my secret idols

When Moses came down from the mountain, where he was visiting with God and receiving the liberating commandments that would free the people from perpetual distraction, he found that the people had already recreated one of their former idols: the golden calf. Of course, the people were eventually brought back into the way that leads to God, but right there in the shadow of the mountain where God was speaking to Moses, instructing him in the way that they could walk with God, they back-slid. They opted for something they knew, that they could hold, touch, and see rather than wait for Moses to report back from the cloud and fire at the top of the mountain.
We've probably heard that story often enough to know better than to make a literal, physical golden calf or statue, and place our prayers at its feet. If the Hebrew people following Moses had heard that story, they would have already known better, too. And they probably would have secretly created new and even more interesting idols. I believe the powerful seduction of the secret idols we worship is that we do not realize we are worshiping them, and we do not even realize they are idols. They are not so much secrets hidden from the world around us, they are secret in that they are hidden from ourselves. We worship them without realizing it.
Here's one of the secret idols I inadvertently worship from time to time: my smart phone. It is so pretty, compact, and useful that I sometimes give it more worth (worth-ship; worship) that it really deserves. I let it wield a power and a value in my life pretty close to that of a god. I'm not planning to smash the thing (it just helped remind me to write this article), but I do take breaks from it to help me intentionally remove it from my idol list from time to time.
Church people of all stripes have to be careful of another even more stealthy idol: the church itself. At its best and healthiest, the church, of course, empowers people to be in relationship with God, creating a community of people who are on the way to reconnection with God. In that way it is the living Body of Christ. At its unhealthiest, it becomes the thing that people worship, and it creates a dependency on the institution rather than relationship with God. Picture a Venn diagram with one circle being the living, life-giving Body of Christ, and one circle being the institution; the hope is that they overlap more than less, and from time to time we in the institution need to make sure they do, or make some changes.   Within any particular church, there are the favorite idols we tend to prop up; in the Episcopal Church we tend to worship the liturgy (the way we worship), our buildings, and even our hierarchy or system of governance.
Both the church itself, and all those things within our church communities are meant to be tools to reconnect us to God (that's what the word religion means: reconnect.) They are not the end in themselves, but the vehicles that might help carry us there. Just like God's commandments given to Moses were a vehicle to get the people on the way to reconnection with God.
For St. Paul, especially as he writes in the Book of Romans, idolatry was el numero uno sin that leads to all the others. Once we start letting those little secret idols distract us from our relationship with God, we're heading for trouble. (And, Paul might say, at that point we should remember that we have been Baptized into Christ, and liberated from those all sins, so accept God's forgiveness and come back to life!)
My secret idols don't go away. They will always be available to me, and they don't end with my smart phone. They sneak in and lead me from being the good person God has made me to be. They pull me away from my deepest connection with God. The 16th century monk, St. John of the Cross wrote of God in the Dark Night of the Soul as "Nada." That's Spanish for Nothing, as in God is No Thing. When we think we've got God figured out, we may accidentally be kneeling before a secret idol. When we trust God to be God, the No-Thing, as we work to become aware of our idols, and let them just be things once again, then we are on the way. We can get back to walking in relationship with our God who is so beyond our understanding that St. John was led to only utter the word: Nada.
Near the end of our worship service in my tradition, the priest offers a blessing. My favorite one begins like this: "May the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and the love of God..." God is unknowable, and at the same time, God will give us the knowledge we need. Both are true at the same time. In that tension, no secret idols can exist. No-thing can exist. Nada. 

Originally published in The South Jetty News Paper.