LUTHER SEMINARY CHAPEL, SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA

APRIL 19, 2005

TEXT: ISAIAH 46:1-4

PREACHER: FREDERICK J. GAISER

Isaiah 46:1-4  Bel bows down, Nebo stoops, their idols are on beasts and cattle; these things you carry are loaded as burdens on weary animals.  ² They stoop, they bow down together; they cannot save the burden, but themselves go into captivity.  ³ Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb;  ⁴ even to your old age I am he, even when you turn gray I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.

I WILL CARRY AND I WILL SAVE

Our text is part of the Lord’s daring strategy in the second part of the book of Isaiah, confronting the idols in a face-to-face encounter to determine who is truly God.  To continue that encounter, we again invite the gods to make their case:

So, come, Marduk; come, Baal: Tell us what is to come, that we may know that you are gods.

Baal and Marduk are no more. But gods remain. We remain. We are war, we are money, we are sex, we are sports, we are celebrity, we are earth, we are religion. We are now your gods.

            Do good, then, O gods, or do harm, that we may be afraid and terrified.

I am Earth, I am Gaia, I am Earth Mother, I am Nature; we are wood nymphs and water spirits, we are order, we are fury, we are beauty, we are life; we are gods. We offer apples and hemlock, we offer sunset and tornadoes, we offer a place to stand and an earth that quakes, we offer kittens that purr and lions that roar. You pass through; we abide. Love us and fear us, for we are good and we are terrible. Serve us and live. Abuse us at your peril. We are gods.

You speak well, O earth, and you speak truly—almost. You are beautiful, for I made it so. You are ordered, for I determined it. You are abused, and I weep. But you have forgotten that it is I who “weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance.” It is I who call you by name. You carry my creatures on your back, and I thank you; but I carry both them and you to a new place, where all your decay is no more. Only I can take you there. You revel equally in death and in life; I revel in life alone. You break loose, but I sweep up. I am God.

I am Money. You know well that I am your god, O America, for you have made me so. I am mammon, I am lucre, I am market, I am consumerism, I am capital, I am stuff. In me you trust. I offer power and security; I offer freedom and independence; I offer self-indulgence, and I enable philanthropy. I am the means to everything. I am the bottom line. I am the prince of this world. Serve me and prosper.

But how is it that you speak, O money? For you are a thing, a tool. You have no mouth. When you fall, you clink, but there is no symphony in you, for you have no spirit, you have no life. You speak only through those seduced by your empty promises. You are meant to be used, but instead you use. You offer freedom, but you enslave. You are for the child’s bread, but you sell yourself for the tyrant’s castle. Finally, in my kingdom, where all is given and all is gift, you have no place. You would not be happy there, and those whom you have provided with camels cannot fit through the gate. You are a tool. Quit pretending. Consider the lilies!

I am Celebrity. I am glitter and glitz. I am neon and now. I offer popularity and pleasure; I offer distraction and display; I offer voyeurism and vanity; I offer excitement and escape. I am the god you want and the god you deserve. Serve me; I offer fame.

Fifteen minutes of someone else’s fame? Get a life. Next.

I am Sex—a god worthy of the name. I am Eros, I am Cupid, I am Amor, I am Aphrodite. I am love and I am life. I offer touch and ecstasy. I offer vitality and vibrancy. I am the song on your lips when you meet, at last, the flesh of your flesh and the bone of your bones, the one with whom you intertwine and intercourse. I am the joy of today and the road to tomorrow. You did not make me; I made you, bringing you into being through my own creative power. I am the force that is with you. Serve me and enjoy.

How I love you, dear Eros. How I love your exuberance and your ecstasy. How I delight in your playfulness and your persistence. How I embrace your passion with its hint of my own and that of my Son. And you are indeed a worthy pretender: What else, next to me, is so powerful as the principle of life itself? My gift of life itself! But, oh, dear Eros, how have the mighty fallen. You have wallowed in the sleaze of pornography and promiscuity. You have mistaken plumbing for partnership. You have become a hustler of Buicks and beer, of diet pills and deodorants. Oh, Eros, why have you sold yourself so cheaply? And, worse news, Eros, though your are strong, you are not immortal. Meet Viagra, the little blue sign of your inevitable decline. Death takes you, too.  A god? You cannot bear the burden.

I am Sports. I offer spectacle and spirit, competition and solidarity, teamwork and individual excellence, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. But not a god, you say? Ask yourself, who owns Sunday? Who gets your tithe? For whom will you sacrifice everything to build my cathedrals? Whose priests receive more pay? I am your god, America. Deal with it.

Oh, sports. How noble you once were and still can be. But now, how pretentious. How will you claim high purpose now that you have prostituted yourself to the lesser deities of celebrity and greed? All you can deliver now is money—and that upwards on the food chain. What a disappointment you are. You have become a parasite. You consume more than you produce. You seduce the young, creating stars only to exploit and discard them. I sentence you to the punishment you deserve: uncapitalize yourself.

I am Religion. I am all the gods. I am all the religions; I am the religion named for your Son. I am spirituality and community, I am wholeness and blessing, I am ritual and healing, I am dance and prayer, I am crystals and beads, I am tradition and culture, I am old and I am new, I am relative and I am absolute. I am the path to all the gods, Lord; I am the path to you. All travel with me toward their several ends. I am the way of transcendence. People, come to me, and I will give you meaning.

Religion, how good you are—and how dangerous! You are timeless; you are ubiquitous. You help people cope; you undermine materialism; you celebrate the spirit.  Not bad. Though, of course, my breath is the spirit you celebrate. Your quest is a restlessness for me. So, don’t overestimate yourself. You are not the way to me. I am the way to me. My Son is the way to me. I am who I am; I happen where I happen. And you overestimate your goodness. You promote death as well as you promote life; you promote the trivial and the foolish as well as you promote the rich and the profound. So know your place. Know your limits. When you suggest that you are the thing itself—when you pretend to deity—when you substitute meaning for truth, you become a stumbling block between me and my little ones. Be modest, religion, and confess you sins. Otherwise, I have a great millstone to adorn your neck.

Now that the others have had their puny say, hear me, the strongest by far. Celebrity? Sports? Sex? Hah! I am War. I am Ares; I am Mars. I am god. I alone am willing to ride the fourth horse alongside my partner Death. We alone will take you to glory. Who else will demand your firstborn without apology—and your second and your third? But who else will promise the kingdoms of this earth? Come now, all the way up. I will restore the pride that has so foolishly been named your fault. I will give you marching boots and medals, swelled chests and swagger. I give you satisfying certainty and delicious hatred. I give you a cause. I give you conquest. I give you the world. Come to me—in your hearts you know that you love me.

O voracious war. O power of darkness. I salute you for your candor. And I shudder at your power. But you’ve gone too far. Your value, if any, is to deliver the oppressed, but how quickly you become oppression. True, you provide moments of great courage and noble sacrifice, but how quickly you learn to take no prisoners. And, oh, how much you like your job. You feed on the nations’ rage; you protect the powerful and devour the innocent.  You carry none but yourself, killing combatants and non-combatants alike, invaders and invaded with equal opportunity. So it has always been with you, Mars, and so it remains. None are wise enough to use you sparingly, but you use them extravagantly. But you will not deceive forever. Having ridden with Death, you will be thrown with Death into the lake of fire; nations at last will beat their swords into plowshares, and they will learn war no more. The word of the Lord has spoken.

And you, Lord, what will you do that we may be afraid and terrified?

Do not be afraid, for I am with you; do not fear, for I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my own right hand. Fear not, for I have called you by name, you are mine. You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.

            You must carry the gods, but I carry you. I am the shepherd who carries you in his arm. I am the mother who carries you at her breast. I am the eagle who carries you on its wings. I am the nurse who carries you in your weakness. I am the ass who carries you along life’s way. I am the servant who carries your diseases. I am the Word who bears your flesh. I am the Savior who bears your sins. I am the Redeemer who carries you through death to eternal joy. I am the Lamb who bears the marks of the cross forever.

            Listen to me, O Jacob. Listen to me, my children. You have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, even when you turn gray I will carry you. I have made and I will bear; I will carry and I will save. Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. AMEN