough visible evidence to reassure us that faithfulness is working. When God does not provide those assurances, we discover how much gold we have lying around. Money, power, success, nation, tradition, family, career, even the Church itself can become material out of which we fashion something more manageable than God. The things themselves may be good, just as Israel’s gold was good. Idolatry begins when we ask some good thing to give us the security that only God can give.

That is the church of Aaron. But Bonhoeffer does not leave us with Aaron. High above all the noise in the valley, almost completely invisible to the people below, Moses waits. From the perspective of the congregation, he does not appear to be accomplishing very much. He has disappeared into the cloud and has nothing visible to show for himself. Yet Moses is doing the one thing Aaron cannot bring himself to do: he is waiting upon a Word he cannot manufacture. He cannot force God to speak more quickly, and he cannot come down from the mountain carrying whatever message the people would prefer to hear.

That is the other possibility before the Church. The Church of Moses is willing to remain before the mystery of God without filling the silence with something of its own invention. It trusts that the hiddenness of God is not the absence of God, and that obedience is still obedience even when its results cannot yet be seen. Such a Church can work vigorously without imagining that its work will save it, plan carefully without believing that its plans control the future, and care deeply about the world without baptizing every desire the world brings to its door. It remembers what Israel forgot: that the God who brought them out of Egypt was already God before they ever made the calf.

The whole story can finally be held in one image. Below the mountain stands the calf, visible, tangible, portable, and manageable. Above it hangs the cloud, concealing the God Whom Israel cannot manufacture, hurry, or control. The calf can be carried and displayed; the cloud demands that we wait. The calf gives the appearance of certainty; the cloud requires trust. Yet the irony is that the calf, for all its visibility, is nothing at all, while the hidden God in the cloud is the One Who has already acted, already delivered, and already spoken His promise.

And that is the question the story leaves with us: Can we trust that God is enough? Can we wait upon God when waiting feels unproductive? Can we obey when obedience offers no immediate assurance of success? Can we resist turning the gold already in our hands into a god small enough to carry, simply to satisfy our restlessness? We do not have to manufacture certainty simply because we are afraid. We can remain before the living God long enough to receive a Word that did not originate with us.

The calf is easier than the cloud, without a doubt. The calf can be carried, displayed, explained, and controlled. But the cloud is where the living God has chosen to speak. And perhaps that is the vocation of the Church in every age: to wait upon the God Who speaks, to receive the Word we cannot give ourselves, and then, when He has spoken, to follow. Amen.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Sermon on Exodus 32:1–8, 15–16, 18–20, 30–35, Berlin, Sixth Sunday after Easter (Exaudi), May 28, 1933,” in Berlin: 1932–1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best and David Higgins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 472–76.