Modern Idols

“Modern Idols”

Rev. Stephen Milton

Lawrence Park Community Church

 May 10th, 2026

Today’s scripture passage comes from the Book of Acts. We are travelling with the Apostle Paul as he spreads the word about Jesus in Greece.

Paul has a strategy when he arrives in a new town. He starts by talking to the local Jews in their synagogues. He tells them that the coming of the Messiah was predicted by the Hebrew Scriptures, and that Jesus was the one people were waiting for. He does this in Athens, too,  but he knows that most people here are pagans who believe in the Greek gods. They put no stock in the Hebrew Scriptures. To make things even more difficult, this is Athens, the birthplace of Greek philosophy. These people have turned intellectual debate into a sport. Their intellectuals are considered the most sophisticated in the Roman world. So, whatever Paul says, he is going to have to make a sophisticated case that doesn’t start with Hebrew prophecies.

Paul has been in Athens for a few days. He’s had a chance to look around. What he sees is shocking. On every street, in every house, in every public square, there are statues of gods. There are temples for these gods everywhere. There are altars to gods in peoples’ homes. Each of these gods is believed to have a spirit which inhabits their statue. Each god demands to be respected and revered. To do that, the Athenians feed them with animal sacrifices large and small. Sometimes it is just a libation of oil. It depends on the occasion, and what you are asking for.

There are gods of all kinds. 

Poseidon

There are gods who rule the sea, like Poseidon, whom sailors propitiate so they can have safe voyages. 

Aphrodite There are statues of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She receives sacrifices from people seeking success with a lover. 

Athena

 There are gods who take care of the city, in this case, Athena. Other cities have their own gods. 

 There are gods specific to a household. They get fed small libations of oil at the door, both by family members, and guests. There are a lot of gods, each with their own department, each offering a different kind of protection.

People pick and choose which gods they will worship, depending on their line of work and station in life. Paul is not impressed. We know from his letters that he thinks all of these gods are fictitious ( 1 Corinthians 8:4) . They are nothing, just statues made by human hands, figments of the human imagination. Paul believes the Greeks are wasting their time with all these statues and false gods. But, he doesn’t say any of this to the Athenians. He doesn’t want to be laughed at or run out of town right away. So he takes a different approach.

Paul notices that they have erected an altar to an unknown god. It appears the Athenians are hedging their bets. They don’t want to offend any of the gods, lest they withdraw their protection from the city. So, in case they missed a god, they have an all-purpose altar for an unknown god. This is what Paul picks up on. Perhaps this unknown god is really the God I know, Paul says. Perhaps you have been waiting for someone like me to come along to give you greater knowledge of the only true God. A way to set these idols aside. 

From our vantage point today, the idolatry of the ancient Greeks may seem irrational and immature. How could the people of Plato and Socrates have been so misguided to pray to powerless statues for protection from harm at sea, or in wars? Why would anyone belittle themselves to a god for favours, fearing danger if they didn’t make the right kind of offering?

The impulse to engage in idolatry may be part of human nature. To mistake a created being as the creator, the all-powerful one. We seem very far away from the idolatry of the ancients, but all of us know this impulse. We all go through it when we are babies. 

Mother and baby

 As infants, we worship our mothers. We are utterly dependent on them for love, for comfort, for safety and for food. Mothers seem all-powerful from a baby’s point of view. 

They are physically the source of life and safety. We slowly realize they have a mind - they can choose to help us or to withdraw help. To a baby, the perceived withdrawal of love feels like a disaster. Babies can cry like their limbs are being taken off when a mother simply leaves the room unexpectedly. The Mom may just be answering the phone or the door, but the child sees it as a disaster. Her god is gone, perhaps never to return. It is irrational, but babies have immature brains. Each of us learns about a being who is all powerful from our mothers. Of course, if you ask a mother whether she is all powerful, she will laugh. Mothers often feel under qualified, hardly like gods. But children don’t see them that way, especially young children. 

As children get older, they start to see their mothers differently, more realistically. That their mothers are real people. They still hold enormous power to grant wishes or to withhold favours, to offer love and withdraw it. The relationship we have with our mothers may be the most complicated one we will ever have. Even in adulthood, when we see our mothers much more clearly as real people, with flaws and strengths like anyone else, the memory of their existence as an all-powerful god still exists within us. They are measured against this primal period. When we are in a mature state, we may appreciate the evolution of our perceptions of motherhood;  the way someone goes from all powerful to actually needing our help in later life. At other times, especially in fraught relationships, children may secretly wish their flawed mothers could be more like the god they remembered. There’s nothing easy about being a mother, a human being who was once seen as a god. 

These feelings fed pagan ideas and practices of idolatry. They saw each god as all powerful in their department - love, the ocean, the weather, war and peace. They were idolized, paid with sacrifices to grant favours and protection. Like a child flattering mummy to get something they want, and desperately wanting to avoid punishment. The Christians put an end to this kind of pagan worship. The temples and statues were torn down when Christians took over the Roman Empire. These practices survived underground as witchcraft and magic, but the age of sacrificing to gods in public ended. 

But idolatry still exists, even in modern society. Like babies, we adults can still be enthralled with idols which we assume are all powerful, which can provide us with everything we need if we just obey them and pay them. 

Tillich quote 

The theologian Paul Tillich has argued that everyone in their life is searching for what he calls “an ultimate concern.” 

 That is, something which seems to be all powerful, which is both here, in the finite world, but also grants access to the infinite world of power. The most obvious example of this kind of ultimate concern is God, who is both the creator and creates the finite, transient world. 

An idol, by contrast, is a being or thing which poses as both infinite and finite, but which is really only finite. An old Greek or Roman god made of stone  was never capable of infinite power, but people believed it was. In our age, Tillich argues, we still have lots of idols. We mistake them for beings with infinite power, but in reality they are just created by human minds and hands.

 Tillich wrote in the 1950s, and he thought nationalism looked like a modern idol. People treated their love for their nation as all-encompassing, a source of enormous pride and self definition. The wars had encouraged this attitude, since men and women were asked to sacrifice everything for their country. And people did, assuming they would be cared for in return. Yet nationalism is a human invention. It doesn’t love you back. People can be ignored, cast off. They may realize the nation that sent them to war wasn’t all powerful, or all-caring. In our time, a feeling of being deceived and ripped off comes from people who were once fierce patriots. Some become totally disillusioned, and realize their idol, their nation,  was never all powerful. Others continue to believe in their nation, and its power, but conclude it has been taken over by the enemy, and it needs to be purged to return to its true power. They want their nation to be great again, as it promised to be in the past. Nationalism is a powerful idol. 

But it is not our only modern idol. You can see them clearly in advertising and on social media. We have idols of physical Beauty. The idol of eternal youth. Wealth. Success.  People become convinced if they spend their money to look young or investing to become rich they will find a happiness that will last. Like the ancient Greeks, we can worship several idols at once.

 Tillich argues that these false idols make promises they cannot keep. They promise we will always be happy if we are rich, ignoring that life has a way of introducing misery into even the richest person’ life. Youth and Beauty never last, either, regardless of how much one spends on clothes, make up and plastic surgery. Idols promise eternal happiness, but can never deliver.

The Apostle Paul saw these flaws among the ancient Greeks. How their gods could never deliver. He saw the Greeks yearning for a relationship that would last and give them what they wanted. But he saw that what we want is not always good for us. We can be like babies, wanting what we desire, but not seeing what we need. So, Paul offers another way. A relationship with a God who is unknown to the Greeks, but the only real God there is. A God who does not hand out favours in exchange for sacrifices. 

Instead, our God says that there is a way of living which sustains individuals and all of creation. To be happy, we are encouraged to learn that way, from God, and so we can set aside our worries and fragile self esteem. This God of heaven and earth created all that is, and asks us to learn God’s ways, rather than worship our own ideas and idols. This divine Way requires some humility and surrender. As Christ says in the garden on the night of his arrest, “not my will, but your will be done.” Christianity does not offer God as a personal valet or idol. We can flourish best if we learn how God works - through love and compassion, not granting every selfish wish.

We are invited to listen to God’s music, and dance to God’s tune in our lives. It’s not a set of narrow rules, but a way of being that makes life easier for us and for others. God is always to some extent an unknown god - always more mysterious than we can ever know. In this way, God is like a mother. But, unlike a mother, we never get to know God so well that we stop worshipping. God stays infinite, a source of infinite love and wisdom. God remains our all powerful mother, forever, wanting what is best for us, even when we do not know what that may be. In God, we feel the love of the infinite mysterious love that is the mother of all of being, our ultimate concern, which sustains us moment to moment. This love will never die, and will be waiting for us even when we die. Amen.