Sermon Library
“You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me”
Gregg R. Anderson
September 25, 2007
Service Theme: Pentecost XIX - 2005
The First and Greatest Commandment
“You shall have no other gods before me.” This is our first commandment in the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are mostly known from the book of Exodus, but they are repeated in various ways and combinations throughout the Torah. In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, for example, the Ten Commandments are stated again in their entirety. Then, immediately following, in the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, the first commandment is singled out and its priority highlighted. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This emphasis is generally considered enough, but if one is a practicing Orthodox Jew, one needs to listen and practice the rest of this elaboration of the first commandment. “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
Over three thousand years later, even in Aspen, Colorado, there are hundreds of Jews in Aspen who have posted the first or all of the Ten Commandments on the doorpost of their home in a container called a Mezuza. And there are now over a hundred people with our orthodox Jewish community who wear phylacteries on their hand and forehead during prayers and reading of the Torah.
Jesus clearly reiterated the supremacy of the first commandment when he answered the lawyer’s question about which is the greatest commandment in the law.
Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.” Jesus placed other commandments and laws of the Torah and the Talmud in perspective by saying that life is much more about following love than following the letter of the law. Nevertheless, Jesus still restated the first commandment in tact. And then he said in Matthew, “And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Biblical exegeticists debate the meaning of “a second is like it.” Does this mean that there are two equal commandments or is the first first and the second second? It is likely that the first is first because Jesus is recorded as saying, “This is the great and first commandment.”
Between the first commandment in the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ clear reiteration of the first and great commandment it is affirmed, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might and you shall have no other gods before me.”
God and Mini-gods
This first and great commandment appears to be clear enough and even simple especially if it essentially means loving God. We can somewhat easily affirm this. How we practice this becomes another issue. The first of the Ten Commandments is not about loving God, but not having any other gods before God. We can just as easily say to ourselves, “I love God and I do not worship any other gods such as Zeus, Baal, the sun or the moon or any graven golden images.” But if we look at our daily lives and practices, we confront ourselves with a host of “mini-gods” that we follow which sometimes and somehow become major gods.
We all know them. They are the gods we spend more time with than God. I am going to mention a few of them just to lay them out and then set them aside. I am more interested in suggesting some more subtle gods that can become even bigger subtle gods than the typical ones we can mention such as the gods of mammon or materialism which is a god that has increased exponentially over the past century. James Farrell, a professor of History and American Studies at the very prestigious college of St. Olaf, has written a detailed demography of our current society entitled, One Nation Under Goods, which I am most anxious to read and, I suspect, will be another sermon. Other such major minor gods, of course, are the gods of politics, power, prestige, possessions, perfectionism and even piety, just to name a few that fit in this particular alliteration.
The first Commandment is a double-edged sword because it is first a literal statement meaning exactly what it says; and second, it is a sweeping, probing, almost unfathomable message, searching the deepest recesses of human life. It is not a Commandment given much attention today, for idolatry is not considered a major temptation of our time. Very little do we understand the meaning of idolatry. Let us probe deeper.
God as Ultimate Concern
Paul Tillich, a great theologian and existentialist of the twentieth century, defined God or gods as a person’s ultimate concern, the ground of all being. Your God is that reality which elicits from you your deepest feelings and your most ultimate concern. The question is not, Is there a god for you? But what kind of god does your life serve? What is the nature of your ultimate concern? Where is your ultimate loyalty? What is the ultimate value your life is organized to serve? Where does your security rest? On a deeper level, does your life serve a unified whole? Or are we split up in divergent, competitive values, serving all sorts of conflicting goals and gods?
God Is One
If there are no other gods and if God is one, the great I Am, then there must be a unity that comes to our lives by the worship of that oneness. If God is one, then our lives must reflect one standard, one value, one truth, and one love that is ultimate. That finally will result in one human family, not a family where everybody looks alike, acts alike, or understands the truth in the same way, but one family all drawn into unity by the worship of one God. Much of our discrimination, nationalism and superiority is a form of idolatry and not allowing God to be God and the one God.
Gods of Nationalism
If there are no other gods and if God is one, then every war in human history is a civil war, for it is a war inside the family of God’s people. Abraham Lincoln was once asked if he thought God was on the side of the North in the Civil War. Mr. Lincoln responded, “The real question is not whether God is on our side but whether we are on God’s side.” If you suggest such a sentiment in a time of conflict, you will run the risk of being branded a coward or a traitor. Bishop John Shelby Spong states, “If the flag of nationalism flies above the altar of God, we have become idolators. The worship of God calls us out of that narrow boundary by which we define the worth of human life; it calls us into a deeper understanding of the common humanity that binds us all. Nationalism is one of the idols that we have enshrined in the place where only God belongs.” If God is God then no nation can rise above God. We cannot idolatrize our own nationalistic interpretation of God as God. We will violate the first commandment. We can ask for God’s vision and even blessing, but again in the sentiment of Abraham Lincoln we need to keep asking not if God on our side, but are we on God’s side.
Gods of Religion
Nationalism can become another god. And so too, and this is more challenging,
can religion become another god. Two Sundays ago, in my introduction to Philathea, meaning the love of God, I made a distinction of the ontological God and the anthropomorphized God. Simply restated the ontological God is that which exists whatever that creator or God is. The anthropomorphized God is the god we have imagined or created. Even though such distinctions are difficult, we need to keep trying to discern infinite and limitless reality within our finite and limited reality. We can so easily make that which we have created the final image of God and violate the first and second commandment.
I call upon Bishop Spong again who writes, “We seek to use God in other ways, and whenever we succeed, we become idolators. God can never be used; this never works. The only way we can respond to God is in worship. We cannot isolate God and manipulate God. Prayer does not bring good luck. Worship does not guarantee success. Faith is not meant as a tool or a means to gain something else, at least not faith in the God who is I AM, the God whose glory fills the world, the God whose life throbs in the life of every human being, the God whose love is the matrix of our world. God is. God alone is ultimate. God alone is real. God alone must be worshiped and adored. The God who is God can never be manipulated, measured, captured, or tamed.”
This is what the first two commandments say; no other gods and do not make your own image of God. I am not saying anything radical. I just happen to be talking about the first commandment. There really can’t be anything more basic coming from any pulpit. I am just taking it a bit further than simply building golden calves and jeweled icons that people might bow before. The essential and deeper meaning is that God can never be captured; God can never be completely seen. Spong continues, “God can never be made to serve our needs. No barriers of human life, no places of worship, no representation, no symbol, no sacrament can contain God. God’s beauty cannot be captured in any beauty of humanity - not in any architecture, nor in art. We can point to God, we can reflect on God, we can imagine God, but we can never fully enshrine God in anything. God’s being can never be fully described, not in the Bible, not in any one church, not in any one denomination, not in any one creed. These are only symbols that point us to God, but they never capture God or substitute for God. Thus no Bible can be worshiped nor can it be installed as the infallible revelation of the word of God, without falling into idolatry. No creed can finally define God. No denomination can finally capture truth on their own; and when with limited minds, they do, they again become idolators.” There are no other gods than God.
God Alone is Real
“The experience of worship is supposed to open life to the world, to call life to freedom, to accept life’s diversity in the common quest after the oneness of God. Idolatry, on the other hand, is always closed and defensive, even imperialistic. Idolatry demands conformity. Idolatry will make us slaves to a system for it suggests that deviation from the system is deviation from God. God alone is real. God alone is truth. Even Christianity only approximates God; it does not capture God. The Apostle Paul made this pretty clear in First Corinthians. Christianity contains truth but it is not to be equated with all of truth. Christianity points to God but to the degree that it is a system devised by human beings, we must acknowledge that God is always beyond our human system. And if Christianity does not capture all the truth of God, then surely neither does any individual branch or denomination of Christendom, despite the claims of limited minds made through the centuries.”
Exclusive Religion
Exclusive religions have taken narrow insights into the truth of God and elevated them to the place of God as God’s self creating an idolatrous image. Then people have taken those exclusive idols and have used them to club into submission those who do not agree with them or they are excommunicated as heretics who no longer share the truth. “It is neither a secret nor a mystery that even the Ku Klux Klan frequently invokes the name of God in the prejudice and venom which it spews out upon people.”
If God Is God
The commandment is, “You shall have no other gods but me.” This is a call to live in responsible freedom. It is a call to live in this world without any certainty, without any ultimates, in the midst of life’s unknown dimensions. It is a call to live in the world without the certainty that any word, any phrase, or any institution is finally eternal. It is a call to live without idols, to know that every revelation, including our Bible, our creed, our tradition, is but a shadow; it is but a pale replica of the glory of God that no image of human creation will ever capture. When we pretend that we have captured it in our own forms, in our own backyard, in our own hip pocket, when we believe we have become the owners of truth, we violate the first and the second commandment.
God Is the Vine and We Are the Branches
How do we love God? The order of creation is achieved when God is the vine and we are the branches, when God is the life-giving power and we are related to God in such a way that we expand and bloom, becoming full, free, whole, and real. If that central relationship is confused or distorted, if we look to something less than God for our fulfillment, seeking affirmation on the level of status, wealth, social position, achievement, education, power or prestige, then our human light will inevitably burn at a lower wattage; our being will be blurred. Our humanity is insecure because we are separated from God’s infinite source of love. If God is not at the center of our life; something less than God is.
How adequately are we in touch with the infinite source of life? How alive are we? Are we burning at the full wattage of our created power? The glory of God is seen in human life when we are being what we were created to be. God is God. We are God’s people. God is the vine, the source of all that gives life. We are the branches, through whom God’s life and power flows.
Loving God
So, how do we love God? The first commandment is to not have any other God’s before God. It appears that God is a jealous God and wants our full fidelity.
What does that really mean? We all have a lot of minor gods in our lives. To sort it all out is not easy. As Bishop Spong has pointed out, on one level this is relatively simplistic, but when we probe all the possibilities, the first commandment challenges us at the deepest part of our being and existence. What is our life’s priority? I mean really priority? This will be a priority unlike you have never asked before? I know I have a long way to go to truly and purely love God. I know more now that it begins by not having any other gods, any other gods, before God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
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