Addiction and idolatry
READ: Exodus 32:1-10 32 And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.
2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.
3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.
4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
5 And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the Lord.
And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.
7 And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves:
8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
9 And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:
10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.
STEPS: 3,4
PRAYER:
Please be patient with me, God, as I struggle to break free of my idols of addiction.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, for however long a particular addiction controle our attention, it has become a god for us. Judaism and Christianity proclaim in unison that such false gods must fall away from us. We are called to grow toward that point at which nothing other than God will be our god. However short-lived or minor our concern for something other than God may be, when we give it more priority than we give our concern for God and God's will, we commit idolatry. Thus we all commit idolatry countless times every day.
Unfortunately, most sermons on idolatry simply leave people feeling guilty.
It is true that we are responsible for our actions, and in that sense we are indeed guilty of being more concerned with our addictions than with God's love. But to stop there is to assume we can eradicate our attachments through willpower alone, and we simply cannot.
Instead, we need to recognize that our personal insufficiency does not make us unacceptable in God's eyes. Far from it; our incompleteness is what draws us toward God and one another. If we do not fill our minds with guilt and self-recriminations, we will recognize our incompleteness as a kind of open space into which we can welcome the flow of grace. We can think of our inadequacies as terrible defects, if we want, and hate ourselves. But we can also think of them affirmatively, as doorways through which the power of grace can enter our lives Then we may begin to appreciate our inherent, God-given lovability.
This is the message our ‘All Powerful albeit Invisible God wants us to believe!’