False Gods of the American pantheon

This was one of the most intimidating weeks to write a sermon, because this reading from Ezekiel is downright terrifying, where it says if God calls someone to preach the word, and I don't say all the things that I'm supposed to say, then it's going to be my fault if you aren't redeemed. So if I leave out important things that I'm supposed to preach about, and all of you aren't redeemed because of it, then God is going to hold me personally accountable for it.

So I went through a lot of drafts of the sermon this week, because this is just a downright terrifying reading. Before you think, "Well good, that's his problem not ours," I hate to break it to you, but God is calling all of us to proclaim the good news to the people in our lives. If any of us are failing to deliver the message that God has for us, then we're all on the hook for not doing what God is asking us to do and not proclaiming the good news.

I'm actually going to start with the bad news. You might think, "Why is he starting with bad news; this is supposed to be about the good news." I do have to start with the challenging part, but I want to tell you that this is going to end in a place that we've been before. This is going to end where, as Linda read for us in the second reading today, it's really all about loving one another. That's going to be where we end up, but it's going to take a little bit time before we get there, so just be patient, but know that I'm not leading youon a wild goose chase here. We are talking about God's love, and that's that's where we've been, and that's where we're going.

I do need to start by talking about the fact that Ezekiel was sent to Israel to warn the people of Israel that they were worshiping false gods. It's really a sad thing, but in our society today there are some false gods that we tend to worship, and what's even worse is we worship these false gods and we call them Jesus.

We worship these false gods and we call them Jesus, but they're really not Jesus. They're really demons. They're really things that lead us away from loving one another. In our American pantheon of the gods that we worship here in the United States, I've got five of them, and I made a list and because you know, thanks to Ezekiel, I'm terrified of leaving things off the list here. So I've got five of them that I've come up with that we need to be careful of: five false gods of the American pantheon. When we worship them, it turns us away from loving our neighbor as ourself.

As Saint Paul reminds us in the letter to the Romans, "the one who the one who loves neighbor as himself fulfills the law. Love does no wrong to the neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." So just keep that in mind here. We've got these five demons. There's probably others, but there are five that I that I came up with this week as we were praying over this that we need to make sure that we're not worshiping.

The first one on this list here is the demon of peace through strength. This is the Roman Empire in a nutshell: the world will be at peace when the powerful can crush anyone who would rise up against them. In the world, this can look like empire, and in our own country, this can come this can look like we're worshiping law and order. When we worship peace through strength, we're saying it's not love and service that is what leads us to salvation; it's crushing anybody who would disrupt things. Sometimes we call this "American Jesus" here. This is not really what Jesus was all about. Jesus died on the cross. Jesus was about vulnerability, and not peace through strength.

Now the second demon that we tend to worship is the demon of prosperity through wealth. How do we find our salvation? By making enough money. By saving enough money. And if we've stored up enough for ourselves, then we'll be okay. Then we can buy all the things that we need. This is the worship of mammon. Sometimes we call this "rich Jesus."  In this worldview, Jesus is smiling on us if we have wealth, and therefore we accumulate wealth, and then we know that we're in God's favor.

The third demon we need to watch out for is dominance through tribe. How do we make sure that we're okay? We make sure that our people are victorious. This could look like a particularly perverse form of patriotism. This could look like white supremacism. This demon claims that Jesus is one of our tribe, and not one of those people out there. We paint pictures of "White Jesus" and think they're the real thing. We've got to make sure that that's not what our faith leads us.

The fourth demon is demon of meaning through pleasure. Hedonism. If it feels good, do it. That's also something that can lead us astray from following Jesus, and it's all about just consuming things that make us happy, and not about service. Unfortunately (or fortunately, because it's real), love often involves doing things that don't make us immediately satisfied. Getting up in the middle of the night with somebody who's sick is not the most immediately satisfying and joyful thing in the world. It might be fulfilling. It's definitely an act of love, but it's not what most people would put on their list of, "What am I going to do on my ideal day? I think I'm going to get up in the middle of the night and help somebody who's not feeling well." Sometimes, though, that's exactly where love leads us. 

The fifth demon is the demon of salvation through our own efforts. We might call that "DIY Jesus" – Do it yourself Jesus. This is when we worship self-reliance, and we don't realize that we have to put our trust fully in God's grace.

So these five demons can lead us astray. These five demons are very present in our popular culture and, the problem with each of these five demons is that they turn us away from what Saint Paul tells us in the letter to the Romans: "Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another, for the one who loves has fulfilled the law."

To love one another could look like lots of different things, but ultimately what it really means to love someone is to deeply desire that that person thrives, and lives, and lives abundantly. To really desire good for someone is to love them. If we really desire good for someone, then that's not just an opinion we have – "oh yeah, I hope good things happen to you." If we really desire it, if we really long for it, then it's going to shape our actions. So not only do we say, "oh yeah, we want that," but we act to make it happen. We act to try to promote the well-being of other people. When we act out of love then, as Saint Paul said to the Romans, "Love does no wrong to someone." Love means that we never desire ill for somebody. Jesus starts by telling us that we're supposed to love our friends our neighbors, but then it gets harder when he tells us that we're supposed to love our enemies too. We're supposed to desire good for everyone. We're supposed to work for the good for everyone. There's no one we can push aside and say, "Well, we don't care about that person. Well, they're not one of ours. Well, they're not the ones that we care about." We really need to desire. and work for the good of all humankind.

God didn't create us to be at each other's throats. God created us to live in love with one another, and when we do that – when we put on our Lord Jesus Christ instead of quarreling and jealousy – what we put on is the full armor of light. What that means is we are transformed into people of love. We are transformed into people whose instinctive action is to act in the interest of everyone. To act out of love for one another.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm not there yet. I'm working on it. There are some days I do a great job acting out of love for other people, and there are some days that I don't. But God has forgiven us for our sins, and God is actively working to transform us into people of the kingdom of heaven. Every time we do acts of service, we're practicing being a person of love. Every time we praise God, we're practicing being a person of love. Every time we practice singing, and sing our praise to God, we're practicing being a person of love. We're rehearsing for the kingdom of heaven, because we can't live in the new heaven and the new earth until we've been born anew in love. We can't live there as long as we are slave to sin. We can't live there as long as our actions and our desires aren't for the good of all others.

As long as we have a "them" in our mind that we don't want good for, there isn't room for us in the kingdom of heaven.

But the good news is, as Ezekiel, said the Lord God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked but wants the wicked to turn from their ways and live – and by live I don't just mean not physically die, because we're all going to physically die, but there's a resurrection coming. Death does not have the final word. When we're born anew in this resurrection, Jesus wants us to be resurrected so that we can live in the kingdom of heaven, and not resurrected but exiled from the kingdom of heaven: The resurrection of eternal death, where we're cast out. That's not what God wants for us. God wants us to be reconciled. To turn back from our evil ways, and embrace, as Saint Paul says to the Romans, love from one another. That is what we are called to be. That is what we are called to do.

God's grace gives us opportunity after opportunity to turn away from the demons that distract us from God and to embrace love. Tt takes practice, and then more practice, and then more practice, and maybe by the time we're done with this life we'll have it down. Maybe we'll still need even more practice in the afterlife. Our hope though is that God is far more patient than we are stubborn. Our hope is that God will not be done working on us until each of us is reconciled to God's love. Until each of us is made whole, so that we can live in the kingdom of heaven.

Our gospel today talks about conflict, and conflict is going to happen. It talks about all the different steps to resolve conflict, and then it says if after all that you still can't resolve conflict with someone, treat them as a tax collector and a Gentile. You might think that means write them off: have nothing to do with them anymore. But remember, this is Matthew's gospel. And what was Matthew's job before Jesus called him? He was a tax collector. So this is the gospel according to the former outcast. This is the gospel according to Saint Matthew. And so when Jesus says treat someone as a tax collector and a Gentile, he doesn't mean have nothing to do with them. He means maybe you need some temporary boundaries so that they don't bring you down, but this isn't writing them off. This is having some space. Ultimately, what does God want from tax collectors and Gentiles? God wants to redeem them! This may be someone that we're not currently reconciled to, but we still very much hope and long that God grant us reconciliation with.

The good news here is that even if we're not ready for the kingdom of heaven yet, God is still working on us. God is still transforming us, and helping us to put on the full armor of light, so that we, too, can be people who live so that our only rule is to love one another. Amen.