Chasing Spiritual Mirages

Then God spoke all these words:

² I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; ³ you shall have no other gods before me.

⁴ You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  ⁵ You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,  ⁶ but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

⁷ You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

⁸ Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.  ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work.  ¹⁰ But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work– you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.  ¹¹ For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

¹² Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

¹³ You shall not murder.

¹⁴ You shall not commit adultery.

¹⁵ You shall not steal.

¹⁶ You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

¹⁷ You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. – Exodus 20:1-17  

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The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.  ² Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.  ³ There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;  ⁴ yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun,  ⁵ which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, and like a strong man runs its course with joy.  ⁶ Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them; and nothing is hid from its heat.

⁷ The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple;  ⁸ the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes;  ⁹ the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.  ¹⁰ More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.  ¹¹ Moreover by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.  ¹² But who can detect their errors? Clear me from hidden faults.  ¹³ Keep back your servant also from the insolent; do not let them have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression.  ¹⁴ Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer. – Psalm 19:1-14

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The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  ¹⁴ In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.  ¹⁵ Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  ¹⁶ He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”  ¹⁷ His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”  ¹⁸ The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”  ¹⁹ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  ²⁰ The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?”  ²¹ But he was speaking of the temple of his body.  ²² After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. – John 2:13-22

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On this our third week of Lent, the theme for today is “Chasing Mirages”.

A mirage, as many of you know, is something found in a desert that looks like a pool of water but isn’t; and for this reason mirages have often caused the death of travelers. A person might think they see water, but when they keep traveling and find no water, it becomes too late: and they may have (in the journey) passed up real water without seeing it.

In a similar way, spiritual mirages can be spiritually deadly. The problem, as always, is recognizing what we’re looking at. In the desert, a mirage can be identified in a number of ways: real water usually has trees around it, or things that are growing, or tracks from people or animals. A mirage, on the other hand, has no signs of life – and as the traveler moves towards it, it never gets any closer; the mirage remains the same distance away no matter how far you travel.

The key to avoiding spiritual mirages is knowing what we’re looking for as we journey through life. Our three scripture readings for today give us some good ideas of what to look for.

In our reading from Exodus, God gives the Ten Commandments: laws organized and put down by God that will help us thrive. The law is not meant to be a killjoy – it was meant to help us live well! It’s like how we, as parents, teach our kids what foods are good for us; or what not to do, like “don’t go running out in the street”.  God’s law is good for us.

In the Psalm, David leads us in a song of praise to God for the goodness of creation, and for the goodness of God. Again, we’re looking at a relationship here. It’s like when we fall in love: we love what the other person does, but we love who they are even more. In the same way we love what God does, but we love God even more.

Then in our reading from John, we see Jesus getting angry. It can be scary when God gets angry! But what is Jesus getting angry at? He’s angry because injustice is happening and we are being excluded.  The events of this day take place in the Court of the Gentiles. Back then, only Jewish people were allowed in the Temple; Gentiles had to worship outside. And we here today are Gentiles. The Jewish buyers and sellers had set up their tables and their moneychangers in the place where we Gentiles were supposed to worship.

Jesus wasn’t having it. He was angry that anyone would try to keep people away from God who love God and want to know God.

All three of these scriptures lead us to love God even more, and to love Jesus for who He is. If nothing else I say this morning makes any sense, take this with you: Jesus stood up for you and for me. We are here today because we love Jesus for what he does and for who he is.

Having said all that, we turn to the concept of spiritual mirages. What is a spiritual mirage? How might we spot them? How might we deal with them?

Again, all three scriptures for today give us possibilities and pointers. For the sake of organization I’ve identified seven kinds of spiritual mirages that are indicated in our scripture readings today:

• The mirage of idolatry

• The mirage of “being good enough”

• The mirage of location

• The mirage of ‘outsiders getting in’ being a problem

• The mirage of corrupt leadership

• The mirage of having to be worthy

• The mirage of ‘salvation by law’, that is, by keeping the rules

I’ll spend a couple of minutes with each.

The Mirage of Idolatry

Back in Old Testament times God was always complaining about the Israelites worshipping idols instead of God. In fact God used to poke fun at those idols, saying things like: “hey look at that! You carved an idol, and covered it with gold and gemstones. Then you nailed it to the table so it doesn’t fall over. What kind of god is that? Is your idol so weak it can’t even stand on its own feet?”

These days we don’t – well most of us don’t – worship things that are made with human hands. But today – and in fact back then too – the real definition of idolatry is making the real God anything less than #1 in our lives. Anything or anyone that is more important to us than God is an idol.

The God of the Bible is a God of relationship. In fact the Holy Trinity has relationship built in: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three-in-one and one-in-three – a relationship that has often been described as a dance; and we are invited to join in that dance. But we can’t dance if we are chained to an idol.

This is why God says in Commandment #1 “You shall have no other gods before me” (or in some translations ‘you shall have no other gods but me’ – which I think is more accurate). God is not trying to ruin our fun! God is saying “this is the only road to life and health and joy and peace” and all those good things we want for ourselves and our families.

This law is the foundation for all the other nine Commandments. Without this one the other nine are irrelevant. In fact the other laws actually help us to identify our idols: things like power, anger, violence, sex, deception, control, and so on.

Personally I believe idolatry is the greatest and most pressing sin of our time. Our culture will value and follow anything but God: sports idols, rock idols, TikTok influencers, talking heads on TV, you name it. Anything that takes up the bulk of our time or the bulk of our attention might be an idol.

God wants to be #1 on all of our lists, because God loves us and knows what we need. One theologian puts it this way: “every time we open our eyes, ears, or nose, every time we taste or touch we can know that… God’s handiwork declares His glory.”[1]  Or as my old pastor used to say: “A Christian is someone who is into Jesus the way a football player is into football.”

So Mirage #1 is the mirage of idolatry.

Mirage #2 is the mirage of “trying to be good enough”. Back when the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt, they didn’t have much time or opportunity to know God. They had heard stories about God, about Noah and Abraham, but they didn’t have Bibles or worship services or priests. They had never been taught how to relate to God.

That didn’t matter to God. God brought Israel into the wilderness – as he told Moses – so that the people could know God and worship God. It would be a first for them. God gave the law to people who had no idea who God was or what God wanted. The Israelites did nothing to earn salvation; they barely knew about God; but God adopted them, and taught them, and cared for them.

The Law of Moses – the Ten Commandments – was not about setting up rules so much as it was building a framework for a relationship.  The Ten Commandments were not something that, if you broke a commandment, you’d end up in jail. They were a learning process. The laws were loving guidelines for human flourishing. And while God does say to ‘obey’ the Commandments; the word ‘obey’ in Hebrew is deeply related to the word ‘listen’. So ‘doing what is right’ is the same thing as ‘listening to God and saying yes’.

If and when we feel like we’re not good enough for God, remember that God called Israel – and God called us – before we knew God. None of us were ever ‘good enough’. In fact, trying to be ‘good enough’ often sets us up to be taken advantage of by religious hucksters who prey on our feelings of uncertainty. Remember the words of scripture: “while we were yet sinners Jesus died for us”.

I like the old Jewish saying:

“you are closer to God when you are asking questions than when you think you have the answers.”[2]

Mirage #3 is the necessity of location – that is, feeling like we have to be in a holy place in order to worship God. Jesus brings this out in our reading from Luke, when he says “destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.” Jesus is saying he IS the temple – Jesus IS where we worship. Not in buildings. We meet in buildings, out of necessity. But real worship is done in Jesus.

In our reading from Luke, Jesus is introducing the concept that people no longer need animal sacrifices; and that any barrier that comes between people and God (like these money-changers) makes Jesus and God very angry. In fact one of the things that made Jesus so angry was that these hucksters and money-changers were set up for business in “the Court of the Gentiles”.  Anyone who wasn’t Jewish, could only worship God in the Court of the Gentiles. And foreigners who came seeking God found the place full of hucksters! No wonder Jesus was ticked off.

Bottom line, Jesus is doing away with the old system of worship. From now on people who worship God will worship in Spirit and in truth. So there is no longer a need for a Holy Location.

Which leads us to Mirage #4: The Mirage of ‘Outsiders Getting In’ Being a Problem. In Jesus’ day outsiders were kept out. Gentiles and foreigners had to stay outside the Temple. But this was never God’s plan. In fact, Gentiles have been included among God’s faithful from the very beginning. The nation of Israel was established by God’s covenant with Abraham, but God had faithful people like Noah long before Abraham. There were Gentiles present at Mt Sinai when the Ten Commandments were given. There were Gentiles who sought out Jesus – and Gentiles who Jesus sought out!

God chose Israel to be God’s chosen people, through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. But God never intended Israel to be ‘exclusive’. A large part of Jesus’ anger that day at the temple was the ostracism of foreigners who had come seeking help or seeking wisdom or seeking God.

So foreigners coming in, is never a problem with God – in fact, just the opposite.

Mirage #5 – The Mirage Created By Corrupt Leadership

In Jesus’ day much of the leadership of Israel was corrupt in some way. Politically, there was King Herod – a puppet king installed by and controlled by Rome. Before him, starting a couple hundred years before, there had been what’s known as the ‘Hasmonean revolution’. This was a time when Israel, after hundreds of years, finally gained back self-rule, and rebuilt the Temple. This was the period of time during which Hanukkah came into being. But as Israel regained rule, they did not set up the kingdom the way God originally ordered it. When it came to choosing a king, they ignored the descendants of David; and when it came to appointing priests they ignored the descendants of Aaron.  As a result both political and religious leaders of the time were poorly educated, poorly prepared, and didn’t really know how to lead well. It wasn’t long before Israel fell again, this time to the Romans.

This was the time when the worship of God became tangled up with money-changers; and the High Priesthood was either bought or exchanged instead of inherited as God originally commanded. The result was the people were badly taught if they were taught at all – and this infuriated Jesus, because it kept people away from God!

Sadly in our own day, faith leaders can be equally sketchy sometimes.  I’m reading a book right now written by a writer for Atlantic Monthly. The book is called The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory. The author, Tim Alberta, is the son of a preacher, a man of faith, who has been wondering what has happened to the churches in America in the past few decades? And why all the scandals – from Catholic priests to disgraced evangelists to Christian Nationalists?

Just to pull one of many examples from the book, he talks about a group of ordained ministers who have been going across the country doing voter registrations in churches – but they’re being very selective about which churches they visit, and they include a healthy dose of campaigning while they do it. It’s part of something called The American Restoration Tour. These pastors see nothing wrong with selling books and flags and other political items in the lobbies of churches. It’s not all that different from what Jesus turned over in the temple that day 2000 years ago.

The author believes most of the problems in the churches today can be boiled down to one of two things: (1) corrupt leadership; or (2) idolatry of some kind. Often both. The leaders of groups like this are are far more interested in earthly power than in God’s word and God’s will.  God gets really angry when God’s people are misled this way.

That’s just one tip of one iceberg in the Mirage Created By Corrupt Leadership who lead people anywhere but to God.

Mirage #6 – The Mirage of Having To Be Worthy

When the Israelites were in Egypt, they knew very little about God and how to live God’s way – God loved them and saved them anyway.  And God gave them Ten Commandments, which “describes what a graceful, dignified human life looks like.” The Commandments are to us, in the words of the prophet Micah, a way to “do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.”

God is in every way perfect. This can make us imperfect human beings uncomfortable sometimes. But we cannot ‘domesticate’ God. You all know that one of my specialties is domesticating feral cats. But God cannot be domesticated! If anything, God is the one making us worthy of being lived with.

King David says in our Psalm today: “who can detect their errors?” but then he prays to God: “Cleanse me from hidden faults.”  This is our prayer too. Which leads us to the final mirage…

Mirage #7 – The Mirage of Salvation by the Law  (or by keeping rules)

As we’ve already seen this morning, Israel was saved by God before the Law was given. It was not the Torah that liberated Israel from Egypt – it was God who led them out.

In our reading from John today, the Passover – which is what Jesus was celebrating in the Temple – was the celebration of the liberation of Israel from Egypt. It was, for them, what Juneteenth is for our Black brothers and sisters. And because of this it was meant to be celebrated by everyone, not commercialized by sellers in the courtyard.

It was not the giving of the Law, but the beginning of the relationship with God, that was being celebrated. And to this day it is still the relationship with God that counts. We are saved by grace through faith by Jesus who died for us on the Cross – and his death on the Cross is a parallel to the Exodus. By the Cross, Jesus leads us out of captivity and into relationship with God, which will last forever.

By comparison, the Ten Commandments are a kind of an introduction. It’s God’s way of saying “here’s how we do things in My Kingdom. This is how we live.”  We are saved first, and then we learn how to live. David says in his psalm that the Law “revives the soul” – it gives hope, it gives wisdom to those who need it, it gives light to the eyes, it gives us truth. But our salvation is not by law, it’s by a relationship with God.

So to sum it up, these are the mirages to be on the lookout for:

• The mirage of idolatry

• The mirage of “being good enough”

• The mirage of the necessity of location

• The mirage of ‘outsiders getting in’ being a problem

• The mirage of corrupt leadership

• The mirage of having to be worthy

• The mirage of ‘salvation by law’, that is, by keeping the rules

May we always keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. And as we grow in our relationship with God, and may God keep God’s word close to our hearts. AMEN.

[1] CMJ

[2] CMJ

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