Anglican Idol : A sermon for seminarians on Deuteronomy 4:25-31, with a little 1 Tim 3:1-16 for good measure

This sermon was preached at the Episcopal Preaching Foundation's 2018 Preaching Excellent Program at Roslyn, VA and published in that conference's journal, "Sermons that Work." ​

I love that we’re reading the qualifications of a bishop to a group of seminarians. Like, “Aim high, kids!”
I told one of the faculty that I would just stand up here and make a whole bunch of bishop jokes. But really, you’ll have to catch me in the lunch room to hear those. Bishops are kind of an easy target, right? They stand up there, in front of everyone, wearing that tall, pointy-hat that makes you want to get up there and knock it right off.

But instead of bishop jokes, what I want to do is talk a little bit about landscape. Our passage today from Deuteronomy, from when Moses is old and getting a little salty, predicts what happens a few generations after the promised land. Moses imagines what the landscape looks like a few generations in. Where once it was all wholesomeness and good, all milk and honey, now idols have been built all over, their hulking forms in metal and wood crowding the skyline, littering the earth.

I work in one of the most typical Episcopal churches out there, which means this sounds really familiar. There are many people in my church today who are looking around and realizing that what they thought was a secure position a generation ago - our particular patch of promised land - these days isn’t looking so hot. Churches like mine are realizing that the things we put in the midst of our life together as an assembly - the things we built our worshipping communities around - have turned out to be mute idols that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. Episcopalians are scattered among the peoples - with, in many parts of our country, only a few left among the nations of megachurch goers; Sunday morning yoga practitioners; and my particular tribe (because I am neither pious nor peaceful), the Crossfitters.

Unless you are in a church plant, and sometimes even if you are, there are folks in your worshipping communities who remember how sweet the old days were: When the Sunday school was full and you had to get to the 10am service early to get a good pew. (If you have retired clergy in your church, they remember a time when a good pew was in the front, not the back.)

It’s become very easy, and very trendy, to point to the things that we made into idols. We’re at a reckoning, at a stage when we are seeing many things for what they are: Dumb, lifeless idols which we let obscure our view of God and divert attention from true worship. Things we now know we sacrificed too much to, gave far too much power to. Big heavy solid things made of wood and metal, which we now know lack the flexibility to help us meet what is to come.

You can name some of these, right? Buildings that we have sacrificed time and money to. Ministries that we hung our churches’ identities on that have little to do with the Gospel. Maybe even … orders of ministry, and all the rules about what they can and can’t do, who can wear what and who gets a tall, pointy hat.

There’s this great book that I recommend to you called Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power,by Andy Crouch of Christianity Today - I KNOW. Andy and I would not get along very well, but this is a good book. We gotta go to the evangelicals sometimes for their exegesis.

Anyway, Crouch does this great exegesis of old Testament texts. Through a reading of Genesis 1, he describes how human beings are gifted by God, from the very beginning - from the garden, when God asks the earth-creature to name the animals - human beings are gifted with this amazing ability to make meaning the world. This is our shared ministry with God. We are made in God’s image, and so we are called to be creators. Creating, making objects and making meaning from them, is how we enter into the community of love that is the Triune God and the creator of our world.

But it is also how we mess it all up.

We make so much meaning of the world that sometimes we come to worship those products - be they products of our hands or our intellectual products. These are the “other gods”, the idols, that scripture warns us against. Crouch goes on to say that idols can be known by the fact that they make really wild, really amazing, magical promises. The tell us: I can make it rain! I can get the young families back to church! I can double your ASA! …But an idol demands more and more of us, until it sucks from us all that we have, leaving us with less than we started with.

An idol will take everything you lay at its feet and still, never be satisfied . Because it has no power in itself, it takes all you will give it and returns nothing.

But you know, it’s become pretty fashionable these days, very very easy to talk about how the old idols have no power, how we will cast them each from their thrones … so easy in fact that I actually wonder if we are paying enough attention to the power that idols have. We must not pay them homage, but we must pay them heed.

The old idols are still with us because they are powerful things. Moses doesn’t talk for his health - scripture doesn’t warn us time and again about false gods because they were easy to avoid falling to your knees in front of them. No, the power of idolatry is far more than we give those idols credit for.

Better watch where you swing that axe when you set out to take down one of these things.

You can get a lot of heads nodding at vestry about how we gotta do something about this old building, but God forbid you try to get rid of the pews in the sanctuary. We can all agree the liturgy should be changed, just not to THAT! Or that - good grief!

These old idols are powerful things - and you would be a wise and wary preacher and prophet to pay them not homage, but heed. They mark the places in the religious landscape where others have laid down their lives and their vocations, and lost them. They’re at the center of some worshipping communities like tent poles holding the roof up - and some might be sat on top of a sinkhole that will swallow you. Get an old-timer to draw you a map before you go out with your axe to chop one down.

I also want to make sure you realize that there are many new idols gaining in power. The truth is that the religious landscape right now looks like wilderness to just about everyone. No one knows where the hell we’re going, which is great for you all, because you probably know as much as I do about the future of the church. We’re all on equal footing, at least, as we wander about in what looks like the desert.

But. We are not in exile. We are in the promised land, where God got us.

And we have messed it up.

We took what we created with own hands and brains and let these dumb things distract us from the creator of all. We littered the landscape with idols, and we forgot why and how we came here in the first place. And in moments of uncertainty, we seem all the more tempted to make some new idols to fill the gaps in our understanding, to help us make sense of this new landscape.  
Just think of all the magical things that you learned about in seminary. Or heard about at diocesan convention. The thing your bishop or your dean told you is going to make it rain, bring the young families back to the church, double your ASA.  I warn you now: hold that stuff up to the light, and it if didn’t sound like Jesus, you better watch out.

Pay heed, not homage. There are idols all around.

And you know what? You’re about to join their number. All of you getting out of seminary - you smart, action-oriented, self-propelled people. I mean this really and truly - it says something great about you that you gave up the first week of summer to come here so I can yell at you and you can share a room with a stranger and some strange bugs. You all got that great new-clergy smell to you. Your faculty just love to smell you.  

And someday soon you will hear that someone got your congregation a shiny new thing. There’s a sense of new energy in this old church. Someone is going to come in and extol the virtues of the shiny new thing. They’ll say in a sweet voice that will sound so good: This is gonna make it rain. This is gonna bring the young families back to church. This is gonna double our ASA in one year.

And you’re gonna be like “Yesssssss, show me this miracle object!” But then you look around and there’s nothing there. Nother there but …. You. “Oh wait,” you say, “did you mean me?”

You will be IDOLIZED by the church, I’m telling you. I am saying this out of personal experience - I really thought, I’m young, I’m female, I’m a little obnoxious, I clearly do not know what I am doing. But. True story: I’m trying to get my parish to figure out how to be innovative, to do things differently. To adhere to our tradition, but to innovate within it. Really groovy missional church stuff. And you know what they said? Well we did innovate - we hired you.

And I was like we are all screwed.

Being idolized sounds great, but it robs me of the chance to be human. I hope you were all listening when one of my colleagues told us a few days ago in a plenary that failure should be a part of ministry.

Let me be clear: I do not wish for you high-stakes failure, but I do wish you room to fail. All of us have to be willing to fail in small matters, and to let each other fail, because the mistakes are where you’ll learn the most. That’s why we’re here at Roslyn, after all! To learn from our own homiletic mistakes, from other people’s mistakes.

Even failing in front of people publicly, even as you lead liturgy - well, if you can do that with grace and humility you can become an outward and visible sign of the redeeming love of God. You can trip over many things in this wilderness - but if you can stand up and laugh at yourself, you become an example of the abounding grace of God.  

Thing about being idolized - It might feel a little seductive, but it sucks.

For a lot of us, too, being idolized is being fetishized. You got some melanin? You can bring in all the people who look like you! You’re queer? You can bring in all the people who love like you. You have a family? Well, this certainly will bring the young families back!

I don’t want my church to have hired me because I’m young and female.  I want them to have hired me because I was, by far, the best candidate with the strongest resume who came in and impressed them.
I don’t want to be an idol … I want to be able to see, hear, eat and smell.

But I know I need to pay heed to that instinct people have to make me into an idol. Because people will ascribe a lot of power to me, even power I didn’t not ask for. And paying attention to that power is pretty important, lest it be abused. Lest respect turn to homage. Lest the prophet in the pulpit become an idol on the shelf. 

This what your CPE supervisor called pastoral authority - when you take the power people give you and give juuuuuuuu-st enough of it back. I hope you have developed some of that - you will have need for it.

And in fact, our ministry requires that we plant ourselves in the middle of the assembly. Church work requires that we root ourselves into the spiritual landscape, that we take on the solidity of wood and stone. That we always be there, so people can depend on us as they make their way.

It behooves you to do that - to be solid and to be planted, to be that kind of a witness that marks the landscape.

But I beg of you - do not be an idol - be a signpost.

Signposts get rooted too. They get planted in a landscape, get down in there firmly… and then they point somewhere else.

Get yourself rooted in, planted real deep and solid, and then be a signpost. Plant, root yourself in the middle of that assembly, and point them onward. Point them somewhere else. Point to what really can save them, save the church, save the world.Point them to what has already saved them, created the church, redeemed the world. Point them to the horizon and then show them how to expand their thinking beyond that.

Point them to Jesus.

People are going to come, and they’re going to gather around you, but if they come to you, you don’t have to leave them there. You can point them onward, outwards, further. You can send them out, even as you stay behind to lock up. You can point them onward to a God who is merciful, who neither abandons nor destroys, above all a God who has not forgotten us, even if we have forgotten her.

In whatever landscape your ministry places you, be a signpost. Be a great big arrow pointing to the enormity of God and the greatness of God’s power.

Keep on pointing, outwards and upwards, and maybe someday you’ll deserve to be turned into a giant arrow too - maybe you really will get to be a bishop and wear a big pointy tall pointy hat, so you look like an arrow pointing up towards where we are to lift our hearts and thoughts. But let that hat just be the ornament, the final finishing on a life that points ever to Jesus.

…That way you’ll be less mad if I ever do work up the courage to come knock that tall pointy hat off your head.
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AMEN.