You Are What You Worship

Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

-Simon and Garfunkel, Mrs. Robinson

I read this first thing this morning.  You may have noticed that I'm on sort of a Rohr kick lately, and I am, because the ideas I find in his writings unfold and intertwine like vines with almost everything else that's going on.  Yesterday, I wrote about how we never seem to learn from the past, and about how we probably shouldn't imagine that things are getting better or worse, but are more aptly described as hovering at a rather disappointing point of futility.  Today, I'm going to give an opinion on why that is, and the answer is simple: idolatry.

Yesterday, we observed a national holiday, well some people did anyway, in honor of Christopher Columbus who "discovered" America.  Columbus Day, for me in the past few years, has been a rather enjoyable reminder of how good postmodern folk are getting at deconstructing mythology.  The Columbus mythology that most of us grew up with was that he defied the odds, and through sheer courage and resolve disproved the conventional belief that the world was flat and in the process stumbled upon a new world.  In fact, by 1492, most people had come to agree with Galileo and the ancient Greeks, that indeed the world was a sphere, the only thing that Columbus really "proved" is the sphere was, in fact, larger than previously imagined by anyone except the Scandinavians who had been there and done that, and been driven off by the rather fierce inhabitants of the "New" world.

Columbus, however, landed far south of where Leif Erikson had originally drug his butt ashore.  Down south, the natives were friendlier, and more gullible, and didn't really see why everyone shouldn't just get along and have some Pina Coladas.  Columbus then brought his nobility and dauntless courage to bear on forming a mutually beneficial society that bridged the gap between...

Oh, no he didn't, he started raping and murdering and enslaving people in a blind quest for gold, which, as it turns out, the natives didn't actually have all that much.  The latter history of Columbus in the New World reads a lot more like a story I don't want to tell my children under any circumstances.  He was brutal to the people he encountered in a way that would probably make Josef Stalin step back and say, "Whoa bro, you ought to chill out." or however you say "chill out" in Russian.

And we have a holiday for him, and we learn that he is a hero.  Remind me again, exactly how the world is getting worse?

This is where idolatry ultimately leads: you end up worshiping monsters.  You end up celebrating a man who sold 9 and 10 year old girls to his crew as sex slaves, and cut off the hands of people who didn't mine enough gold to make a quota, and then made them wear the hands tied around their necks.  Tell me again about how letting gays get married is going to bring down God's wrath.

Go back and read that thing about becoming what you worship again.  Who do we worship?  Who do we venerate and honor?  Historical figures?  Columbus?  Jefferson (another guy with a questionable human rights record)?  What about athletes?  How is that Adrian Petersen or Ray Rice jersey feeling right about now?  Movie stars?  Politicians?

You know, it occurs to me that there was a pretty good reason why God was so unreasonable about Israel worshiping idols.  When you worship an idol, whether it's a person, or even an idea, it shapes who you are.  If you worship power, you become war-like.  If you worship money, you are driven by greed.  If you worship success, you become hard and driven.

No matter what you worship, if it's not God, you are essentially worshiping a demon, and thus the world is populated afresh with demons and the idolaters that sacrifice on their altars.

So what's the way around this?

Jesus, but you probably guessed I was going to say that.  Jesus shows us a God that is loving to an extent that challenges the rational abilities of every human being.  He breaks apart the assumptions of will to power (when people wanted to make him king or Messiah, he avoided them).  He certainly shuns the trappings of wealth and greed (just look at how he talks about the rich).  He even breaks out of the most deeply held human instinct of self-preservation at one point.  In the process he rejects the cycle of violence and revenge that dominates our history, and becomes something more.

If you're going to worship something, worship him.