Tent
or
Exodus
20:4-6; Matthew 4:1-11
A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie
University
Congregational United
Seattle, Washington
“You shall not make for yourself an idol.” Exodus 20:4a
Part of what it means to be human is to have idols. We all have them. No one doesn’t have idols. But we are here today to help each other discard them as we are able and in our discarding, we will feel a new freedom and a stronger, deeper relationship to God.
There’s a photograph I remember of a family standing looking at the place where their home had been in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Nothing was there but rubble. They had lost everything. Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to lose everything, to have nothing but the clothes on your back? Our brothers Kevin and Cole, evacuees from New Orleans, can answer that. Who would we be without our things, our homes, our cars, our furniture and clothing and possessions? To what extent do they define us and blur the relationship we have to God?
Idolatry concerns things that we can see, touch and feel that come between us and our sense that we are children of God and that our primary relationship in life is to the creator and redeemer God who made us and who cares for us in this life and beyond this life. For example, when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror what do you say to yourself or what do you think? Do you say, I am a child of God, God is with me, it’s a new day to serve God’s purposes? More likely, you rehearse your failures, your anxieties, your needs for forgiveness and maybe somewhere in that crowd of things there a glimmer of hope that helps you to stand there and face another day. Keep in mind that the beginning of the Ten Commandments proclaims liberation for us. We can be free to focus on God as a defining relationship and on Jesus as the path to that relationship. We don’t have to bemoan our failures. We can be free to focus on what is good and hopeful in our lives, focus on our blessings and deal accordingly with our curses.
In the film, The Mission, a story of the Jesuits in Brazil in the 16th century, a man commits murder, a crime of passion, and his sentence and penance are to drag a big net full of military armor behind him as they progress up the Amazon to the mission they are building. They are following a path next to and above the river. The agony in the eyes of the man dragging the net is moving and we can see in his eyes the connection between his suffering and the murder he committed. But there comes a moment in the film when one of the soldiers guarding this man sees that he has completed his penance. We can only imagine that the soldier has looked into these penitent eyes and realized that the man had dragged the net behind him long enough. So, he pulls his sword and in one swoop, cuts the rope holding the net and its cargo and it falls away into the river.
Such a scene moves us to ask what we are dragging behind us, what things that could get in the way of our spirituality, our connection to God, our sense of our freedom that God has already given us. What would we like to see fall into the river? What would we like to be rid of? How would that redeem us?
Many of the things we drag behind us are things that we have as the consequence of idolatry. We place value on things that, if we were to stop to think about it, we wouldn’t. Chris Hedges, in his book Losing Moses on the Freeway, quotes from Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Hedges describes the novel as one that “chronicles the spiritual death of those who dedicate their lives to the insatiable idols embodied in possessions and power, as well as intellectual and moral superiority.” [1] We need perspective on everything he names and we need God and each other to help keep those in things in proper perspective and in a place where they cannot be worshiped as God.
The needed perspective can be described using the tension between the words tent and temple. A tent is something that protects us from damp and cold. It is completely utilitarian. When we are finished with it, it can be folded and stored until the next time it is needed. A temple on the other hand is permanent and is vulnerable to becoming idolatrous because of its beauty and purpose. A tent can be a place where spiritual vitality flourishes. A temple, ironically, can be a place where the spirit dies because it has placed a higher value on something other than God, some material effigy, a graven image, an idol.
Our lives can be tents or temples. We can shape our lives in such a way that they convey substance such as love, justice and forgiveness, or we can shape in our lives in ways that because of our own self-concern, there is no room for love, justice or forgiveness.
Our homes can be tents or temples. They can protect us and provide a pleasant place to live, or they can be too important and in that become hollow places where love and forgiveness can’t exist.
Of course, our church buildings can be tents or temples. The six-year project that is just about finished with the renovation of our building, could in some circumstances end up as a temple. Not this building though and not in this congregation. While we have been greatly blessed by leadership, by money, by vision, and by generosity, permitting us to have this work done, at the same time, we have been trying to live up to the substance of our covenant by continuing to shape all the areas of our ministry and we having been trying to say yes to God’s purposes as it says in the new purpose statement you receive a month ago. We could not do that if we had been improving a building we worshiped. But this is our tent. It holds us and keeps us dry and warm and while protecting us, we are free to do God’s work in this place.
Today is pledge Sunday and it is a good day to ponder the tents and temples in our lives, the tensions between appearance and substance, between God and idolatry. These tensions exist whether we are in first grade or if we are 90. They are a part of human life. They have their own little battles at each stage of our lives. Let us pray that through the ministry of this church and the help of all that we have, our spirits will flourish in service to God’s world and not die being consumed by the temptations of human life. Amen.