The spiritual soup of the land simply continued after the Israelites
were taken away. The king resettled
other peoples in Samaria (the capital of Israel) and they began immediately
worshiping their gods but then lions devoured some of them so it was decided
that they needed to bring back one of the Israelite priests to instruct them in
the ways of the god of that area so that they would not too deeply offend
him. They gladly accepted the Lord into
the mix of all the other gods as the territorial god but nothing more, several
times we are told that they feared the Lord and also the other gods. Syncretism is the word for this practice of
taking a bit of this religion and a bit of that and making a do-it-yourself god
and religion. It is the primary religion
in America today, even in the church. We
may not call these other things gods but we worship them nonetheless. The prosperity Gospel is one manifestation of
this, what is being worshipped is prosperity and "God" is simply the
vehicle for realizing one's true hopes, materialism. Relevance is another God, reducing God to
man-sized to make Him palatable as a concept.
Fear of the Lord is necessary if we are going to have an accurate
understanding of God, the fear Peter expressed in yesterday's Gospel in begging
Jesus to go away from him, a sinful man.
Wisdom begins there.
Here in the Sermon on the Mount, right at the outset of His
ministry, Jesus speaks about the problem of materialism. He says that the Father knows our needs for
food and clothing and such things as that and we are not to spend our energy
and toil on these. How much time does
the world spend thinking about and working for material things and then they
become their gods. They are demanding
gods, keeping up with the Joneses requires a great deal of our lives and keeps
us always seeking more. Jesus says that
we are to simply trust Him to provide for us and concern ourselves with the
kingdom of God and righteousness. Do we
trust enough for that? GK Chesterton
said, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has
been found difficult and left untried."
Jesus challenges us here just as the prophet Malachi did when he said
for the Lord, "Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be
food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I
will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing
until there is no more need."
Paul gives a similar teaching and admonition to Jesus' in
our Gospel lesson. His basic point is to
not worry about externals and those things that are temporal. Be content where you are and how you are and spend
your time and energy on those things that are internal and eternal. He is making no rules regarding marriage for
the community, simply suggesting that time is short, and they would be far
better served seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness than things of
the world which, he reminds them, is passing away. Now that a couple thousand years have elapsed
since Paul wrote these words, do we sense the urgency and truth of his admonition? Have we lost that sense that time is short,
hell is hot and the stakes are high?
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