Signs and Idols

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Of ourselves we have no strength.” We make this confession in the appointed Collect for today. And indeed, we have no strength. Neither you nor I have any strength in us to do anything useful. Our wills are corrupted and our bodies are weak and feeble. We live in a dying world, among the walking dead. Of ourselves we have no strength, because of ourselves we are dead.

One of the things for which you have no strength is resisting temptation. Even the regenerate man, the person baptized into Christ and marked with the Name of the Lord, still faces temptation, and more often than not gives in to it. Today's Gospel lesson alludes to a great temptation – the temptation of images and signs.

On one hand, there is the temptation toward idolatry. Depicting God in any form, even the face of Jesus Christ, runs the risk of creating an idol, an object of worship, or at least dependence. This is why the Reformed traditions reject all forms of church art or visual depictions of God. They assert that to depict God in any way, shape, or form is to diminish His glory, because the glory of God is beyond the capacity for human beings to represent. Furthermore, they assert that to depict Jesus in visual form is to rob Him of His divinity, because the divine cannot be expressed in visual terms. Finally, the Reformed claim that God commands His people to worship Him and to deal with Him only in Word and Spirit, and that to depict Him visually is a direct disobeying of this edict.

Follow the Sign

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The world is full of signs, some more helpful than others. I once saw a sign on a fence that said “No Smoking Propane”. Or there is the sign I saw in a book that read “To Go Left Make 3 Right Turns”. I'm sure you have seen signs in various places that caused you to laugh, scratch your head, or just plain wonder what the signmaker was thinking.

In general, most of the signs we see regularly are good. Signs give useful information. Street signs tell us where we are, and help us find where we want to be. In every land, in every language, the first thing a foreigner learns to recognize is the restroom sign. Then, once you can find the restroom wherever you are, you learn to recognize food signs. We need an abundance of signs to help us answer those three basic questions: where am I, where is the restroom, and where is the food?