Sermon notes 10/9 Ex. 32, Phil 4:1-9

Idolatry’s impetus comes from fear and anxiety.It is the answer to the question is go with us or not? That was left hanging in the reading 2 Sundays ago at Massah and Meribah. Now it appears that the people have already made an idol of Moses and grow anxious when he is gone for a while. Like teenagers, they decide to throw a party with daddy out of town. Idolatry is not limited to the adoration of an image. We have extended it to even making a priority in life of Church and culture, as we will soon hear in the affirmation of faith. . It was a feast to god but to try to capture the essence of the liberating god in a human enclosure is part of the point.I’ve always liked the expression that Presbyterians worship a big or large God.The reformed tradition has always seen idolatry as a most dangerous sin, partly as Calvin said, the human mind is a factory of idols. We are constantly at work creating substitutes for god, ways of replacing god with a smaller more malleable god. Is it beyond our capacity to try to capture the ineffable One in something we make? Is it another bite from the apple of the garden? With Adam and Eve human nature seems to want to be like a god.

Positive psychology can be an aid against false gods-it distracts the idol-making of our minds
positive psychology is demonstrated in helping in a crisis, in helping keep us resilience and flexible, instead of rigid and inflexible, therefore vulnerable to all of the twists and turns of life.
What we feed our minds does have a decided impact on a sense of well-being. I am not saying that we have discovered a panacea, but we do know more about the effects of mental stimulus than we once did. Let’s go at it from another angle. Those of us who deal with depression find that their thought patterns are altered due to the condition. When most people would shrug off a small issue, depressives will blow it out of proportion. Depressives see themselves as a cause of poor behavior in others and then beat themselves up for it. Depressives overgeneralize. Instead of seeing incidents as discrete, we will tend to put them in a pattern and mutter, why does that always happen to me; I never get things right. If we recognize our unhealthy thought patterns, recognize that depressive episodes are unconnected to events in our lives, then we have a tool that helps minimize the episodes when they do occur.

On the other hand, building up a stock of the material Paul urges does help mold virtues such as resilience. Dr Cam Meredith of this church spent a lot of time in his take on Adlerian ego psychology as trying to find the ways we can encourage the self to discover options and resources to deal with life’s difficulties. Paul emphasizes the word, excellence, quality, virtue, arete, in Greek. The word lovely would be closer to winsome, calls forth love, to see them is to love them, their kindness or benevolence evokes it in others--things fit to say and hear gracious/high-toned words--honorable/worthy/venerable/honorable/revered/dignified as in kabod/gravitas.

Years ago, I came across a study by Michael Robinson of videomalaise. High news watchers were more down on the country in than low news watchers. Alienated people say good things about a local official , but they know the country is going downhill fast. We use religious motivation to say that the world is going downhill. We do well to match every complaint with signs of hope and good. Religious commitments are screened our glasses.Will they look like Paul’s here this morning or glasses where everything looks gray, somber and in decline?