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Sermon
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THE COUNSEL OF LESSER GODS As you know, the book of Psalms is an anthology of the hymns and liturgies of ancient Israel. This one, Psalm 82, is most extraordinary. It pictures God holding court in the divine council. All the lesser gods are there in their serried rows, and very attentive to the God of gods. God stands like a teacher in front of a class of unruly students and takes them to task: Who are these lesser gods, if they need to be upbraided like recalcitrant year-nines? We need to go back into history for an answer.How long will you judge unjustly The Hebrew people were slow to identify the One they worshipped, whom they called Yahweh, as the sovereign of the whole universe. Early in the period of the Bible it was assumed that Yahweh was the God of the Hebrew people, and that was more or less that. The Hebrews discovered over the centuries that Yahweh was not merely the god of Israel, not merely one among the many gods of the surrounding nations. It took a long while to sort out the difference. Remember the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal, the god of the Canaanites. Elijah and the priests of Baal stage a competition to see who can call down fire from heaven to burn a sacrificial bull. Strange stuff. Then last Sunday the Lectionary included a reading from the second book of Kings. Naaman, commander of the army of Aram (later Syria) goes to Israel for healing of his leprosy. There he meets Elisha, Elijah’s successor. Elijah directs him to bathe seven times in the River Jordan. When Naaman’s skin becomes clean again, he wants to give continual thanks to the God of Israel for his healing, and to worship only the God of Israel. But how can he, since he lives sixty miles or so away in Damascus? How can the god of Israel hear from such a distance? Naaman’s solution is to beg two mule-loads of earth from Elisha. If he has the sacred soil of Israel with him, so he reasons, he also has access to the god of the soil. Nifty thinking. Eventually Israel comes to believe that Yahweh, the Lord, their God, is also sovereign of the universe, while they still harbour a remnant of the old polytheistic thinking. Their solution is to envisage the various divinities of the surrounding nations as real but lesser gods. Here they are in Psalm 82 getting the blame for all the injustice in the world. “How long will you judge unjustly?” According to this theology, the injustices perpetrated by humans on earth are to be laid at the feet of decisions made by the lesser gods in heaven. Not that the lesser gods shoulder all the guilt, so do the humans who follow their leading. How do we make sense of this in our own day and age? Are the lesser gods to blame for the mess in Iraq? Are they to blame for the ugly standoff that has prevailed for so long in the land of Christ’s birth? What about the distress of aboriginal communities in Australia? In short, does injustice derive from adherence to a lesser god? Injustice prevails on the earth, while the God of gods remains wholly righteous. We have heard a fair bit about family values of late, and we support family values whole-heartedly. We all do, although the Church is prone to speaking of the whole human family. In the movie The Godfather, the important entity was “the family.” Everything, including murder, was justified in the name of the family, its prosperity and its honour. In short, the family became an idol to be worshipped. Let’s take our memories back to the Germany of the ‘thirties. There the Nazis constructed a primitive tribal religion out of the power and pride of the nation. They were building a Reich that would “last for a thousand years.” Collective egotism offered individuals the opportunity to lose themselves in the larger whole, together with possibilities of self-aggrandizement. Think the Nuremberg rallies. The nation pretended to be God and demanded the unconditioned loyalty of its citizens. The pride of nations is not wholly spurious. Their claim to embody values has a foundation in fact. Nevertheless, if there are things we ought to render to Caesar, there are also things that must be rendered only to God, for “we must obey God rather than mortals.” St Andrew’s Church in Bendigo has some wonderful windows, some of which go back to an older building of the Victorian age. The one I have in mind celebrates the Holy Trinity. Opposite to the symbol for the Father the artist has posed the rose of England, to the Son the thistle of Scotland and to the Holy Spirit the shamrock of Ireland. The artist no doubt wished to depict a Christian nation, but for all that, there was more than a whiff of national hubris. Was it George Orwell who coined the term “groupthink?” It is easy to see how members of Al-Qaeda, for example, reinforce one another with groupthink. Thus there arises a lesser god lacking the majesty of the high God whom the three monotheistic religions aspire to worship and to serve. Is it true that George W Bush claimed that “God” had told him to go into Iraq? Certainly he spoke in early days of a “crusade.” Was he inspired by the high God, sovereign of the universe, or by the lesser god of fundamentalist Christianity? The New Testament speaks of “principalities and powers,” as quasi-demonic realities warring against God. The Book of Revelation speaks bitterly against the Roman Empire, the “whore of Babylon,” although St Paul advises us to “be obedient to the governing authorities” as set in place by God for the sake of order in the world. Many contemporary commentators have equated the “principalities and powers” with ideologies, like communism, which mould their adherents into groupthink, but which have been responsible for terrible injustice. And lest we see only the motes in our neighbour’s eyes, let us recognise the injustices that have been perpetrated under the rule of democracy. Psalm 82 paints a picture of God in heaven convening a gathering of all the lesser gods: A few months before the invasion of Iraq Anne and I attended a little gathering in the office of the Asylum Seeker project of Hotham Mission. We were saying farewell to Mrs Kedem and her five children, ranging in age from eighteen to three. Their application for refugee status had been rejected. They had to go back to Iraq. No doubt there were good reasons at the time. Yet I am still haunted by the memory of this small woman, looking so very, very young, and very frightened . . . and the little people, clinging to her.How long will you judge unjustly? . . . I asked after them the other day. Apparently they have found their way to neighbouring Iran and comparative security. Thank the God of gods for that. There are said to be two million refugees from Iraq now crammed into countries like Syria and Jordan, victims of competing ideologies, victims of arguments between the lesser gods. The psalm says of these entities: In John’s Gospel Jesus takes up this verse. If the Psalm calls these entities “children of the Most High,” then how can his opponents take offence if he calls himself “God’s Son?”They have neither knowledge nor understanding, The Christian faith thinks of Jesus as a “window into God.” Windows need cleaning from time to time. Much has been added over the centuries to the original memory of Jesus of Nazareth. Much of that obscures the vision, turning him into a lesser god—the rallying point of an ideology. Psalm 82 concludes: Rise up, O God, judge the earth; The New Testament claim is that in Jesus of Nazareth God has risen up to judge the earth. He refuses to let us recruit him to any ideology and turn him into a lesser god. He comes to us again and again as the risen One, hidden in the Word, hidden in the sacraments, hidden in our time together. He is the Good Samaritan who rescues us on the way, and who commands us to 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, your neighbor as yourself'. ___________________________________________________
A sermon presented by the
Rev Dr Stuart Murray at St Aidan's
Uniting Church North Balwyn, on 15th July, 2007 IT MAY BE
REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. |
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Page updated 19/07/07