Sunday, February 1, 2015: Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Idolatry seems like such an easy thing to avoid.
In the unfolding drama that is God’s love for creation, I am repeatedly reminded of how distorted my sight is. Idolatry seems like such an easy thing to avoid. No wooden statues on the mantel, no lockets with Zeus pictured within.
But it’s never that easy, is it? Idolatry isn’t solely a matter of the artifacts that fill our lives. More often idolatries are the ways our lives coalesce, imperceptibly, around the “invisible unholy.” Idolatry’s normalcy becomes a comfort, and this comfort is taken for nature. After centuries of this—the deaths of dark bodies in the next town, the wailing of Afghani faces covered in the rubble and dust of a drone’s missile, the news of settlements built upon the crushed homes of dispossessed land—these realities seem not only inconsequential but almost necessary. We hurry to believe the justification of death before we even mourn the dead.
Prophets are inconvenient reminders of our everyday idolatries and how they have hardened to become structures of death. As the children of Israel enter a new land, they desire a prophet. What are they hoping for? Do they know what they are asking for?
