Let's talk about Idolatry: Lectionary Reading for October 11th

 One of my favorite parts of being a Pastor was nearly always the novelty... you never knew what any individual week was going to bring to the table and it was pretty darn fun. Still, sometimes it's good to have a rhythm, and for me, the process of Sermon writing was my favorite rhythm. It would start with reading the texts on Monday, taking a solid guess at what the Holy Spirit was up to and then submitting my bulletin based on that guess.

Then, the real fun would start.

For the next couple of days, in the midst of the other work of being a Pastor, I would live in those texts, often walking to the Sanctuary to walk around, trying out phrases, reading the text aloud (which can REALLY change how you read) and seeing what ideas would jump up. Often, those ideas followed the initial line of thought for the bulletin somewhat... but occasionally, the impulse would go in another direction entirely.

I usually started those sermons with an apology that what the people were about to hear would NOT be following the expected course they'd read in the bulletin. Some of them would roll their eyes at me, others would lead forward. Typically, if the Holy Spirit interrupted my usual rhythm to take me in a different direction, the result was pretty good, at the very least, they knew it would be interesting.

Here are the texts for October 11th!

Exodus 32:1-14

 The Text:

With Moses delayed coming down from the mountain after receiving the 10 commandments, the People of Israel assume that he is dead and get started with the idolatry, with Aaron melting down the people's gold belongings (many of which were probably "gifts" from the Egyptians when they fled Egypt) and making a golden calf. God informs Moses of this and decides to wipe the people out, and start over again from Moses. Moses then pleads on the People's behalf and changes God's mind.

The Take:

It's worth pointing out here that Israel's seemingly shockingly quick descent into idolatry probably was not MEANT by the people as an abandonment of the God who saved them. You have to remember that only Moses had really spoken directly to the LORD at this point, and the storm on the mountaintop when he received the Ten Commandments gave them more than enough reason to believe that Moses was dead. In the loss of their previous reminder of the presence of God, they turned to another... in admittedly a way Aaron at least should have seen was a really bad idea, but you also have to remember they had to this point in their lives been second class Egyptian citizens,  and in the chaos since their exit from Egypt, it's reasonable to assume that they hadn't been caught up on details such as how THEIR God, unlike others they had known, was not about idol worship.

God and Moses then descend into what can only sound to us now like a pair of parents arguing over their children. If you are a parent (and have a partner in that endeavor) you likely WELL know what it is to go home and have your partner inform you of what YOUR child did in your absence. That context is worth remembering... I have occasionally muttered to my wife "That's it, this time I kill her," about our daughter, but that is never the meaning, and my wife never has taken it as such. It's frustration voiced in hyperbole, not murderous rage. (Let me step away from the keyboard to confirm that she knows that... yup, confirmed!)

This isn't to say the LORD is above violence according to the authors of Exodus... we're just a few plagues out of Egypt, after all, but huge mistake I think a lot of people make in interpreting the Old Testament is the fact that the Hebrew people were funny, liked jokes (especially puns) and in general had nuance... it's stodgy old white people who've done everything they could do to drain all humor and color from the source material.

So while it is certainly POSSIBLE that God was just about to go down the mountain and wipe out the Hebrews once and for all, it's at least worth a second to consider that something else might have been going on.

Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23

The Text:

This is a psalm about our previous text, and skipping right over the parents quarrel it goes straight to the sins of the Israelites and gives praise to God for being Merciful. It cuts straight to the quick of the Hebrews as well, naming their calamitous misrepresentation of God as the sin it is, and taking a moment to again praise God for patience in the face of such a colossal mistake. 

The Take:

 This is another text that you probably read in a very serious way, thereby missing out on a lot of the tone that is just screaming out at you if you allow yourself to hear it. 

 

You. Mistook. Your GOD. The one who SAVED you. From EGYPT. You mistook that GOD for a gold Bull. A creature that eats GRASS. YOU THOUGHT YOUR GOD WAS A BULL.

 

I mean, if you allow yourself to hear the incredulity the psalm, it can totally shape how you read the whole text, and as the psalmist sings on behalf of Israel, it reads somewhat like a VERY apologetic spouse thanking their partner for the forgiveness offered when they had done something incredibly stupid.

 

Philippians 4:1-9

The Text:

So the middle part of this text probably rang familiar for a number of readers, it's a fairly famous text, and often ends up in "memorize these texts" collections. Focus on the good. Do not worry about the bad, but raise your concerns before the Lord. Always rejoice for what has been given, and hope for the good of all. This famous text is then couched in the midst of some closing exhortations, two members of the church in Philippi have been quarreling and Paul asks them to get along, and urges the people of God to focus on the truth, and to push for it, to push for the good.

 

The Take:

 It's easy to read this is a Biblical "don't worry, be happy"  but there's a bit more meat to it than that. It takes work to find the positive, it takes work to seek the truth. It takes work to bring a quarrel to a close and it takes work to remember to give praise to God in the midst of hardship and toil. The joy, truth, and peace being extolled here is NOT a passive acceptance of the status quo but instead a work of discernment, identifying the good, the pure, and the true, and holding THEM up as the model for your life, rather than whatever happens to be at hand.

 

 

Matthew 22:1-14

 

The Text:

 

The parable of the Wedding Banquet, where the Master of the House prepares a wedding banquet (hence the name) and invites guests, only to receive a number of excuses, and so throws wide the doors to let everyone in to be sure the banquet is well attended, but then still requires a certain decorum from those in attendance.

 

The Take:

 

This one sure can be a doozy, eh? Widely seen as a parable of the slow expanding of the phrase "The People of God" this text has taken on some anti-Semitic baggage over the years,  often used by Christian Pastors as a sort of "taking of the torch" from the Jews by the Gentiles. It's worth pointing out that the original invitees are never UNinvited, their refusal to commit is simply shown as a reason to throw wide the doors. Anyone with qualms over such a reading may feel free to take it up with Jesus in John, where he says plainly, "Salvation is of the Jews."

Matthew itself is widely called the Gospel to the Jews, intended as a Christological apology to the Hebrew people in a time of chaos and transition, so you're not making wild assumptions when you say that Matthew's intention likely was NOT "Oh well, no more Jews" in the kingdom.

The end is telling, though. Here the doors are, open wide, but then the Master sees an invited guest who did not dress appropriately, and has them bound and thrown out. Here IS an invitation lost... you can't just show up, you need to make an effort.

The Takeaway:

 

I find myself struck here by a running theme of calling out the "People of God" for inappropriate behavior as it relates to God, namely, mistaking our God, creator of Heaven and Earth, for something that God is not.

When we look at Idolatry, we often see it as this dumb thing. What are those people doing, worshiping a lump of metal! We looks especially at the sin of the Hebrews in Exodus in such a dismissive way. "Hah, God had JUST helped them escape from Egypt and now already they're making up a new God to follow and giving that God credit? How dumb can you be!?"

But when we treat the sins of the People of God that way, we minimize the risks. They were dumb, we are not, and so we fail to take the warning of the text at face value.

Some might have been surprised at my minimizing of the sin of the Hebrews in the Take on that particular text, but I did so because it is important to keep in mind what really happened. The Hebrews had reason to believe that Moses was dead, and Moses, to that point, had been their most visible reminder of the presence and commandments of God. In their minds, they probably weren't replacing God... they were replacing MOSES.

But Moses was a flesh and blood guy who spoke with the LORD and could tell them when they were going right or wrong, a Prophet. An Idol had no opinions, had no agenda, was an empty object upon which the desires and biases of the people could be projected, and thereby deified. They took the living, breathing God and replaced God with an inanimate lump of gold, in the image of a creature which, while powerful, was also non-threatening.

I think that sin is one that is not only understandable in our modern context, but also prevalent. Many of our older representatives of the LORD have moved on and in their place we have placed Idols. We tell ourselves we are still worshiping the same God, but in place of a God with desires, drives, and commandments, we have started worshiping something inanimate, something unchallenging, something that permits us to project our own angers, fears, and biases upon it.

In North America today, that idol is often Americana, a rose-colored glasses version of an old America which was once "great." We lionize our old morality, our old religion, our old social structure as a better time, and as that gilded material starts to harden in the mold we start to see any deviation from it as a deviation from the will of God, even when God's scriptures again exhort us to seek out what is good, true, and pure, we instead cling to the status quo, to what is familiar. We say the word God, we sit in buildings we call Churches, but all the while we worship nostalgia, rather than the God announced in the scriptures.

And because we have learned to worship what is familiar, what is comfortable, it never occurs to us that we might be called upon to CHANGE ourselves as we answer God's call. And when God sees us, no different at the banquet table than we had been at any time in our lives and asks why we didn't even think to wear our Banquet robes, we have no answer.

Because the idols we worshiped never told us to change, it never occurred to us that we might need to.