Having other gods before/beside the Lord your God

“Having other gods before/beside the Lord your God”
Higganum Congregational Church
October 5, 2008 – World Communion Sunday
Scripture: Exodus 20:1-4,7-9,12-20
Many of you know that I used to teach Old Norse mythology at the University of Colorado: the stories the Vikings told about their gods, stories about Odin, Thor, Baldr, Freyr, Freyja, Loki, and their enemies the giants. I never thought any of that would ever pop up in a sermon, until this week when I read the Ten Commandments again.
I was struck by something that I had never noticed before. When God says to Moses, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me,” God would seem to be saying that there are, in fact, other gods. I always took this commandment to be a sort of long-winded, god-like way of telling us that we really ought to love and worship God. You see, I had always taken all the Biblical talk about the Lord our God being “the one true god” to mean that our God is not just the only “real” god, but that the Lord our God was and is the only god. When I lectured about the Norse gods, it was always with a small “g” and in the plural, meaning not really real and certainly not divine, as opposed to the Lord our God, which is always with a capital “L” and a capital “G” and always in the singular, as in uniquely real and certainly divine. I told my students that the stories of the Norse gods were myths, stories, literature, the imaginative creations of less advanced peoples, peoples who were awash in superstition and ignorance, stories which they made up in an attempt to explain how things were the way they were. But stories about the Lord our God were religion, not mythology, true in some way that the myths were not. And then, all of a sudden this week, I noticed for the first time that the very Lord our God, capital “L” and capital “G” and singular, as in the one true God, as in the only god, has been telling us all along that there are, in fact, other gods; that, at least in the opinion of the Lord our God, who of all beings ought to know, there are other gods who can challenge the Lord our God for supremacy in our lives. How about that?
It was an eye opening moment to say the least, as I started to think about what that might mean. So I decided to look around to see if I could see any evidence of the old gods. I knew all about the Viking gods. I knew what they were like. I knew what they did. I knew what they demanded of the people who worshiped them. It was just a question of looking for them, which I spent the week doing. Where does one look for gods these days? The easiest thing to do is let the high priests point them out, the people who tell us who and what we ought to worship. I looked in the news to see what the high priests were saying. I watched the recent round of presidential and vice presidential debates and heard what the wanna-be high priests had to say. I thought about what I read and heard and suddenly realized that the Lord our God is right. There are, in fact, other gods. As a scholar of the Bible and as a former scholar of Old Norse mythology, I think the old gods are alive and well. We don't call them gods these days. We use other names, but we treat them exactly the way the Vikings treated their gods, with fear, sacrifice, and hope. Even with other names, they seem to have the same power and evoke the same devotion that they did a thousand years ago in the forests and mountains of Scandinavia.
Just so that you don't think I am crazy, I am not talking about person-like beings running around the world as they do in the myths, an Odin, Thor, or Freyja. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a god as “a being of supernatural powers or attributes, believed in and worshiped by a people, especially a male deity thought to control some part of nature or reality.” What I am referring to as gods are the amorphous forces and powers in our world, amorphous because we can name them but we cannot exactly define or point them out. They have superhuman power, superhuman as in we feel like we have no control over them while they have control over us, as in we feel like we depend upon them for our well being at the same time that we fear that they may turn against us to our destruction. For these reasons, we worship and devote ourselves to them, as in we fear them, are in awe of them, don't really understand them, and do whatever they seem to demand of us. They are the things that, when they are named, everyone goes “Ooh,” “Aah,” and bows just a little bit. We get a little fearful of what might happen if we don't agree with what they seem to demand of us, even though we don't understand exactly what we mean when we name their names. For these reasons, we give them our allegiance, our devotion, our worship. Better safe than sorry. They shape our lives. They may not even actually be gods, but I think our society treats them a such. So what's the difference? A rose by any other name is still a rose.
Let's start with this thing called “The Economy.” This god also goes by the name “Economic Growth”. One specific manifestation of this god is watched with particular dread and rapture, “The Stock Market,” also known as “Wall Street.” We think we depend on this god for our well being. We think this because our high priests tell us that this is so. We throw our money at him. We devote our time to following it. When we hear his name mentioned, we drop whatever we are doing and listen more closely. And perhaps most significantly, we don't really feel like we have any control over him. At worst, he is superhuman with a life of his own. We call this aspect “Market Forces.” At best, we have our heroes, Warren Buffet, George Soros, Bill Gates, who are uniquely able to tap into and harvest its power and we just hope to ride on the coattails of their success. For many years we had a high priest, Allan Greenspan, and everyone felt safe as he propitiated this god on our behalf. Every politician gets on his or her knees and bows before this god, knowing full well how quickly we will sacrifice him or her to this god if things go badly. The closest thing the Norse had to this god were the fertility gods, Freyr and Freyja.
There is another god, which we call “Our National Interest.” What is “Our National Interest”? No one knows exactly, but every politician names it as something they will protect and extend on our behalf. Once the words “Our National Interest” are mentioned, everyone gets a little a nervous. “This could be good, but it's probably bad.” We are told we must agree to do this or that, because it's in “Our National Interest.” Our recent devotion to one aspect of this god, which we call “Our National Security,” has made us ready to throw all manner of treasures on this altar, the lives of our sons and daughters, our civil liberties, our rights to habeus corpus, our right to question and challenge our government, our participation in the Geneva Convention which outlaws torture, and our money. The violent aspect of this god is most like the Norse god Thor, who rumbled around the world in his chariot, swinging his hammer, smashing giants' heads in, protecting civilization from the destructive forces of chaos out there in giant land.
There is not time this morning to describe in depth all the other old gods I see running around in our world right now, but I will name one more, just to give you some idea of where we are at. I see Odin everywhere. As the chief of the Norse gods, Odin had many functions: the god of war, the god of oblivion and ecstasy, the god of science and technology. In each one of these areas, the recourse to war as the solution, the desire for more and more entertainment, and the hope in and promise of new and better technologies, Odin promises us salvation and we go “ooh” and “aah,” bowing to him.
I must make one thing clear before I finish this sermon. I am not trying to paint a simplistic, stark black and white picture of how the world is. I am not trying to ignore human responsibility and blame it all on these superhuman forces. I am not saying that we are surrounded by evil spirits who threaten us. I am merely pointing these gods out and showing the ways in which they invite our worship, inspire our fear and awe, and demand our devotion. When we give them what they want, which we have, we find ourselves right where we are: fearful, feeling powerless, not really understanding what is going on or why, turning our minds off and just hoping for the best.
Which brings me to the Lord our God, “Adonai Elohenu” in Hebrew. In the midst of all these other gods which many of us worship to one degree or another, lives the god of Abraham and Sarah, the god of Israel and Moses, the god of Jesus of Nazareth, and our god, who is radically different from all these other gods. They take our lives, demand our lives from us, whereas the Lord our God gives us life and creates new life in and through and among us. All these other gods separate us from each other, whereas the Lord our God invites us into communities of new and abundant life, assures us that community is the place of life. All these other gods draw us into the frenzy, the confusion and anxiety of daily life, whereas the Lord our God, what does he want for us? To invite us into a place of quiet relationship, to be with Him in Sabbath, a day set apart or rest and enjoyment, a day of gratitude for the life that He has given us and the life he has in store for us. All the other gods want us to be like them, whereas the Lord our God wants us only to be ourselves, the beloved children he created in his own image us to be. The Lord our God offers us freedom from the slavery the other gods would impose on us. I am amazed that I never noticed any of this before.