The Calf Kissers

On idolatry, the love of money, and the righteous use of wealth

— Ty Ngachira (@anto_ty)

I scrolled past that line and had to stop. Read it twice. It put words to something I had been circling for a long time.

We tend to treat addiction as a weakness, a deficiency, a missing piece of willpower. But that is not what it is. Addiction is the opposite of an empty tank. It is a full tank pointed at the wrong target. The person bound to a bottle, a screen, a team, a title, a number in a bank account, is not someone incapable of devotion. They are someone capable of enormous devotion who has handed it to something that cannot carry it.

Same energy. Wrong altar.

The men who kissed the calves

I listen to the Bible cover-to-cover on audio, and a while back, I was somewhere in the Minor Prophets when a strange little phrase caught my attention. I had to rewind it. It is in Hosea, chapter 13.

— Hosea 13:2

Kiss the calves. I could not let it go. I kept turning the image over, and the more I sat with it, the more it unsettled me, because of what these calves were made of.

Look closely at the verse. The idols are made of their silver. Their own wealth, melted down, shaped by their own hands into the form of an animal, and then bowed to and kissed. They took the thing they had earned, formed a god out of it, and worshiped the work of their own fingers. That is the whole tragedy in a single sentence. It is the golden calf of Exodus 32 all over again, the people stripping off their gold and casting it into an idol before Moses had even come down the mountain.

The calf kissers were not godless. They were devoted. Intensely, sincerely devoted. They just aimed all that devotion at the silver they had shaped themselves. And that is the oldest temptation there is, because money is one of the most discussed subjects in all of Scripture. Not because money is evil, but because of what we are so prone to do with it. We melt it down and kiss it.

Do not use it if you have a hole

Here is a principle I have come to live by. Do not use it if you have a hole.

Money, like the calf, does not create what is inside us. It reveals it, and it magnifies it. Hand a fortune to a whole person, and it becomes a tool. Roads get built, people get hired, orphans get homes, the kingdom advances. Hand that same fortune to a hollow person, and it becomes a god, an endless demand that can never be satisfied because it was never designed to fill a spiritual vacancy. The silver does not change. The person holding it does.

Whole people use tools. Broken people are used by them. The difference is not the amount in the account. It is the condition of the heart that holds it.

So the question is never really whether wealth is good or bad. Wealth is silver. The question is whether you will kiss it or steward it. And the most powerful answer I know to that question is not an argument. It is a handful of lives.

Arthur Guinness: wealth as ministry

During my doctoral program, I read Stephen Mansfield's The Search for God and Guinness, and it has stayed with me ever since. We tend to know Guinness as a beer. We rarely know Arthur Guinness as a man.

He built one of the most successful businesses in the world, and then spent the rest of his life giving it away in ways almost unheard of for his era. His company paid wages far above the going rate. It provided medical and dental care, built housing, funded education, and looked after the widows and families of its workers. Arthur Guinness himself was a founder of Sunday schools and a tireless supporter of causes that had nothing to do with his profit margins.

He got rich, and then he poured it out. He understood his fortune as a stewardship rather than a possession. The silver was a tool in his hands, and he used it to lift everyone around him. That is the exact opposite of kissing the calf.

Milton Hershey: the orphan boys as heirs

Right here in our part of Pennsylvania, we have another example, and this is one of my favorites. Milton Hershey built a chocolate empire and had no children of his own. After his wife, Catherine, died in 1915, he made a decision that still echoes today.

In 1918, he placed nearly his entire fortune into a perpetual trust for a school for orphaned children. When someone later asked him about it, his answer was simple. He said that since he had no children and no heirs, he had decided to make the orphan boys of the United States his heirs.

Here is the part that tells you everything about the man. He kept the gift secret for about five years. The story did not break publicly until 1923, when a newspaper ran the headline announcing a sixty-million-dollar gift had been confirmed. He had not wanted the credit. He told a magazine that advertising it would have felt like telling people to eat more chocolate in order to help the orphans, and he would not do it. The Milton Hershey School still runs on that trust to this day, more than a century later, educating children from families in need.

A man melted his fortune down and shaped it, not into a calf, but into a home for the fatherless. And then he refused to be photographed kissing it. That is what righteous wealth looks like.

Zacchaeus: the calf kisser who climbed down

But the heart of this whole matter is one short man in a tree.

Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector in Jericho, which means he was a professional calf-kisser. He had built his life on extracted silver, and he was so devoted to it that he had become wealthy by taking more than he was owed. By every measure of his day, he had handed his entire devotion to the wrong god.

And then Jesus looked up into that sycamore tree and called him by name. What happened next is one of the great turnarounds in all of Scripture. Zacchaeus did not renounce his wealth and walk away from it. He did something harder and better. He reconsecrated it. He stood up and announced that he would give half of everything he owned to the poor, and that anyone he had cheated he would repay four times over.

Notice what he did not do. He did not declare money evil. He did not abandon his calling. He took the very silver he had once worshiped and turned it into restoration and generosity. The calf kisser climbed down out of the tree and became a steward. Same man, same money, redirected devotion. And Jesus said that salvation had come to his house that day.

Which altar?

That is the invitation in front of every one of us, because the truth is we are all capable of intense devotion. That capacity is not the problem. It never was. The only question is where we are going to point it.

You can take the silver in your hand and melt it into a calf, or you can shape it into a school, a fair wage, a home for the fatherless, a fourfold repayment of an old wrong. The metal is the same. The fire is the same. What changes everything is the altar you bring it to.

We were never promised control over the markets, the economy, or the size of the fortune that passes through our hands. But we are always accountable for the condition of the heart that holds it. So check your heart before you reach for the tool. Do not use it if you have a hole. And if your devotion is already running hot, and it is, then aim it well.

Kiss the One worth kissing. Steward the rest.