In church I’ve always heard the word idolatry used to describe the act of bestowing worship on an entity that is not the Hebrew God. I don’t think that’s it. The people of the Hebrew bible were not monotheistic, they acknowledged the existence of other gods. They were henotheistic, and their God Yahweh was above the rest. In Deuteronomy it is written “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord your God is one.” The lower gods were not outcasts, but included in the lower ranks in the hierarchy of gods. There are a whole myriad of heavenly beings going by such names as principalities, powers, cherubim, thrones, angels, demons, and planets. I have never seen these, but I can bear witness to the material powers of wind, gravity, tectonic plate shifts, the United States government, addiction, and Taylor Swift.
All powers, visible and invisible, have their place in the cosmic hierarchy. It would be folly to carve one of these out and revere it apart from the rest. It would divide us against ourselves. To worship the goddess of the harvest, as if she alone is sovereign, is to give in to despair in the winter. To worship Yahweh and reject practitioners of Buddhism as if he doesn’t also represent them, is to attack one’s own body. To worship food as if it alone would fulfill us is to gamble our lives on elements that breed as much sickness and death as health and energy. To engage in this idolatry is to fracture the image of God. None of these powers has a moral value. Alcohol is not good or bad on its own; crowned king it is deadly.
In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul warns against idolatry and then shares about the communion; about partaking of One bread and One body, and not partaking of food offered to any of the lesser entities. In the next chapter, he delves deeper into the communion, and tells the church that they are suffering health ailments because they “eat and drink the Lord’s cup in an unworthy manner” and they “do not discern the body”.
I’m sure these passages have multiple meanings, but I think first about addiction. This is likely because I once purchased a bottle of wine for the purpose of communion at church, then got home and drank it myself in bed. I gave many offerings to the power of alcoholism in my time under its spell, but that one stood out as particularly telling of its mastery of me. Wine is one of many neutral elements planted on earth for us to utilize and enjoy; and for me it reigned supreme over all the rest. It feels safer to collapse our hopes and dreams onto one element that we can immediately see and taste, than to distribute them among all of God’s invisible and faraway creations. We become completely lost in its absence, and then resentful. It is not infinite, so it lets us down. We scandalize it. We assign more meaning to it than it can hold. We become fragmented into a worshipper, a fearful chaser, and a tired little piece of our original selves. We become sick because we have not discerned the Oneness of God and each power’s place in His order.
Taken on their own, each of these powers will fall short of expectations. The goddess of the harvest will abandon us in winter. A Christian community will come toppling down over a scandal and the neighboring Buddhist community will step in to help rebuild. Our food will poison us. No individual power in the hierarchy can contain all of our hopes and dreams and fears and sufferings, save Yahweh; the God at the top, the God who holds them all. May we hear that the Lord our God is One, and may we never turn against ourselves again.