April 29, 2018 “Idol or Icon?” – Acts 19:21-41

Acts 19:21-41
“Idol or Icon?”
April 29, 2018 – Fifth Sunday of Easter

I ran over a little bump with the lawn mower and they came buzzing out. I had stirred up an underground nest of yellow jackets. I backed off and waited for them to calm down. It’s much like what happened to Paul in Ephesus in our text today. Threatening people’s idols is like poking around in a wasp nest.

Paul was almost ready to leave. Verse 21 says he planned to go back to Macedonia and Greece, visiting churches he had planted earlier in cities like Philippi and Thessalonica and Corinth. Verse 22 tells us he had already sent ahead two of his partners, Timothy and Erastus, while Paul stayed to wrap things up in Asia, particularly in Ephesus.

Wouldn’t you know it, then, that just as Paul is about to leave Ephesus, that in verse 23 we read that “no little disturbance broke out concerning the Way.” Here it is again. Luke uses that term “the Way,” identifying faith and life in Christ as a journey, the way of salvation. The disturbance came, we discover in verse 24, from a competing way, from an unholy trinity of business, sex and politics all wrapped up under the banner of a pagan religion, the worship of the goddess of Ephesus, Artemis.

Artemis in Greek mythology was the virgin goddess of the hunt who became Diana in Roman mythology. In Greece she was pictured with a crescent moon above her head and carrying a bow and arrows. But in Ephesus in Asia, Artemis was mixed up with an older fertility goddess and often portrayed as a figure with multiple breasts. As we can discern from verse 35, a meteorite had fallen whose shape suggested to the Ephesians their many-breasted goddess. They set up a temple to worship it and set up businesses to copy and make money off it.

Local craftsmen, working in terra cotta and silver and probably in other materials, made small replicas of the shrine to Artemis and sold them to visitors and others. It was a lucrative trade, much like selling souvenirs to tourists today. Go to downtown Seattle and everywhere you turn you find T-shirts, coffee mugs, key rings and a host of other junk with the Space Needle pictured on it. It was like that in Ephesus with the temple of Artemis. “No little disturbance” was being caused because verse 24 says it was “no little business” to make those little silver shrines of Artemis.

A slump in their commerce got the wasps of Ephesus buzzing. Demetrius the silversmith called together all the craftsmen who sold Artemis artifacts. First he points out in verse 25, “Men, you know that we get our wealth from this business.” Then in verse 26 he pinned the blame for the downturn on Paul. The apostle was supposedly leading people astray, not only people in Ephesus, but throughout the whole Roman province of Asia. According to this financial leader, Paul taught that “gods made with hands are not gods.”

Demetrius got it right. There right in the heart of the Greek world, Paul fearlessly declared that the gods being worshipped were not gods at all. We’ve already seen how right in the shadow of the Parthenon, the awesome temple to Athena in Athens, he pointedly proclaimed that God’s being is not like gold or silver or stone, not something to be captured by human craft or design. So Demetrius’ charges had some truth to them. The preaching of Jesus Christ did result in a decline in sales for those who carved and molded and sculpted representations of pagan deities like Artemis.

The silversmith was clever. Verse 27 shows Demetrius understood very well how to sway a crowd and get them worked up. He makes a smooth transition from concern about income, starting with “And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute…” Then he went on to stir up religious feelings with, “but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be scorned, and she will be deprived of her majesty that brought all Asia and the world to worship her.”

The combination of money and religion is pretty familiar here in America. Kick a man in the wallet and you often also kick him in his “god.” Before the Civil War, the American South considered the economic consequences of abolishing slavery, all those cotton plantations losing money if they had to pay wages to those who worked the fields. It wasn’t long before some of them found biblical ways to justify a cruel institution which kept them wealthy and powerful. The attack on slavery was understood as an attack on southern religion, an affront to their god who created them to be masters of an inferior race.

Artemis of Ephesus was an idol and that slave-making god of the South was an idol. False gods and idols are frequently fashioned and worshipped wherever and whenever people love money more than they love the true God. It’s a good lesson to remember in this time when making profits and keeping the economy healthy demands so much of our attention and concern as a nation. When that concern gets mixed up with religion, things get ugly, like they did there in Ephesus.

Those craftsmen of Ephesus did not just take economic offense. They were not upset merely about lost income. They insisted their financial loss was a spiritual issue. They weren’t just losing money. Their gods were being insulted. Verse 28 says “they were enraged and began shouting, ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!’” It was a massive uproar which engulfed the whole city.

Last Saturday evening in South Africa hundreds of soccer fans stormed the fence at Moses Mabhida Stadium after their team lost. Eighteen people were injured, fire was set to the stands, and electronic equipment around the stadium was damaged. Those irate fans felt like their own honor had been insulted and they responded with violence. That was the sort of thing that seemed to be brewing there in Ephesus.

The Ephesian disturbance did in fact move into an ancient stadium, the stone outdoor theatre which still stands there. Verse 29 tells how they seized a couple of Christians, Macedonian friends of Paul, and dragged them into the theatre, all the while chanting their war cry at the top of their lungs, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

You and I might want to make note of that chant, which gets shouted again a bit further on in the story. It’s about being great. They were concerned about the greatness of their idol, but national greatness itself may be a modern idol.

What worries everyone else, in verse 30 gets Paul excited. A crowd gathered in the theatre! In his mind, this is an opportunity, a chance to share the Good News. Completely oblivious to the danger, Paul would have gone to tell them about Jesus. But the other disciples would not let him. Verse 31 says that even some friendly officials in the provincial government sent messages warning Paul “not to venture into the theatre.”

Consider the noise. In Greece we visited a theatre very much like the one in Ephesus. Joanna and Susan and I climbed the stone seats high up to the very top. Then Beth stood in the center of the stage area way below us and spoke in a quiet voice. We heard what she said. Someone else dropped a coin on the ground. It rang out clearly in those upper seats.

Imagine a similar theatre’s fine acoustics with shouts of an enraged mob echoing around it. In verse 33, when a Jew named Alexander finally tried to speak to them, nothing could be heard above the din. He had to wave his hand to get attention. But the rioters would not give way. Verse 34 says they shouted even more, in unison, for two hours, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” In that cry, just four words in Greek, you can hear a spiritually dangerous connection.

The Ephesians claimed Artemis as their own deity, “Artemis of the Ephesians.” She was their goddess, their claim to spiritual prestige, their ticket to happiness and prosperity. We live in a beautiful place in a good country. But you and I are in the same danger whenever we as a church or especially we as a country begin to belligerently use phrases like “my God,” or “our God,” as if He belongs to us. When we tie God to our own national identity and prosperity and make associations between the place we live and the Lord we worship, then we are in grave danger of turning our own faith into idol worship.

We hear news all the time about nations where Christian faith is repressed and persecuted. We just heard that from our friends in China. We pray for believers like Andrew Brunson in prison in Turkey and those in North Korea and Afghanistan and Sudan and Iran. It is easy for us to see the idolatry of a government which sets itself up to control and discourage faith in Jesus Christ. But it may be harder to discern our own idolatry.

I shared a bit of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities with you last week. As the book draws to its end there are terrible images of the French Revolution, an uprising of the common people embracing many of the same values as our own American Revolution. But in France the ideals turned into idols. Dickens paints a horrifying picture of how the brave French cry of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” became “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or death!” The last, he wrote, “was much the easiest to bestow.”

Dickens describes how la Guillotine became the great symbol of the Revolution; how little silver images of guillotines were worn on chains around the neck in sickening parody of the Cross. The French patriots were not satisfied, Dickens suggests, when merely 20 or 30 aristocrats have their heads removed each day. The number, they say, should be 50 or 60. Liberty itself became an idol to which daily sacrifices were offered.

It happens over and over through history. Some of you have been studying the Reformation during Sunday School. You’ve seen how a huge part of that story is the alliance between governments and churches, how national identity played a huge role in how Europe divided up between Protestants and Catholics and went through thirty years of horrible war. Good Christians on both sides fell into the trap of imagining that their faith was necessarily connected with the country and king to whom they gave allegiance.

It keeps happening in more recent times. In that fine film Chariots of Fire. Runner Eric Liddell was called before the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of England, the future king, to explain why he would not run an Olympic race on a Sunday and bring honor to his country. Liddell refused because of his faith in God. Old Lord Cadogan grumbles, “In my day it was King first and God after.”

Last week I talked about our need for identity and how we find that by being together. There’s a dark side to that. Sociology and psychology show that group identity seems to be hard-wired into us. A school teacher divided her class into those who wore tennis shoes that day and those who did not. She asked them to write down for the other group either why or why they did not wear tennis shoes that day. It turned out that most of the reasons were negative. Their friends did or did not wear tennis shoes, the students said, because they were lazy or too poor or had bad taste. In just a few minutes, tennis shoes became more important than all the other things they knew about each other. Shoes became an idol which governed how they saw themselves in relation to one another.

Meteorites and many-breasted statues; kings and presidents; guillotines and guns; fireworks and flags. Throughout history we turn to idols, keep finding tangible gods to worship and give us identity. As our lesson from I John 4 said, “No one has ever seen God.” It’s hard to worship a God we cannot see, an invisible being beyond this world. So, like the Ephesians, we fashion visible gods, tangible gods, manageable gods, who give us an identity and a place in the world. We make idols.

That is why Jesus Christ changed everything in Ephesus and in the history of the world. The only lasting answer to idolatry is Jesus. God became flesh. He became visible. The Son of God became human. God answered our need to see what we worship. God made Himself visible to us in Jesus. And so the things we see, the visible, physical things we cherish, no longer need to be idols. Be it country, family, home, or a favorite sport, when you trust in Jesus Christ, when you put Him first, natural experiences become supernatural. The physical becomes spiritual. The idols become icons.

You may know that icons are an important part of worship in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Beautifully painted images of our Lord and His people cover the front screen of an Orthodox church. It might look to us like they are being worshiped, especially as people line up to kiss a particular icon, as we watched one day in Greece. Yet Orthodox Christians have a deep understanding that their images of Christ and saints are not idols. They are not worshipped. Like our worship music or our own banners, they are meant to lead us past and through the objects themselves to God Himself.

The Orthodox don’t even talk about “painting” icons. When an icon is made, they say it is being “written.” It’s a visible word, teaching us about spiritual reality. When you look at an Orthodox icon, your gaze is not meant to stop in the image, not meant to see and venerate mere color brushed on wood. The icon is designed to be a window you look through, a window by which your spiritual eyes are carried on beyond the image to gaze at the Lord Himself.

When Jesus became flesh, He sanctified the flesh, sanctified our humanity and the world we live in. We no longer need physical idols to worship because our God actually became physical and made matter into an icon, into a way to see and experience Him.

The end of our text tells how a Jewish man named Alexander calmed the citizens and told them that Christians meant them no harm. The Christian community did not try to take control of the situation. They simply accepted the verdict that others reached about them. That is how God means us to live in this world. We don’t need to control the money and the power. Those are idols. Instead we seek our Lord through what we do have.

One of the great quotes from Chariots of Fire arose from Eric Liddell’s desire to put God first in his life. Knowing God had called him to a mission in China, Liddell tried to explain to his sister how he could still give so much time to training for the Olympics, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” For him, running became an icon, not an idol. It was a window to God, not an end in itself. Liddell went on to serve and to give his life for Christ in China. Jesus came first. Running was only a way to serve Him.

So I ask you this morning to put your faith in Jesus Christ above all else, above all ideals, above all possessions, above all authorities, above all other loyalties. Great is Jesus! But don’t trust in a “Jesus of Eugene,” or a “Jesus of America.” Don’t believe in a Jesus who belongs to you and me. That “Jesus” is an idol. Believe in the great Jesus to whom we belong. He is not ours. We are His. When we belong to Him, then all that belongs to us now belongs to Jesus. Whether it’s our possessions or our talents or our identifications with groups of people or places, they are His, icons through which we see our Savior. Let’s not worship such things, but always and only worship Jesus.

Amen.