I hope you caught that, and I hope I'm not alone in this childhood experience, in which, when looking at a mirror, you had a moment of wondering what happens when you walk away from that mirror? What happens when you take a stroll, walk away, and aren't looking in the mirror anymore. And what happens to your reflection? Does he continue to mirror you in everything in the mirror world, or does he just disappear until you come back? And then you get to thinking about the bigger questions at play, questions including, but not limited to, am I the real person, or am I the reflection and the reflection is real? Do I have real agency, or do I just think that I do, though I'm locked into slavish obedience to a shadowy mirrory guy?
I refuse to believe that as a child, I was the only one to have these thoughts. You've all been through this, or similar things, right? Right. Glad we all agree. But this experience, these questions, they serve us reasonably well when looking at the concepts that come up in the scripture readings from this Sunday. For in the scripture readings,they talk to you about the desire to speak for God, to speak on his behalf, which is something that most of us will do at one time or another. We will speak for him, we will quote his word to people, we will tell them about the God that we worship and how he affects our lives, and so on. But even as we have these conversations, we need to check the metric for how we see the word of God that we are sharing with others. We need to check this out, because there's a good chance that what we're sharing with people has nothing to do with the God of the Bible at all.
Moses, in the Old Testament reading, cautions us that when we speak God's word to people, it had better be that . It had better not be words that come from other gods, that come from idols. And yes, this is where we all snicker, and say 'pastor Jim, we don't have idols anymore, not real ones anyway. Nobody has an altar in their home where they bow down and worship gods made of stone or ivory.' Okay, fine. But we do still have idols, and quite frequently, the idol that we worship will speak up, and will hide what it thinks and feels behind speaking on behalf of God.
Have you ever noticed a strange phenomenon with most churches, and with most Christians, that God tends to be strangely in line with their opinions? Have you noticed this? Have you noticed that God tends to quite figuratively mirror the opinions, thoughts, and emotions of the person speaking at the time? All of a sudden, God loves who they love, hates who they hate, feels as though their concerns are the most important thing on planet earth, and generally is obsessed with their obsessions and no further. This leads us to the superbowl phenomenon, in which both teams are filled with observant Christains, and both teams would proceed to give glory and honor to God should they happen to win.
This meme is helpfully called 'scumbag God' and for good reason. There's a real idea that the most important thing to consider in God's mind is who is winning the superbowl (hint: not Seattle) not him doing, literally anything else. Here in Regina, the whole town turns into a ghost town during Roughrider football games, and for the people playing in the football game, they have a similar idea that God in heaven turns into this as well - that he will essentially shut down his care for anything else, and get really into the game.
Remember how I talked about idols earlier? How we don't have idols made of steel or wood or ivory in our homes on altars? Well, we do have idols in our homes, you know. Idols placed on altars coveniently called vanities. Idols of glass, where we see the most important thing in the world staring back at us. Where we come face to face with who often stands in for God in our experience. And that person is the man in the mirror.
This is the idol that we all seem to worship. This is the idol that speaks for God. When we speak for God, when we speak on behalf of him, there's a big question to ask, and it's the same question as we
But this does far more damage overall than we think it does. We think about our perspective on God and what he wants, and we think to ourselves that it doesn't do any harm if we have our own view as to what God would or would not want. What could it possibly hurt if we add what we want to God's word, especially if it's good stuff that's worthwhile. What could it hurt if we said that God probably didn't want anyone to drink alcohol, or that a true Christian wouldn't celebrate halloween, or that no true Christian would ever think of listening to any rap music. And you know, you may have good reasons for abdjuring those things, you may have excellent reasons for skipping all that stuff, but it doesn't mean that God ever said it. And doubly, if we present ourselves and our metric as what God is all about, then we end up putting ourselves between people and God, and we tell them that if they reject our likes and dislikes, if they reject what we think is important, the things that never came out of the Bible at all, then they reject God and the church. And that is a real problem for us.
I remember reading some years ago P.F. Berton's The comfortable pew. And in this book, I can recall Berton complaining about not being able to eat breakfast before going to church so that Holy Communion would be the first thing he would eat that day. Okay, complain away. But who on earth told you to do that? I can promise you that Jesus didn't. It's not in the Bible, it's not to be found in the words of Jesus or of God, but someone at some point put it forward as a good idea, as something that helped in their religious observance, and then people took it and ran with it, holding it up as the thing you have to do if you want to be a properly observant, reverant communicant.
Paul talks about this in the epistle reading, letting us who are Christians know that if we are to present Christ to people, it has to be taking ourselves out of the situation as much as we possibly can. It's tempting for us to want to make ourselves be the biggiest thing in the situation, to show ourselves as being vital, our thoughts as being the most important ones, and if we conflate our thoughts with those of the scriptures, then there's a good chance that when people reject our opinions, or our approaches, then they will reject the God of the Bible wholesale.This is part of the reason why we as Lutherans are so big on the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, or scripture alone. We are only to have scripture as the source of our doctrine. If God says it, then we can base things on it. If he doesn't, then we have to aknowledge that at best, it's our opinion talking. But this conflation of us with God, of him mirroring us instead of the other way around, of Christ marching in lockstep with us rather than us being imitators of Christ, this is a great deal of what Christ died for. He died, the Godly for the ungodly, he died to forgive us of our sins, including, but not limited to, our damnable idolatry. And yes, our idolatry is the cause of and root of so many of our problems. Were we to quit with our idolatry, a lot of what we run into would fall away. Most of our sin would not be an issue. If we stopped presenting ourselves as equivalent to God, if we stopped valuing things other than God so highly, then we wouldn't have the problems that we have. We would be focused on the Lord our God, and we would serve him only. But we aren't and so we don't. And this is why decision theology, that talks about you making a decision for your Lord, it's why it doesn't work. Because your own biggest idol is yourself, and even as a Christian, you end up speaking for God the vast majority of the time. His words get drowned out by your thoughts.
So this, among other things, is that Jesus died for. He took up his cross for your idolatry, for your focus on yourself, for your confusing your words with his, for your desire to have the God of the Bible reflect you rather than you imitating him. That's what he died for. And knowing this means that we can do two things
1 - repent of that and be forgiven, and
2 - actually get to know what he really says about things.
It'll be a difficult and painful process, and the reason many people don't want to go through it is because of what will happen if they actually engage with the God of the scriptures. If you read through the scriptures, you will find that Jesus disagrees with you on a great many subjects. He will not back you up on every decision you make. He will not support all the things you do. He will ask for and demand so much more than you want to give, and that you are capable of giving. He will make all these requests which is why most of us don't want to investigate his words too far. He will push us and ask too much of us. But if we are serious about being a people of Sola Scriptura, then we will have one additional gift in all this, which is to know the most important thing that Jesus has to say is not to lecture us about what we ought or ought not to do, it isn't to give us more and more lists of what to do vs not to do, but it is to offer us his grace. It is to remind us that he has died for us, for our idolatry. He died for the man in the mirror, he died for everyone to forgive them their sins that had dragged them down. All the nonsense that we have committed, all the prizing of ourselves over and above all other things, all the obsession with ourselves, that's what Christ died for. He went to the cross for all the sins we have committed, and nailed them to the tree, never to be seen again. If you ever want to speak for Jesus, then the best place to start is always going to be to tell them of the love of Christ.
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