God is Roomy

Genesis 31.1-19

Death is a big part of what I do.

There is no Easter acclamation without a grave. Resurrection requires what St. Paul calls the “Last Enemy.” Ministry— mine but also yours— is part of what my undertaker friend calls the dismal trade. Because, “in the midst of life…”

Every day is Ash Wednesday for somebody.

I spent Monday standing vigil with Gary Sherfey’s family as his time ran out. His death was both unsurprising yet shockingly swift. Together we accompanied him through the dying that is the last part of living. Laying hands on him and holding hands around him, I listened as each of us gave thanks to God in concrete terms for the gifts God gave to each of us through Gary— spoken them into the only part of him that was still working, his ear. We gave thanks and then I prayed and declared the absolution that is unconditional on account of Christ.

An hour or two later, as the nurse removed the respirator from him, I watched— no, I witnessed— how Pat, Gary’s wife, kissed him ferociously  as the moments of their life became minutes. Like the picture Jesus paints of God as a Mother Hen wrapping her brood in her wings, their sons leaned down and enveloped both of them in their arms.

As his breath became air, I gathered them once again around him, around them, and I prayed the commendation. And before we prayed the prayer Jesus taught— taught as though he knew we would struggle to find words, I promised Gary that the next voice he heard would the Lord Jesus calling him in the resurrection.

Like Lazarus.

Gary, come out!

Having stewarded him so, we all stayed with him for a long while. When I finally left his hospital room, I was thinking a great many thoughts.

Chief among them was this thought:

It makes all the difference that the gospel promise I’d given to Gary, the gospel promise those around his bed all believed, is true.

It makes all the difference that the gospel is not a good thought or a comforting message or a hopeful sentiment. It makes an absolute difference that what I had proclaimed and what we had prayed is true.

As true as 1+1 = 2.

God did raise Jesus from the dead having first raised Israel from slavery in Egypt.

It makes all the difference that what I had proclaimed and prayed is true, a true promise from the true God.

“If you died tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity?”

When I was younger— before I got cancer— I thought it was a reductive question. Of course, it’s intended to be a reductive question, but that it is a reductive question does not make it a bad question, especially not when it’s more or less God’s own question.

As God asks Ezekiel at the Valley of the Dry Bones, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Standing there at the Ground Zero of Israel’s grief and despair, Ezekiel answers, “O, Lord God, you know.”

And then the Lord says to Ezekiel,

“Mortal, these bones are the whole people of God. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” [But] I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back… And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live again…”

Such an eternity is not automatic.

Eternity is not automatic.

Only the true God can gift you such a future. Which is to say, it makes all the difference who is the God on whom you’ve hung your heart, a heart that Calvin warns is “a perpetual idol factory.”

Calvin could have had Rachel in mind when he rendered that judgment.

In Genesis 31, Laban has gotten a taste of his own medicine and Jacob has worn out his welcome. Jacob’s enriched himself by turning the tables on his father-in-law’s grift, leaving Laban impoverished and enraged. “

And Jacob saw that Laban did not regard him with favor as before,” verse two puts it understatedly. And so the Lord Jesus warns Jacob to return with his harem to the land of his kindred. “I will be with you,” the Word promises him.

Genesis reports then that as Jacob is grabbing his go bag and strapping his sons into carseats and driving his newly acquired livestock towards Canaan, his wife Rachel “stole her father’s household gods.”

The little detail in verse nineteen is like discovering a dirty bandaid in the hotel sheets.

It spoils the story.

The Hebrew word for these “household gods” is t’rafim, pocket-sized figurines that represented the pagan deities which looked out for the well-being of Laban and his  household.

If we inherit our tendency to worship false gods from Rachel, it’s hardly a recessive trait. When the Israelites left Egypt, Moses needed to warn them to cease worshiping goat demons. Ezekiel blames the exile, hundreds of years after the exodus, on the fact that Israel never forsook the idols of Egypt. When Joshua’s an old man, he has to repeat his predecessor’s warning, “Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt.” Nor is false worship a proclivity unique to Israel. When Paul specifies the occasion of God’s wrath against the Gentiles, he names only one thing, idolatry.

In both testaments, the Bible judges God’s people first, last, and foremost for idolatry.

Israel understood religious pluralism better than we do and constantly they were tempted to deal with it the way we do; that is, by attempting to worship all the candidates at once.

Rachel has lived with Jacob as his wife for twenty years. She knows the true God, the God of Abraham and Isaac. She believes in the true God. After Rachel gives birth to Joseph, Rachel praises the true God and prays for the true God to give her yet another son. Nevertheless, at the outset of a dangerous journey, Rachel pockets her father’s idols— just in case— so that they might watch over her family along the way. Rachel has faith in the true God. She simply wants the Lord and whatever protection the pagan deities might also provide.

The Lord and something else— that’s the problem.

The Lord and anything else— that’s the sin.

The first command is a demand to choose amidst “the religious smorgasbord of putative gods.” “Choose me and eschew all the rest,” are the first words of the Lord’s first word, the law. And in issuing the commandment, the Lord stipulates that jealousy is not merely the first of his attributes. It is the first of his proper names. As the Lord says to Moses on Mt. Sinai, Jealous is my name.”

Not to worship the Lord only is to worship him not at all.

Not to worship the Lord only is to worship another god.

The question that animates the Bible is not the question we so often ask. The question at the heart of scripture is not, “Is there God?” The question on which all of scripture hangs together is, “Which god is God?” As Robert Jenson writes:

“The notion that all gods are more or less alike, or that there could God-in-general, is a piece of childishness born of religious provincialism.”

The meaning of the title “God” depends upon the identity and history of the one who bears it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the deity of the right wing’s Blood and Soil, Blute und Boden. The God of Israel is not the Invisible Hand of capitalism nor is he socialism’s Dialectic of History. The God who justifies the ungodly is not the god worshipped at the Church of Social Justice. The God of the Red Sea and the Resurrection is not the vague deity invoked on the idol you may be carrying in your pocket, “In God we trust.” That god is more likely to be Mammon than Yahweh. There’s a reason why when Jesus answers the begrudgers’s question about paying taxes to Caesar, he has to ask for the coin in question. He’s not carrying one.

Unlike us, Jesus doesn’t have any idols in his pocket.

Not to worship God only is in fact to worship another god entirely.

And do not be fooled. Just because Rachel’s rival gods had been fashioned into figurines, inanimate objects, does not mean that every alternative deity is so obvious or obviously born by us.

As Martin Luther famously taught in his Large Catechism:

Whatever you hang your heart on, that is really your god, your functional savior.

Notice— a possibility presents itself in Luther’s aphorism: the prospect that we may hang our hearts on something that cannot bear the weight.

A couple of weeks ago, following a different hospital visit to see Gary and pray with him, I was standing in front of a pay station by the parking lot elevators, waiting for the machine to process my ticket.

Behind me I heard a woman shout softly, “God dammit!”

I didn’t turn around. Then I heard her kick the machine and smack it with her hand like it was a boyfriend who’d cheated on her. Then I heard her start to cry.

“Can I help you?” I turned to ask her.

Snot was already running out of her nose. She was thin and expensively-dressed and looked to be in her early sixties. She was an attractive woman.

“It’s this damn machine,” she stuttered, “I’m putting it in like it says but it keeps spitting it back out. I’VE HAD IT!”

Then she braced the machine with both hands and shook it like it was a recalcitrant vending machine.

“Let me try for you,” I said, taking the ticket and credit card from her hands.

She stood next to me as I inserted the ticket arrow side up.

“That’s what I’ve been doing and it just won’t work and it’s got me so upset,” she cried.

I handed the ticket and card back to her and I looked at her and I said, “I think maybe you’re not upset about the parking ticket machine.”

Like a stone popping out of a dike, she fell apart, the tears flooding out of her.

“I’ve spent our whole marriage working seventy— eighty— hour weeks, telling myself we’ll have more time for each other when we retire, but now he’s just got weeks.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

And I was. I felt sorry for her. She’d been carrying an idol in her pocket. I don’t know the particular god’s name. Money maybe.  Prestige perhaps. It could’ve been Success or Security or Enoughness. It might have been Family, Children. Jesus warns those are the most dangerous gods of all. Whichever the god’s name, it ultimately could not bear the weight of her heart.

We should not rush to judge her for whichever pagan deity she’d pocketed.

After all— the Bible tells me so:

It’s easier to fashion a false god from Biblical and Christian material than it is to invent one out gold or stone.

Last week Military.com began a series examining how extremist groups target veterans for recruitment and radicalization.

The first article profiled Ken Parker, who had been out of the Navy for two years, struggling to find a good job, when he went to his first Ku Klux Klan rally. Frustrated by his job prospects in a lousy economy, Parker attended what was billed as a "family event for whites only" with a cross-burning at dark in a small North Carolina town. The event featured Chris Barker, a KKK leader in North Carolina, who litters his racism with near-constant references to Scripture. Barker preached to the gathered crowd that night that all Jewish people represent Satan and should be killed.

Ken Parker confided to the journalist that he hadn't realized that the KKK was antisemitic, but that something clicked for him:

”I was like, I'm gonna get my Bible and prove this guy wrong and change the way he thinks on that topic, but everything else seems OK so far. But, you know, within a matter of weeks, I was reading my Bible trying to cherry-pick things out to hate Jews.”

The true God cannot be whatever we choose to make him because the true God has already elected to be the God of Israel.

God cannot be anything because God cannot be otherwise than the Father of the Lord Jesus.

A year ago I toured Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. The whole way through I trailed behind a group of Hebrew School kids. At one point, in the middle of the tour, I stood next to the school kids as we looked at black and white photographs in an exhibit. You could just make out our reflections, Gentile and Jew, staring back at us in the display glass case. Behind our reflections was a picture of two soldiers— Gentile soldiers— posing proudly in front of a cattle car filled with Jews.

The exhibit noted how the inscription on the soldiers’s belt buckles— the inscription on all German soldiers’s belt buckles— read: “Gott mit uns.” Which is German for “Emmanuel.” Which is Hebrew for “God with us.” The buckles on their belts are absolutely no different than the figurines in Rachel’s pocket.

Those Nazi belt buckles are a perfect illustration of what the Church has always taught; namely:

Idolatry is equivalent to unbelief and both are the primary mode of sin.

This is Paul’s Letter to the Romans in a nutshell.

Sin is the incurvature of the soul upon itself. Curved in upon itself, the soul seeks to use deity for our ends (idolatry) and so doing we end up inventing gods to suit our purposes (unbelief).

Idolatry is not an accident.

It’s not as though some of us mistakenly land upon the wrong candidate for deity. The Not-God is born, Karl Barth says, when we attempt to use deity for our own ends. To bless and baptize our bias. To imbue our politics an Absolute seal of approval. To ratify and reify our culture or station or status quo. To get out of God anything— even a good thing— other than God himself. The Not-God is born when we attempt to use deity for our own ends.

Rachel pockets her father’s household gods, why?  In order that they may protect her family on a dangerous journey. Why does she turn to them? Why doesn’t she just pray to the true God? Because Rachel knows, she knows what Adam and Eve discovered in the garden, the true God can appear arbitrary. Unreliable even. The true God is persuadable. But the true God is often not persuaded. You know— the true God does not always do what you want him to do.

If I had told you the god in Rachel’s pocket would heal Gary, you’re telling me there’s no chance you’d not have taken a chance on it?

Biblically speaking, it really is that simple.

Apart from pure nihilism, there are only two possibilities:

Faith in the word of God or turning away from it to whatever else, however much that something else may cite scripture or purport to be Christianity.

One of the astonishing aspects of the Bible is that it is seldom interested in denying the power of the false gods to bestow benefits on those who worship them. The Israelites continually relapse into idolatry, for example, because they receive a spiritual experience from the worship of Baal that their devotion to the true God does not give them. It’s the very same reason the Galatians preferred the false teachers to Paul. Just so in our day, Q Anon and political organizations on the fringes of both left and right clearly bequeath their adherents a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives that Church and Synagogue do not give them.

Scripture seldom denies that idol worship bestows benefits.

Scripture simply insists that idol worship is false.

Because it is misdirected.

You can pocket any number of pagan deities that will confer upon you joy, calm and peace, guilt relief, liberation, empowerment, hope and well-being. Really, it’s a matter of deciding which of their salvations you want and making your choice. Yes, of course, the gospel can elicit in you joy, calm and peace, forgiveness, liberation, empowerment, hope and well-being. But what the gospel chiefly does— what the gospel does for all of you who are not Jews— is introduce you to the true God, the only true God. And this God is not as interested in the services the false gods feature.

This God is single-mindedly determined to preserve your identity through eternity.

The true God promises communion more so than forgiveness. The true God promises incorporation not mere uplift. The true God promises fellowship that time cannot erase nor death undo,

“Tell me, O Mortal, can these bones live?”

None of the other gods on offer have room in them for others.

They may make you feel forgiven, or enlightened and inspired, or they may make you feel like you’re enough. But not one of the barren deities can bless you by taking you into himself.

The true God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is roomy.

Gary’s last words to his wife were, “I love you.” You have to know Gary— no, you have to know Gary and Pat— to know that’s the perfect ending to a story that is not over. And I know it’s not over. As surely as I know 1+1 = 2, I know it’s true that it’s not over.

I know because every week, Sunday after Sunday, the true God contravenes our tendencies to idolatries and confronts us directly with himself so as to render our attempted manipulations of him and our journeys to him moot.

The true God encounters us himself.

In word and water and wine and bread.

And that same God who says so reliably, “This is my body, broken for you” is the same God who promises, “I will raise you from dead” and “I go to prepare a place for you” and “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Gary’s “I love you” is the perfect ending to a story that is not over because God is roomy.