Oct. 8, 2023

Have you ever tried to get God to do something? I’ve got a laundry list of things I want God to do – everything from smiting my enemies to mending the environment to healing and health to squeezing another year out of our furnace. It’s a long list. My guess is that we all have similar lists. And it’s disappointing, isn’t it, when God doesn’t do what we want, when we want it. Frustrating. Maddening.

There’s a real danger in trying to control God. So today I want us to be thinking about the ways we try to manipulate God, and what that might mean for our lives of faith. And I want us to think about this in the context of the Ten Commandments.

There’s no way we’re going to cover the whole Ten Commandments in one sermon. So let’s narrow things down. The Ten Commandments can be divided into two groups – commandments that deals with how people are to be in relationship with God – theology – and how people are to be in relationship with each other – ethics.

Now, this link between ethics and theology is incredibly important. But the ethical commandments – honoring your parents and being honest and making sure not to murder people – aren’t terribly controversial. You can find people of all sorts of faiths – or none at all – who consider this part of a great moral code. It’s the commandments that relate to our relationship with God that define us as people of faith, and so that’s where I want to focus.

Most of us have a good understanding of two of these theological commandments – have no gods before the God who brought the Israelites out of Egypt, and don’t misuse God’s name. But the other commandment—that we make no idols – often flies under the radar. And it raises two interesting questions – what’s an idol, and why is this a problem?

Some Christian traditions interpret this commandment to prohibit making any image of God at all. But my sense is that this commandment isn’t really intended to prohibit artistic representations of God.

If we go back in a time machine to the Ancient Near East, we’d find idols of all kinds. Archaeologists dig these things up all the time. They’re little statues that were associated with the different gods that the various cultures worshipped. Canaanites, for instance, made idols of the fertility god Baal. Greeks pursuing joy would have made idols of Bacchus.

But what we don’t understand is that these idols weren’t about worship. They were all about control. People in these cultures believed that if you made incantations, or spells, or performed the right ritual over the idol, then you could threaten, or bind, or control the deity that it represented. In other words, people who created these idols did so to try to exploit the deity. To manipulate the deity into doing what he or she wanted.

The temptation that this commandment is warning us against, then, is not creating beautiful art or stained-glass windows or anything else depicting God. Instead, the temptation is to create ways to domesticate and control God. We may not be sitting around creating wood or stone statues as idols. But how often do we try to create a God who acts and thinks and feels just like we do? How often do we put God into a mental box where we try to impose our will on God to give us what we want?

And I wonder: why do we do this? What’s so tempting about trying to get God to do what we want? I think, if we’re honest with ourselves, we try to take control of the world when we operate out of spaces of despair, and fear, and anxiety. We want so badly to get the outcomes we desire that we claim false autonomy over the universe. And trying to take responsibility for everything in our lives is exhausting. As our efforts fail our disappointment and our anger begin to spiral out of control while we blame God for not being who we want God to be. And that is corrosive to our lives of faith.

All of us do this in different ways, but I think a common one is through our prayer lives. I want to be perfectly clear on this – there is nothing wrong with prayers that ask God to take action. We do this in the Prayers of the People every Sunday – when we pray for the church, the nation, the world, our community, those in trouble, and the departed. And that is a good and holy and righteous thing. The problem is when that’s all there is to our conversation with God. When our prayers are nothing but cosmic wish lists or demands for metaphysical magic intended to force God to meet our individual interests, then our prayers have become a deadly religious farce. Because we’ve made God into an idol and taken God’s place for ourselves.

In the Ten Commandments, God offered a succinct vision for creation to a community of liberated slaves. And maybe that’s the key to living this commandment out faithfully. Maybe we, too, need to own the identity of being a community of liberated slaves. Not liberated out of the slavery of Egypt. But liberated from the slavery of lies that despair and fear whisper to us. The lie that brokenness is final. The lie that suffering and death cannot be followed by new life. The lie that we cannot trust in the Good Shepherd’s leading.

Today, let’s rejoice as we smash the idols of God we’ve made for ourselves. Rejoice as we reject the false autonomy that despair and fear tempt us to claim. Rejoice as we let our faithful, liberating God be who God is, and be blessed in return with the Kingdom’s hope and abundance.

Amen.