Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness

I don’t think any of us have a problem with idolatry. We have our heads on straight: only God is God. Nothing else competes for our worship as a deity. Well, I have had to check myself on school loyalty from time to time. In the years surrounding my alma mater’s big years in basketball, I was a little nuts during March in the late nineties. When the Wildcats took the NCAA national title, I was all crazed with the red and blue.

The term “alma mater” means something like “nourishing mother,” and is kind of sweet with the notion of a school supplying the right nourishment of mind and heart (and body) for our livelihood in this big old world. But the alma mater song swings the concept almost over to worship. I would sing it for you, but creating an audio clip is a bit out of my wheelhouse:

All hail, Arizona! Thy colors Red and Blue
Stand as a symbol - of our love for you.
All hail, Arizona! To thee we'll be true
We'll watch o'er and keep you, All hail! All hail!

I think we would rather all sing.” All hail the power of Jesus’ name…” wouldn’t we? Is it nearly bordering on idolatry to be hailing an educational institution? It is true in pre-pandemic conditions we can fill Texas stadiums and field houses with tens of thousands of fans for big games. I am thinking the word “fan” may be short for “fanatic,” but surely, we are not worshiping our sports teams. If sports are not our things, we all find other devotions of one kind or another that really grab attention.

If we looked at a full twelve months of a personal budget, we might see where a person’s heart is. In some budgets, we find a full belief in security, with the costs of shelter, insurance, alarm system, etc. We might find a belief in information and communication, a belief in transportation and mobility, a belief in entertainment, travel, and stimulation, or in health and fitness. Our spending reveals something about belief but is not exposing the idolizing some aspect of our experience reflects. Let’s hope.

The actual worship of idols was one of the realities of the ancient Greco-Roman world, so as Paul moved about the Mediterranean areas, he was intent on proclaiming the Lordship of Christ to polytheistic cultures. In the portion of the Thessalonian correspondence of Paul we have as our Epistle reading this week, the Apostle to the Gentiles complements the community on no fewer than seven points. Among them, he commends his sisters and brothers for their diligence along these lines. He writes:

“For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead-- Jesus, who rescues us.”                     (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10)

There is an implicit treatment of idolatry in our Sunday gospel story of Jesus responding to the Pharisees trying to trap Jesus on a question about Roman taxes. I would like to go into that fully tomorrow. It revolves around the image of the emperor on a coin, affirming the Roman push to acknowledge the deity of Caesar. You can see how for the people of Israel, the monotheistic Jews, any connection with belief beyond the worship of the one God is horrifying.

Maybe we should be attentive to the things in our lives that pull us away from our basic selves, and away from God.  We can be drastically distracted; that is just life. We can get a bit compulsive about this or that and it can take away from important things, even attention to God. If we can let things within and around us compete with our devotion to God, I am certain we can reverse that. I am sure we and bring greater attention to the One in whom we have our being.