American Idol

I had intended to write this week about the benefits of a midwinter retreat.

Instead, after the recent political events, my attention was drawn to the day’s Scripture reading from the first Letter of Saint John:

Beloved, we have this confidence in him that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in regard to whatever we ask, we know that what we have asked him for is ours.  If anyone sees his brother sinning, if the sin is not deadly, he should pray to God and he will give him life.  This is only for those whose sin is not deadly.  There is such a thing as deadly sin, about which I do not say that you should pray…We know that we belong to God, and the whole world is under the power of the Evil One. We also know that the Son of God has come and has given us discernment to know the one who is true…Children, be on your guard against idols.

Sometimes one needs to parse the ancient language to get to the kernel of what is being said.  One reads with a new eye and a new regard for certain emphasis.

Until now, this passage has sounded almost cloying to me:  Whatever you ask for in sincerity will be granted.

But this morning, in the wake of the domestic terrorist attacks in Washington, I read this very differently.  Discern, John is telling us.  Be on your guard against idols.

I think he is saying: falling prey to idols is deadly.  Doing so distorts our moral compass, and destroys our capacity to communicate with God/Higher Power/wisdom.

We have seen countless examples of elected officials whose integrity has been distorted by the idol of ambition, by turning a blind eye to indecent and unethical behavior, by temporizing when they should have refused to collude, by playing to the mob.  Step by step, the golden calf was erected in our midst.

Idols stir in us all sorts of emotions we don’t know we are capable of until we have come under their sway — narcissistic appetites, frenzied self-aggrandizement, personal inflation, and fury when our idols are threatened.  We become infatuated with them, and in the heavy transference of these transactional dynamics, we are capable of justifying almost any behavior as “spirit-led,” and “God-willed.”  Our public and personal lives are littered with the stuff of idolatry.

The story of the biblical Golden Calf comes to mind here.  Recall the general outlines:  the Israelites, impatient for a sign from God that they would secure the Promised Land, smelt a calf from gold they gathered among themselves as they grumbled about their lack of progress, and beat the drum with their litany of grievances against God.

Recall, too, that Moses destroyed the calf and routed the perpetrators of this blasphemy.

But it might be useful to look a little more closely at what preceded this large-scale group brain freeze.  Moses, the undisputed moral leader, had left the people to their own devices “for 40 days and 40 nights.”  Who knows how long this absence actually was, but clearly it was long enough for the people to feel the keen absence of true leadership, and with it a growing desperation about their well-being.  What is the saying?  (Human) nature abhors a vacuum…?

I can’t help but wonder today what vacuum in leadership allowed the germination and hothouse explosion of what has been unleashed in the past weeks?  Where, the leadership that might have been able to address and resolve the anxieties and grievances expressed now in violence — or even to acknowledge them — such that our own Golden Calf might not have been erected, or at the very least, acquired such power?  What propaganda machinery in the shape of social media was itself pandered to for far too long, until its owners have been shamed into taking ethical action?

And now what?   The calf was destroyed when Moses descended from Sinai with the tablets on which the 10 Commandments had been etched.  He had experienced the presence of God, and believed that he conveyed in his person the ethical foundations for a just and caring society.

In his anger and disappointment at seeing the calf, he broke the tablets.  A reminder of how difficult it is to not react with our own gestures of violence.  But this did not shatter his enlightened consciousness, nor his will to leadership.

Like you, in the days following the attack on the Capitol, I’ve had many conversations about “what to do next.”  Calls for impeachment, invoking the 25^th Amendment, the removal from office of the key Senate collaborationists, criminal charges for the perpetrators, and renewed vigor from our law enforcement agencies in addressing the evil of domestic terror groups.

Something foundational in our confidence was fractured last Wednesday when the Capitol was breached.  But the most important thing that happened was that the Golden Calf was identified.

Toppling idols is always necessary.

But the next step is even more important, and this is the conversation we need to begin.  We need leaders whose moral compass aligns with a truly ethical society for all of us, and who have a vision of inclusivity that will help us to heal and to grow again.  We need to lean into our ethics with a clear-sightedness that recent times has seen grow too dim.  If there has been “sin” among good people, it has been the complacencies that have allowed (or enabled) this to happen — unequal opportunity and access, and temporizing, fueled by propaganda.

As we are able to step back from our immediate reactions to the events of last week — and our fears of what may be to come — we would be well to remember that behind Moses stood the wisdom of justice, truth-telling, and a vision of a society based in mutual respect, bounded appetites, and the rule of law.  This was a gift to the Israelites.  A similar gift was offered us and it is our call to redeem it for those who follow.  Let it be so again.