Idolatry

 questionnaire by Wendell Berry, number 5:

Please state briefly the ideas, ideals or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

I'm not quite sure where to put this, it's a bit theological, perhaps mostly so, so I'm putting it here.  But it also is a current issue, and probably a bit political, if you choose to take it that way (everyone seems to these days).  I guess the main reason it's here is because it relates directly to my pastoral work, in fact, it is a bit of a deeper dive about something that began as a digression in a Bible Study on the Prophet Isaiah.

We were talking about idols.  In Isaiah, the idols of Assyria and Babylon are compared with the One True God.  The remarkable thing is that, on one level Assyria and Babylon could make a case that their gods beat up the Living God and took his lunch money.  However, the Living God chooses to play a longer game than they could.  The covenant making God shows faithfulness and steadfast love, even in exile, and in the long run, proves that The Lord is the only God, there is no other.  The other idols are not rivals, they are nothing, figments of the human imagination.  The Lord says through the prophet of the idols: "these things you carry are loaded as burdens on weary animals." (Isaiah 46: 1, NRSV)

The reason The Lord God is so angry about idols is not because he actually fears or resents them, but because they ultimately cause human suffering.  They are bad ideas in the beginning, but their true damage can only be seen as things unfold.  In the beginning of things, the idols are completely in control of the humans who make them.  They are products of a spiritual imagination that has slipped the bonds of the covenant, with an arrogance that says, "I can do better."  All of the ancient cultures had their idols, they all worshipped their gods, they all made sacrifices to something they believed might help them.  When times are good, these idols were beneficent, demanding little more than some grain or a perhaps a feast or festival, and who doesn't like that?

The problem comes when the storm hits, when the plague comes, when the drought or the fire lasts longer than expected.  Then people start to panic and think that the god they had been praying to desires more sacrifice.  It starts with blood, first of animals, then of enemies and finally, if things progress far enough, with their own children.  If you put your faith in a transactional deity then, if you really want something, one of your own children is the only sure way to make sure you paid a high enough price to ensure success.  Not all idolatry gets this far, but it's always a firm possibility.

I have long been aware that our idolatry leads us to sacrifice children, but until recently I figured it was in the same sort of abstract connection that has always afflicted humanity.  We desire power and security and therefore we are willing to engage in war.  As Dylan says in Masters of War, "you hide in your mansions, while the young people's blood, flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud."  That is familiar, tragic and pretty much perpetual.  But recently, with the COVID pandemic, I have begun to realize that perhaps the white hot arms of Moloch are not just the sinister embrace of the military industrial complex.

There are two related crises facing us right now and I believe they reveal something deeply idolatrous about this so-called Christian Nation of ours, the first I think is actually much older and more serious.  However, it represents a penultimate expression of idolatry. When the bridge of human sacrifice is crossed by an idolater, the first sacrifices/victims are the enemies, the strangers and the aliens, next come the slaves, and then finally their own children.  We have been working our way up this ladder for a very long time.  We have been shamefully willing to sacrifice others on the altar of national security and pride.  Whether it was the millions of Africans we enslaved, the millions of Native Americans we exterminated, or the hundreds of millions of their descendants that we continually oppress and brutalize.  We have used "others" in many forms as grist for the grinding wheel of our empire, and we only acknowledge that wickedness in passing, let alone repent of it. The consequences of this are deep and enormously destructive to our souls.  We must repent or we will be destroyed.

Now to the more novel of the two crises, the coronavirus and what it has shown us about our world.  This "clever" little virus is uniquely suited to reveal our idolatry.  Our idols these days don't have names like Baal or Nebo, but one has long been known by it's old name, Mammon.  We also have a raft of others that manifest themselves as a sort of rogues gallery of our collective neuroses: individualism, selfishness, ignorance and last but not least, inconstancy.  That last one was a big favorite of John Calvin back some 500 years.  He saw it as one of our worst flaws, because he saw that we could, if we so chose, exercise our will in accordance with love and grace, he just saw that we couldn't do it for very long.

COVID has put these weaknesses on display.  We cry for individual "rights," we refuse to believe inconvenient facts, but most of all, we just can't seem to settle in for the long fight.  We want our old "normal" back, and we want it now.  We want sports back, we want restaurants back, we want to go to a concert or a parade, we want to just not have to wear a mask.  We want our kids back in school, no matter what the risk, and if they're college athletes, we want them back on the football field. Last week parents of Ohio State Football players were making quite a ruckus for the "right" of their kids to put their lives and long term health at risk.  I never figured there was a connection between Moloch and Brutus the Buckeye (as much as I despise Ohio State), but there it is.

These things are connected, because as it was in the days of Israel, the people knew what was right and holy, the first Law, "Have no other gods before me," and their central prayer, "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One," were always there to remind them of what the truth was, but they always thought idols seemed like a good idea, until they weren't.  We thought slavery was great, until it wasn't, we thought reservations and forced relocation would work, until they didn't, we thought Jim Crow and segregation and "separate but equal," were okay until they weren't.  We think that the way our police function is just fine, until it's just not.  We think that we can manage COVID until an outbreak hits our town.  How much are we willing to sacrifice on the altar of our own arrogance and greed?

That question has not yet been answered, but perhaps it doesn't have to be.  We can go back to one of our archetypal stories in Scripture and find an example of a time where Abraham thought that God wanted him to sacrifice his only son Isaac.  It turns out God did not require any such thing, and probably didn't particularly even want the goat that ended up on the altar.  God knew Abraham was a human though and was going to take some pretty stiff convincing before he would believe that the covenant didn't need such gore.  So he leads him through what is essentially a lesson of sorts, gets him to contemplate the consequences of sacrificing his child and then lets him "wake up" before he goes through with it.  Can we wake up in time?

If you want a Christian question that needs an answer consider Jesus.  Who is Jesus willing to sacrifice for the Kingdom of Heaven?  Only himself.  He goes to the cross himself rather than participate in a violent uprising that would lead to not one, but thousands of crosses.  That should be a gauntlet that is thrown down at our feet America, especially if you call yourself a Christian.  You can and should take up your cross and carry it, but you should never build one for someone else to hang upon, that's not a choice we should ever make.  Please keep your answers brief.

You who build these altars now,

To sacrifice your children,

You must not do it any more.

A scheme is not a vision,

and you never have been tested,

by an angel or a god.

-Leonard Cohen