University
Congregational United
“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not just as precious as they are?” -Matthew 6:26
As
we move in our study of the Ten Commandments to commandment two, I want to
start with a little variation that you may already know about. In every tradition, Jewish and Christian,
there are in fact ten commandments (just as one of our sanctuary banners
depicts). However, these commandments
are counted differently by different traditions. It is this text from Exodus that we just heard
which is the cause of the discrepancy in counting.
If you were raised Catholic or Lutheran, then even after we finish reading about making graven images and bowing down to them, we are still on commandment one. (By the way, in these traditions, to make the count still come out as ten, the very last commandment gets split in two by these traditions. It is an interesting and in some ways sensible split, but we will leave that story for another day).
Nevertheless, the context of all the commandments, regardless of how
you count them, is liberation.
“Remember,” says God. “Remember
and respond. I am God, who brought you
out of
The first four commandments (as we in the Reformed tradition count them) are all about our connection to God. The last six are about our connection to each other. And spanning them all is the call to remember: once you were slaves, and now you are free. Which brings us right back to this second commandment: “Don’t make any graven images, don’t bow down to them, and don’t imagine they are god.” God has set you free: do not become enslaved again.
And this command against graven images- idols- brings up the question: who was making such images and why would you bow down to them in the first place? If there is no problem, there is no need for a statement about the problem. And if it is not a significant problem, there is no need for this front and center statement, coming right out of the box as soon as we have made the commitment to worship only God. If this were not a critical point to be made, then something tucked in the back of Leviticus would have been just fine. A further and quite fair question might be, what does this commandment have to do with us, who in no way imagine that some statue has any power at all?
But this is the second clear
thing that God has to say to the people of
Then, God says, “Don’t make idols to bow down to.” Our elementary age children have been using as a basis for their study of the commandments a book by Rabbi Marc Gelman , called God’s Mailbox. This reading can give us a beginning point for understanding this commandment. Gelman says it this way:
Then God spoke to Moses and said to him, “Tell people not to even think about having any other god. I made everything everywhere. I made everything in heaven. I made everything on earth. I made everything over, under and in the water. I made everything that is sometimes under the water but mostly on the land. I made everything that is sometimes on the land but mostly under the water. I made everything that flies around, buzzes in your ear, and lands on your nose. . . . But make sure that you explain to the people that none of the things I made are me. . . . . Teach the people that the whole universe is filled with just two kinds of things: stuff . . . and the one who made the stuff.
“Now I know that people want to worship what they can see, and they can’t see me. I know they might pick out something they can see and call that thing God, but it isn’t! Only I am God. People will worship mud if you let them, so be careful. It will take three or four generations for your kids to get it right if you get it wrong, but if you get it right, your children will get it right for a thousand generations.. . . . Remember, remember, remember . . . everything but me is not God.”
There are two things in the world. There’s the stuff. And there’s the one who made the stuff. Don’t get those two things mixed up and you will do well. But as soon as you start confusing them, you will get tripped up.
But again we have to ask, how
might we be tempted to start confusing the stuff with the one who made the
stuff? One answer actually comes as part
of the Ten Commandments story, and it is a pretty well known story in the Old
Testament. Remember it with me. Moses has been up on Mt Sinai for forty
days. The rest of the people, having
escaped
It is Aaron, Moses’ brother,
who comes up with an answer. As the
moment of fear latches itself on to that longing for something to hold on to,
Aaron asks everyone to give him what is most precious to him or her. And out comes the gold- the rings, the
jewelry, all the precious things the people had taken with them from
Scholars have pointed out that
the calf, or more specifically the bull, was a representation of one of the
Egyptian gods, Apis.
It is no coincidence that this is the figure the Israelites are
worshipping. They just want to go
back. No matter that back there was
slavery. No matter that back there was
brutality. At least back there, they
imagine, we knew who we were, what was expected of us. The people in fact say it several times
throughout this journey in the wilderness.
Every time things get tough, they turn on Moses. “Why have you brought us out in this
wilderness to die?” they ask him.
“Wouldn’t it have been better just to stay in
It is a stunning statement, one that never fails to catch my attention. “Why fight this bondage?” the Israelites say. “Why expect something more?” I guess it catches my attention every time because it is such an accurate portrayal of the human situation. What we risk when we step out into something new is nothing less than losing everything. What happens when we try to cross the desert is that we go out to the desert and we risk the death of something- our dreams, our hopes, something. Not only is the journey to freedom very hard to begin, it is even harder to maintain.
The second commandment, the one so quickly broken, appears as it does because of our very human tendency to fall into fear, and from that place of fear to grab on to almost anything that we can see and imagine that it will save us. But there’s the stuff. And there’s the one who made the stuff.
And so quickly we get confused. And when life gets out of control, we are tempted to reach out to just about anything that promises control. And we are surrounded by those who profit from our panic for control. We are surrounded by those who erect false gods and invite us to worship them. Some of these invitations are easy to see- but they are no less tempting for it. In our world, we say, “Own the right stuff. Go to the right university. Get the right job. Have the right amount of money (and there is no end to how much the right amount is.) Look good. And things will go well for you in the land.” We build our idols and we bow down and worship them.
And of course there are also very subtle idols as well. They promise to fulfill us, and further promise that if we will just sacrifice to them, we will get what we want. So we work long hours to buy just the right electronic equipment to make our lives work well. We sacrifice our own sense of self in order to fit in to just the right group. We believe the lie that we can do it all, all on our own. “Be in charge. Don’t let anyone get the best of you. Achieve. Move up the ladder. Don’t let them see you sweat. And don’t ever let them know who you really are.”
Chris Hedges has said it very well in his little book on the Ten Commandments. “Idols comfort us, reassure us and empower us. They can be understood. Idols appear, when we worship them, to give us what we want. It is easier to trust idols. It is harder to trust in the unknown, in the darkness, in the voice answering Moses’ request for revelation with the words: I Am Who I Am.” (Losing Moses on the Freeway, p. 40).
God cannot be described. So beware of folks who “promise that God not only can be known but also can be manipulated.” “False prophets,” Hedges notes, “who say they can harness the power of God for us, lead us away from the worship of God into the corrosive idolatry of self-worship.” (p.42)
Idols are idols precisely because, by giving us something we can hold, and control, and manipulate, they promise a life that can be managed, and controlled, and manipulated. “Worship me,” they say, “and I will give you all the desires of your heart.” And it is precisely worship that the idols demand. They insist on devotion and sacrifice. They insist that we grant to them center place in our lives.
“The idols of nation, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and class are idols that demand exclusive and false covenants.” Hedges notes. “These covenants exalt ourselves, as long as we only define ourselves through these narrow definitions and exclude others outside the circle.” (p. 42)
And the deep failing, of course, is that we end up giving our lives over to the care of that which does not care. Idols draw us more deeply into the reality that they create, and further away from what it actually means to be human, vulnerabilities and all.
The prophet Isaiah was perhaps
the one who clarified it the best. When
the nation of
How shall we then keep this second commandment, and most especially how shall we keep it when it seems that we have been led into the wilderness and abandoned? Here is where I suggest that we turn to Jesus, who was able to live in the full reality of life. In the midst of his sermon on the mount, which some say is a rephrasing of these very commandments we are considering here, Jesus turns us toward an answer, when he invites us to consider the birds of the air, the lilies of the fields, and then, as fellow creatures, to relax into the care of God who cares for all. This invitation is the flip side of the second commandment. It is the centered response to the panic driven need to control, or to try to control, our lives. Turn again to Isaiah and hear the contrast in another way. Those idols that folks worship, he notes, they have to be carried wherever they go. If you want company on your journey, prepare to lift. Ultimately, and always, idols become a burden. God, on the other hand, is not the one you carry, but the one who carries you. (See, for example, Isaiah 45:19-21)
The answer is not something more to carry, but someone who carries us. This does not mean the path will be easy. But it does affirm that on this journey there is one who walks with us. There is stuff and there is the one who made the stuff. Count on your creator. And as you do, you will find a way to move forward.
Idols consume us, says Chris Hedges. But in the small acts of life, kindness,
giving of self, we find a way to resist.
It is self-giving that will save us from self-absorption. And of course such giving can be hard, and lonely,
and very much un-measurable in the world of idols. Yet it is just such an insistence on focusing
outward, and moving toward the difficulties and realities of life, and offering
ourselves in service, that we meet God, whose eye is on the sparrow and who is
indeed watching over you and me.
In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott tells how her father described writing to her brother. When he was overwhelmed by the thought of writing an essay for school about birds, his father told him, “Just take it bird by bird.” That now famous advice for writing can also be expanded into advice for life. Life will always have moments when it overwhelms us. We find ourselves in the middle of the desert, not sure where to turn or how to move forward. Life moves us toward moments of panic. Where shall we turn? How shall we move forward? “Bird by bird,” says Jesus. “Remember, the one who brought you here did not bring you this far to leave you.”
Let me say one last word, which is a word of community. I do believe that it is in community and in covenant that we are truly held by God. To resist the false gods of society, find a community that is resisting them as well. And I believe that I have found that community right here.
This month, our congregation is moving into a time of stewardship, a time of pledging, a time of budgets. As we begin to talk about these numbers that we can see, let us remember: There’s stuff, and there’s the one who made the stuff. The stuff we can see, we can handle, we can manipulate. It is tempting to come to believe that the final reality of this community is in the numbers. But what I hope our pledge campaign will remind you of this year is that we are indeed a blessed community.
There’s stuff, and there’s the One who made the stuff. And God is indeed watching over you and me. Amen