American Idols

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, on March 1, 2009

Who has seen the tv show American Idol?  Any AI addicts here with us this morning?

As I sat staring at a blank piece of paper and thinking about the title I’d chosen for today’s sermon, I figured I’d better begin by confessing that I’ve never seen the show.  I know - I’m a cultural zero.  And curmudgeonly about it, too. 

Oh, I’ve seen the random clip now and again, especially of those sad auditions by people who should have been steered in other directions by somebody - but the producers apparently are not shy about making fun of people.

I know the premise of the show, I think, that the show goes around the country looking for “talented” people who want to be the next American Idol.  They take the best of the best and have them perform in front of a huge studio audience and live on tv and then the three judges tell them what they think.  The judges must have the power to say yay or nay most of the way along, but I believe at some point that the television audience across America gets to vote, so it at least appears to be democratic to some degree.

Far be it from me to knock democracy in action.  But I do have some questions.  Who gives those three judges the power?  Why let someone like Simon LeGree be your point man?  Why take thirty minutes out of your day to watch somebody like that run roughshod over people?

More importantly, what’s missing in the lives of all those young people who line up around the block in every city in America desperately hoping for a chance to become the next big thing?  Has our idolatry infected them this way?  Why are they willing to risk such shame and disappointment?  Why does being the next big Idol seem so attractive?

We UU’s are heir to a flow of history that has traditionally opposed even the merest whiff of idolatry.  In that passage we heard from Exodus 32, for instance, Moses came down off Mount Sinai to find that his brother Aaron had constructed a golden calf, a precious metal god to go before the people on their journeys.  Aaron wasn’t a bad guy - he was only trying to help.  His people were, after all, in a horrible predicament having left Egypt in such a hurry to escape from slavery, only to find that freedom, too, has its costs.  We who are ostensibly free find ourselves wandering in the desert quite often, seeking God-knows-what, waiting for God’s promises - whatever we think they are - to be fulfilled.  Moses saw the sin of the Golden Calf for what it was: idolatry.  And he took the people to task for their behavior.  But then he took it upon himself to argue with God to Let His People Go rather than to destroy them for their transgressions.

Another of our forebears, Abraham, is said as a boy to have worked for his father in an idol shop.  Little Abram was left to tend the shop while the family went away.  While he was supposed to be watching over things, his love for the one true god got the better of him and he broke all the idols except for the biggest one.  When the family returned and his father asked him what the heck had happened, Abram answered that maybe the big idol had taken a hatchet to all the other idols.  The father was livid and shouted at Abram, “Those idols can’t walk or talk!  They have no power to do such things!”  To which Abram responded, “Then why waste time worshipping them?  You ought to be worshipping the truly powerful.”

[As an aside, this story is not found in the Bible but rather in the Mishnah, a Midrashic text of rabbinic commentary on the Bible and the characters in it.  Though it is non-biblical, it did find its way into the Koran, which is said to have been dictated in a cave to the Prophet Muhammed PBUH by the Angel Gabriel.  Why would the Angel Gabriel take a story from the Mishnah rather than the Bible and turn it into Islamic scripture?  Something to think about…]

Our forebears in the Radical Reformation left the pomp and circumstance of the Roman church because they decried the magic they saw in the rituals (what you might call the smells and bells).  Nor could they stomach worshipping the Church rather than what the Church ought to be pointing them toward.

Our Puritans relatives n this continent removed all ornamentation from their places of worship.  Nothing visual should keep a person from focusing on the worship of God.  Our sanctuary looks like it does because of that sensitivity:  nothing here should be idolized or taken as anything more than a pointer to that which is un-nameable and beyond us all.

At the same time I’m defending our choices of sparse ornamentation, I want to be careful not to knock our more orthodox friends.  I know that some of those Catholics and Protestants who use statuary in their worship use those images not as idols but as pointers, even as some of the faithful come awfully close to idol worship, venerating the saints rather than connecting to that which is larger than themselves, thinking that that statue right there is going to save them from whatever is going wrong at the moment.

Our Greek Orthodox friends never put 3-dimensional statues in their worship spaces, but instead fill them with two-dimensional paintings and other art.  They are careful not to worship these renderings; they tell their adherents to look through them to see God, not to look at them as God.  I believe this should be true for all religious symbols, including our own - they should point at God rather than being mistaken for God.  Otherwise, idolatry raises its ugly head.

 

My concerns about idolatry come up for me quite often, actually:  not just when we talk about American Idol or read the Golden Calf story from Exodus.  I worry when we have pledge drives that we focus overmuch on what it takes to keep this place running and not enough on what we ought to be pointing to.  I worry when we celebrate Heritage Day that we edge toward worshipping our past history or some of the individuals in our membership books or this community.  Nothing short of the ineffable should ever be the object of worship.  So I worry that we stumble when we raise the church or the people in it or even ourselves to a level worthy of honors better reserved for larger forces. 

And yet, I am also keenly aware that we do not stand in this flow of history on our own.  We are not self-made.  We could never have made it to this point in our personal or our communal existences purely through the power of our own will.  We best remember that it has taken the work of all those who have gone before us to build this place in which we gather.  And it is right that we honor the past.  It is right that we honor those who worked so hard that we might reap the benefits of their labors.  It is right that we continue to tell the stories and to fill in the gaps in our understandings about what’s happened here before we got here.  And it is not only the successes that are important:  if we tell only the positive, uplifting, saintly tales, we risk making mythic figures of what were real flesh-and-blood human beings.  We shouldn’t aspire to being mythic ourselves;  we should, however, dearly strive to be real.

I look around here and know that I do not have the same depth of historical memory that some of you do.  At the same time, I have more memories of this place than others.  I want to impress upon all of you that this is not a perfect place and we are not perfect people, regardless of what our stories say.  I’ve been in this place long enough to have seen some of these walls ruined by leaky roofs.  I’ve seen the doors blown open by a gust of wind on a Sunday morning that lifted the ceiling and brought down a fine mist of black dust onto everything and everybody here.  I didn’t see it but I’ve heard the stories of the workman who slipped on a ladder and put his foot through that stained glass window.  Some of the history of this church you will experience for yourself, some of its history you will hear stories about, some of the history of this church you can only read about, you will never know first-hand.

But all of this congregation’s history (the good, the bad, and the ugly) combined with each of our personal histories (the good, the bad, and the ugly) has brought us to this bright sanctuary on this glorious morning.  What a miracle.  What a blessing.  What a reason for thanksgiving.  Take a breath.  Feel the connectedness and the peace of this stop on your journey.

After all that sinks in, then come back and consider for a moment the amount of work that was done in the past to allow us to be here today.  Consider the commitment that those who came before us to this place must have had.  And consider the implicit request that those who came before made of us: can you keep this place going?  Do we agree that keeping a beacon of liberal religion lit is a worthwhile endeavor?  What can you do to give back some of what you’ve received here?

Our forebears worked hard, not just to build a nice building but to build a community, not one that just looked out over a river but one that looked out over the generations, a community that would be here over time, that would comfort people who were hurting, that would feed people who were hungry, that would educate and nurture children, that would support families of all different shapes and sizes and varieties, a community of comfort and challenge, a community that would shine a light of hope and justice and religious freedom.  Not a perfect community of perfect people where nothing ever went wrong, but an intentional community of people who were aware of their brokenness but didn’t let it hold them back from giving life their all, especially when things went wrong, especially when things were at their bleakest, especially when it seemed as if all the people could do was sit together and cry.

We celebrate this community often, not to worship those who came before but to answer the challenge they put before us:  yes, as we remember their efforts, we do pledge ourselves to a continual renewal of this beloved community.

But the danger of idolatry persists.  Our tendency is to make Golden Calves of whatever we have at hand - our historical predecessors, our building, our social justice outreach, our goodness, our intellect, our science, our philosophy, our religion, our money.  We must be careful to not allow those things to become ends in themselves, but to point us toward that which is larger than ourselves, toward that which can never be adequately named.  As the I Ching says, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”

We must be careful not to idolize this beloved community just as we are careful not to idolize each other or ourselves, just as we are careful not to place in our sanctuary those items that may become objects of worship, just as we are careful not to make idols of those young people who make it to the finals of American Idol.

If those young people are willing to risk shame and disappointment as the price of their fifteen minutes of fame, how much more should we be willing to risk in our quest for what is far beyond ourselves, for what is eternal?

In this Pledge Drive season, let us not mistake the lifting up of this community or the celebration of its work or its people or all the talk about money as ends in themselves.  Let us continually be pointed higher, beyond the idols to the Source of All Being, the eternal Tao that cannot be named.

So may it be.