L.D. 34, Psalm 115 "To Your Name the Glory" Scott Hoezee

Across the centuries, Christians have affirmed that Jesus is divine, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity. The disciples were the first to figure this out--that's why those pious Jews who had been taught from the cradle that they must worship God alone nevertheless worshiped Jesus. The undeniably human fellow they had been following around for some years was revealed to them to be God in the flesh. So they worshiped Jesus and were certain it was not an idolatrous, sinful thing to do. They concluded, as have Christians ever since, that it's not a sin to worship Jesus--it's a sin not to worship him!

In the abstract, you might think that this broad Christian consensus about Jesus would settle everything about Jesus. In reality, however, this is not so. This past week I looked at a classic book by Jaroslav Pelikan titled Jesus Through the Centuries. If you are familiar with this important work, then you know that Pelikan surveys the last 2,000 years to show that Jesus has been viewed in a dizzying variety of ways. Recently the author John Eldredge released a book titled Wild at Heart in which he claims that Christians who follow Jesus need to be like Jesus in terms of being rather fierce and stalwart. The book has elicited a lot of arguments, but really this is just the latest example of how even Christian people can and do disagree as to the character of the Jesus they worship.

Pelikan's work shows that in various cultures and times, Jesus has been viewed alternately as either a mighty warrior or a meek and humble figure who cannot be associated with warfare of any kind. Jesus is the great liberator of the oppressed or the Prince of Peace who ought not be invoked in revolutionary causes. Jesus has been invoked by both liberals and conservatives as endorsing their politics. Jesus is sometimes said to be always on the side of the poor and at other times is said to be the friend of the wealthy and powerful, even the secret of their success. Sometimes Jesus is depicted as a stern judge who is forever wagging a bony finger in the faces of the sinful and at other times he is the utterly gracious one who forgives all sin in ways that prevent him from ever getting into anyone's face.

Just stroll through any major art museum and you can see this. When paintings were done of Jesus during the Holy Roman Empire, he tended to look at lot like a king and military general. When paintings of Christ emerged from Third World cultures, the seed-bed for the Liberation Theology movement, Jesus was shown as sleeping in the alleys along with other impoverished denizens of the slums in El Salvador. If you look at paintings of Jesus from China or Japan, Jesus looks curiously Asian. Other portraits show him looking more African, and certain portions of the feminist movement have turned Jesus Christ into "Christa" or "Sophia," portraying the Savior in very feminine ways.

As we today begin a look at the Ten Commandments from the Heidelberg Catechism, we begin where God's Law begins and that is with the injunction against worshiping anyone or anything other than the one true God. Idolatry has always been defined pretty much the way Q&A 95 presents it: idolatry is having or inventing something in which you place your trust either instead of the true God or alongside of the one true God.

Of course, all of the first three commandments deal with keeping the true God as the sole focus of our religious devotion, hope, and trust. In addition to touching on idolatry, by extension this could lead us to wonder about people who are very devout but who adhere to religions other than Christianity. This is a key sticking point in the debate about the Ten Commandments, though we sometimes forget this point. When it comes to public displays of the commandments in courtrooms or schools, few would be against the last five or six of the laws. Honoring authority, not killing, stealing, lying, or committing adultery are civic virtues, many of which are already enforced by the police as it is.

But we forget sometimes how these first three commandments must look to a devout Hindu or Muslim. This first commandment orders people to worship the God of Israel, whom we now worship through Jesus the Christ. So the government cannot post at least these first three commandments without endorsing the Jewish and/or Christian faith in a way they probably ought not do in a religiously free culture. Worse, suppose a person who worships a different deity looks at a public display of these commandments but then pours his or her own religious content into the first commandment, substituting in his or her mind Buddha or Vishnu in place of the Lord God. Do we really want this important part of our Christian tradition to be used like Silly Putty that can be molded into the shape of any god a person desires? Wouldn't we actually be promoting idolatry in that case?

Maybe part of our own obedience to this injunction against idolatry is not letting others use God's law in ways that distract from our God in Christ. In that sense, the first commandment becomes a starting point for us to witness to Jesus and to his Father and to the Holy Spirit. But time this morning will not permit our looking any further at how this relates to other religions. For this sermon to do us any good, we need to ponder how we ourselves can keep this commandment by always making sure that we are worshiping the true God as he reveals himself in the Bible. As we just said, that is not as easy as you might think, even within Christian circles.

Certainly that was true when the Catechism was originally written. In sixteenth-century Europe, thinking about what to make of people from other religions was not very prominent. What warmed the blood of the Catechism's authors was the Catholic practice of praying to the Virgin Mary and to other saints instead of to Jesus alone. That's why the Catechism works so hard to do exactly what we also must do: namely, constantly check to make sure we are not getting distracted from Jesus.

In a world that has become so very diverse; in a time when we quite commonly encounter people from very different faith tradtions, from no faith tradition, or people with their own quirky ideas about Jesus, in a world like ours we need constantly to measure ourselves against the Bible to make sure we keep God squarely in focus. The better you know who Jesus is, the better you will be equipped to detect even minor variations and blendings away from the truth. But, as we have been saying this morning, when even Christians disagree with one another as to whether Jesus is a conservative or a liberal, a warrior or a mild-mannered Savior, a stern judge or a compassionate forgiver of sins, where do we begin in determining who Jesus is? This is where Psalm 115 may be able to help us.

Psalm 115 is a very clever piece of polemic. It is a poem, like all the other psalms, but this is one poem with some real bite to it. In the end it is a loud call for the people of Israel to stick with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. They must worship this God alone, especially in the face of surrounding nations that worship other gods. Since the second commandment forbids making any visual representations of God, foreigners who visited Israel were forever asking the question posed in verse 2: "Where is your God? Don't you have a statue or totem of him somewhere? What's he look like?" Israel's pious answer to this loaded question comes in verse 3: "Our God is in heaven." But that always led to the cynical rejoinder, "Well, if you can't see him, how do you know he exists?"

"Seeing is believing," the old adage has it and yet from the beginning we in the Jewish and Christian traditions have been called to believe without seeing, to hope in what we do not yet have before our eyes. At first blush, that looks like a disadvantage. But this psalmist is not to be outfoxed. So starting in verse 4 he lampoons the people who do have gods they can see. Yes, the Philistines, Babylonians, and Egyptians have gods they can see and touch but the problem is that those gods cannot see or touch the people who worship them! When you can touch your god, he cannot touch you!

In my study I have a carving of a wood duck that a friend gave me when I graduated from seminary. He did a great job in carving the wings, the bill, the head, and then he painted it so very smartly, too, using that riot of colors that the wood duck so splendidly displays. But that carving is not a duck. It doesn't quack, it doesn't look back at me when I look at it, it neither swims nor flies. So with false idols, the psalmist says: When you invent your own gods, you create something that is actually less real than you yourself are!

But the kicker comes in verse 8: "Those who make [such gods] will be like them, and so will all who trust in them." In other words, when you serve a god who is of your own making, you end up becoming like that very idol. But the real cleverness in that verse can be seen when you reverse it: the reason that these people become like the gods they invent is because the gods they invented were like the people in the first place!

That's why false gods never challenge people. One of the more prominent, albeit loopier, promoters of a made-up religion in recent years has been actress Shirley MacLaine. She has located the divine within her own self, within past lives she ostensibly has led, and most recently within her dog. It's all very Californian finally. Some of you remember the book Habits of the Heart and its single most famous interview with a California woman named Sheilah who had founded her own religion curiously enough called "Sheliahism."

But when was the last time you heard someone like this say, "I made up a new religion by borrowing from Christianity, Judaism, Jainism, Hinduism, and Islam. I took the best of all those faiths, popped them into a spiritual blender, and whipped up a frothy new god that now guides me. Once I encountered my new god, he told me I had to repent, I had to clean up my life and change my ways, I had to devote more time to serving the poor and denying myself the trappings of the good life as our society defines it."

No, that's not the drill. A funny thing happens when, like Sheilah, you make up your own god: the first thing that god says is that you are just fine the way you are. Almost no one makes up a god who ends up being demanding. Hence it's no surprise to find that the same people who tell us these days that they hate creeds, catechisms, sacred Scripture, and other pre-packaged forms of truth are also the people who tend to make up their own, always very convenient, religious ideas.

The people who create false gods, Psalm 115 says, become like those gods but only because the gods they invented were like the people who invented them to begin with. John Calvin once said that the human heart is a perpetual idol factory. If so, then we know that even as Christians we are not immune to this temptation to project onto Jesus someone who will go easy on us in our lives. To follow the first commandment's call to worship the Lord our God and him alone, we need constantly to be wary of our own hearts.

The moment I find myself thinking that Jesus endorses every opinion I have, I need to worry. The moment we find ourselves tempted to think that Jesus approves of every action our own nation takes, we need to start getting worried. The moment any one of us becomes so rigid in his or her conception of Jesus that we refuse to listen when we sense that even the Bible may be challenging our ideas, then we need to be very, very worried. Because the Bible, and the Holy Spirit's witness to God through the Scripture, must ever and always have the final word on who it is we must worship.

That's why I have always liked these lines from C.S. Lewis, which you've heard me quote before: "My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. God shatters it. God is the great iconoclast. Could we not say that this shattering is one of the marks of God's presence? Most are offended by iconoclasm. Blessed are they who are not." Of course, Lewis did not mean to convey that there is no fixed reality to God. Instead, Lewis wanted to say that God will always burst our abilities fully to conceive of him. The God of the Bible resists neat formulations or easy packaging.

Really to hold in creative tension the full display of God which the Bible gives us requires a balancing act--sometimes it even requires a dumping of any one-sided pictures of God we perhaps once carried with us. The Bible reveals a multi-faceted, always surprising God; a God who is at once the Lion of Judah and the slain Lamb. He's both. He is the fierce judge whose holy word is like a two-edged sword and he is the God of all grace who inflicted that sword on himself as a means to our being saved. He is at once the God who truly is "above it all" dwelling in light inaccessible and he's the God who is close enough to his beloved creation that something of his glory can be seen in your flower garden.

The Bible constantly challenges us. So perhaps one way of trying to make certain we are worshiping the true God and not one of our own manufacture is to humble ourselves before the Bible. Instead of always trying to make black-and-white the Scripture's multi-hued portrait of God, maybe we need to bow before the mystery of a God who, within the course of the Bible, says and does so many things. For instance, you all know how much I have preached grace. But I, like the rest of you, regularly run into parts of the Bible which require that we see God as not only the decanter of grace but also as the source of judgment. That doesn't get rid of the grace, of course, but it adds to the portrait of a richly complex God. So if I find myself covering up or merely glancing over the judgment passages because I don't want them to interfere with my preference for grace, that's when I need to worry about how well I am obeying the first commandment.

But what finally motivates our desire to worship, serve, and honor our God in Christ is the same thing that finally lies behind our desire to obey all the commandments: love. We don't obey God's law out of fear that he will send us to hell if we don't. Nor do we obey God's law because we think this is how we work our way to heaven. That's the last thing we want to think. What motivates us is love. What motivates us is a very moving gratitude for the fact that in Jesus, we are already saved, we already have a place in heaven prepared for us. What's more, we have the glorious New Testament promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

But when you love someone, don't you always find a desire to get to know him or her better? Show me a marriage where both husband and wife have concluded that they know everything there is to know about each other and I'll show you a dead and joyless marriage. Show me a parent who thinks he knows enough about a son or daughter and so is not interested to learn more about this child and I'll show you a cold, distant, rather aloof mother or father. If you are here this morning as a Christian believer, that means you already know the Lord your God and you love him deeply.

Nothing I have said today was meant to suggest to anyone that you maybe don't know God after all. Instead, this sermon has been aimed at saying that we must never think we have got God cased, we must never conclude that there is nothing more to learn. Instead, and in ardent love, we do already now the same thing that will occupy us in eternity: namely, getting to know the God whose glorious nature is inexhaustible. We will never be finished getting to know God. As the opening line of Psalm 115 puts it, we're not looking for glory for ourselves. We're looking to glorify the great God whose very name means love and faithfulness. Once you begin to become acquainted with this sublimely gracious God and Savior, you'll never want to worship anyone or anything else. Not ever. Amen.