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Sunday, September 11, 2016

WE NEED GOD to Keep Up Our Image

A sermon based upon Exodus 20: 4-6; 32:1-29; Acts 17: 16-31
By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, D.Min.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Year C: Proper 19, 17th Sunday After Pentecost, September 11th, 2016

A little boy drawing a picture was asked, what are you drawing?   
        His quick reply: “God”. 
The teacher answers, “But no one knows what God looks like.”  To which the 
          little boy answers, “They will when I get through with my picture.”

How do you visualize God?  What lens or filter do you look through?    The Second commandment; “You must not make carved or graven images of God” (Ex. 20:7), intends to make us realize that any of our ‘images’ of God, either mental or religious, are not really God.

You do realize that you don’t actually see or hear God on your own terms, don’t you?   Some in Broughton Mental Hospital would claim they’ve heard God talking to them directly, but a healthy mind would only acknowledge knowing God through the mind or heart.   Recent science even suggests that we have “God spots” in our brains.   Using physical, cultural and spiritual filters, our minds seem ‘wired’ with a capacity to focus less on self and more on God and others.  But we do this indirectly, not directly; approximately, not exactly, intuitively, not always analytically.   For example, we can see this limitation is how many of us, because of our forefathers in faith, understand God through Baptist filters, through Methodist filters, Quaker, Presbyterian, Catholic, and so on.   Humans are spiritually ‘programed’ with a built-in need to transcend our self-centeredness, but our spiritual beliefs and religious traditions are particular to our own ways of seeing, based upon our specific needs, experiences, and our own ability to understand through differing cultural and religious viewpoints.   (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/20/god-spot-in-brain-is-not-_n_1440518.html)

Scripture says “No one may (actually) see (God) and live” (Ex. 33:20).  This means the ‘living God” who is the ‘true God,’ will remain hidden, beyond all our individual viewpoints and the mental images in our minds, or he ceases to be God.  As J.B. Philips suggested many years ago, unless you always allow for your own limitations, even in how you interpret the God who has revealed himself to us through the Word, Jesus Christ, “Your God (Could) Be Too Small.” 

THE PROBLEM WITH “IMAGE
Since, ‘our ways are not God’s ways, and our thoughts are not God’s thoughts’ (Is. 55:8), let me tell why this is so important;  why it is important for us to know that the true God and the ‘truth of God’ is always beyond us and can’t fully be ‘imagined’ by any of us.  I was on my first mission trip outside the U.S., on a mission trip to Brazil, where I was revival speaker for the Monte Horbe, Igelsia Baptista.   My sermon was being translated by a Brazilian lady who did everything she could to try to make my sermon work.  But it just wasn't working, at least it wasn’t working for me.  But it wasn’t the sermon material that was the problem; but it was the hammering going on overhead as I preached on that Sunday morning.  

While we were trying worship and I attempted to preach, several men were hammering away on the roof.  How could they do such a thing on Sunday?”  I thought to myself.  “Why did the people and the pastor let this go on, especially while I, a visitor, struggling to preach with a translator, was trying to preach?”   I just could not figure it out.  Was my preaching that bad?  Maybe.  Maybe they just took advantage of moment when the real pastor had a Sunday off, and they wouldn’t pay attention an American.  All this was whirling in my mind, so after the service concluded, I could not wait to ask the Brazilian pastor why those guys kept hammering while we were trying to worship.
      “Those are my deacons,” he answered trying not to laugh.
     “Your Deacons were hammering on Sunday during the worship service? 
    “Yes,” he said.  “We have a hole in our roof.   We are all poor people and cannot afford to take a day off to fix it, so with the only time they had free, they were fixing the roof.”
      “Doesn’t that disturb worship?”  I asked.
      “That hammering was worship”, he said. “They were all hammering away to the glory of God because they were fixing the roof.
His answer both humbled me, but also inspired me, to realize that God could ‘work’ in ways that I had never imagined before.

This is one of the first things you’ll notice when you visit different churches in different cultures.  They seldom do things exactly the same way we do.  We all pray, but we pray differently.  We go to church for worship, but we express our worship differently, we dress differently and we approach God differently.  Sometimes this happens out of habit or traditions established long before we can along.  Other times, differing worship arises out of particular experiences or necessities of a particular moment.   It is always important that we no mistake the ‘form’ for the truth of God that is always beyond our own traditions, rituals, or worship practices.

Whenever missionaries go to different cultures, one of the great temptations is to try to make “Americans” out of people, rather than calling them to become Christians within their own culture.   Because we all come with set of lenses that human culture gives us, the good news of God ought to be allowed to shape us within our own cultural filters.  While this is the normal and natural way to receive the gospel, it is also important that the gospel must not restricted by these cultural filters.   For example, when you put ‘native’ peoples into three piece suits and make them sing Bach, it might look cute and interesting, but the problem is that it may not be true worship for those people.   True worship must arise out of a particular culture and tradition.  Faith must not oppose culture because it also needs culture as a channel for responding to God.   In other words, it is through what happens around me, that I realize what my responsibilities should be. 

In the same way, you must try to understand culture when you preach, teach, or try to communicate the gospel, especially ‘cross-culturally’.  For example, when missionaries first preached to Chinese people and spoke of being ‘sinners’ it first sounded like the missionaries were calling them all “criminals” or ‘crooks’.  The traditional Chinese language had no actual word for sinner.  So, those missionaries had to develop a way of  clarifying that being a sinner did not make you a criminal, or bad person, but it being a ‘sinner’ means that we all ‘fall short’, as Scripture says, and we all have potential to commit ‘crimes’ against God and each other.  But, through Jesus, God has provided a way to forgive and help us overcome.  They had to help the Chinese, and other Asian cultures,  picture the ‘good news’ in ways that “fit” their own cultural understandings.

Why am I giving you this extended lesson in “Cross Cultural Communication?”   It all goes back to this second commandment.   If you are going know a truth as big as God, you must realize that you will always face limits.  The truth about God, if it remains God’s truth, must always remain bigger, larger, and greater than all “human” understandings and cultures.  God can’t be reduced to human ingenuity or imagination. God only remains God, precisely when we don’t try to force God to fit neatly into our finite minds.  Only when God remains above or beyond us, can the true God be in us.    

Don’t make any graven or carved image!” is the commandment that reminds that no cultural, human-made, or humanly imagined image of God you or I have in our minds, will ever be all there is to God.   If you stop and think about it, no command has had a greater ‘ripple effect’ in Bible or theological “pond’.   While defining what we mean by God has very important implications for what we believe, realizing that we ‘can’t’ fully grasp the whole ‘truth of God’ is just as important.  When you start to believe or think you know everything there is to know about God, or when you think you have ‘the corner-market’ on God, you have immediately begun to create a ‘false image’—a false image, which the Bible says can become your idol.  

Idolatry--- worshipping “Idols” is the big “no, no” of the Bible (1 Sam. 15:23).  The sin of Idolatry is how ancient peoples tried to approached or imagine God on their own terms.   This is not just a religious problem.   This is something that should concern you—whether you are religious or not.  When you imagine God, on your own terms, without allowing for your human limitations or without submitting to God’s revelation of Himself, it isn’t long until you begin to make ‘false’ images or idols, not only of God, but you can also start making ‘false images’ or ‘idols’ of yourself.   We must realize that this is not really a commandment about God wanting to protect his image, but it finally a commandment this who God who is trying to protect the ‘image’ of God stamped within each of us. 

Of course, we live world that uses the term ‘idol’ figuratively, but also flippantly--such as the once wildly popular show “American Idol”.    This popular usage of the word “Idol” reminds us just how much of our culture today is built around ‘image’?   Image sells.  Daily we are bombarded by stereotypes; including popular images of youth, images about money, about sex, and of course, in this political year, images of power that promises the ‘moon’.   Even churches have gotten into image making business, by marketing themselves in ways that may help present the gospel in a very image conscious world.   Make no mistake, even though our society has very few ‘ironsmiths’ fashioning  images of godlike ‘idols’ (Isaiah 44: 12ff), we still live in a world continues to promote ‘godlike’ images of what people want. 

On the TODAY SHOW once, there was a spot about how many thousands, even millions of dollars are spent by Americans each year so they can go on diets in order to project the ‘right image’.   In fact, for most American who diet, it is not about health at all, though it could be, but most dieting today is about ‘image’.   What was most interesting in the report, was scientific studies have proven that ‘fad’ diets really don’t do much to help us lose weight, nor recreate our image.   Heredity and genetics has much more to do with our body type and sometimes even our weight, as much as anything we try to do to obtain a certain look or shape.  Moderation and exercising are much healthier than going after an ideal weight that most people cannot, or should ever REACH.  And even and if we do reach it, we will most likely not be able to maintain it.   

Along with this concern for physical image, we also SEE THE SELLING of images all around us?  The image of having the right body, the right car, the right house, and the right job are all a part of the daily dreams of most Americans.  Some will sell their own souls, or the soul of their family, in order to obtain or maintain the perfect image some wish to see in themselves. 

Interestingly, the commandment of God is concerned about the kinds of “images” we promote.   But, in this second commandment,  as it is constantly communicated in the Bible, God has some very different reasons for being ‘image conscious’.   God is concerned that when we create ‘false images’ of God, or what we want to be ‘god’ for us,   we will also end up with false, self-destructive, life-robbing images of ourselves. 

HOW IMAGES BECOME IDOLS
In order to better understand humans still may become ‘idol’ makers, let’s go back to the first story of ‘idol’ making.   IN EXODUS 32, even while Moses was on the Mountain with God, receiving the Ten Commandments, the people of God became impatient and convinced Aaron to help them CREATE AN “IMAGE” representing their desire for gods’ on their own terms.   It is exactly this human tendency to be impatient with the truth of God, along with being so overbearingly “IMAGE CONSCIOUS” that this commandment was given to deter, saying:  "Do not make for yourselves a carved image, whether in the form of anything in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the water under the earth.  You are not to bow down to them and you are not to worship them."  (Ex. 20:4-5a).   GOD’S PROBLEM IS NOT SO MUCH WITH us needing to imagine God in our own minds, AS IT IS WITH TURNING our way of imagining God into self-serving “IDOLS”.   WHEN WE “IDOLIZE” the IMAGE---we confuse a human-made image we have created in our own limited, finite minds, with the unbounded, infinite, eternal truth of a living God, who cannot be contained or controlled by us.    
ONE OF THE GREATEST truths in the entire Hebrew Bible is how it was finally perceived that “idolatry” was the ‘sin’ which resulted in the DOWNFALL OF Israel  (Eze. 23:49).  But of course, we would never be so foolish today, would we?  IDOL WORSHIP SEEMS LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM US, right?    Wrong!  Idolatry is still a major concern for truth faith.  Do you know why?   It’s simple:  God does not allow for substitutes; none.  This is the core problem of making our own images of God.  WHEN WE ‘IDOLIZE’ THE IMAGE, even perhaps a very good image of God which we may have in our own mind---if we are not careful,  even “good” images and ‘true’ understandings of God, when craved out or controlled by us, can END UP BEING SUBSTITUTES for the true God, who is beyond all human imagining and comprehension. 

Let’s get practical.  Think, for a moment about how we might idolize an image as a substitute for the true God.   Let’s go straight to the most important one for ‘biblical Christians’: BIBLIOLATRY---which is IDOLIZING THE BIBLE.  We Christians believe the Bible.  We Believe the Bible is true in what it intends to say, and we also believe that God’s truth is revealed in the Bible.  What we must be careful not to think or do, however, is to start treating the Bible as if it is “god-like”.  The Bible does become a worthy vehicle of the truth of God, but it must never become ‘godlike’.  Since the Bible has human authors, though guided by the Holy Spirit, we still have to carefully interpret its words with reverence.  The Bible is a trustworthy ‘channel’ for God’s Word, but only because it points us to the final WORD of God, who is Jesus Christ.   When we lose the living message of Jesus as the key that unlocks the truth of God written Word, we are liable to idolize the Bible.  Some people do this with a particular version of the Bible, because instead of following the Spirit of Jesus revealed in the Bible, they start getting stuck on Bible itself, and end up brow beating other people with their opinions about the Bible, rather than actually following Jesus.  Let’s face it folks, there’s been a lot of Bibliolatry among some Baptists.  Many have idolized a book, and have missed  obeying the truth of the God of the book.

The same kind of thing HAPPENNED WITH DENOMINATIONALISM, DIDN’T IT?  Some people used to think their denomination was the only true denomination and that all other denominations were going straight to hell.  Instead of being humble and realizing that we are all limited in our view of God and we all see God through our own experiences, SOME ELEVATED THEIR OWN VIEWPOINTS SO HIGH, that they MISSED OTHER ASPECTS OF GOD, which could be found in other denominations. 

If we are not careful, we too can get stuck in the very kind of MAN-MADE RELIGION Jesus came to free us from.   OUR FAITH IS NOT ABOUT RELIGION, IT IS ABOUT RELATIONSHIP.  This reflects the great problem with idols: It’s HARD TO RELATE TO AN IDOL.  You can talk to them, but they don’t talk back.  You can walk to them, but they can't walk with you.  You can hold them in your hand, but they can’t hold you.  That is the problem with substitutes.  They can be there when you want them, but THEY ARE NOT ALWAYS THERE WHEN YOU NEED THEM.  Idols are mere substitutes with no true substance.   They are dead replacements for a living, true God. 

We still need to be warned against the trap of creating Idols, even in a modern world.  WHEN WE PUT ANYTHING, anyone or any idea in the place of the living, untouchable, unspeakable, and undefinable God, we CREATE AN IMAGE THAT BECOMES AN IDOL.  God defines us, we don’t define him.   As the theologian Paul Tillich once put it: “The true God is the “God beyond God” we imagine, or he is not God at all.”   If we fail to forget that God we could and would know nothing of God, unless God had revealed himself.   AND EVEN WHAT has been revealed to us, we CAN’T HOLD TO TOO TIGHTLY, or MISS the Many WAYS GOD CAN still COME to us, in our world and into our hearts.  Remember Mary Magdalene in the Garden, as she met the resurrected Christ, and how she was still trying to hold on to the earthly Jesus.  Jesus spoke to her, saying, “Mary, don’t cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father.”   Only when Mary ‘let go’ of the God she once knew, could she continue to walk with the living, life-giving, death-defying God of her own future.

WHO REALLY GETS HURT?
In THE FINAL PART OF THIS COMMANDMENT, God reminds Israel that HE IS A JEALOUS God who will NOT ALLOW HIS PEOPLE TO WORSHIP idols.  If they do, GOD says he WILL BRING JUDGMENT, “visiting the iniquity of the Fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation….”

SOUNDS A LITTLE HARSH, DOESN’T IT?   Why is God so concerned about idolatry?  Why is he so jealous?   Well, the answer is in the text itself.  IDOLATRY ENDS UP HURTING US more than it could ever HURT GOD.  When we substitute our false images for the true God, WE are the ones who SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.  

The greatest tragedy of idolatry is that when we ‘create’ a god of our own, we create a god we can use, but we have left the very GOD can use us.   When we limit God, WE LESSEN OURSELVES.   When we create a false image of God, we demote and demoralize the image of God within us.  When we get fixated on the thing we want, we are likely to miss the very thing we need. 

Pastor John Killinger tells of a woman who once fell in love with a travel poster.    It was a dramatic photograph showing the whitewashed buildings and Byzantine domes of the Greek island of Santorni, with the shining blue sea behind them.   She asked the travel agent for a copy of the poster, and she took it home and put it up in her breakfast nook, where she would see it every morning.   Soon she began to dream of going to the Greek islands and seeing this ‘fabled’ view for herself.  

Each time she received a paycheck, she put away a few dollars toward the realization of her dream.   Eventually the day come when she flew off to Athens on the first leg of her journey.  Because her tour included several days in the city of Athens, she dutifully made the rounds of the sights, but she confessed to one lady that she was not very much interested in what she was seeing, for she had really come for only one purpose: to see the beautiful scene in Santorini that was captured o her travel poster.

When the tour group left Athens, it traveled by steamer to the ancient island of Mykonos, with its twisting, narrow streets, it unforgettable harbor, its picturesque windmills, and it whitewashed buildings and Byzantine domes.   Most of the people in the group oohed and ahhed at the glorious sights, and some even began to write poetry the evening they stood on the hill and watched the sun set like a fiery red wafer into the mauve and golden sea.  But the woman was unyielding; she had come to see the houses, domes of Santorni.
From Mykonos, the tour transported the group to the little island of Paros.  They stayed on the leeward side of the island in a hotel overlooking a beautiful bay where the fishermen brought in their catches every evening just before dinner.  In the daytime, many of the party lay indolently on the crescent beach that stretched around one end of the bay.  Others swam in the luminously clear waters, marveling at the beauty of their surroundings.  But the woman rarely left her hotel room.  She was dreaming of her special view in Santorini.

Finally, the tour arrived at Santorini.  The ship sailed into the rim of the enormous volcano on which the city is perched.  It was almost dusk, and the sky over the sea looked like a great bank of embers, slowly fading into the night.  Many people said it was the most beautiful sight they had ever seen.  But the woman rode silently up the hill to the hotel, clutching her dream of the view on the poster.  “Tomorrow morning, when the sun rises,” she thought to herself, “I will see it.”  She would have only a few hours in the city, but it would be worth it.  She would stand on the walls of the city and look down across those gorgeous housetops and domes pictured on the poster.  Her heart was pounding faster than she had ever known it to pound.  She didn’t know if she would be able to sleep.
During the night, a great storm off the coast of southern Italy moved into the Aegean Sea, bringing cooler temperatures to the region.  As the cold air met the warm sea water, thick vapors rose and spread their murky blanket over everything.  When the woman awoke and rushed out to her balcony to look out over the view she had longed to see, everything was shrouded in fog.  She could barely see the building immediately below her hotel.  Later in the day, her heart heavy with disappointment, she sailed with her group toward Crete, where they would catch a plane home.  She had missed everything; all the grandeur and beauty of an entire civilization, by focusing too exclusively on a single image. (See To My People With Love, Abingdon Press, 1988, pp. 36-38).

If you idolize God into a single fixed form; a god who only reflects your own views, your own self-made images, your own individualized politics, even your own culture or ‘home grown’ religion, you will end up carving out your image of God.  If you fix your sights only on this one image, you’ll end up missing everything else God is or is doing in this world.   The only way God can be seen, without shortchanging his image and without short changing our own lives, is by following Jesus. 

While we know that people can ‘use’ Jesus too, instead of actually following him, if we want to find the way to follow Jesus without falling into idolatry,  we need to remember the conversation Jesus once had with the Woman at the Well.  The topic of their discussion was about whether God should be worshiped in Jerusalem, or in Samaria.   The Samaritans had their own copy of the Bible, and considered themselves faithful Jews, even though they were not Jewish.  The Jews considered these Samaritans half-breeds, because they weren’t purely Jewish and used their copy of the Bible.  How did Jesus answer the argument over who had the true image of God?  Jesus answered, “one day” we will all “worship the Father in spirit and truth”.  One day, we will get beyond all the limiting ways humans get fixated and miss the ‘true God’ who is spirit—the spirit of love and compassion.    Paul explained the same hope to the Greeks in Athens when he said, “God doesn’t live in man-made temples… human hand can’t serve his needs, because he has need of nothing.  He himself gives life and breath to everything and satisfies every need there is.. (Acts 17: 22-31). 

So, how do we overcome idolatry, according to the Christian gospel?  There is only one way.  Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father.” (Jn. 14:9).  Do you know how WE CAN WORSHIP JESUS AN NOT IDOLIZE GOD?   Besides the fact that JESUS WAS GOD IN THE FLESH, there is yet another reason.   Jesus not only showed us God was at work in Christ Jesus, reconciling the world to God’s love, but Jesus ALSO SHOWED US HOW GOD CAN LIVE THROUGH any of us.   What Jesus came to do was to restore the “image of God” in us.   WE WERE CREATED IN GOD’S IMAGE, and through Jesus Christ, this image of God in us can be restored.  WHEN YOU CAN SEE GOD IN JESUS and you want to see God at work in your LIFE, AND when you also begin to SEE THE IMAGE OF GOD IN OTHERS, you don’t need an idol any more.   It is like Jacob told Esau, “Seeing your face, is like seeing the Face of God.”  WHO NEEDS AN IDOL, when we can LOVE EACH OTHER?  Who needs an idol, when the GOD WE CAN’T SEE IS REVEALED BEST BY LOVING the people we do see?  It is through loving, caring, and serving others that the God’s truth still tears down all the false idols in this world.   Amen. 



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