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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