A few months ago, we cleaned out a basement closet in the Heatley household. This closet was primarily used for storing my old and now obsolete video equipment. As our kids helped sort through the old items, they were confounded by such artifacts as VHS tapes and players. Most puzzling was my old Motorola flip phone from the late nineties. In their world of ultra-thin cell phones, such a monstrosity was inconceivable.
“How did you fit that in your pocket?” they asked.
“It didn’t fit in my pocket,” I explained. “I had a belt clip for it.”
“You wore that on your belt? What a geek!”
I didn’t mention that, at the time, I also wore a pager on my belt so clients could reach me when I was out of cell phone range - which was just about everywhere. This exhibit of the last century’s technology demonstrated how far we have come. In the interest of convenience, cellular devices have become increasingly smaller and more portable. Ironically, the more convenient we make them, the more inconvenient they can become. Many of us feel we are at the beck and call of Blackberries. They have taken control of our lives. Portability has led to enslavement.
A portable containable god? What in the world am I talking about, you may wonder. To understand this concept, we must first look at how gods and idols functioned in the ancient world. Some anthropologists theorize that many ancient idols were in fact just representations of the values and traits of the collective community. In other words, a group of people would develop a set of values, come up with a totem or image to represent those values (such as an animal), and then worship this symbolic representation of their own values. The origin of these gods and idols was not from outside of human beings, but projections from within their own collective consciousness.
Many critics of the Judeo-Christian tradition would say we have done the same thing. God is merely a projection of our own best ideals and values - and that’s the nicer critics. However, such a criticism fails to take into account that built into our beliefs about this God is a self-awareness that humans tend to create gods. It is as if there is a safety mechanism built into the Ten Commandments to keep us from constructing God in our own image. As we explored last week, the commandments begin with the assertion that they have their origins not in our own best wishes, but in a source outside ourselves.
Have you noticed that people who believe in God tend to agree with what that God teaches or commands? As a result, that god never seems to challenge them or stretch their beliefs? When was the last time you felt God tugging on your heart to change your beliefs about something or someone? When is the last time you felt God challenge you or your assumptions? If it’s been a long time, it may just be that the god you believe in is not the God of Mt. Sinai, but an idol of your own construction. Or it may be that you are trying to fit God into a manageable and convenient package.
The ancients did this all the time. For those who used idols in their worship, gods were both partisan and portable. They were partisan in that these gods would presumably protect the believer’s city and provide victory in battles. They were portable in that it was believed the deity actually resided in the crafted idol. That’s why these idols needed eyes, a nose and a mouth - so they could live. As a result, when you conquered a nation, the first thing you would do is take your opponents idols out of their temple and bring them to your own, presumably to now work in your nation’s interests. We see this in the book of Samuel when the Philistines beat the Israelites in battle. As victors, they take the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the Ten Commandments, back to their homeland. They mistakenly believed that the Ark was the Israelites idol, that it contained their god and that this god would now side with them.
Even the children of Israel were guilty of this same small thinking about God. We are all familiar with the story of the Golden Calf, the idol they built at Mt Sinai. Most likely, when we hear that story, we assume the calf was meant to represent a god other than Yahweh, the God of Israel. In fact, many scholars believe that the sin of the Golden calf was not that it was a graven image of another god, but was intended to be a idolatrous representation of Yahweh. Archeologists have discovered statues of Canaanite gods such as El, or Baal depicting these deities as standing on the back of a bull. It may be that in making the Golden Calf, the children of Israel were not worshipping a different god, but were trying to confine the infinite Yahweh into their existing ideas of what a god was supposed to be.
The God of the Hebrews, the God of the Ten Commandments is not that kind of God. God is the infinite ground of being, as one theologian described it, and cannot be confined to a sacred object or idol. As Christians, we find the image of God perfectly in one place and in one person - Jesus Christ. In his life, death and resurrection we encounter this infinite God in a way we can comprehend. Think about it, as followers of Jesus, we are called to declare allegiance to this infinite God who cannot be contained. Where in the world will this God lead us? That is a scary proposition. In order to manage our fear, you and I continually make attempts to control and compartmentalize this infinite God. In turn, we create a false god and put that false god ahead of the one true living God. In that process, we break this the second commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me and you shall not make any created image.” How is confining God putting other gods first? Because once you define and limit God, it is no longer God you are following.
Few of us are sculpting totems in our garage anymore, yet all of us still fall prey to making idols. Sometimes we do that by putting other loyalties ahead of our loyalty to God. When we put our allegiance to our country, or our political ideology ahead of Jesus, we are worshipping other gods. The cross is not wrapped in the American flag, nor the flag of any other nation. I don’t care if you are a George W. Bush supporter or a Barack Obama supporter. When you put your allegiance to a political figure ahead of your allegiance to Christ, you are breaking this commandment. So as a pastor, I am not interested in hearing anyone in our church fawn over how much they love President Obama or former President Bush. I am interested in how much you love Jesus.
Recently I read about a mainline liberal church who fired their pastor. The congregation wanted to hear sermons about progressive political causes. This pastor, although politically liberal, kept tying his beliefs back to Jesus. He talked about Jesus - a little too much for their taste. Just this week, I read about a very conservative church who also fired their pastor. One reason for his dismissal was that in the three months he had been there, his sermons emphasized discipleship. Not once in those three months had he preached a sermon about gay marriage or abortion. So they fired him.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe following Jesus inevitably leads us to engage in politics and social issues. We aren’t supposed to be detached from the world, but we must be careful. I have seen Christians, on the right and the left, get involved in causes and as time goes on, the causes connection to following Jesus becomes tenuous. These people become more likely to speak the words of Jon Stewart or Rush Limbaugh, as the case may be, than the words of Jesus of Nazareth. When you take a stand on some social issue, if your stand generates from being first and foremost a liberal, or a conservative, or an independent, and does not first spring the teachings of Jesus, you are breaking this commandment. When you put your allegiance to a particular church, or denomination, or branch of Christianity be it Evangelical, Pentecostal, Emerging or whatever, ahead of Christ, you are breaking this commandment.
I have a new friend who teaches theology at a fairly conservative school. As he goes around and speaks at seminars and churches, there have been a few people who question his Christianity. They don’t like some of the things he has written in the nature of truth. One time, he was speaking at a church and someone in the audience, hung up on this truth issue, was accusing him of heresy. My friend explained that even though they disagreed, as followers of Jesus we could come together around Christ and let these other issues work themselves out.
“Jesus isn’t enough!” the man replied.
My friend was stunned. Here someone was telling him Jesus wasn’t enough, yet he was the heretic.
Jesus is enough. Sometimes we create idols with our ideas and concepts. Many religious traditions, including our own, state that the God you can describe completely is not the real God. When we put your ideas and beliefs about theology or the Bible ahead of following Jesus, we create an idol.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the ads on the inside covers of my comic books. They would advertise things like a six-foot figure of Frankenstein. I never ordered one but a friend did. Instead of a life-size statue, all he got was a big vinyl poster of the monster. There was also an ad for a submarine. I never ordered it but I suspect, I would have been disappointed had I ordered one. Then there was the one with a picture of Tyrannosaurus Rex standing next to a kid. This 3-D dinosaur looked to be about five feet tall. However, next to this two-inch high drawing was a small asterisk. Had I been more savvy as a child (or know what an asterisk was) before I ordered my T Rex, I would have looked to the fine print of the ad where it said - *Actual Size.
Sometimes, when we read about our infinite God in the Bible, we humans take assign an asterisk next to those words and add the phrase - Actual Size. But God is bigger than the words of the Bible. God is bigger than our conceptions, our causes or our idols. God is not limited to the convenient, partisan and portable containers where we try to confine God. God’s actual size is the size of Jesus who embodied infinite love, infinite compassion and infinite mercy for God’s Creation.
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