LENTEN
SERIES I – 29 February 2004 – Bishop Owen Dowling
For our Lenten series we are looking at the Ten Commandments
– are they for today? Because there are only 6 Sundays in Lent, it will
necessitate putting several commandments together in the one address – today
nos. 1, 2 and 3.
The commandments are about the recognition and honouring of
God, before all else. “I am the Lord your God, you shall not have any other
gods but me; you shall not make any graven images or idols to worship and you
shall reverence my name and being”. that’s commandments 1, 2 and 3 in a
nutshell, though there’s no way of putting the God they represent in a
nutshell! Moses the great man of God claimed he heard God speaking to him and
engraved, so it is said, God’s words on stone tablets. The essence of religion
however, is not letters graven on stone, or even written on a scroll or in a
book – it is an affair of the heart, so well expressed in the ancient Hebrew
Shema: “The Lord your, God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might” – Not
just believing in, and not merely fearing – though those words are used –
but ‘loving’ – loving God with everything you’ve got, heart soul and
strength.
According to the account in today’s gospel from Luke, Jesus
rebuked Satan, the Tempter, Accuser and Underminer, when Satan tried to subvert
him to his ways over quite a long period of time. Jesus kept saying to him
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”. Worship – love – it’s
the same thing. to worship is to love, and to love is to desire to serve.
To worship and to love the one God who is the creator of the
universe and by whom everything holds together, is to find our place in the
scheme of things. Whereas non-believers and sceptics would say that “God” is
a creation of our own minds and our projections of meaning into a meaningless
void, we say the opposite: We are God’s creatures, and we and the whole
creation are a projection of God’s mind and will. We can’t encompass god
with our own mind and limited understanding, nor can we describe God. We are
derivative of God, rather than God being derivative of us. That is axiomatic.
And that is what the Second Commandment is all about. “You shall not make for
yourself any idol, whether in the form 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 worship them”
To try to make an image of the Lord God of all creation is to
have a God as our own creature – a God we can understand, possess or
manipulate. The true God is to be always above and beyond that. Why, we can’t
even form images in our mind of God which are satisfactory – big enough,
subtle enough, wonderful enough. If it is our image, our idea, then our God is
too small. God is, according to one theologian, Rudolf Otto, who wrote a book
called ‘The Idea of the Holy”, a “mysterium tremendens et fascinans”. If
you don’t know any Latin, you can probably work out that means “a tremendous
and fascinating mystery”. I was taking a sixth class Primary lesson several
years ago in my last parish in Tasmania, and the children were asked to write on
their work sheet what they though of God, or how they thought of him. “Totally
awesome” wrote one child. I don’t think I will ever forget that succinct
statement. Totally awesome.
Language fails us, though, as we try to speak of God. I
recall a rather tense conversation with an elderly priest, formerly of this
diocese, when I was the diocesan bishop and the controversy was raging over the
ordination of women as priests. This priest believed that a woman couldn’t
properly represent God, because God was male. I objected that God was neither
male or female, but included both, and was beyond both. I asked him on what
basis he though God was male. “Well doesn’t the bible refer to God as
‘he’ and ‘him’?” he said. But that of course is just a weakness of the
English language that our singular personal pronouns are gender specific and we
don’t like to speak of God as ‘it’, because God is a personal being. You
may have noticed in recent times, a certain awkwardness in preaching as
preachers who are sensitive to this aspect of theology, who try to avoid the use
of ‘he’ and ‘him’ in relation to God. So the word God crops up several
times in a sentence, or the word ‘Godself’. this makes language a little
awkward and heavy and an occasional ‘he’ or ‘him’ can be used, I
believe, without being committed to a male concept of deity.
Sometimes I say ‘he or she’ to remind myself that God is
beyond gender. In one seminary I attended in the U.S. for a summer course a
number of years ago, one lecturer always used ‘she and her’ of God. He
reckoned that we’d overdone the male bit for so long, it couldn’t hurt to
restore the balance!
When we were compiling the present Prayer Book we were
mindful of this problem. That is why we now sing ‘peace to God’s people on
earth’ in place of ‘peace to his people on earth’ or say in the creed
concerning the Holy Spirit ‘who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and
glorified’ instead of ‘with the Father and the Son he is worshipped and
glorified.’
We are not to trap God into our own language or imprison God
in our own images and ideas. that’s called ‘anthropomorphism’, which means
imposing human concepts on to God. Let’s face it, most of us were brought up
with an idea of God being like an old man with a beard up in the sky, and we
have to grow far beyond that.
Another aspect of idolatry is that we become enslaved to
something which isn’t only less than God, but in a devilish kind of way,
dominates and enslaves us. You will notice that most idol-ridden religions have
had horrible and cruel practices and rituals associated with them. the extreme
example would be the God of fire, Moloch, one of the middle eastern deities to
whom infants were sacrificed, even through the open mouth of the God image set
over a fire, to appease an angry or displeased deity.
We so-called civilized people who claim to have moved beyond
such crude forms of idolatry, have our idols to whom we sacrifice living people.
The capitalist god of profit and money has claimed many who have been sacrificed
or pushed aside for financial gain. Unswerving loyalty to the business or the
state, to this or that cause – the giving of one’s all, means that these
have become demanding gods in our own lifetimes. Some of you have had to escape
destructive loyalties and demands. Anything we make our god does demand more and
more of us until all else is eclipsed. The true God wishes to set us free from
all kinds of idolatry. “if the Son shall make you free you shall be free
indeed” said Jesus, the truly free man.
There’s a statement in the psalms that always impresses me
– “They that make them (that is, idols” shall be like them” – you
become like your idol. Idols are hard taskmasters. They demand all of us whereas
that total giving is only to be given to the true God of us all.
I’ve practically come to the end of my address without
making much reference to the thirst commandment – “you shall not take the
name of the Lord your God in vain” or “You shall not make wrongful use of
the name of the Lord your God.” Apart from the positive meaning of giving due
honour, worship, praise and love to the ‘immortal invisible and only wise
God’ – ‘hallowed be your name’, Jesus taught us to say – we can break
this commandment every time we use the name of God to support our own side, our
own course against everyone else’s. We break it too, every time we misuse God
– “I swear to God and by God I’m telling the truth’, when I’m telling
a blatant lie. Or perhaps a very religious person makes a boast of their
religion, or incites hatred of other’s religions in a totally unworthy way. A
leader may be so carried away with their own sense of importance or rightness
that they lose all sense of proportion, and make sure they only have those
around them who adulate them. All critics are to be silenced. A gifted person
may be tempted to seek glory for themselves rather than glorify God, the giver
of the gift……
“Lord God, the one above and beyond all good things, help us to glorify your name and serve your cause of love and truth in all that we do. protect us from giving devotion to anything or anyone that could harm us. to you alone we bow. In you alone we find our true selves, our true place.