Worshipping Yourself or Someone Like You
To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?
An idol! A craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and casts for it silver chains.
He who is too impoverished for an offering chooses wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skillful craftsman to set up an idol that will not move. - Isaiah 40:18-20
There is a church in San Fransisco called Ebenezer Lutheran Church. They are now also calling themselves "Her Church." You can visit their website at herchurch.org, if you would like to learn more about them. Pastor Stacy and her congregation are:
a diverse community, standing firmly within the Christian tradition in order to re-image the divine by claiming her feminine persona in thealogy, liturgy, church structure, art, language, practices, leadership, and acts of justice. Challenging the church?s restricted language of the past, we pay special attention to images and metaphors that attempt to embrace divine fullness and that offer a witness of holy nurture and inclusive justice, both to the church and to the world.
This is what happens when man begins to instruct God. When we tell him how things are going to be, anything goes. When we tell him what church should be like, we are free to make it as absurd as we want, as Pastor Stacy proves for us.
Her Church had a "Retreat with She Who Is" where they got together to pray the "Goddess rosary" and build clay statues representing the femininity of the "god/dess." Jo Ann Heydron writes:
Pastor Stacy reminded us of some of the discounted feminine images of God in the Old Testament?probably none of which were the products of female imaginations?and invited us to form our own images in clay of Asherah, the mother goddess of the Canaanites familiar to early Jewish inhabitants of Canaan. I am no artist. Warming and working the clay with my hands, I wondered whether my goddess would look anything like the photograph of an Asherah figure Stacy provided as a possible starting point. Almost immediately I forget all about the picture. I began to form, as well as I could, my own breasts and hips, my own hair and face and arms and belly, my 52-year-old self, an Asherah with a sacred body just like mine. I can't tell you how healing that was.
In other words, these ladies were instructed to make idols that were in their own image. I'm no Old Testament scholar, but I seem to remember quite a few stories of God getting pretty angry with the Israelites for building Asherah idols (21 different stories, according to the ESV). In fact, if the Israelites were "familiar" with Asherah, it was because God dealt with them very severely when they worshipped the false god.
Like many (most?) churches in North America, these ladies need to open their Bibles and find out what God, the Father, has told us about himself, and about Jesus, his Son. God is real, and he has told us plenty about himself. When we worship a god who is how we think he/she/it should be, but not how he really is, we are guilty of idolatry even if we don't get out the modeling clay and form a statue.
God isn't just some little statue we can make with our own hands, but he gets pretty angry when we act like he is.
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