Golden Calves

No, I speak not of my resplendent lower legs. Rather I speak of that poor bemused bovine held up as an example to all of how not to worship God.

Those poor Hebrews having struggled through seemingly endless times with an ever elusive God finally got sick of the whole thing and decided that they just wanted something they could grab hold of; something they could actually “look up to”, to be their object of worship. It really doesn’t seem too much to ask does it? It is very tricky worshipping a God that can’t be sculpted – something about us always wants the security of the “tangible”.

That got me to thinking about the whole idea of an “idol”. I mean we really give the Golden Calf worshippers a hard time about the whole false god thing but are we really any better?  Our Christian history seems to me to be a long pilgrimage from one idol to the next.

Statues of the Saints or the Blessed Virgin Mary and relics of the saints became objects of veneration and adoration because they give us something concrete to focus one. Priests became the representation of God for us, even though one of the obvious things that Jesus seemed to make clear was that there was nothing now standing between us and God. Then of course came the Reformation with Martin Luther’s wondrous claiming of the Bible for all people, not just the chosen Latin reading few. And what did we do with it? – why we made the Word of God into an idol of course!  The Word became that which we must hold on to and immerse ourselves in and, like the Golden Calf, when we remove the attention of our heart from God onto anything tangible, God becomes smaller. 

Our idols can be anything. In some personality based churches the idol is the pastor.

In some churches the idol has become “showing the fruits of the Spirit”.

I sometimes wonder if we haven’t made Jesus into an idol. When I hear the church sing “It’s all about you, Jesus”,  I wonder how Jesus would react to that. I’m not sure it would find favour.

The devil once went for a walk with a friend. They saw a man ahead of them stoop down and pick up something from the ground.

“What did that man find?” asked the friend.

“A piece of truth,” said the devil.

“Doesn’t that disturb you?” asked the friend.

“No,” said the devil, “I shall let him make a belief out of it.”

Proud to belong to the False Jesus Church

Some things get my head to working.

Around the corner from us, opposite the local supermarket is a church which calls itself the “True Jesus” Church. The implication is that whatever church the rest of us go to must, by process of deduction, be the “False Jesus” church. Now, I actually don't know what they believe; I've never met them and I have no right to comment on anything about them - but the name of the church started my brain cells percolating.

I started thinking about how remarkable it is how all of us seem to want to be right and often to be able to define that “rightness” by the “wrongness” of others. 

If we want, we could do a cruise around local churches and we would certainly find that many define themselves by words such as “Bible believing” or “Spirit filled” – the implication being that these qualities differentiate them from those who disbelieve the Bible and are empty of the Spirit.

This type of thing has been going on for millennia, not just in the Christian church but in every religion and in almost every aspect of life. We all want to be more right than the other guy. The gnostic religions had secret knowledge that others didn’t have and only through the possession of the secrets could one achieve entry into the inner sanctum of holiness. “Prophets” who interpret signs to give the dates of end times; who find the secret lost (or new) scriptures (Mr. J. Smith) – all these hold out the promise of belonging to the best club, of letting us become one of the 144,000 if we join the group of correct believers.

Doesn’t this all sound just like what God would do – God who so loved the world? He’d like it if the numbers who could get really close to him were very, very few, because He’s picky and a bit mean.  And that’s the message of Jesus, right? You know – the guy who seemed to think that Samaritans had a right to be accepted in God’s sight; the bloke who chatted to the social outcasts, the lepers and those that had been told over and over that they didn’t belong to the Kingdom of God.