Rooted

The Old Testament reading at Evensong today was Jeremiah 10:1-16, a text that highlights the futility of idols. Here are some extracts:

‘For the customs of the people are false:
a tree from the forest is cut down,
and worked with an axe by the hands of an artisan;
people deck it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
do that it cannot move.’ (Jer. 10:3, 4)

and, later,

‘Everyone is stupid and without knowledge;
goldsmiths are all put to shame by their idols;
for their images are false,
and there is no breath in them.’ (Jer. 10: 14)

I am about half-way through reading A Burning In My Bones, Winn Collier’s authorised biography of Eugene H. Peterson. Peterson was an American pastor, who loved the language of the Bible—the Hebrew and Greek—and the ordinary people in his congregation; who loved connecting the words of God and the people of God; and whose broadest legacy was to write a transliteration of the Bible into the idioms of the American English spoken by his congregation, published, in stages over many years, as The Message version.

Though he was a Presbyterian pastor, Peterson was born into a Pentecostal family, in Montana. His father was a butcher; his mother, an itinerant preacher in the Assemblies of God. In an early chapter, Collier recounts a story from Peterson’s early years. Each year, at Christmas, his father would drive them into the forest, where they would choose a tree which his father would cut down with an axe, put on the truck, and drive home, where it would be decorated. One year, his mother announced that there would be no tree. She had read Jeremiah chapter 10, and decided that this custom was false in God’s eyes.

This did not go down well; and the following year, without any discussion, the tree was back.

This might sound funny, but in fact Peterson’s mother was quite correct in recognising that the customs of our culture (whether American, or British, or any culture) do not necessarily align with God’s values. Those who would live in faithfulness with God will need to weigh our own culture against the patterns we see in scripture, in the stories passed down to shape our communal lives. And we will want and need to do so humbly, open to saying, with Peterson’s mother, ‘We didn’t get that quite right’ at times.

When a tree is cut down, removed from the soil, from the blessings of the sun and the rain, and transported inside, it can point to something bigger than itself, but, eventually, it will die, its needles will drop to the floor. In the same way, if we cut ourselves off from the breath of God’s animating Spirit, we remain in the world as no more than idols. Indeed, this is how we view other people: perhaps, at this moment of Euro ’21, perhaps, footballers, worshipping them when they win, and toppling them when they fail to win.

But if we remain rooted in the love of God, in the wisdom, the grace, the mercy, the forgiveness of God, then we are not idols, but icons: windows onto the majesty of God's glory, pointing beyond ourselves to something far greater, wilder, life-giving.