Hilton Head Island, SC – October 29, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 2:6-11; 2:12-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the pride of men shall be brought low; and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass away. – Isa. 2:17-18 - RSV
Last Sunday I began a series of sermons based on the prophet Isaiah. The readings were from the first chapter and the first five verses of the second chapter. Today we are looking at the rest of the second chapter.
From the viewpoint of Elijah in the ninth century BCE to the post-exilic prophets up to the end of the of the third century BCE, one of their primary prophetic concerns was that they believed there was a perpetual violation of the First and Second Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me,” and “You shall not make yourself a graven image.” Taken together, these two commandments refer to the sin of idolatry.
An idol may be defined as a false god. These foreign divinities could exist either in people’s minds or in their hands, in the form of deities carved or crafted from stone, wood, gold, silver, or other metals. All the other peoples of the Middle East in early biblical times were polytheists. They believed that each god or goddess had a particular divine job description: gods of the seas or mountains or farmland or desert, gods of wind, fire, sun, moon, and stars, powerful gods and also-rans, male and female. Even beyond the New Testament period, the Greeks and Romans were still polytheists, although they were not as observant as their classical forebears had been in previous centuries.
Idolatry always appealed to some of the Israelites, and that was a constant burr under the saddle of the Hebrew prophets. For them, strong adherence to Adonoy, the God of Israel, was the only acceptable form of religious worship. Anything else was anathema to them, and they let everyone know it in no uncertain terms.
Over the passage of centuries, the attraction of nature deities lost its allure for most people. Only the simplest and least educated among the Israelites held fast to the traditional idolatries of their pagan neighbors. The movers and shakers in Judah were no longer drawn to false gods that had been recognized as false for centuries. Instead they were captivated by more tangible and valuable entities: not graven images of gold or silver, but bars of gold or silver, or cases of fine jewels. It is easier to devote one’s life to the pursuit of assets than to deities that exist only in theory or in mind or in man-made shapes in man-made temples.
Speaking to God and through Him to Israel, Isaiah said, “For thou hast rejected thy people, the house of Jacob, because they are full of diviners from the east or of soothsayers like the Philistines, and they strike hands with foreigners. Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures; their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots. Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands” (2:6-8).
Haves are much more likely to fall for costly false gods than Have-Nots. Because Isaiah was born a Have, and lived his whole life among Haves, he may have understood that better than any of the other prophets, apparently none of whom rubbed shoulders with the awesomely affluent as much as Isaiah did.
Isaiah: American Idols. How are these two ideas connected?
First of all, there has been a longstanding television series called American Idol. It features singers who compete with one another over the better part of a year to determine who shall be the American Idol for that year. I didn’t know the show existed until several years ago when The Beaufort Gazette, and thus The Island Packet, featured stories about Candice Glover. The only thing I know about popular music is what I read in newspapers and magazines, and I make it my business not to read very much about it. I’m not opposed to it; I’m just not very interested in it.
Anyway, Candice Glover was a young woman from Beaufort who continued to advance in the 2013 competition until she became the American Idol for that year. It launched her career as a big-time entertainer, so I read. I have no idea how well she’s doing now.
The kind of innocent adulation which produces that kind of American Idol is not an infraction of either the First or Second Commandments. There are always many people who become that type of idol. Currently the world’s most recognizable such person is Taylor Swift, who I read is making cumulative billions in concerts all over our planet. I didn’t know much about her either until I read about the spectacular success of her concerts. I know her better now because she seems to be romantically associated with Travis Kelce, a tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs. She is always shown whenever he catches a long pass or scores a touchdown. Other than that I would have been as totally unfamiliar with Taylor Swift as with a swift tailor, female or male, who can turn out a flawless dress or suit from scratch in three days or less.
It is a pleasant occurrence when anyone is idolized by someone else, especially for the one who is idolized. But when people worship anybody more than they worship God, that is a certain sort of sin which may become a breach of either or both of the first two Commandments.
When Isaiah started to list some of the idols that were worshiped in the eighth century BCE, completely unknown to him he was referring to the kinds of idols which commonly exist in the USA today. “Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures.” Decades ago Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother Herbert, who were two of the oil Texas Hunts, tried to corner the market on silver by buying up as much of it as they could. Eventually they owned a third of the world’s silver that had been held in private hands. The price rose to fifty dollars an ounce. But even more quickly it dropped to under eleven dollars an ounce on Silver Thursday, March 27, 1980. They lost over $1.7 billion on that day, the largest individual loss in history up to that time. They were fined by the US government and were forbidden ever again to invest in any of the commodities markets.
Greed plus perceived gain can quickly turn into idolatry. More Americans have a higher percentage of the total domestic wealth than ever before, but it is not held evenly by all age groups. People who were born from 1920 to 1960 (in other words, us) are more likely than any other age cohort to own the highest value of assets of all age groups. Our land is not filled with silver and gold as such, but we have trillions of dollars in other tangible assets, although the word “we” only tangentially applies to “us.” Yet without question there are more millionaires, both absolutely and relatively speaking, than ever before.
I read in last Wednesday’s USA Today that the median household wealth hit $192,900 last year. That doesn’t mean that is the median income; it means that the median of all households owns that much in total assets. If that is true, imagine how many millions of families have at least a million or more dollars in assets. The same article said that $2.6 million is the median amount of assets in total wealth for the top ten per cent of Americans. There is far more wealth than we oldsters imagine, because now we are trying to protect wealth rather than to amass more of it.
Pensions used to be the primary means for people to save up money for retirement. Then most corporations stopped offering them, and 401Ks and IRAs became the main ways for workers to save up for retirement. Because many oldsters still have pensions, plus 401Ks and IRAs, we probably have a higher percentage saved up than any past generations or for the foreseeable future. But we want to make sure we don’t outlive our retirement income, and too many of us may be living too long to achieve that. It’s a confounding conundrum.
Manufacturing is now a distant front-runner in the American economy. The service industry, broadly defined, is our primary industry, and the financial services industry is by far the most lucrative sector in American services. Hilton Head Island has almost as many financial service offices as it has restaurants. That is an exaggeration, but we do have many such businesses. They surely do far more business and make far more profit than all the restaurants put together.
When we live among people with money, it is a natural tendency to make money an idol, even if we don’t have all that much of it ourselves. But that’s not all. “Their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots.” We don’t see many horses around here, but chariots of a particular kind are visible everywhere. They come from Detroit and Tennessee and South Carolina, but also from Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, France, and Britain. The larger the number beside their trunk lid the more expensive, in general, is the price of the chariot. Never have so many car agencies done so well in a population so small as can be seen in west-suburban Bluffton and east-suburban Hardeeville. You’d think Highway 278 is the Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive of automobile agencies.
Idolatry may not seem to be a big problem, but it is its biggest when it is the least visible, simply because it is so ubiquitous. Where wealth is everywhere, idolatry disappears. It is no longer a sin; it is merely a way of life.
“For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high, …against every high tower, and against every fortified wall…And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the pride of men shall be brought low; and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass away” (2:12,15,17, 18).
God cannot allow idolatry to flourish for long periods of time. It erodes good values, and undercuts humanitarian impulses. As a percentage, there are far fewer desperately poor people in the world today because of globalization than there were twenty or thirty years ago. But as a raw number, there are more generally poor people now than ever before. Wars greatly magnify the problem. The war in Ukraine which began on February 24, 2022, and the one in Israel and Palestine, which began on October 7, 2023, inevitably shall add to the problem.
The poor see the affluent becoming ever more affluent compared to themselves, and their observation is correct. All over the globe non-profit organizations are attempting to meet the needs of people whose lives are a constant struggle, but the NPOs don’t have enough income to assist everyone. Every week I receive thirty to seventy requests for funds from various NPOs. If I contributed even twenty dollars to every organization, I’d be bankrupt in half a year. But these organizations are dealing with people who have been bankrupt as long as they have been alive, and they see increasing numbers of them every week. Idolatry and affluence combine to construct walls against human need.
There’s a reason that Commandments One and Two come first in the listing of the Ten Commandments. When people eagerly engage in idolatry, everything else falls apart. If people are not devoted to God, they will be devoted to other far less worthy pursuits, and the world will come unglued.
When one of my brothers was a late teenager and in his early twenties, somehow he got interested in country music, even though he was not a singer himself. One of the songs I remember him playing on the radio was written by a man named Hoyt Axton, and it was called A Rusty Old Halo:
I know a man, rich as a king,/ Still he just won’t give his neighbor a thing;
His day will come, I’ll make a bet,/ He’ll get to heaven and here’s what he’ll get:
A rusty old halo, skinny white cloud,/ Second hand wings full of patches,
Rusty old halo, skinny white cloud,/ Robe that’s so wooly it scratches.
Some people have big shiny cars,/ Swimming pools, and diamonds in jars;
Real silver gates, real golden doors,/ They’ll get to heaven and trade them all for
A rusty old halo, skinny white cloud,/Second-hand wings full of patches;
Rusty old halo, skinny white cloud,/ Robe that’s so wooly it scratches.
We can’t afford to ignore God. Only God is God; nothing else is. God wants us to follow His rules, and to live by His laws. If we don’t, life invariably turns south on us. If we do, not only do we prosper, but everyone else does as well. That’s how God’s economy has always worked.