Sermon 76 - (Men's) Retreat to Efficiency
Leviticus 19:4
Do not turn to idols or make metal gods for yourselves. I am the Lord your God.
Leviticus 26:1
Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the Lord your God.
Deuteronomy 4:25-26
After you have had children and grandchildren and have lived in the land a long time—if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord your God and arousing his anger, I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess. You will not live there long but will certainly be destroyed.
Isaiah 44:14-17
He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. It is used as fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.” From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, “Save me! You are my god!”
1 John 2:15
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.
Long, long ago, in the dim and distant past, studying through the Bible (actually, originally looking for information about what the Bible had to say about the "land ethic"), I began to have a sneaking suspicion that God did not care much about efficiency. There was that whole thing about not gleaning to the edges of the field, and not going back over a field once you had gleaned it once. Okay, yes, there was the fact that you were supposed to leave it for the widows and orphans in the foreigners, but that really didn't cover everything that appeared in other places.
There was the whole sabbatical year thing, when you were supposed to cancel certain debts. And then there was the Year of Jubilee, when you were supposed to cancel *all* debts. And, in fact, you are not only supposed to cancel all debts, but return any land to its original owners. I mean, how is anybody supposed to run any kind of economic system with weird rules like that?
(Eventually I did come up with a reason why God might really have a reason to not like efficiency, but that came well after the events that I'm going to relate here.)
Anyway, in the fullness of time, I got to run the denomination's provincial men's retreat. Since we are dealing with a men's retreat, we figured, what are men most interested in and concerned about, and we decided that that was: work. What did God have to say about work? What did God have to say about business? We got a guy who had been with Regent College, and was currently at Trinity Western University, and asked if he was interested in pursuing such an idea. He was. And we got a bunch of different guys from different businesses, and got them to speak on their perspective on what a Christian attitude was to their particular business or industry. As it happened one of them was a friend of mine, and I found out after the fact that he had given an absolutely outstanding presentation on the film-making industry, and had done it completely extemporaneously because the video he had brought along to illustrate his original presentation didn't work.
The professor from Trinity Western did an absolutely fantastic job. It was a solid Biblical perspective on work, employment, and a theological and Christian attitude towards the business world in general, addressing particular types of business: just all kinds of things to do with your work life. It was an absolute delight to listen to. It was insightful, it was Christian, it was Biblically based, and it was just amazing all around.
The men attending the retreat absolutely hated every minute of it.
The thing was, he, and the Biblical material itself, was very clear. You could either serve God, or you could serve mammon. You either worshiped God, or you worshiped at the altar of capitalism. You couldn't have it both ways. There was no exception for capitalism in terms of what God required of you.
Really the reason for the reaction against the material that was presented at the men's retreat was that we don't think there is anything wrong with money, or efficiency, or capitalism. I mean come on, admit it. You don't think there's anything wrong with those things. Yes, they can take over our lives, you'll agree. Yes, they can become a detriment to us. They can be used for evil. But by and large, by themselves you probably just think that they are neutral at the very least. They are not bad. They are not exactly false idols.
Well, it's not just the business about gleaning to the edges of the field that is why I started to think that God didn't care for efficiency. After all every time I talk about that somebody brings up the widows and orphans and yes I agree the widows and orphans and the foreigners are things that we should consider. You can say that not gleaning to the edge of the field just has to do with an early version of a social support network for the poor and disadvantaged population.
But then there's the guy who wanted to tear down his barns and build larger ones. Actually that's a great example of efficiency. You are using more bricks if you build multiple barns. If you take the same number of bricks and instead of building four barns you just build one, that one barn is going to have more capacity than the four barns you were going to build in the first place. That's efficient. That's efficiency.
And God, apparently, doesn't like it. The guy dies. Admittedly probably not just from building a bigger barn, but it's got to make you think!
How about the Cleansing of the Temple?
Well, I mean, it wasn't a cleansing, it was a criminal act, wasn't it? The temple was private property, and, while he was had a right to be there, he was trespassing if he was going to cause trouble.
Okay, yes, that business about the temple should be a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves is a direct quote from the prophets in the Old Testament. And Nehemiah and Ezra specifically refer to people who are misusing the temple premises for their own purposes (and possibly business), instead of the proper worship functions.
But that must have seemed very, very close to blasphemy. Although, of course, he wasn't actually impeding worship, was he? Well, yes, I guess he was. After all, the stuff was to be conducted in a certain way and the business depended on the worship--but the worship also depended upon the business. After all, you were supposed to have the right pigeon, or the right dove, or the right lambs. And, well, I mean if they were a bit more expensive, I mean they were here, and your lambs or pigeons or doves were in Tyre or Damascus or Galilee or someplace that wasn't the temple.
Well if that isn't enough then go to the prophets. God is always telling the prophets, "Look you don't need to glean to the edge of the field. You don't need to pick up extra stuff. You don't need all these extra efficiencies. I will bless you! I will pour down so much fruit and wheat and wine that you won't know what to do with it!" And of course that is really what God intends for us to do. Not to be more efficient, not to pursue efficiency as an end in itself, but to turn to him when we need something or even just want something! We are to turn to God. Not to efficiency.
Because efficiency *is* an idol. If we turn to efficiency; if we say that we need to be efficient, that we need to do things better and more efficiently; rather than turning to God and asking, then we are doing the wrong thing. We are relying on efficiency. We are asking efficiency to save us. We are asking efficiency to bless us and provide for us. We are calling upon efficiency. We are not calling upon God.
Anytime we call upon something other than God, something *instead* of God, that something is an idol.
So maybe efficiency is our idol. But maybe money is our idol if we look to money to save us, to protect us from troubles. Do we look to a savings account to be our buffer against any kind of trouble? Do we look to our tax-free savings account to tide us over if we happen to lose our job? In particular, are we intending to do everything that we can to grab all the money, all the cash, all the wealth just for ourselves? Generally speaking to protect ourselves from a whole bunch of other people who are trying to do the same thing, only grabbing the cash for themselves?
Or maybe capitalism is our idol. Capitalism is, after all, much larger and more powerful. That pretty much absolves us from all responsibility since we can't be held responsible for capitalism as a whole, can we? Are we looking to capitalism to improve our society, to deal with the problem of homelessness, to eliminate the problems that we see around us? Shall we jump on the artificial intelligence investment bandwagon? After all that investment has two possibilities: either we are investing in a bubble and then all of us lose our shirts, or we *aren't* investing in a bubble and we make tons and tons and tons of money and then we concentrate wealth to the extent that we render everyone else poor! If we only pursue capitalism in a purer way then all of these problems will magically disappear, swept away by the invisible hand of Adam Smith! Praise be! Praise capitalism! Can I get a "Cash Back"! Supply/Demand!
We will all now turn in our hymn books to the works of Ayn Rand and sing of the virtue of selfishness!
(If you haven't actually read the works of Ayn Rand and don't get that joke, I forgive you. She does tend to go on. And on. And on. And on. And on.)
Anything that gets between us and God, anything that pretends to supply our requests better than God, is an idol.
And every idol is a false idol.
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