I’m really going to date myself this morning but do y’all remember a brief fashion frenzy that happened sometime in the early 1980s called the Member’s Only Jacket?  Perhaps some of you may even have one lurking around in a closet somewhere.  I mean, the things were a big, big deal for a brief period of time.  Well, I went to a private school and, well, there, what you wore was a big, big deal.  Just the kind of place where having a Member’s Only Jacket would propel you forward in your standing among other students.  Well, long story short – I wanted one.  I see now that I myself wanted to be a big big deal and that was the root of many of my problems). But anyway, And, at that age (I would’ve been around 12 years old at the time), I could be very persuasive.  Read: obnoxious.  My parents, who didn’t give me everything I wanted by any stretch of the imagination, yielded on that one.  One day I arrived home and there was a royal blue Member’s Only jacket, just like I’d wanted for so long.  I don’t know why Mom and Dad capitulated on that one but there it was.  The irony of the thing was that those Jackets stayed in style for like the cultural equivalent of 15 minutes before they passed out of fashion into the scrapheap of short-lived fashion fads.

  Although I’m certainly no longer attenuated to it any longer, I’m sure fashion trends still come and go these days with great frequency.  Seems like UGG boots were a thing a few years back, and that’s probably the last trend I recollect but I’m sure things are similar today as they were back then.  That’s because there is an expression which I think you still hear in culture that seeks to define what we’re all searching for.  It goes a little something like this – Image is everything. 

  Image is everything.  That’s what was in the back of my mind way back when I would do anything just to get a Member’s Only Jacket.  Image is everything. 

  I would, thinking Biblically, adjust that expression only slightly to make a wry commentary about you and I.  I would say that for us fallen humans, “Images are everything.”  And, by images, I mean, idols.  John Calvin, one of the founders of our Presbyterian Reformed tradition once noted in Institutes of Christian Religion that, “we may infer that the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols”. Basically, what Calvin is saying is that our minds do little more than act as creator of idols all of the time.”  In fact, in the beginning of his book, Counterfeit Gods, a book on idolatry really, Timothy Keller notes that many Biblical scholars look at the entirety of the Bible as a statement against idolatry.  That all of its central stories reveal how making an idol of something is the surest way to heartbreak and misery and that many of the stories of the Bible have, at their center, a warning against idolatry. 

  Paul, as he writes the Roman church, is greatly concerned about idols and idolatry.  Rome, after all, was the center of the universe at the time.  And, as a consequence of drawing all sorts of people into the city, all sorts of other gods and perversities were permitted and even encouraged.  

  So, Paul writes this at the beginning of Romans to alert the congregation to the central danger of our faith – idolatry:  “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.  For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.  So, they are without excuse.  For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”

  A couple of things need be mentioned before we go any further.  First, Paul’s claim is that God is knowable through creation.  That is too easy that one can look out at this glorious thing called creation and see clearly that there had to be some kind of divine hand behind it all.  I think I never felt so assured of the handiwork of God as I did one day in the Pisgah National Forest when I looked out over a valley as the sun was rising in the East.  It was the most breathtaking image I think I’d ever seen in my entire life.  As I stood there, an avowed teenage atheist, I quivered, for I knew deep within my heart of hearts that no matter what I said, that there most assuredly was a God at the center of all creation.  It’s funny, atheism is becoming out in the academy.  As particle physicists and other scholars continually probe the mysteries of the universe a growing consensus is stating the obvious – something must be behind all of this.  There is too much order, too much purpose embedded into things to be randomness.  My experience is the kind of thing Paul means when he says that the glory of God has been “clearly perceived.”  That is to say that it doesn’t take a PhD in particle physics to know that there is a God.  Paul says that it is plain to see within the bounds of God’s creation.  That you can look out and see and know that there is a God.  Which should lead you directly to worship and adore that God. 

  But we don’t.  That brings us to our second point.  The second point is a difficult one to swallow.  Oftentimes our image of God hovers somewhere near an old Santa Claus like figure who is always jolly and sure to say a kid was nice when he was really naughty.  That is to say that what we imagine most about God is like a universal grandfather that is permissive and just loves and loves and loves.  Which is certainly true about God.  God is, after all, love.  But God is also Holy, powerful, AWESOME.  The scriptures say that in His presence, the mountains melt like wax.  Can you imagine power that great?  That simply in the presence of God, the mountains crumble into the sea.  Amazing power like that reminds us that this is no simple grandfather.  This is the awesome and mighty and Holy God who commands our attention and whose handiwork is so apparent, so manifest, so all around us that we simply should not ignore it.  But we do.  That’s what Paul says.  We exchange this amazing Glory of idols.  That’s what Paul says.