Counter to What?

It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and the oppressed - this, despite the Gospel.

-Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

I don't think I have ever read three words in the English language that chill my soul quite like, "despite the Gospel."  It not only means that we have gone wrong through a sort of sin-blindness, but rather that we have willfully missed the point of Jesus and his teachings.  And I cannot come close to refuting Thurman when he says, "It cannot be denied."  Indeed I think trying to deny it is a very complex and certainly dangerous sort of spiritual/intellectual gymnastic routine.

Yet, I hear people try, rather than confess to the sins of empire, rather than admit that the people who call Jesus their Lord, have often been much more buddy-buddy with Caesar.  I have heard it said that the ones who climbed into bed with power and violence were not "true" Christians.  I have heard the excuse that they were just living according to the moral values appropriate to their time. I have even perhaps nibbled at these arguments and felt the warm embrace of their poison, as it soothed my middle class, white soul.  But for the past week or so, I have this staring at me:

And he is looking at me and telling me that a lot of my assumptions about stuff are really wrong.  As the Supreme Court made their decisions and dissents about the ACA and about marriage equality, black churches were burning in the south, and there is Thurman reminding me that these things are all connected, and how the church responds is really important.

I have heard people say that the church needs to be counter-cultural for years now.  I have heard people interpret the ways in which Jesus challenged the dominant and powerful people of his time.  But these days the most common usage of the "counter-cultural" argument is to encourage Christians to "stand up" on moral ground to the changing world around us.  This is all good and fine if it means we stand up for equality and dignity for people who are oppressed, if we work to see that human beings are not objectified, labeled as somehow inferior and denied their full participation in society.  It is all good and fine if we're working to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and house the homeless.  It is all good and fine if we rail against the ways that the social and economic systems of our day stack the decks against minorities and those who are born poor.  It is all good and fine if we say that we are against a culture built on violence and greed and fear.

But what if the culture changes for the better?

Do I need to remind you (again) of MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he strongly critiques the leaders of the Christian church for sitting on the sidelines of the civil rights fight?

Do I need to tell you the story of Thurman's Grandmother, born a slave, who used to hear white preachers tell her all about Paul's injunction for slaves to obey their masters?  (She eventually decided she didn't need to read or hear about that part of the Bible any more, and thankfully didn't reject the whole thing).

Yes, the church is supposed to be counter-cultural, but that is not synonymous with obstinate and contrarian.  I think that sometimes the world can have a prophetic pull on us as well as the other way around.  Wasn't it some while visiting some Gentiles that Peter had that dream about the sheet (Acts 10)? Didn't God and the changing world conspire to convince a bunch of Jewish followers of Jesus to accept and even eat with people who they had previously considered enemies, and even unclean?  Didn't the very voice of God say, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane?"

How do you read these stories church?

Want to be counter-cultural?  Try welcoming "the least of these," try loving unconditionally, try refusing the vicious cycle of power and violence, try laying down your swords and dropping your defenses, let your enemies in and love them.  Try actually forgiving, as you have been forgiven.

When we get done with that part, then we can talk morality.

Persecution Complex

"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness."

-2 Corinthians 12: 9

The above Bible verse is an answer to prayer.  In context it is an answer to the Apostle Paul, when he complains about the "thorn" that was given to him in his flesh, and about the fact that other people seemed to have much cooler visions of heaven than he did.  In other words, when Paul starts throwing himself a pity party, God says, "knock it off!"

So... so... so...

I guess same gender marriage is now a thing across our great nation.

I suspect you probably know what I think about this.  I'm not gloating.  I don't want to rub it in the faces of those who disagree with actions of either SCOTUS or with the Presbyterian Church (USA), which sort of fought this dragon a few months ahead of time.  I would like to say that some of the reactions to last week are causing me pastoral concern. 

Let me be as frank as I possibly can: losing cultural hegemony and privilege is not tantamount to persecution.  I know, it feels uncomfortable, to be shown that the "world" no longer agrees with your belief system and values, but let's be honest, if you follow Jesus, the world never agreed with you, or even really liked you.

Right now the artist formerly known as the Religious Right in the "glory days" of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush is sort of like a clique of once popular folks who bullied and intimidated their way around the whole school.  But a little queer kid stood up and punched them in the nose and now they're not the big man on campus any more.  The faculty (at least 5 out of 9) are supporting the little guy and saying that the big clique can't tell them what to do any more.  Yes, they still have a lot of people on their side, yes they once truly did set the trends and the tone of the entire body, but they don't have that right any more.

However, that does not make them persecuted.

Furthermore, I don't think it means that our culture has suddenly become a godless moral morass waiting suck us into an apocalypse. If God didn't strike us down for 400 years of slavery, for genocide of the Native population, for sitting on our hands while the Nazis stormed through Europe, for dropping not one, but two atomic bombs on Japan, for keeping the world locked in fear of a nuclear holocaust for over 50 years, for still failing to deal with the systemic oppression of people of color, not to mention the rather lackluster way we have shown our Christian "love" to LGBTQ people.  I don't think this decision is going to tip the scales.

I don't want to see persecution, I've talked to people from parts of the world where it actually happens.  I know that Christians around the world are facing the rather grim reality of dying for their faith, and because I find these stories so harrowing, it makes me a little skittish when I hear people who are angry about this decision talk like, now we're at the same place as Christians under Nero, or in Iraq under ISIS, and how God is going to bring down this nation because we have forsaken God's Holy Law.  So obviously I would like us to anathematize that sort of fundamentalist prattle.

There are, of course, many shades of gray in the reaction to the SCOTUS decision, not everyone who laments the decision is doing so with grand melodrama. Some are being quite reasonable and asking legitimate questions about what this says about our culture as a whole.  What does this mean for a nation that is founded on and for freedom of religion?  What is this going to do to our family structure?  How is the church going to deal with this?  Like it or not, we are rather wound up in the whole business of making people married.

The answers to these questions lies in the future, and so the answer to Paul's prayer is also an answer to our anxiety.  In our legal system, in order for one person to claim injury by another they must prove that they were somehow damaged or have had their rights violated.  A lot of people are "feeling" like they have had their rights violated.  In fact, feeling like you are victim of injustice in some way shape or form has become something of a national pass time.  The problem is that very few people can actually prove any damage.

This decision does not forebode persecution of hetero-normative Christian people any more than removing the Confederate Flag from South Carolina's state house implies the persecution of white people is right around the corner.  You can "feel" that it's true, but that does not make it true.

Time will tell if there are going to be negative consequences to this decision, but for right now there are mostly just a lot of feelings: some are happy, some are angry, some are just a little anxious.  As always if the anger and the anxiety win, there probably will be some bad days ahead.

But as so many have said recently, and as I thoroughly believe: love wins.

Love does not win through control.

Love wins through patience, kindness, gentleness, joy, peace, hope, and faith, in other words all the things that most of the angry, fearful and anxious people see as impossible and weak.

Wiser people than me have pointed out that the true measure of a society is not how well it's high born and powerful folks live, but how well it provides for the most vulnerable among them.  Giving equality and dignity to those who are not in the in crowd is not a bad idea, it is actually what God does for all of us.  Our prayers for strength often lead us to accept our weakness rather than conquer it, to endure trouble rather than eradicate our enemies.  "Power is made perfect in weakness."

Why are we afraid to be weak?  Haven't we been paying attention?

Searching Questions

Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin?

Is this impotency due to the betrayal of the genius of the religion, 

or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?

The question is searching, for the dramatic demonstration of the impotency of Christianity in dealing with the issue is underscored by the apparent inability to cope with it within its own fellowship.

-Howard Thurman, The Preface to Jesus and the Disinherited

They are taking the Confederate Flag down, but honestly it's only because it's politically necessary, not because anyone really repents of the systemic disease of racism.  Another African American Church burned and who knows what the motives were, but it would take a pretty naive or willfully ignorant person to not at least suspect it was about race.

A week after the Emmanuel AME church killings, the person responsible is in custody and the nation has progressed rather quickly through the stages of grief.  For a few days the conversations about race and justice burned hot, people rallied, people prayed, flags were taken down, and I suspect that now life is pretty much getting back to normal as the burners of hatred are getting turned back down to simmer.

I decided I would re-read Thurman this week, to keep myself from moving on too quickly, because I'm white, and we do that (shrug and move on) when it's not at all appropriate or healthy.  Thurman is prophetic voice to me as a person who is utterly ensconced in white privilege and the ivory tower of intellectual, middle class, mainline protestant Christianity in America.  I'm going to have to take this reading of his rather thin little book very slowly.  I didn't even get through the preface before these questions smacked me upside the head.

I think the question of why Christianity (particularly American Christianity) is "impotent" to deal with the problems of racial justice is actually rather closely bound to why our nation is "impotent" to deal with them "radically, and therefore effectively,"  Like it or not, a certain manifestation of Christian faith is encoded into our national DNA.  You can argue about whether it's "authentic" Christianity, or some strain of Deism, but the fact remains that it almost always pranced about wearing the costume of the Church.  The discussions were different when our nation was founded, and the Church could only sporadically bring itself to say that "maybe" slavery was wrong, and "freedom of religion," basically meant you were free to be Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Unitarian or Quaker, and the government wasn't going to kill you for it.  Separation of Church and state was primarily to make sure that the government didn't have the power to meddle in the affairs of the church, read persecute certain people for their faith.  One wonders if the founding fathers could have ever envisioned the rise of the "religious right" or a "moral majority" as a political force.

But I digress, my point is that it is either the "betrayal of genius," or "basic weakness," that Thurman is talking about above has been coded into our national identity.  As a big fan of Jesus, I tend to want to think of this flaw as a "betrayal of genius," rather than a fundamental flaw.  I think that to use the teachings of man who did not grasp at power or seek to rule an earthly kingdom as a blueprint for a nation in the modern sense is fraught with danger. Take deistic humanism, gnostic denial of "the world,"the over-realized eschatology of millennialism, then throw it into a broth of worldly power and wealth the likes of which the world has never seen, and you have a soup that stands little chance of actually tasting anything like the recipe of a poor first century Jew.

I'm being a little bit negative here, because you do have to acknowledge that the better angels of our nature are also probably rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well, and when you compare how we are doing with how much of the non-Christian world is doing, things don't look quite so grim, but you have to admit, as Thurman insists repeatedly, that the majority of men at any moment in history stand, "with their backs against the wall."  What the church does about this can be our greatest glory and our greatest shame, and sometimes it can be both almost simultaneously.

We can be great servants of the poor, alleviating symptoms and ills of oppression, like hunger and homelessness, and we can be utterly silent about the systems that create these ills, and indeed we can even defend the very nature of the oppressor.  We can welcome the stranger into our midst and almost with the same breath say that a symbol of hate is just a "part of our heritage."

We may give our dollars to the poor, or the disinherited, or the ones with their backs against the wall, but will we give them our voices and our votes as well?  Will we speak of the injustice that doesn't effect us directly to those who are bound to represent us?  Will we move beyond mere self interest and actually care for the least of these?

I would ask these questions of Christians and Americans alike.

Responsibility

I've noticed that any time the issue of societal ills and systemic injustice come up, there are those who want very badly to make it all about personal responsibility.  The logic goes something like this: there are bad things; violence, poverty, addiction.  These things all have a somewhat complicated cultural pathology, but at their most basic level they could theoretically be solved by individuals deciding to act differently: don't hurt other people, work hard and pull yourself out of poverty, don't use the substance you're addicted to any more.  In other words, "Man (or Woman) up and stop whining that it's not your fault."
This sort of speech generally comes from middle class white people who have never significantly struggled with addiction.  They are mostly older guys who have worked their butts off for most of their life and are now enjoying a comfortable retirement.  Because of this, their perspective gains validity with many people who share their lifestyle and their experience.  It resonates with younger people who are following the same trajectory in life, who don't feel like life has really given them a big old head start, or rained showers of rose petals all over everything they've ever done.  They had to pay their dues and work hard; they never went on welfare, or turned to crime, or got lost in addiction.
Personal responsibility right?
Well yes, congratulations to all of you who are or have lived such virtuous lives.  I'm about to tell you something that you may not want to hear, but being the responsible, thoughtful, hard working people you are I'm sure you'll hear me out: You had a head start.  The best metaphor I have heard to explain privilege uses baseball.  In America white people are already on base, maybe it's second, maybe it's third depending on your socio-economic status, if you're born into money, you're practically standing a step away from home plate.  At any rate, you're somewhere on the diamond already, you don't really have to prove that you belong there.  People of color start at the plate with a bat in their hands if they're lucky.  They have to get a hit just to get where you are (that hit being education and surviving adolescence with your body, mind and heart in tact).  Then, maybe, you could call it a level playing field, but they still have to deal with umpires that are slightly biased against them, maybe not downright unfair, but definitely a little tilted.
The peculiar thing is though, by the time they get around third and cross home, they will totally agree with you about personal responsibility.  They will see that it could be done through hard work and a few good breaks.  They will say, "Gee, you were right about that," and you and all of the home plate crowd will dance and rejoice.
The fly in this ointment of hard work and success is, as usual, Jesus.  Jesus tells us that it's not enough to look out for number one.  It's not just about working hard and getting ahead and taking care of you and yours.  It's about the least of these; the ones who didn't have a chance, who struck out on three straight high fastballs, who got hit by a pitch and hauled away from the plate with a broken jaw, who tripped rounding first and snapped an ankle, who got thrown out trying to steal second, I could go on with the baseball metaphors, but I really want to get on with this.
Why should we change laws that work for most of us, just to accommodate those who seem to be unfairly oppressed by them?  Why should we examine our own assumptions about power and violence, when the way the world is has got us a boat and country club membership?  Why should we challenge unbridled greed and usurious practice when our 401K is sitting pretty?  In short, why would anyone, who has benefited so much from the system, work to change the system?
How about because it's broken?
Maybe not for you, but for a lot of people, it's broken.  Maybe you can turn a blind eye to racism, because it's never really affected you.  Maybe you can ignore poverty and massive incarceration rates because you were never poor or in jail.  Maybe you can vote for politicians who cut food stamp programs and welfare and send that money to build bombs.
But if you call yourself a Christian, I would read Matthew 25 very, very carefully, and think about a poor Jewish man who got crucified for breaking the laws of his time, who willingly associated with the untouchable and unsavory people in his world, and who has told us who call him Lord to do the same.  Ask yourself if he's going to be impressed with your level of personal responsibility.

Are We Dumbing Ourselves to Death?

Anti-intellectualism is not about intelligence (as the linked article helpfully points out).  Saying someone is ignorant is not the same thing as saying they are stupid.  In fact, in the actual definition of the word ignorant, you will notice that it is not as pejorative a term as your average seventh grader who just learned the word would have you believe, it is simply a lack of knowledge.  We are all ignorant of something. I am ignorant of how to integrate derivative equations, despite taking and passing two semesters of college calculus.  It's something I should have learned but did not, and the fact that I passed two terms (granted with D's) is a testament to the failure of something or other.
The problem is that ignorance has become acceptable and perhaps even lauded in certain quarters.  I'm not sure how old I was when I first felt self-conscious about being smart, but it happened, and it stuck with me until well into high school.  Through middle school I became rather adept at hiding my intelligence and feigning ignorance.  I suppose it's lucky for me that I'm rather good at taking tests, the standardized testing that we had to take in eighth grade finally clued the school system into the fact that I wasn't actually a lunkhead.
Honestly, it was sort of a surprise to me.  You might think that people suppressing their natural intelligence is a conscious decision, but actually it's more of a herd instinct in adolescence: don't stand out.  We want to fit in, and if ignorance is par for the course than so be it, bring on the Budweiser and Confederate flags, and I'll shout, "play Freebird" from the back row of a jazz concert.
How do people become racist?  You know, it's not that hard to figure out.  I've never met a racist toddler, we learn it.  We hear people we admire use the N-word or talk about "those people," and we accommodate our behavior to that standard.  And don't think that you need to have an uncle in the KKK for this to happen, it can happen in the most subtle ways.  Did you see your mom hug her purse a little tighter when that black man sat next to her on the bus?  Did you sense a little different tone in your grandfather's voice when he talked to the Latino teller at the bank?  Kids are little sponges, and they observe a lot more than you think.
The only thing that is going to counter-act that sort of conditioning is a lot of education and experiences that stretch you to form relationships with people who are different than you.
You can be smart and kind and still be a racist, in fact, some would tell you it's unavoidable to some extent because of a tribal mindset or because of unexamined privilege, or maybe a bit of both.  What ignorance does is never raise the question or the possibility that it might be bad. There is a difference between the sort of tacit racism that you find everywhere, and the active, hostile racism that breaks out with some regularity.  Both are the product of ignorance, but one is simply a lack of examination and one is a willful denial of reality.  Both are sinful, but only one is prone to violence.
We may have made this nest for ourselves, we may have glorified the marginally educated workingman a little too much.  We may have allowed people to consider personal freedom (and perhaps even salvation) as the be all and end all of existence, but the reality is that we are all connected.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, you mostly read about Israel being saved, people prayed for deliverance for their whole nation, not just for one or two people, or one or two thousand people.  An individual might be rescued from trouble here and there, but the idea of salvation was a larger picture.
The forms of Christianity that were dominant in this nation around the time of the founding, were largely individualistic, meaning they emphasized a "personal" faith and a "personal" salvation.  I think it may have been inevitable that this foundation would lead to fracturing of the community, both the churches and the nation.
The industrial revolution compounded the problem, by pulling people out of the simple, necessarily communal life of an agrarian society and putting them in a place where their identity more closely resembled drone ants or bees, and their intellect and curiosity was mostly just a nuisance to the productivity of a worker.
It's amazing to me how communism and capitalism both have this proletarian value system, and both of them utterly fail to empower the working class.  It's because educated people ask questions and desire more freedom and equality, and they don't want to just play the same old role.  Ultimately, we all want to be bourgeoisie.  We want to be the well to do, we want to be the upper managers and the executives, but we can't, and so we seethe and learn to hate, and we reject the "high-falutin" ways of the very people we aspire to be.
Pretend like you don't care.
Pretend you would rather have a beat up pickup truck than a Porsche.
Pretend you would rather eat hot dogs than sushi.
Pretend that "book learning" isn't really that important for the likes of you.
In other words: lie to yourself, stay ignorant, because if you ever learn the truth, you might have to change the way you behave.

And Now for Something Less Depressing: Sadness

Looking back over my blog posts, I realize I have fallen into a sort of serious rut, or a rut of seriousness, so I'm going to talk about a kid's movie: Inside Out.  I should begin by saying that when you combine this with Up, you have two of the most serious tear jerkers that I can think of short of Old Yeller, and Where the Red Fern Grows (movies where bad stuff happens to dogs are usually prime make a grown man cry territory).  This is especially interesting in the case of Inside Out because it is absolutely hilarious and emotionally poignant at the same time.  Up hit you with the montage about the little old man and his wife, and then it was all about the talking dogs.  Inside Out sort of tickles your emotions for a while with sweet little memories of how great life used to be contrasted with how it has really changed for the worse in the life of Riley the character in whose head most of the movie takes place.
Riley is an eleven year old girl, which was particularly important to me, as I currently attempt parenthood of an eleven year old male creature and will soon have an eleven year old female creature living in my house.  The female creature, now nine, has already demonstrated that no one, including her is the master of her emotions.  Riley has four different characters living in her brain: Joy (who was first), Sadness (second), Anger (third, voiced by Lewis Black and worth the price of admission), Fear and Disgust, who sort of work together to keep her safe.
You may have heard of the "Wheel of Feelings," which I like in a sort of tongue in cheek sort of way, but it is actually useful in deciphering the source of some complex feelings. So here it is again:

For the sake of the movie: Fear is purple, Sadness is blue and Anger is Red, Disgust is green and joy is golden (couldn't find a wheel with completely corresponding colors.  Each emotion colors certain memories, and for the most part, while Riley is little, Joy gives her memories a bias towards the golden and happy.  When the family moves from their comfortable home in Minnesota to San Francisco and stuff starts to get stressful, the other emotions start to over-rule Joy.  Sadness especially, an emotion that is sort of dumpy and depressed, who mostly just tries to stay out of the way of an irrepressible and overbearing Joy.  There are several scenes where sadness touches otherwise happy memories and they start to turn blue.

This is absolutely anathema to Joy and she becomes more and more oppressive to Sadness, at one point drawing a circle and telling her to stay in the "circle of sadness."  This leads to chaos, as one might imagine (though apparently not all actual adults realize this danger).  Joy and Sadness get thrown out of headquarters along with crucial core memories that make Riley who she is and help her cope with the world.  The longer Joy, Sadness and the core memories are lost, the worse Riley's ability to cope with life becomes.  The theme of the movie is that Joy needs to learn to let go and value the other emotions and their roles, especially the role of Sadness.

There is so much psychology sort of wedged into the movie that it kept me really paying attention and occasionally chuckling out loud, like the scene about the phases of abstract thought.  But what I was particularly interested in were a couple, possibly minor details.

First of all, there is the fact that most of the other characters in the movie have single gender emotions, while Riley has both male and female (Anger and Fear are male).  Her mother has all female emotions and her father has all male emotions.  Also, while Joy is the dominant emotion in Riley, her mother's dominant emotion is Sadness and Her father's is Anger.

I'm pretty sure these things were not an accident, and they kind of add an even greater amount of depth to a movie that's already pretty deep for a cartoon.

The Thing About Flags

Okay, so here is the disclaimer: I'm not against flags.  I will stand and say the pledge of allegiance, including the "under God" part.  I would never burn a flag. I even get a little choked up at funerals when the VFW guys do the folding and presentation of the flag to the family of the deceased veteran.  I understand that humans are wired for symbolism at a very deep level, and quite frankly it is because of the power of symbols that I feel like we need to have a talk about flags.
Let's start with the flag du jour, the "stars and bars," the battle flag of the Confederacy, the "Rebel" flag, which is still flown, worn and otherwise honored in much of the South, and on top of orange Dodge Challengers.  Some would tell you it's about being proud of where you come from, that it's about heritage and about holding on to home and family values and church and God, biscuits and sweet tea and fried chicken, and all the good things that make the South the South.  But others would tell you that it's a sign of a people who have never really given up an old grudge.  Maybe they're both right.

At this point in history though the Confederate flag means one thing that is absolutely and positively unavoidable: racism.  I know that the American Civil war was about a lot more than slavery, I have learned at least that much about history.  I know that the form of slavery that existed in the Antebellum era was going to die eventually and that the war was more about state's rights and taxation. I know that the Union was more or less telling the Confederacy that they just needed to pay their taxes and shut up. However, in the annals of history and perhaps more importantly, in the collective consciousness of our nation, the war was about ending the state sanctioned practice of slavery and making sure that we lived up to our creed of "all men" being created equal. That phrase continued to mean land owning white males long after the war was over, and to some extent is still true, but at least in theory we mean "all humans."

The Confederate Flag symbolizes a sort of uber-conservative mindset: leave us alone and let us do things our way, don't change because we like the way things are working out... at least for us and ours.  And so you still find it flying in many places, including South Carolina.

Don't you dare tell me that it's "just" a symbol, people kill and die for symbols all the time.  Symbols infect us in a way that we don't always fully understand.  Poor white people everywhere have been saturated with the notion that things have changed for the worse and those changes account for how crappy the world is for them.  They have been told that, once upon a time, the world was different for the likes of them, back in the good old days, when black folk knew their place and the benevolent white landowners made sure that things didn't fall apart.  Never mind that many of their ancestors were virtual slaves called sharecroppers, who were so poor and hungry that former slaves ended up regretting the emancipation proclamation when they found out how hard it was to feed your family the way the poor whites did.

The Confederacy was an idea that was conceived by and primarily benefited the wealthy landowning class.  They did everything within their power to convince the poor white folk they should buy in, and boy did they ever, and boy will they still buy in today.  They buy in to such an extent that it sort of confounds me on a nearly daily basis.  The Confederate mindset is alive and well in America today, and it has spread out of the South, and it has it's own TV shows and is all over talk radio.

Most white folks will whistle Dixie and view the idea as a sort of charming little cultural wrinkle.  Up until last week, I almost never heard anyone make a fuss about the Confederate flag flying in state capitols or being displayed in thousands of other public spaces.  Until we ask ourselves what it means, what is that symbol about?

Way back in the Hebrew Scriptures, God was always getting super cheesed off about idols.  "Have no other gods before me," it says in the Law of Moses, in fact, "don't even make pictures of other gods, or even of me, or angels or anything," because as soon as you do that you're tiptoeing towards idolatry.  Idols are tricky little blighters to say the least, they sort of sneak up on you.  Sure none of us have probably gone out to altar to Baal or Moloch recently, but I guarantee you we are not innocent of the idolatry thing.  It's because of our innate awareness and use of symbols, we give them power the very moment they start to mean something to us.

As you might imagine, this applies to any symbol, a flag, a swastika, a star of David, a picture of a dead president (money), or even a cross.  And so it behooves us to always consider the meaning of our symbols.  Where do they come from? What do they mean now?  Are our attitudes and allegiances to them consistently subordinate to our devotion to God?  In other words, what is more important: that we display a cross around our neck or in our home, or that we actually do what Jesus told us to do?  Is it more important that we pledge allegiance to the flag or that we truly seek to be a good and righteous nation "under God?"

Are we letting our idols get the better of us?

I'm not suggesting we stop being symbol using creatures, however, I am suggesting that we stop letting our symbols use us.