sermon on idols and certainty

I had another chance to preach for the Beyond the Walls ministry based out of Toronto yesterday. I went a bit off-script in emphasizing passages other than the one I was assigned to, but I’m pretty happy with the result, and I hope it worked out for others, as well. There are a lot of people (Jacques Ellul, Pete Enns, Thomas Römer) whose ideas are floating in the background of this sermon without ever getting mentioned—it channels a lot of thoughts that I’ve had over the past decade or so. Here are the recording and the script:

A couple of months ago, John wrote to me to tell me about today’s passage and theme and to say that he thought I might like them. To be honest, I wasn’t sure at first. Our passage today features Paul in Athens. There are a lot of different religious beliefs in Athens, but Paul is very certain about his own beliefs. This leads him to explain to others why they should all believe like him.

This feels familiar to me. When I was a young adult, I was very certain that the church I then attended was “the one true church.” This led me to take two years off from university to travel, like Paul, to another place full of diverse religious beliefs and explain to others why they should believe like me.

I think I was sincere in wanting to share my beliefs with others, and I’m sure that Paul was, too, so I can appreciate what he’s doing. However, the fact that I’m preaching today for a Community of Christ congregation and not in the denomination I grew up in shows that the certainty I once had in my beliefs eventually disappeared.

While I am very happy to have found a new spiritual home in Community of Christ, I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced that same certainty again. I have friends, co-workers, and family members who have many different religious beliefs—or even none at all—and while I know that a place like Beyond the Walls is where I find spiritual meaning, I’m just not ready to be like Paul and argue with others about what they ought to believe.

Here’s the thing, though: John’s a pretty smart guy, so it’s not a surprise that I have turned out to really like this passage. I think there’s a way of reading this story that invites us all to challenge our certainty—and even to find God in uncertainty—and that’s what I’d like to share with you today.

Let’s start by remembering what Paul’s main motivation was when he argued with others in Athens. In the first verse of today’s passage, we read: “While Paul was waiting… in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Then, in the last verse of today’s passage, Paul argues that: “‘Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.’”

So, Paul’s arguing with other people seems to be motivated by a concern about idols. This makes sense: Anyone who’s spent even a little bit of time with the Bible probably knows that its authors just do not like idols. Paul is drawing on generations of tradition in his arguments. However, even this tradition is not as straightforward as it seems. Yes, the Bible insists that idols are bad, but that insistence might be hiding something.

Imagine that on your first Sunday attending a new congregation, the pastor stands up, gives some announcements, and then says “in this congregation, people of all genders are valued.” You might be excited to hear that—it might come off as a sign that this is a truly inclusive congregation.

Imagine, though, that every Sunday for the next six months, the pastor stands up, gives some announcements, and then says “in this congregation, people of all genders are valued,” maybe with added insistence each time. If the pastor feels the need to repeat this phrase every week, it could instead be a sign that there are actually problems with inclusion in the congregation, and that the pastor is trying to change the congregation, not describe the congregation.

Many scholars have suggested that something similar is going on in the Bible, that the repeated insistence that God’s people do not worship idols is a pretty good sign was an effort to change things, not describe how things were. In other words, these authors may have been trying to shift from a religion that valued idols to a religion that firmly rejected them.

I don’t bring this up to criticize our spiritual ancestors but rather to ask some important questions: What value did they once find in idols, and if they did find value in idols, why did they eventually reject them in the way that Paul does in Athens?

To explore these questions, let’s go to one of the most famous stories about idols in the Bible. In Exodus 32:1, we read: “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’”

Notice the uncertainty that drives this question. Moses is supposedly up on the mountain talking to God, but Moses is late getting back, and the people don’t know what has happened to him. Rather than this uncertain God whom they can’t see and who apparently can’t stick to a schedule, they long for a God who is more visible and more certain.

So, let’s read what happens next, in verses 3 and 4: “all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”

This last sentence is a little bit funny. The Exodus story tells us that God’s people made a single golden calf but for some reason talked about it as though there were multiple of them. Is this a simple grammar error, or is something else going on here? To puzzle this out, we need to remember that the stories in the Hebrew Bible—or Old Testament—were often written in a different order than the order they take place in. Like a prequel that is written after a book or movie that it takes place before, the stories in Exodus sometimes include references to stories that we will not read until later in the Bible.

So, let’s take a look at 1 Kings 12, which will help us better understand some of the golden calf story in Exodus. In this chapter, a man named Jeroboam has led a revolt that has led to the splitting off of the northern kingdom of Israel from the southern kingdom of Judah. Jeroboam is now king over the new northern kingdom, but he still faces one important limitation to his power: The holy site of his people’s religion is still in the southern kingdom. Let’s read verses 26-27: “Then Jeroboam said to himself, ‘Now the kingdom may well revert to the house of David. If this people continues to go up to offer sacrifices in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, the heart of this people will turn again to their master, King Rehoboam of Judah; they will kill me and return to King Rehoboam of Judah.’”

Jeroboam understands that as long as his people are looking elsewhere for religious leadership, he does not have full power over them. (As a brief tangent, this may also help us understand why high ranking politicians in the United States have recently tried to fight with the pope about what Catholicism teaches). We find Jeroboam’s response in verse 28, which should feel very familiar to us after reading the famous story in Exodus: “So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. He said to the people, ‘You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’”

The strange grammar in Exodus, which refers to a single calf as though there are at least two of them, is probably the result of a direct quotation of this story, where Jeroboam creates two golden calves.

Now, in both of these stories, we may be used to understanding these figures as rejecting God by turning to a golden idol (or idols). However, that’s not the only way of understanding what’s happening here. We can also understand them as worshipping the same God but preferring a visible, certain version of that God that is under their control to an unseen, uncertain version that they have no control over. Aaron just wants to reassure the people that God is present and predictable. Jeroboam just wants to ensure that God does not distract from his political agenda. They don’t need a different God so much as a more convenient version of the same God they have been worshipping.

We might be proud of never worshipping a golden calf, but can we really say we have never tried to reduce God into something more visible and certain than what the divine really is? During my own faith journey, I have often built golden calves, not in the sense of trying to replace God but in the sense of trying to make God fit within the narrow scope of my own expectations and desires. However, while certainty is comforting, it is also more fragile than it seems.

During much of my life, I kept God contained within the walls of a single church and its specific teachings, and I could not fully recognize the divine except when it aligned with that perspective. Several years ago, I was confused when I felt the divine calling to me from beyond those walls toward some “new teaching” I did not recognize. I was terrified when the visible, certain, controllable God that I had constructed for myself began to fall apart and revealed itself for what it had always been, what Paul describes as “an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” I was awestruck when I came face to face with a very different version of God whom I did not understand but who had a much larger world to show me.

So it was with our spiritual ancestors, who also traded their familiarity with a visible, certain God for trust in a God who is harder to understand but is present in a much larger world. I have already mentioned today that the stories of the Bible are not always written in the order that they take place in and that earlier stories are often written with later considerations in mind. Perhaps the biggest of these “later considerations” was around 586 BCE, when the southern kingdom of Judah, its capital of Jerusalem, and the temple in Jerusalem were all destroyed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. Remember that this is the same temple that was so important to our spiritual ancestors that the Bible earlier describes Jeroboam, king of the northern kingdom, as trying to replace it with golden calves so that he could keep God under his control.

Yet, it’s also important to recognize that even if the temple was the “true” place of worship, it also represented an effort that tried to contain God within the realm of certainty. Our spiritual ancestors understood that temple as the home to a powerful, unmatchable God who would never allow the kingdom of Judah to be defeated. When that kingdom was defeated, and when that God’s home was destroyed, they were faced with a crisis of faith that makes my experience pale in comparison. In fact, some scholars believe that the temple contained a physical representation of God never mentioned in the Bible that might have been destroyed or carried off by Nebuchadnezzar’s armies. How does a believer respond when their God is literally destroyed or captured by an enemy?

Our spiritual ancestors responded by recognizing that God as yet another “image formed by the art and imagination of mortals” and embracing a “new teaching” of God as something less visible and less certain but also much less fragile. We can understand the biblical authors’ rejection of idols as an embrace of a God who may not always protect our nation but will be accessible from any place on the planet, a God who may not be visible but who can never be destroyed, a God who may feel uncertain but who always has a bright future prepared for us.

So, yes, Paul brings some religious certainty to Athens with him, and yes, I feel a little uncomfortable with that certainty. But Paul’s certainty is in an uncertain God, and that is something that speaks deeply to me.

Today’s theme—which I am finally getting to at the end of my sermon—is a question: “What Is This New Teaching?” This is not just a question that Athenians asked Paul as he challenged their gods of “gold or silver or stone.” It is also a question that Paul himself asked as the risen Christ challenged everything he thought he knew about his faith. It is also a question that his ancestors asked generations earlier as they built a new faith out of the ruins of all they had taken for granted. It is also a question that we must repeatedly ask ourselves if we want to set aside our golden calves and embrace the fulness of the divine, even though it is unseen and uncertain and out of our control.

Thank you.

• Beyond the Walls
• idols
• Pete Enns
• Jacques Ellul
• Community of Christ
• Thomas Römer
• golden calf
• certainty
• idol worship
• Latter-day Saint missionaries
• Paul
• Jeroboam