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Living Without Idols
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 10, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Samuel 5:1-12 Colossians 1:15-23
We turn again to the Ten Commandments this morning as we will for the rest of the summer season. Though before we consider the second, I think a general word about God's command is in order, a word that may help us hear these ancient words as God's present address to us. Last Sunday we said that the Decalogue was not a "repository of regulations but the clue to responsibilities… underlin[ing] the indicative in distinction from the legalistic, the descriptive as opposed to the prescriptive relation of the Commandments to the human living of human life." Yet how can that be when these verses are filled with what we "shall not" do, with boundaries that seem to set definite limits on our behavior, with ten Almighty lines drawn long ago in the sand of the wilderness east of Egypt? Have we misunderstood something basic? Did Moses, as the joke goes, come down the mountain carrying ten suggestions rather than Ten Commandments chiseled in stone? Or did Aaron ask and actually receive Moses' assent that the ten be reduced to one which read: "Act responsibly in love"? Not exactly! Still the question before us thousands of years after Sinai is simply this: how is the law God commands gospel? In what sense are these "thou shalt nots" good news from God concerning the covenant into which we have been adopted in Christ? The answer is a sermon unto itself, but suffice it to say this morning that the command of God (if it is God's command and not the culture-bound rules of a religious institution or the pronouncements of a pious politician purporting to speak for God) always has the effect of setting us free-or giving us permission--to be who we are. We are not dealing with a despot who would rule us with threats. [Though I will admit, today in the second commandment we have before us words which do sound a bit threatening! Punishing the third and fourth generation for the sins of the parents, you should know, is heard in biblical math as a gracious limit set by God on God's wrath, while showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation is heard as promise of God's boundless love!] I repeat: we are not dealing with a despot, but with the God revealed in Jesus Christ who can only invite us to live in relation to him, because that is the nature of the love with which God in Christ loves us: command as freedom to be who we are! To put the experience of this freedom another way, God's command "bursts open the door of compulsion under which we have been living" since the fall, since we chose to disobey the only "thou shalt not" spoken in the garden. Choosing to know good and evil rather than to know God alone, you see, our eyes are opened "but only like those of a victim of insomnia. [We] have now to choose and decide and judge on all sides." We have to find a way for ourselves in a "forest of claims". But it is graciously into the thick of that forest that the command of God summons us "out of the sphere of harassment," says Karl Barth. "[The command of God] wills only that we make use of the given permission by the grace of God to be what we are….The command of God orders us to be free." The analogy in merely human terms is of a young person who secretly longs for the limits set by a parent which, if obeyed, may set her free from the confusing claims of peers, claims that would have her be someone she is not. [Am I showing my age?] She has desired the so-called freedom to do as she pleases--to take whatever dare might be proffered-and yet she experiences this not as freedom but as pressure to become a stranger to herself. We adults know such harassment all too well, though by now many of us have become that stranger, have forgotten the person we were on the way to becoming, the person claimed not by the forest but by the freedom permitted in God's command: to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. In sum, God commands us, in each commandment, to be that person: to be free! That said we come to the second commandment, by John Calvin's count, wondering just how exactly our obedience to this command frees us to be who we are. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, says the Lord. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. One can only imagine Moses trembling before the incomparable God speaking from out of the cloud; nothing on earth would suffice to represent such a God! Hence the distinction between Creator and creature assumed in this prohibition also underlines what it is to be human and not God. But one also imagines from the start that, even as God was explicating the first two commandments to Moses on Sinai, the people were saying to Aaron, "Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us." Thou shalt have no other gods. Aaron complies, melting the gold brought to him into a mold which he casts in the image of a calf. Thou shalt make no graven images. "These are your gods," he says to the Israelites, "who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." So the people bow down and worship the image fashioned by human hands instead of the living God. In their defense, this was what everyone around them did! In fact, the higher religions of the day were the ones that attempted to represent the transcendent by some tangible image, presumably to aid the cult in its worship. Was that image literally taken to be a god? We cannot know. All we have is the later theological reflection of God's people in relation to cultic gods represented by figures made of silver and gold. According to the psalmist those figures "have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see…ears, but do not hear; noses but do not smell…hands but do not feel; feet, but do not walk". At the end of the day, the gods they represent are dead, silent, powerless-like Dagon of the Philistines--whereas the God of Israel is alive, is active in human history…yet without image. "That no gods besides Yahweh are to be worshipped," writes John Barton of the first commandment, "says something about the source of divine power: only one such source is to be acknowledged. That no images are to be made," he writes of the second commandment, "says something about the character of divinity: it cannot be captured in any physical representation." Leap for a moment over fifteen hundred years of church history to the time of the Reformers or, more to the point, to Calvinists a generation later. After centuries of images filling cathedrals in Western Christendom and icons weeping freely in the sanctuaries of Eastern Orthodox churches, the Reformers turn to the second commandment and begin to obey the letter of its law with a vengeance! There is still evidence of that vengeance in Zurich's Grossmunster Cathedral-the church of Ulrich Zwingli--where the walls allow the careful eye to see a faint reminder of once painted figures and so of art in the life of the church. Zealous reformers in the years following Calvin's death smashed and slashed their way through the religious art of Europe, destroying painted and sculpted images of God, Father, Son or Holy Spirit! In the spirit of removing everything in the life of the church that was either prohibited or had no positive warrant in Scripture, cathedrals came to resemble the unadorned sanctuaries of Israelite worship. So it was that the church which once was art's greatest patron became art's most ardent critic: thou shalt make no graven images! Even Henry Sloane Coffin in the second sermon of his 1914 series on the Commandments concedes that "…if one must sacrifice either spiritual religion or sculpture and painting, there can be no question which is the more valuable to retain. As it is better for a man to forego the development of his nature altogether on some lines, rather than imperil his moral health; better for him (in Christ's words) "to enter into life maimed," rather than having two eyes and two hands to be wrecked in character; so it is better that life should be artistically impoverished than religiously degraded." I will confess that I shuddered when I read those words, knowing deep down that I would rather be religiously degraded than artistically impoverished! To his credit, Coffin critiques this false choice as his sermon unfolds, bemoaning along the way our failure to develop a Protestant art and architecture because of it. Yet he also offers the only credible reason the Reformed mind can find for its history of iconoclasm, a reason that hints at Coffin's own aesthetic dullness, I think. "The real difficulty with a graven image," he says, "is its rigidity; it is a fixed, and therefore a limited and confining representation of Him who is limitless. [Actually, I just heard the Cambridge theologian Jeremy Begbie make this case against pictorial art's ability to represent the trinity in contrast to a three note chord sounded in all of its oneness and differentiation.] A growing soul demands a growing thought of God and mental images can be as stationary as marble or bronze." So, I might add, can literal interpretations of Scripture, rigid liturgical practices, and wooden doctrines! So far we have only begged the question of how the second of God's commandments commands our freedom! With Israel kept from employing any representation of God in worship or in daily life, the question of what or who would represent God in the world and among nations remained. There was only one answer: God's chosen people! Living human beings chosen to be a part of what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human: the community of faith has been witness to God's active presence and power in the world since Abraham first beheld the stars and trusted God's promise. Or as Calvin put it in so many words, "Israel is to make no image of Yahweh, [and is thereby freed] to be such an image of God in the world." Furthermore, according to my own Old Testament professor Walter Harrelson, the prohibition of images led the Israelites to seek evidence of the invisible God in the fabric of daily life: in the treatment of the widow and stranger, the showing of hospitality, the doing of justice, the love of kindness, the parabolic actions through which God's reign was glimpsed. More also was required of Israel's poets and musicians who, in worship, had only word and song, hymn and lament to enable "the assembled worshipers to sense and feel and detect that presence of the Holy that in other societies would have been much more easily and vividly portrayed through the images of deity." So then what of those who live in the world without idols and yet bowed down before him who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the living God now not hidden in a cloud but revealed in human flesh? What of our freedom and our obedience before his command? Only this: that in Jesus Christ we finally behold the human being that obedience to God's command frees us to be; in him we encounter the love of the God who has freed us not to be ourselves without him; in him, we are given a second chance to be who we are in the world: for we are his! Thanks be to God. |