Banner Logo

Sermon

Sermon Graphic


Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
St. Stephen's Anglican Church
The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, August 25, 2013


Idols and the Narrow Door


Text: Luke 13:22-30

This morning as we meet up with Jesus on His way to Jerusalem, we find Him teaching in the towns and villages along the way. What we hear Him saying is a striking answer to a question out of the crowd: "Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?" (Luke 13:23). His answer is worth spending some time on. There are three things about His answer that grab our attention:

1. The door is narrow.

2. It's going to close, and then it will be too late.

3. People will be surprised that they are not included among the saved.

I'm going to talk about all these points today. But mostly what I have to say will be focused around idolatry. For in the end, idolatry is what makes that door narrow. Giving up our idols is something that has to happen for us to go through the door. And many will not understand why they aren't included, because they don't recognize that they are worshiping other things besides Jesus.

Jesus says the door is narrow. And then He says, "Many will try to enter and will not be able to." He is not saying that only some people will be able to achieve what will get them through the door. He is saying that, for those who wait until it is closed, it will be too late. But even with that, it is a narrow door. He is saying that the door is only one Savior wide. Jesus is the door. You may remember He called Himself that once, where He said, "I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved." (John 10:9)

When Jesus spoke about the narrow door, it was Himself of whom He was speaking. And He was very clear about the fact that there is no other door.

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. [John 14:6]

The door is narrow, because He is the way. He is the only way. This is not a new teaching. His Father said the same thing at Mt. Sinai when He gave the Ten Commandments to the Hebrew people. The very first commandment, and the one from which all others take their authority, is this:

I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD. YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GOD'S BEFORE ME. [Exodus 20:2-3]

As you have read in the Old Testament, this was the great failure of God's people. They lived in a world where every people group had their own gods. Everyone knew that the world did not simply spring into existence by accident. They knew there was a world beyond what they could see. And so they constructed systems and gods, whom they cajoled and bribed to protect them, to bring the rains in their seasons, and to give them good crops. The Canaanites had their Asherah and Baal. The Ammorites had Molech. The Philistines had Dagon. And the Moabites had Chemosh. There were little carved idols that people kept in their tents and worshipped. But God introduced Himself to Abraham and his descendants, and revealed that He is the only true God. Please note that God is not simply the regional god of Abraham. They didn't make Him up. He came to them, and He made Himself known to them, so that they and their descendants could tell all the world about the one true God.

And He told them they were not to worship the gods of any other nation. He warned them before they came into Canaan, the Promised Land, that they would be tempted to worship the gods of the Canaanites. He warned them not to do that, for things would not go well for them. (See Deuteronomy 30:15-20) Idolatry has always been what makes the door to salvation narrow.

What about today? There are still people all over the world who worship false gods, very much like those of the people in the Bible. There is a false god named Allah, who has claimed the loyalty and worship of over 1.5 billion people. There are wiccans, some of whom worship Satan as their god. There are druids, who worship nature. So, there is a wide array of idols to which people turn today in preference to the one true God. But the door remains narrow.

And then there are those who don't worship any god. They don't believe in a world beyond what they can see. And yet, they have their own idolatries, and they can't take their idols through that narrow door.

For the past two weeks, I have been touring in Russia. We visited Moscow, St. Petersburg, and five towns and villages along the waterways that connect those two great cities. It was a marvelous experience. I loved the Russian people. I admired their courage, their resilience and their hospitality. We got to spend one-on-one time with a number of Russian people and got a very good feel for how they live. Most of them were Orthodox Christians.

When you visit Russia with tour guides, there are two things you see a lot of: Orthodox churches and royal palaces. Both are beautiful and ornate. But they struck me quite differently. The Orthodox Churches were highly decorated inside and out. In the worship space, separating the nave from the sanctuary, stood the iconostasis, which was a five-tiered display of icons depicting God and the angels, and judgment, the life of Christ and the saints. The iconostasis represents the door between this world and the next. A tremendous amount of artistry and expense goes into the decoration of each church.. And, although they were more ornate than most churches in America, they drew me into worship and spoke to me about our glorious God.

The palaces were also ornate—ostentatiously so. They were built by the Tsars in the 18th and 19th Centuries. They were enormous. Every inch was decorated, including the inlaid wooden floors. In two places, we were required to wear protective covers over our shoes for the sake of the floors. A fortune in gold, woodwork, painting, crystal and gems went into the decoration of the palaces. Their purpose was largely ceremonial: they were a statement to the world of the excellence, power and wealth of the royal families, just as was the case elsewhere in Europe.

As I "oohed and ah-ed" through Katherine the Great's Summer Palace outside St. Petersburg, I began to be overcome by the idolatry of it all. I thought of the peasants whose sweat and tribute went into this statement of the greatness of mankind. I thought of these Christian princes and tsars who were boasting of their own glory in place of glorifying God. And it became even more apparent as I thought about the restoration of the palaces. Katharine's summer palace was bombed and left in ruins by the Nazis during World War II. But in the 1950's and -60's, during the Communist era, Billions of dollars were spent restoring the palace. Doesn't that seem amazing? Communism was supposed to be a system of economics and government that eliminated the aristocracy and gave ownership of everything to the people. And yet, the government made it a priority to restore these palaces in order to show the world the glory of man.

And that makes sense when you consider that Communism is officially an atheistic system. There is no room for worshiping God, for that undermines the ideology, which places all hope in the work of mankind. Idolatry is written all over this enterprise.

We, of course, are free from idolatry, right? Not by a long shot. Here in our democratic society, we have many idolatries.

As Jesus said, "You cannot serve two masters. You will either hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other." (Matthew 6:24) "You cannot serve both God and money," He said.

Money is one of our idols in this society. The Bible tells us that "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." (I Timothy 6:10) And haven't we seen that in our nation over these past few years? Money itself is not an evil thing. It is neither good nor bad. It is necessary to run the world. But the LOVE of money is a root of all evil. What happens when people love money so much that they throw it blindly into a rapidly expanding stock market? That is what has happened over and over in our economy, most famously in 2007-9. People heard that it didn't matter what you invested in, you could get quick rich. And so speculation began to drive the market. People stopped looking for solid value in investments, and just bet their money on prices going up. Similarly, prices in the housing market were going up rapidly, and banks were making it easy to buy houses at low rates with little money down. So people used to camp out at new housing developments to be there on opening day and snap up four or five properties. They expected to turn them around for a big profit in a short time.

What happened is that the bubbles burst. As God has told us repeatedly in His word, when we worship things other than Him, things will not go well for us. And things are not going well for us:

Well, that is not the cause of all our problems, is it? We have other idolatries that claim our love, dominate our thoughts and drive our decisions. Individual freedom and autonomy is one of our idols. This week, Army private Bradley Manning got sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking top secret documents that compromised national security. The day after he was sentenced, Manning announced that he wants to become a woman. He wants to begin hormone therapy and have surgery to make that happen, so he can become Chelsea Manning. His lawyer is arguing that the government should pay for that. The Army, who has locked him up for 35 years for espionage, has a constitutional obligation, he is arguing, to carry out Manning's dream. One of his supporters said it would be cruel and unusual punishment for Manning to be deprived of this as part of his incarceration.

We hear all kinds of bizarre arguments being made as to why individuals should be allowed to do virtually anything they want. And always there is a reference to some clause in the Constitution. And almost never is there a reference to the will of God. Never is there a reference to the commandments God has imposed on humanity for our own good.

This idol of personal freedom has become a scourge on the Christian Church in the West. Christians have become confused about what is right and what is wrong because they have elevated human freedom to the status of an idol. It has been said that,

Liberal Christianity is largely a human construct; it is what happens to a revealed religion after human beings finish redecorating it to modern tastes.
(Leon J. Podles, "The Comforting Doctrine of Hell," in Touchstone, A Journal of Mere Christianity, www.touchstonemag.com.)

Modern tastes include the right to kill your unborn child and call it a woman's health choice. Modern tastes include allowing men to marry men and women to marry women. And maybe it is a modern taste to be able to change your gender and have the taxpayers pay the bill. In many quarters, the Christian Church is standing by happily reconstructing the faith to account for modern tastes. Over fifty years ago, in a book called The Kingdom of God in America, H. Richard Niebuhr described Liberal Christianity this way:

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
(H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, p. 139 (Harper & Row, NY 1959)

Another one of our idols is our peace and quiet. That is why the church has gotten into this mess. People aren't willing to stand up and say something that is going to make others angry at them. They aren't willing to stand up and say a kingdom without judgment and a Christ without a cross is not the Christian faith. They would rather have their peace and quiet and hope the chaos in the Church will not make its way down their congregation.

If we want to stop the slide of our culture, we're going to have to stop the slide of the Christian Church into liberal Christianity. We have got to tell the world the truth about the Christian faith. Christianity is not a garden party for people who want what they want and know how to get it. The Christian faith is a living relationship with a Savior who said that the door is narrow. It is a door that is only one Savior wide. He is the door. He requires that we love Him with our whole heart and mind and soul and strength. And He says that to love Him is to do as He commands.(John 14:23)

And that is why Jesus describes how surprised many will be when the door is shut and they haven't made it in. C'mon, Jesus, you know who we are. We ate and drank with you, and you preached in our streets. You came to our garden party, remember? Yes, but just being there when Jesus spoke is not the same thing as going through that narrow door.

I'm not saying all this just to fuss about everyone out there. I'm talking about idolatry because it haunts every one of us. You may have good, solid, orthodox beliefs, but you still are at risk for idolatry. It stalks us and brings us all down from time to time.

For all of us, there are things we love more than we love God. That sounds awful to say, and most of us would be loath to admit that. But if you look objectively at our behavior, you will see it is true.

So as you pray this week, and as you spend time with Jesus, and as you ponder the word of God, ask yourself what your idols are. Be brutally honest with yourself.

Ask God to help you identify your idols. And ask Him to please, through the power of the Holy Spirit, give you the strength and the discipline to cast your idols aside, ...for they won't fit through the narrow door.

And give thanks and praise God that there is a door. We are not destined to spend eternity condemned for our sins. God has made a Way where there was no way. And what a way He is, Jesus, the narrow door:

© The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, 2013

Return to top

Sermon Archives