Monday, April 03, 2006
Prayer Idol
I had to do a talk last week at work and the reading for the day was about the golden calf that the Israelites made and worshipped while Moses was up the mountain, receiving the ten commandments and hammering out the finer points of how to worship God (Exodus 32:7-14 – but v1-6 also relevant). I realised I’ve actually been thinking a lot recently about idolatry.I guess I see the Lenten tradition of giving things up as partly about identifying and acknowledging idols - our dependencies and where they are misplaced or unhealthy, whether that’s making work and professional achievement our ‘god’ or always turning to chocolate in a crisis etc. I’ve always thought about the golden calf like that before – it’s seemed that the Israelites have so obviously got it wrong, and have rejected God in favour of something of their own creation just as I may (at whatever level) try and replace God with sex or money or a new iPod or bike or whatever. But what struck me was that it wasn’t that simple - the Israelites weren’t rejecting God and making a new one that they liked better. They had a real need to worship God, and to have some structure and focus – which is exactly what God and Moses were working on up the mountain. They just contributed to and made a golden calf, not a tabernacle, and placed the wrong thing behind the altar. And Aaron the priest led them in this.
So I was thinking, what are our idols? It seems more likely to be something to do with how we see and seek God, than a rejection of God and an attempt to replace God with something totally different. I go to another church which, after 6 years without its own space following a fire, moved back into the church building yesterday. A lot of that process has been about deciding what we really want and need to have in our church and it’s clear that a lot of people are deeply anxious that they won’t be able to meet God in the same way if the church isn’t the same (and they assume that this will be a bad thing rather than an exciting new possibility!). Moot is far more creative, dynamic, and fluid than my other church but we still have habits, structures, preferences, focuses - things that make moot distinctive. And each of us has preferences - I find it harder to pray and worship for example if there are lots of words, if all the references to God and people in general are male, if I’m not involved (ie feel like a passive observer of a performance by whoever is leading), if I’m sitting on a chair or if I'm wearing shoes. Of course I still believe I can pray and worship if not all my boxes are ticked - but I guess I have limits and have sat in some churches miserable and livid, feeling utterly unable to connect.
Where is the line between these kind of preferences and making a 'golden calf'? How can we identify the idols in our own spiritual lives? What assumptions do we make about God's ability to reach out to us, by putting limits on how we reach out to God?
