Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Reading from II Kings today, we read how King Josiah endeavored to root out idolatry from the land, destroying the various idols and the cults of neighboring gods that had made their way even into the temple at Jerusalem.

It can be easy to think that concerns over idolatry are either a thing of the past or nothing that we need to be concerned about, certainly not to the point of actively rooting idols and their altars out of our lives. But idolatry is much more pervasive and troublesome than one might expect. We don’t openly sacrifice our children to Molech these days…we do it far more discretely and politely. Our gods tend to be the strength of the economy, or various forms of privilege, or our understanding of our rights, or our political platforms, our faith in human progress, our liberal or conservative ideals, a flag, a club, our nation, our piety, our government, our family, our addictions, our self….

Idols are everywhere, Beloved Friend. And the temple that needs cleansing of them is our hearts. Anything, in fact, can be an idol, because an idol is anything we prefer to God; anything by which we claim an identity or a personhood apart from God; anything we imagine we can love apart from God. And the difficulty is: idolatry comes easily to us. It’s the root of all sin, in fact. Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann in his book For the Life of the World writes, “The truly ‘original sin’ is not a transgression of rules, but, first of all, the deviation of [humanity’s] love and [its] alienation from God. That [a person] prefers something—the world, [themselves]—to God, this is the only real sin, and in it all sins become natural, inevitable.”

It’s not bad enough, though, that we engage so easily in idolatry, but we often do so believing that God’s on our side, that God’s fundamentally okay with us as we are, that we don’t need to change, that we don’t need repentance, that we don’t need to be transformed. In this way, we can make of our faith or our church yet another idol to preside over and sanction our other idols; in doing so, we diminish the transcendent God to a mere proxy for our debased appetites, our desires, our politeness and “good” manners, our lust for comfort and security, our preference for ourselves and what’s ours, our graceless ideals…. God becomes for us a sort of thin, spectral, pointless, vague, gently approving, never challenging, well-wishing, universalized will-to-happiness to which all religions can be helpfully and meaninglessly referred and reduced, by which we live and by which we inevitably insist others live as well.

The truth is, Friend, if you believe in a God that sanctions your idolatry, that keeps you comfortable with yourself and demands nothing of you, that keeps you happy but never joyful, that helps you accommodate yourself to the fallen world-as-it-is rather than empowering you by grace to live a life in Christ in which the world redeemed by Christ is uncomfortably, disconcertingly and blindingly visible in and through you…if such a thing of vanity and smoke and shadow and desperation is your deity, I urge you to turn to the Lord and to repent.

My Friend, I feel I’ve been particularly blunt in this brief missive. Please know, Beloved, that I write to myself as much as to you—I have idols I cherish, from which I flee, to which I too often return, and from which I must be saved by the grace and power and love of Jesus Christ. I’ve written as I have, one sin-sick soul to another, because I need us both to remember—and hopefully if we can remember it, we can live it—that there is balm in Gilead: Jesus Christ. And Jesus loves you, loves us, and desires us to be free of anything and everything that would enslave us and destroy us; loves us too much to allow us to stay comfortable with ourselves and our world as they are, but wants to return the world to us (and us to ourselves) renewed and restored by grace; loves us so much that he gave his very life for us that we may live in him, that his divine Life may live in us and truly be our life. Thanks be to God!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+