In the name of the Holy Trinity ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“You shall not make for yourselves any idol.” That is one of the 613 commandments in the Old Testament. Yes, I know that Jesus was once asked which commandment is the greatest – to which he responded with two: love God from Deuteronomy and love your neighbor from Leviticus. To be clear, I’m not disagreeing with Jesus. Those two together, indeed, are the greatest commandment. But the commandment about not having idols might be most urgent for us today.
Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity, a day that has been marked on the Church’s calendar for the past 1,000 years. We celebrate the majesty and mystery that God is both one and three; there is one God who is, at the same time, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How exactly this works is beyond us, and so the purpose of this day is not to explain but to worship.
And we might say that Trinity Sunday is an anti-idolatry feast because we are reminded that we do not worship some vague or generic deity of our own making; no, we worship the God who, as we heard in the first reading, created all things. We worship the God whose name is exalted in all the world, as we recited in Psalm 8. We worship the God who got very specific in the flesh of Jesus and to whom, as Matthew records, all authority has been given. We worship the God who is revealed to us, not one that we figured out on our own.
The specificity of the Trinity helps us to avoid idolatry in making God serve our purposes and agendas. The Trinity, in being both three and one, is inherently dynamic and mysterious. What we often try to do, which is a form of idolatry, is to make God static and understandable. We try to concretize God and say things like, “We know what God wants.” One Biblical scholar has noted that “the way to avoid idolatry is a multiplicity of images for God. The closer we get to a single image is a step towards thinking we’ve figured God out.” The Trinity resists fitting into any of our boxes.
So, though the word “god” is short and useful, it tempts us towards idols because we think, without actually thinking, that we know what God is. Think of how many atrocities have been committed in the name of “god,” how many ways in which “god” has been co-opted to become a cheerleader for our causes. But what if, instead of using the word “god” we used the name that is exalted in all the world: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? All of a sudden, things get a lot more specific.
There’s a fairly easy way to tell the difference between an idol and the Triune God – idols always take more than they give. Idols operate in the world of quid pro quo, this for that. If you offer this sacrifice, then you get that reward. If you say this prayer, then you get salvation. This is not how the Holy Trinity operates. Instead, when it comes to the Trinity it’s all Grace: we don’t have to earn or deserve our belovedness or belonging. The Trinity receives what we offer and returns it to us as a blessing, whereas idols demand, take, only give us enough to keep us dependent on them.
Just as the ancient world had many false gods and idols, we too have a lot of them: nostalgia for the “good old days,” money, growth, power, titles, awards, spirituality, winning, likes, shares, efficiency, certainty, politics, the self, our kids’ success, body image, security, AI and technology, nationalism, the stock market. The list could go on and on.
The way that any idols works is by evacuating the Trinity from the center, replacing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with a more malleable and less specific sort of “god” who does our bidding and validates our positions. One of the most dangerous and obvious places this is happening is in our common political life. This form of idolatry is often called “Christian nationalism” and in a recent column in the New York Times a columnist wrote that this form of idolatry, in particular, has a hollow core.
The columnist wrote, “there’s not much Christianity in Christian nationalism;” and what’s missing from that “hollow core” is what theologians call the aseity of God. Aseity is a way of saying that God is independent, self-sufficient, limitless, and sovereign over all. You’ll easily notice that those words are often applied to both the nation and the self. In other words, because we look to the state and the self for the source of our purpose, identity, and morality, we no longer need a deity to do those things, but we can always use a deity to justify our positions.
By having a generic god instead of the Holy Trinity at the center of our faith, we turn God into an idol, just as our ancestors used to fashion physical idols in whatever way suited them. This is why people on diametrically opposed sides can all claim to have “god” in their corner. Perhaps you’ve heard people arguing against a social safety net, say “God helps those who help themselves” – a logic not found in Scripture. Well, it doesn’t quite work if we get specific and say, “The Trinity, or Jesus, helps those who help themselves.” Immediately, we recognize the absurdity of such a statement.
This is what also allows us to treat a generic “god” as a parochial deity and say things like “God bless this nation.” To be clear, God’s blessing is upon the whole earth, the United States included. But if we were to say, “The Holy Trinity bless this nation,” we immediately realize that we’re setting the bar too low and turning a blessing into a commodity for us to have in opposition to other nations.
The great theologian of the 20th-century, Karl Barth is remembered for his insistence that we must allow the Trinity to stand at the center of all things. He often said some version of “We must allow God to be God.” In a 1936 address, he noted that the way we end up with a hollow core in our faith that idols come in and fill is liberal pietism instead of the Gospel.
The modern liberal agenda has become obsessed with the rights and responsibilities of the individual. Instead of Christianity being a religion of Grace, in which we rely solely on what God does for us, we’ve made Christianity into a set of rules, a self-improvement project, and we’ve taken making the world into a better place as our job. The problem, Barth says, with this approach is that there’s nothing left for God to do. So instead of being a living God known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we’ve made God into a lesser deity that is there to reward our good behavior and function something like a mascot – but we all know that mascot does not call the plays or appear in the game.
Barth goes on to note that we’ve come to believe that the Gospel is something that we possess and carry into the world, instead of the Gospel being something that possesses us and carries us into the world. Put differently, one preacher has said “God is the subject of the verbs.” The difference isn’t just semantics – it’s a question of who sets the agenda of our lives.
Christian nationalism, according to Barth, is not concocted by people seeking to do evil, rather it is simply Christians doing what they’ve been taught to do by most Protestant theology – to take on all the verbs of faith ourselves. Again, when we evacuate the Trinity from the center, we start acting as if we belong at the center.
The pernicious thing about idols is that they love to be invisible. They love it when we take it for granted that we’re making our own decisions without any bias. The most dangerous idols aren’t the ones that we choose, but the ones whose lairs we unknowingly live in. Idols thrive on unexamined beliefs and cultural assumptions. By contrast, idols do not like complex questions, unknowable mysteries, or conscientious reflection. Idols do not like the specificity of the Holy Trinity which calls their vagueness into question.
It’s why when Jesus sends us out in mission, he says that we are to baptize, that is, to immerse, people into the reality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christianity is not a religion about following the rules, self-improvement, or being do-gooders. As Barth said in that lecture, “We stand not on the foundation of our goodness, piety, or sincerity, but on the sole foundation that God is God.”
The turn that we’ve made in the last century though has been towards human potential and away from the Trinity. Barth continued, “My dear friends from England and America: I come from Germany. And we have there before us the end of this path on which you are now just beginning.” The path he is referring to is the path of “God and…” He says there can be no talk about “God and country,” “God and wealth,” “God and self-improvement,” “God and culture.” The “and” turns God into an idol who is pushed to the sidelines of serving whatever follows the “and.” Barth said, “there can be only God.”
This is the central claim of Judaism and the faith of Jesus. It’s known as the Shema – “The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” That name “LORD” is the proper name for God, something like “Trinity.” It can’t be confused with another generic deity or idol. The Trinity alone. Not God and anything else. Barth further noted, “When we say, ‘God and…’ the door is opened to demons.” And he knew what he was talking about, he saw some of the worst demons in human history show their face in the Holocaust, masquerading as Christian nationalism and faithful pietism.
Clearly, idolatry is bad – but how do we avoid it given how common it is our society? A few quick things for us to consider. The first is what Jesus told us in Matthew – “make disciples of all nations.” The word “disciple” means “student,” meaning that we always have something new to learn, that we never figure out the mystery of the Trinity, that we remain humble. A phrase to incorporate more into our vocabulary is “I wonder…” When you run into a person you disagree with, a sermon you don’t like, perhaps this one, or a truth you’ve never heard – before we rush to judgment, we can ask “I wonder…” And then we might use very specifically Christian language and ask, “I wonder what the Trinity has to say about this?”
Second, we can borrow a phrase from John the Baptist as a mantra – “He,” speaking of Jesus, “must increase, and I must decrease.” It’s a mantra that can help us to examen our motives. Am I saying this or doing this to increase myself, my party, my side, or is this about exalting God the Holy Trinity?
Thirdly, we can use specific language for God more often – use “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” or “Jesus,” or “Trinity” more and “God” less, because “God” is generic enough to mean whatever we want it to. Think about baptism, marriage, and ordination. These are some of the most powerful moments in the life of the Church and we don’t Baptize children into a generic name, but into the name of the Trinity. When the priest pronounces a blessing, it’s done in the name that is exalted in all the world, not with the word for any abstract deity or idol.
And lastly, we can better resist idolatry when we remember the great promise that Jesus gives – “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” In remembering that Jesus is with us, we are more likely to remember that we are not God, that we don’t need to prove our worthiness in competition with others, that the fate of the world isn’t up to us. It’d be like struggling to lift a truck off someone when Superman is standing right next to us.
Indeed, there is a hollow core at the center of much of what claims to be Christianity and that hole is filled by idols that devour and divide us. We, though, have been given the wisdom and grace to know and call upon the name through which mercy and peace forever flow. It is the core and joy of our faith to call upon the name of the Holy Trinity ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
