One of the Christmas cards I got this year wasn’t really a Christmas card. It wasn’t even a Hannukah card. It was a Solstice card. It came from an old friend of mine named Sally who sang soprano in my medieval chamber vocals ensemble and taught me Middle Eastern dancing. (That’s belly dancing, to the carnally minded.) Sally was raised Methodist, has a BA in English lit, earns her living as a paralegal, and is very spiritual. She’s like the Athenians Paul preached to in Acts 17, after he’s wandered around the city for a few days looking at all the temples and shrines and statues. He starts out his sermon with “I see that you Athenians are very religious, for as I walked through your city and looked at the places where you worship, I found an altar on which is written, ‘to an Unknown God.’” He then proceeded to explain that this unknown God they had been seeking was the creator of Heaven and Earth, now made known to them in Jesus Christ. And many of his listeners were intrigued, and wanted to know more.
Unlike the Athenians, though, Sally doesn’t have an altar to the unknown God. She worships everything else. She’s into astrology, and Tarot, and crystals, and reincarnation, and channeling, and who knows what all else. Her family was Christian, at least nominally, but she rejected - not the unknown God, but the known God, YHWH God who revealed himself first to Moses on Mt. Sinai, then through Scriptures and the prophets, and finally in Jesus Christ. So she sent a Solstice card instead of a Christmas card, sharing with me her latest adventure in spirituality. Now, for those of you who haven’t kept up to date on all the do-it-yourself religions the New Age has brought us, the Winter Solstice is December 21st, the shortest day of the year. (The Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year). The other two major festival days of the ancient Druid religion are the spring and fall equinoxes, when day and night are of equal length.
The Druids were the priests and scholars of the Celtic tribes of France, Britain and Ireland. Rome just about wiped them out with the conquests of Gaul and Britain a couple of thousands of years ago, and the last remnants, in Ireland, were routed by Saint Patrick within another couple of hundred years. The Druids weren’t all bad. Part of the legacy they left was a love of music and poetry, and a really nuanced and comprehensive legal system. But one of their more colorful customs was telling the future through human sacrifice. They had a number of different ways of carving up the individual, depending on what the question was. Another of their religious practices was burnt offerings. They’d put a slave or a prisoner of war in a wicker cage, and hang him on one of the oak trees in their sacred grove, and set it on fire. You see, these people were valuable “things” they were giving to God, to get protection or provision or power.
It makes you wonder why anybody would be interested in awakening these old religions, doesn’t it?
And yet another friend of mine, a Unitarian of Jewish descent, tells of dawn rituals in college with a group of so-called neo-Druids featuring toasting the return of the sun every winter equinox with single malt Scotch. Now, probably most of the point of the ritual was the Scotch, but why the flirtation with pagan gods?
Maybe Moses knew what he was talking about, coming down from Mt. Sinai 3000+ years ago. Maybe there was a reason for the 2nd commandment that would outlast not only the Divided Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, but also the exile in Babylon, the rise and fall of Rome, the Dark Ages and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Maybe God knew what we are like, what our temptations are.
You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness 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 serve them; for I YHWH your God am a jealous God. [Dt 5:8-9]
It seems so far away from us, doesn’t it, that camp in the desert in the wilderness of Sinai. What can those refugees from forced labor, semi-starvation, and occasional outbursts of ethnic cleansing have to do with us? There are no humanitarian missions flying in food and medical supplies, no starving children or heroic freedom fighters getting their pictures on the evening news, no stirring speeches in the UN or uneasy speculations about the cost of living up to treaty obligations.
No, just a rag-tag band of religious fanatics followed by a horde of bewildered travelers in their 3rd month on the road, no doubt with the children whining “Are we there yet?” at every rest stop. Sure, they’d had plenty to eat, manna appearing as if by magic every morning & quail falling out of the sky & water bursting from rocks in the desert but they wanted what they were used to, hamburgers or pizza and a good cup of coffee, for goodness sake, they’d sell their souls for a cup of coffee and a good night’s sleep in their own beds. This wasn’t what they’d expected. God was so unreasonable. Why didn’t he just kill the Egyptians and let them take over? Wouldn’t that have been easier on everybody? Why did they have to go through all of this trouble?
But every time the people dared grumble or complain Moses would slap ‘em down. So they did what they were told, but reluctantly, out of fear. They were afraid of God, but they weren’t grateful. They were afraid of God, but the minute they thought he wasn’t looking, they broke the covenant they had made only days before. They were afraid of God, and most of them really didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Especially when they found out how he wanted them to behave.
When the people heard the thunder and the trumpet blast and saw the lightning and the smoking mountain, they trembled with fear and stood a long way off. They said to Moses, “If you speak to us, we will listen, but we are afraid that if God speaks to us, we will die.” Moses replied, “Do not be afraid, God has only come to test you and make you keep obeying him, so that you will not sin.” But the people continued to stand a long way off, and only Moses went near the dark cloud where God was. [Ex 20:18-21]
And no sooner had Moses disappeared up the mountain to get the stone tablets with the commandments they had already agreed to, they took the very first opportunity they could to change gods. They were even willing to give up their precious possessions – their gold and silver jewelry - to switch to a less demanding god. And Aaron, the priest, Moses’ brother for goodness sake, who of all people certainly had firsthand knowledge of God’s power and every reason in the world to stay faithful, agreed to build a golden calf for the people to worship. Why did he do it? Perhaps he secretly found God’s standards too demanding himself; perhaps he had been longing to be head honcho all along. At any rate, he read the polls & built the calf. And the people partied. To be blunt, they had a drunken orgy.
And God didn’t like it one bit. Read Exodus 32 if you want all the details.
Well, here we are in the book of Deuteronomy, forty years later, with the people poised on the river Jordan waiting to go over to the other side, and Moses is preaching a sermon series on the Ten Commandments, reminding a new generation of how important it is to remember what God has done for them, and to remember to do what God asks of them.
Last week we looked at the first commandment, and we saw that each one really has three parts. The first part is always a statement about God. Sometimes - as in the first one - this is part of the commandment; sometimes we find it in Moses’ sermon on the commandment, sometimes it’s inherent in the commandment itself. The second part tells us how we are supposed to respond to God. And that’s always spelled out pretty explicitly, so as to minimize the amount of wiggle room. The third part is, I believe, a statement about people. It’s almost always unspoken, and it’s the answer to why God chose these ten particular behaviors to focus on. Each commandment tells us something about ourselves, and it’s usually something we would rather not admit to.
With the second commandment we find the statement about God in Moses’ sermon.
Since you saw no form on the day that YHWH spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. And beware lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away & worship them and serve them, things which YHWH your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. But YHWH has taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own possession, as at this day. [Dt 4:15-20]
There are three things in this passage which we should note about God. First: God is invisible. Second: God is the creator / giver of all things. Third: we belong to God.
We know all these things. We take all these truths for granted. And because of that I’m not going to spend much time on this part of Moses’ sermon. But these three facts are the reason for the prohibition against making graven images, or idols.
Because God is not visible - that is, he is beyond the reach of our senses - we are not to try to reduce him to something that is visible.
Because God is the creator, and therefore above all creation, we are not to worship created things as if they were above God or independent from God.
And because we belong to God, we must not try to make God belong to us, be our servant, do our bidding, and take for granted as an ally in our non-stop wars against our neighbors.
But what does it say about people that God had to add this commandment to the first? Shouldn’t it have been enough to say, “You shall have no other gods before me”?
The first two things that this commandment tells us is that we want something we can see, and we want something we can control.
But this commandment also tells us that we often lie to ourselves, pretending that the things we have made up - the systems - the traditions - even our own beliefs about God - really are God. The people of Israel, when they had Aaron build the golden calf, cried out, “this is our God who brought us out of Egypt!” We are so built that we must worship something. But in our fallen state we turn away from the God who is, to whom we owe everything, and turn to something smaller, something that we can manage, that won’t call us to account, that will leave us with our comfortable lives, our self-esteem and our independence intact. Some of us do it by leaving the church, and worshipping something that we don’t even bother to call God - like our work, or our play, or our egos. Some of us, like my friend Sally, actually seek out other gods. Some of us come to church, but really worship elsewhere. And sometimes we worship an idol right here in church, and call it God.
Ken, another acquaintance of mine, rejected Christianity because of all the hypocrites in the church. “If the Christian God really is all that powerful,” he says, “why does he put up with it? Why doesn’t the Holy Spirit - if it’s real - really transform people? If Jesus gives us new hearts, why do so many of us go around acting as if we still have the old one?”
I’ve got to admit he has a point. There are a lot of hypocrites in the church. (I don’t particularly mean this church, mind, I actually think this church is some above average.) But even those of us who love the Lord with all our hearts often don’t reflect Jesus very well. What many people do in church has very little to do with worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, YHWH God the Holy One of Israel, God incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ, and more to do with enjoying the music, or meeting our friends, or maintaining our self-image.
Because true worship involves giving up control over our own lives, and putting them into the hands of God, and that is very difficult indeed. True worship lasts beyond the church service, and breaks into the rest of our lives. Worship that honors God comes from the glad surrender of our hearts, and many things get in the way.
Sometimes there are habits or ambitions or sins that we wish to hang on to that we know or suspect God wants us to give up. Sometimes we think God should be grateful that we’ve given up our mornings to be with him. Sometimes we’re just too blamed stubborn to give up control. Sometimes we are simply afraid of the unknown, as the Israelites were at the foot of the mountain, and seek to keep control of our own lives because we do not trust God enough to let go.
David wrote in Psalm 50, “Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice honor me,” and in Psalm 51, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken heart and a contrite spirit.” True worship consists of offering our very selves as a sacrifice, as Paul writes in Romans 12.
Poet Henry Twells has a word for all of us, in danger of being comfortably self-satisfied with our religious activities:
Not for our sins alone thy mercy, Lord, we sue;
let fall thy pitying glance on our devotions, too:
what we have done for thee, and what we think to do.
The holiest hours we spend in prayer upon our knees,
the times when most we deem our songs of praise will please,
thou searcher of all hearts, forgiveness pour on these.
Let us thank God that he doesn’t treat us and our modern-day golden calves the way he did the Israelites. Moses made everyone who had participated in that memorable party grind up the golden calf and drink the dust, and the next day the ones the Levites didn’t slaughter were wiped out by a plague.
No, God is more gentle with us, because of what Jesus Christ has done. Not only do we have forgiveness, we also have the Holy Spirit, who does change hearts, and who does show us the truth.
Our challenge today is to ask the Holy Spirit to show us the truth about our worship. Have we run from the the One who is, YHWH God the Redeemer of Israel and the father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Have we flinched at the thought of his transforming fire, and built a golden calf in its place?
Let each of us search our hearts in silence, and ask the Holy Spirit to give us the honesty and courage to place our idols on the altar.
