“American Idols”

 Jer. 8:18-9:1

I was just a 13-year-old kid, but there was still no excuse. The place was Camp of the Woods in upstate New York. I was enrolled in a two-week basketball camp run by former Mavericks general manager Norm Sonju. It was a piece of heaven. The first week was going great: I was making friends, playing well, and competing hard. I couldn’t wait until the next week.

Then my parents showed up. We had a lake house just thirty minutes down the road, and they wanted to see how I was doing. They wanted to see me play and be there for the awards ceremony. It was also their wedding anniversary, and they chose to come see me. Bad decision. I didn’t want to see them. I liked my little life with my new best friends at basketball camp. I liked the smelly T-shirt dorm rooms, the Guess Who eight-track tape we played too loud over and over, and most of all the feeling of being big, of being on my own. Then they showed up, and what, I was supposed to leave my friends—none of whom had parents so inconsiderate as to show up like mine did, don’t you know?!—and just hang out? It was embarrassing.

It was also deeply hurtful to my parents. They had forked over good money to give me the chance to go. They had immense pride in their number-one son. And I treated them like people who ought to be hidden away in the basement when guests came to visit. The tears welled up in their eyes, but the anger flared right behind the tears. They loved me and sacrificed for me, and what they got in return for it all was not grateful love but a cold-shoulder shunning. They decided I needed a lesson in love and respect. They pulled me out of the camp and would not let me return for the second week. I cried, I begged, I apologized. I tried every kid trick of contrition I had used or heard about being used. But the joy was gone, their grief was upon them, and their hearts were sick.

When we read Jeremiah’s words in Chapter 8 today, do we really think he is telling us how God feels about us? Do we really understand that God has feelings at all? Idols have no feelings. They sit on the shelf or on an altar after we have shaped them with our own hands, made them in our own image, and told ourselves that they are always there for us, forever smiling back at us. But they can’t talk back. They can feel no joy or pain.

Maybe this is just the problem: maybe we are not worshiping the one true God whose love for us runs the same gamut of emotions as our love for each other. In religion as in love: If it’s easy, it’s sleazy. A real relationship with a real God will occasion occasional conflict. But maybe we have preferred gods of our own making to the God who made us. Maybe the gods made in our own image are really a deep affront to the God who made us in God’s own image. And maybe at that affront God pours painful words into the prophet’s heart to speak aloud the divine hurt. Why have my people provoked me to anger with their images and foreign gods? God laments.

Sounds a lot to me like my parents’ voices that day they drove me out of camp. Why have your friends become more important to you than your parents? You have known them one week. What have they ever done for you that you should treat us like we don’t exist, like we don’t matter to you at all?

This is the heart of God’s heart-sickness. God is the power of the universe that gave life to each of them. God adopted Israel before they were Israel, when they were a poor slave people in Egypt with no chance of being a world power, let alone a people who could take a break once a week to worship and put their feet up. This is the God who rescued them out of Pharaoh’s hand, gave them the Law to live by instead of another tyrant ruler, and delivered them into a land flowing with milk and honey to be their new home. But once they became a nation like all the others around them, they wanted to be a nation like all those around them. They forgot the ancient wisdom: You got to dance with the one that brung you. They started looking for other partners to cut a rug with. Israel saw how other nations conducted their business and started modeling themselves after their neighbors rather than being a model for their neighbors of an alternative way to live in the world. They made new friends that became more important to them than God. They even started worshiping the gods of their neighbors, as if to fit in. And this idolatry was nothing short of betrayal to the one true God.

We tend to think of idolatry as an ancient thing. I mean, you don’t see many people putting graven images on their mantels and paying homage to them every morning before the Starbucks is brewed. You don’t imagine Americans praying to the Coppertone god or doing a rain dance or offering corn flakes on the altar of harvest sacrifice. But don’t think that means that idolatry is dead. Don’t think that just because America was founded by Christians in search of freedom to worship the true God that we are immune to the worship of other gods. Don’t think the church of Jesus Christ can’t wander off into idolatry by hungering to be like everyone around us. We do it all the time. We think if we are enough fun and we make people only feel good when they come, if we don’t ask much of them, then they will like us and stay, and maybe they will even give us money to build big buildings that will make it seem like we are a successful business that God is blessing. But that’s too easy. If building a church was all about buildings and budgets and baptisms, we could do that without God. The problem is that we can’t any of us do without God—not the true God, the God who loves us enough not to be ignored or abused or used.

The American Idol TV competition illustrates one kind of idolatry. The whole thing is geared to making overnight stars out of unknown people who show some raw talent and promise. If they can make it past the panel of judges, especially that made-for-TV Simon Cowell scoundrel who is making millions being rude and cruel, they get put into the hands of handlers who reshape them into the image of American idols. This is where the Joni Mitchell line comes in about “the star-maker machinery inside the popular song.” The sweet, elfin-like Clay Aiken is a case in point. Although he lost to the big R&B guy Ruben Studdard by the slimmest margin, he got a complete makeover with a new ’do to cover his oversized ears and a huge contract to boot. The young man may have a good voice and may make good as a pop singer, but the whole thing smacks of what is wrong with American low culture today. We want success without sacrifice. We want celebrity more than artistry. We want fame without accomplishment. We want idols more than heroes.

You can see this in the gambling culture we have created, including state-sponsored lotteries. As a public  we now encourage get-rich-quick schemes that undermine the work ethic. What’s even more amazing is that we promise to fund public schools on the back of gambling. So let’s see if I’ve got this straight: education of the youth is intended to pass on wisdom about what makes for a good life as well as what it takes to make a living. Things like discipline, hard work, and perseverance. We hate it when we see young athletes drop out of school to play basketball or seek millions in boxing, say. But then we think it is perfectly fine for the state to say to young people that the way we are going to promote their education is exactly the opposite of the way we say they ought to live their lives.

Idols require little of us and promise us much for our little. The problem is that idols are only our own creation; they have no capacity to act for or against us. They are only projections of our own desires. And as such, therefore, they cannot give us anything. They can only take from us; they can only steal from us the life that only God can give us.

Take our obsessive need to always have something more and better. Sooner or later we will realize that consumerism is an idol that consumes us because we can never get enough. Only the true God can satisfy our deepest needs by teaching us that enough is enough. Any good thing God has made can turn into a false god when, instead of taking hold of it, it takes hold of us. It then becomes a slave owner instead of a liberator, an agent of death instead of life. False gods cannot save us; they can only enslave us. And when we are so enslaved, when our idolatry has taken control of us, God’s joy is gone, God’s grief is full, God’s heart is sick.

Israel is astonished that God is not protecting them from their enemies. Babylon’s terrible ruler, Nebuchadnezzar—in whose image Saddam Hussein modeled his reign of terror in the same land now known as Iraq—came marching through Jerusalem and took the people captive. They wanted to be like other nations? So be it.

Is God not in Zion? the people cry. The harvest is past, the summer has ended and we are not saved. They had presumed upon God, thought they could trust in their own ways and ignore God, and God would still be there for them. They were wrong, just as we are wrong.

God says, Is there no balm in Gilead? Are there no physicians in the land to heal you? And the answer is no. Gilead was a mountainous area across the Jordan River where a medicinal resin was conjured that people thought would cure many ills. God is mocking the self-sufficiency of Israel, the attitude that all their resources would be enough to fix any problem, heal any disease, make things right. It could not for them. It cannot for us.

Some of you this morning are mourning the losses in your life. Some of these are necessary losses, as Judith Viorst calls them, the normal kind that goes with being alive, the kind that have to happen if you are going to grow up, that sort of thing. But others of you are dealing with losses you brought upon yourself. You let your life get out of control. Your heart lost its bearing in the heart of God. You feel God’s absence more than God’s presence. You’ve maybe even been to doctors and bought balms of every kind that still haven’t cured the sickness in your own heart. You can’t find your way back or out or forward. And today you are here wondering whether God is in Zion still, whether God will answer your prayers and dry those tears in heaven long enough to find you again.

Let me remind you that Jeremiah is not the last word on God in the Bible. Let me assure you that God did not suffer apart from us without finally coming to suffer with us and for us. Let me tell you the good news that the African slaves in the American South came to sing: [sung] "There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sinsick soul."

That balm is not a salve drawn from a balsam tree that cures from the outside in. It is a Savior drawn on a tree that cures from the inside out. He is not our best man offered to heaven as a sacrifice to appease God’s anger. He is heaven’s true God offered to us as a sacrifice of love to bring back the joy at last to all of us.