Church Idols

Today we’re in the Season after Pentecost examining Paul’s letter to the Galatians. And we’re looking at something that can be a major temptation in the Christian life. And that is, we start with a dynamic relationship with Jesus based on the gift of faith. But we feel like we have to build monuments to it. And more often than not, the monuments we build make us value the monuments more and the relationship less. A monument becomes a distraction and sometimes an idol. I will probably have this Tim Keller quote on my tombstone. Tim Keller calls an idol “a good thing made into an ultimate thing.” This morning I want to talk about idols in general and church idols in particular, because I think that’s what we’re seeing at play in Galatia. Church idols can be the worst idols because they feel justifiable. They can be as simple as loving being an Anglican, and I say this as an Anglican priest. They can be worship style or a specific spiritual practice or even a person, a beloved Sunday school teacher, or pastor, or child. It can be anything that distinguishes my church from another one. If it’s a noun or even an adjective in your mission statement, if it’s found on your church website, if it’s a deeply held value, it has the potential to become an idol. 

One way to identify any idol, but this is especially helpful when looking at church-related idols, is to ask the question, “Is this person, place, thing, or practice something that helps me draw close to Jesus, or is Jesus becoming the thing that justifies my association with the person, place, thing, or practice?” Do we value Anglicanism because it helps us draw close to Jesus, or are we infatuated with various aspects of Anglican faith and practice and make those our main focus, with Jesus thrown in to make it noble and right, to baptize it? And we can ask the same thing about anything at any church. Idolatry is everywhere, including church.

And this was true in Paul’s time and among the Galatian church. There, the thing in danger of becoming idolatry was the Law and Jewish identity, and good works. Now again, Paul and the rest of the New Testament makes it clear that these things are good things, very good, just as many of our church-related idols are. But they had come to the point where those good things were shifting into sharing and even supplanting Jesus as the ultimate one, the only one. And so Paul has to address it. The monument that the Galatians had walked inside seemed like a really good one. It had tradition and history behind it, even the presence of God and relationship with him. And that made it really effective. But again our good things need to be put in their right place. If they don’t help us see Jesus as he is, as the ultimate thing, then we’re in spiritual danger. 

So the back story with the Galatians is that they were a group of largely Gentile believers. They had been worshiping the Father and the Son; they had received the Holy Spirit and been baptized. And then some Christians visited them and told them that if they wanted to be REAL Christians, if you REALLY wanted to worship God the way he wants to be worshipped, then you need to (fill in the blank). We might fill in the blank with any number of good things: speaking in tongues, using incense, reason and intellectualism, anti-intellectualism, hymns, drums, liturgy. The good thing that the visitors filled the blank in with was the ceremonial aspects of the Levitical Law. They said something like: “That’s great if you’ve come to trust in Jesus, that you worship the one true God, that you’ve received the Holy Spirit. Now it’s time to be mature. If you Galatians want to be real Christians, you’ll take on the requirements of the Levitical Law.” The Galatians, (I’ll continue to paraphrase a bit), the Galatians look around to each other and say “I thought things were going pretty well. I thought we’ve got the right focus, but if we also need to take on all the Jewish holidays and clothing requirements, and dietary requirements, and get circumcised to be real Christians, let’s get started. Salvation is from the Jews. I guess we need to become Jewish if we’re going to get this Christianity thing right.” Church idols are parasitic. They borrow the goodwill built up by the gospel and use the gospel’s credibility to stand in the gospel’s spotlight. And so belief and trust in Jesus was being set a bit to the side to entertain belief and trust in the ceremonial, temporary, Levitical Law. And eventually the right obsession with Jesus and his love for us as seen in his sacrificial death, turned into an obsession with the thing being added to Jesus or the thing meant to point to Jesus when it’s functioning as it should. And once you lose focus on Jesus to trust in something else that’s good, you fall for a lie. 

And the lie is that the good thing you’ve decided to trust in possesses its own goodness. When in reality, the goodness of hymns, or speaking in tongues, or the Law, or liturgy, the goodness of those things is in relaying Jesus’ love for you. None of those things are helpful in and of themselves. If you find yourself resting peacefully in the fact that you finally got your new Bible or a spiritual director or started fasting or reading theology or studying Hebrew or taking on this or that good practice, if your peace rests there, you’re blind and lost. In that moment you’ve stolen the goodness of Jesus that was shining through those things and you’ve cut off that goodness from its source and you treat it as if it possesses its own goodness. I can turn my back on Jesus as long as I have you, new worship guitar, or vestments or number of people in church or financial support. If the goodness in your good thing isn’t the light of Jesus’s goodness shining through, then the goodness in your good thing is a lie. There is no such thing as intrinsic goodness apart from Jesus. So let’s be careful with our good things, especially church things.

Now for Paul and the Galatians and the Law and the Jewish Christians trying to bring the Galatians under the levitical Law, things are even more complicated. The Levitical Law was a bandaid on the wound caused by sin. It was meant to keep things from falling apart until the real, true solution came in Christ. It pointed to him. So let’s imagine you’re slicing cucumbers because you’re having some friends over for some Greek food, and while you’re slicing away, you cut your finger. It’s deep. And so to avoid bleeding on everyone’s food, you get a bandaid. Your friends come over, you have a great time. You go to bed, wake up the next morning, and you take a look at your wound. Still bad, still time for a bandaid. A couple weeks later you’re all healed up. Looks good. Do you put an another bandaid? No. And that’s because it’s much better to be healed than to wear a bandaid. If you’ve been healed, you don’t keep wearing a bandaid. If you do, the skin around the wound that the bandaid was sticking to will start to become affected and after a while will start to see some damage. We’re not meant to wear a bandaid forever. Once the bandaid has done its job, it’s held things in place and protected your wound until it’s healed, you can show off something much more appealing than looking at a bandaid: your healed skin. 

Look what God has done for you. He’s healed your wounds. It doesn’t give him any glory to cover up your brand new skin with a bandaid and pretend like he hasn’t healed you. I lie to myself and everyone else when I pretend that I haven’t been healed when in fact I have. And so that’s a special kind of dysfunction caused by religious, church-based idols that Paul was dealing with in terms of taking on the part of the Law that was already fulfilled in Christ, after receiving Christ through faith. This issue for Galatia gives us categories for religious, church-based idols and leads us to examine our idolatrous impulses. It helps us ask the question: “Am I letting something stand in the place of Jesus, even a little bit, just because I like it, because it’s a delight to the eyes and desired to make one wise?”

Our passage also shows us the effect idols can have on us, especially church-based ones. Idols give us identities apart from Jesus. And when they do that, they divide the church. In Galatia, the people who were converting to a form of Judaized Christianity sat apart from the others and wouldn’t eat with them. Pride in their newfound Levitical practices made them glad to be different. And different is always different from, in this case, from their brothers and sisters in Christ. When you celebrate what makes you different from other Christians, your faith is probably suffering. Not always. Sometimes the thing that makes you different is that you haven’t bowed the knee to Baal when other Christians around you have. But Lord, save us from thinking we’re better than other Christians because we’ve got this or that distinctive element to how we are living out our faith. What we can say is that I’m glad that Jesus is using something to help me see him more clearly and be drawn into worship of Him as he really is. But we also have to remember that God can use something that would never work on us to draw someone else into seeing his goodness, beauty, and love. 

In the end, it’s worth doing what Paul does, especially in robust traditions like Anglicanism. He looks at some of the universal, basic things that unite all Christians. In verse 26:

Galatians 3:26–29 ESV

26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

Faith has brought about our adoption as sons of God, heirs according to the promise. And baptism is the adoption certificate. The adopted children are true children. No one’s better than anyone else. Slaves, males, Greeks, masters, females, Jews, we’re all equally children of God. And just as a child adopted into a new family doesn’t just be adopted in their room somewhere, life in the family of Christian faith means going into the living room and playing a board game once in a while. Families have their quirks and interesting traditions. There are lots of good and meaningful ways to be a family together, good ways to be more than officially adopted, but actually living life together. But there are foundational things common to all families.

The one thing that all believers in Jesus hold in common is the Cross. We have to be careful. Just because we value the Cross doesn’t mean we can also carry around whatever idol we want. Valuing the Cross doesn’t excuse our plan for continued idolatry. But if we see Jesus’ love for us and for the Father, on the Cross, if we see the Son of God emptied of his glory and dying in our place, if we look to Jesus the crucified and cherish his act of selfless love, then our arms and hands become weak and the idols we carry around with us will fall to the ground and our focus will finally be where it belongs, on Jesus. And so we look to the Cross of Jesus, and as you do, ask to see him clearly. When that happens, when we see Jesus as he truly is, when we see his unmatched worth, then we’ll be able to rightly judge the worth of everything else and put it in it’s right place in relation to him. So let us look to Jesus and value him as he deserves to be valued, seeing him as he really is.