Sermon 11/6/16
Exodus 20:1-5a, 22-24, Matthew 6:24-25
Thankful People: Idols
I’ve mentioned to you before that
one of the things Jesus talks about most in the gospels is money: our stuff,
our things, what we treasure, what we do with what we’ve been given. Perhaps up
to 40% of the teachings of Jesus relate in some way to our wealth and what we
do with it. But throughout the scriptures as a whole there’s a broader,
recurring topic that takes us from one end of the scriptures to the other, and
that’s idolatry, the practice of making and worshiping false gods.
Today when we hear the word idol, we
don’t usually think of worshipping false gods. Without a little context, that
concept is kind of hard for us to get our heads around. What pops to our mind
is American Idol, celebrities, sports figures, people we put on a pedestal,
people we want to be like, people we admire. But I don’t think we’d say we want
to worship those people, right? I
think when we think about idolatry, we maybe think about the golden calf that
Aaron and the Israelites made and worshiped, and we can’t picture ourselves ever
doing anything like that, and so we’re pretty sure idolatry isn’t something we
have to worry much about.
In the scriptures, most of the story
we get of God and God’s people finds God’s people living in an extremely
multicultural society. The Israelites were a tiny people, relative to the size
of other nations, and they often found themselves living and moving among
peoples of other nations and cultures, surrounded by people who practiced
different faith traditions, worshiped other gods. And so, when God gives the
law for God’s people to Moses, the very first of all of them is the one we read
in Exodus in our text for today: “I am the Lord your God … you shall have no
other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the
form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or
that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship
them.” Instead, God says, at the altar, make offerings to me from your life,
your livelihood. And I will bless you. Time and again in the scriptures, God
and God’s servants demonstrate that God, creator of the universe, is not a god
who can be contained, boxed in, controlled. And making idols is something that
makes a deity small enough to be controlled by the one doing the idolizing,
even though it seems like an act of adoration.
Our gospel lesson is two short
verses from Matthew, and Jesus’ words demonstrate that idols are more than
images of other gods. Idols are whenever we’ve let something else be master of
our lives besides God. “No one can serve two masters” Jesus says, “for a slave
will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and
despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. Therefore I tell you, do
not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about
your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more
than clothing?”
When Jesus talks about worry, the word means literally to “be
preoccupied with or be absorbed by.” When Jesus speaks of worry, he’s not
speaking of the mild anxiety we might have about our upcoming to do list. He’s
speaking of something that preoccupies us, absorbs our attention, takes our
effort and energy and heart’s direction. In fact, in this way, Jesus is describing
something that’s very close to idolatry. Idolatry is when we take anything that
is other than God, and give it the place of God in our lives. All through the
scriptures, idolatry is one of the things that God most deplores about our
human behavior. Again and again, we’re putting something else in a more
important place than we put God. Are you absorbed by something other than God?
Letting your life revolve around that which is not God? You can never serve two
masters, Jesus says, and doing so is putting your very soul at risk. If we
don’t want to end up serving a master other than God, we must stop letting our
lives be absorbed by things that aren’t God. Idolatry, then, is the thing God
and the writers of the scriptures warn most against from one end of the Bible
to the other.
Today I talked with the children
about putting God first. It isn’t that God doesn’t want us to have the other
good things that we enjoy in our lives. But we’re meant to put the things in
our life in the right place, the right order, giving priority and weight to
what matters most. God first, and God most and best, and then everything else.
How often, and how easily, though, do we find that we’re trying to put
everything else in and squeeze God and God’s hopes for our life in with the
little bit of leftover room at the end!
When I was first in ministry, and
making my giving commitment, I have to admit I did something like this. I’d
make my budget and budget in what I wanted to give as my tithe – but I wouldn’t
give it right away. I’d wait, because I considered it sort of a cushion of
money if something went wrong during the month. Inevitably, things would come
up and I’d spend a little more here and a little more there than I meant to,
and the portion I was giving to God got smaller and smaller, and sometimes it
disappeared altogether. After some time, I decided I needed to make a change,
and I started having my tithe withheld from my paycheck. I’d never even see the
money, so I couldn’t forget to give it first, and I couldn’t play around with
the amount, and I couldn’t use it for other things. It was a hard change, but I
learned to make do, and more than that, I felt like I was putting my life in
the right order. God first, everything else next. And our financial resources
are just a part of it. Who gets our time first? Who gets our energy first? Who
gets our heart first? Getting your life in order, with God in the right place,
the first place, isn’t a magic plan that will make you rich or make things
trouble-free, or make things easy. But reordering our lives with God first will
bring us deep peace, unfailing hope, lasting joy. God promises. Next Sunday we’ll celebrate Consecration Sunday, as we
make a financial commitment to God for the year ahead. It’s one way in which we
are called to tangibly reorder our lives with God first.
Today we celebrate All Saints
Sunday. It’s not a day that we’re celebrating idols that we’ve put up on
pedestals, as much as we loved the people who we’ll name today. That’s not what
All Saints is about. In the scriptures, the word we read as “saints” literally
means “holy ones.” Saints are people who are being made holy. Remember, last
Sunday we talked about how God makes us holy, when we ask God to consecrate our
lives – to take our ordinary selves and make them holy. When we have opened our
lives to God’s work in us in that way, when we’ve committed to a life of
allowing God to work in us more fully and completely all the time, when we’ve
committed to reordering our lives so that God is first, and center, that’s what
God does in us – make our ordinary lives holy, makes us holy ones, makes us
part of the communion of saints.
We can be disciples of only one teacher. We can serve only
one master. Only one thing can have first place in our lives. What are you
putting first?
Amen.
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