Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18 August 30, 2009

Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel; and they presented themselves before God. And Joshua said to all the people...

"Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord." Then the people answered, "Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed; and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God."

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There once was a Japanese warlord who ruled over Japan in the late 1500s. His name was Toyotomi Hideyoshi. A story is told of how he once commissioned a colossal statue of Buddha for a shrine in Kyoto. It took 50,000 men five years to build, but the work had scarcely been completed when the earthquake of 1596 brought the roof of the shrine crashing down and wrecked the statue. It is said that in a rage, Hideyoshi shot an arrow at the fallen colossus, shouting, "I put you here at great expense, and you can't even look after your own temple."

I have no idea whether or not this story is true. Hideyoshi was a warrior and a prominent historical figure. It's not hard to imagine him throwing a tantrum under the circumstances. On the other hand, considering I found the story on a website of Christian sermon illustrations, many of which are quite conservative, I wouldn't be surprised if some Christian missionary made it up as a way of saying that obviously the Buddha is a false god.

Of course, if some ancient king had commissioned a huge statue of the God of Abraham, that too could only have been a false god. The Ten Commandments strictly forbid constructing any idols or images of God, or of anything else for that matter. The second commandment reads, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." (KJV) That pretty much covers the territory doesn't it. Among those Jews who took the law seriously, most did not become painters or sculptors, which at least partly explains why there has historically been a relative lack of Jewish representational artwork.

Eventually though, people came to understand that the commandment was not so much about making pictures and statues as it was about worshiping them. Putting a golden calf on your shelf as a work of art is not the same as falling on your face in front of it. Worshipping anything less than the one true God is what the Bible calls idolatry, and the Old Testament, especially, has quite a lot to say on the subject. Clearly, worshipping idols was a common practice. But if God is infinite, as the Israelites believed, then nothing that is finite, nothing made with human hands, could ever be worthy of true devotion. And so the practice was outlawed.

As far back as it goes our tradition has always believed there is only one God. That's why Christianity is said to be among the great monotheistic religions. However, that doesn't mean the ancient Israelites only had one choice. There were lots of gods around. Joshua says as much in this great speech he gave to the twelve tribes of Israel: "Choose this day whom you will serve." Every country, every people, every petty kingdom had its own collection of local gods, and the Israelites were familiar with a good many of them. But, Joshua says, it is Yahweh who led you out of bondage in Egypt. It is Yahweh who guided you through the wilderness. It is Yahweh who gave you the land of milk and honey, despite the fact that other people were already living there. And, he says, make no mistake, after all he's done for you, it is Yahweh who is not going to be amused if you now decide to turn your backs on him. "Choose this day whom you will serve," but don't imagine you won't be punished if you should happen to make the wrong choice. Joshua could not have been more clear.

Now, that's all good and well for ancient history, but, in my ministry, whenever the subject of idolatry has come up, it seems clear that most people have a hard time relating. Attention begins to wander. Eyes glaze over. Don't we know well enough that there is only one God? The idea that there ever were people who groveled in front of golden statues seems just a bit ludicrous; hardly something we would ever need to worry about. But the truth is we are all very much wrapped up in worshipping other god's. We just do it in ways that aren't quite so literal and obvious.

I took my title today, "Taking on the gods," from a book by Merle Jordan. Jordan writes about what he calls, "The task of the Pastoral Counselor," which is to help people understand how false ideas of who we think we're supposed to be can tie us up in knots. "A person is largely defined," he says, "by what he or she places at the center and ground of his or her personality." (Pg 22) What we place at the center and ground of our personality is what the theologian Paul Tillich called our "Ultimate Concern." Tillich believed that whatever we are ultimately concerned about, is in fact the god we are serving, regardless of what we may think we believe.

In Jordan's view, the pastoral counselor's job is to help people become clear about what their actual ultimate concerns are; to help them see how these "false gods" get in the way of a healthy life and to help them move toward greater freedom. As an example, Jordan tells about a man named Harry who came to him for counseling. Harry talked about what he called "the rules of the game," the rules handed down from on high which he believed he was bound to live by. Listen to this:

You have to be good and nice all of the time. You have to work hard every minute, or else you are not worthwhile. There is no place for joy in life, and if you start to seek it you better watch out because you will get completely off track and ruin your life. You are only worth loving when you are laden down with work and are acting nice and good. You will never succeed at being really loveable, but you'd better always keep trying, otherwise you are of no worth. I speak with the authority of the universe. This is how things are.

We may have a hard time relating to "idolatry," but I know a lot of people who can relate to Harry, and I'm one of them. Back in college, I remember being extremely hard on myself, unforgiving of my mistakes, always pushing to improve, trying to fulfill the potential that people seemed to think I had. Looking back, I can see that it was all about trying to make myself worthy, but back then it was just what I was supposed to do. Nothing was ever good enough. One semester I managed to get straight A's, but instead of feeling good about it I just felt miserable. I had given my classes all I had to give, but I hadn't managed to quiet the voice in my head that said it still wasn't good enough.

Gerald May, in his book, "Addiction and Grace," also talks about how bound up we are in the worship of false gods. He defines addiction as any compulsive behavior that limits the freedom of human desire, any concern that usurps our desire for love, anything that becomes more important to us than God, which, by any other name, is idolatry. May also says though, that too often sermons about idolatry just leave people feeling guilty. In his experience, when a minister preaches about idolatry, the usual message is about how we make all kinds of things more important than God, that we should feel bad about it and that we're supposed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to get out of it. But all that does, May says, is feed the false notions of god that caused the problem in the first place.

My friends, I don't mean this to be that kind of sermon. I know from personal experience how futile it is to believe we can make ourselves worthy. I went on from college to seminary, dragging my sense of impending doom right along with me. What I ran into was an even more pressure than I'd had in college; tougher classes, tighter money, a difficult student job and a daughter in diapers who spent much of her time unhappy that she wasn't getting the attention she wanted. After a full year of this, I entered a summer class in Pastoral Education that raised the bar even further. Right toward the end of that class I finally came apart. I had one more major paper to turn in and, for love or money, I simply couldn't do it. I stormed into my professor's office and told her flat out that I didn't have the paper and wasn't going to do it and if she wanted to fail me she could just go right ahead and do it.

Well, Rosemary, that was her name, waited for me to calm down a bit. Then she looked me right in the eye and said, "Kevin, you're right. You have failed. You haven't completed the required work of this class and you don't deserve to pass." She let me think about that for a minute, and then she said, "But I'm going to pass you anyway." Folks, that was a life changing moment for me. It was, I believe, the first time God's grace actually managed to pierce through my exalted idea of who I thought I was supposed to be. It brought me right down to earth. Suddenly, it was crystal clear to me that I had been, in effect, worshipping the god of my own self-importance.

Gerald May calls it addiction. "Addiction," he says, "can be, and often is, the thing that brings us to our knees. Sooner or later, addiction will prove to us that we're not gods." Well, that's what happened to me. I was brought to my knees. And you know what? My ministry would stink if that hadn't happened. I would've gotten up here week after week and told you things like how bad it was to be idolatrous. I would've told you how important it was to make yourself worthy; to pick yourselves up by your bootstraps. I would have preached exactly the kind of sermon Gerald May talked about. And you know why? Because whether we want to or not, whether or not we're conscious of what we're doing, the idea of God under which we live is the idea we impose on those around us, on those we love.

"Amazing Grace, that saved a wretch like me." It is an ancient story. It is the heart of the Christian faith. It is grace that reveals to us the essential nature of the divine; that essential divinity Jesus came to tell us about. And my friends, if you are serving a God that is anything less than the God of grace, you are an idolater just like me. If you are serving anything less than a God who loves and forgives and offers abundant life, you are serving a false God. You may not know it. Like me, you may not have any real consciousness about what your true ultimate concern actually is. But out of all this, the one thing I hope you will take to heart is that trying to make ourselves worthy - all by ourselves, apart from grace - is not the solution. It is the problem.

As St. Augustine once said "God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them." May we all, in grace, learn to let go of the baggage that keeps us from receiving God's good gifts.

Amen