We worship the gods we make

We had a visiting priest last week who gave a great sermon on the difficult subject of the Holy Trinity. I admit with a baby, toddler and 4 year old to field I didn't catch all he said, but I heard him say something along the lines of making God the way we would prefer Him to be and then worshipping that false image.


How true is that!


There are so many different kinds of Jesus out there. If you were to believe everyone's view of him you could only conclude he had multiple personality disorder.


Of course the Jesus of Scripture and the Church is very clear and recognisable. I am seeing that strongly in reading Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth (yep, I just had to get it). Is this the God we really want to worship, to make the centre of our lives?



Father was quite subtle really in his warnings against making our own gods to worship (in direct contravention of the First Commandmant), but he was asking why we feel the need to do it. Why can't we take God as His Word?

Some time ago a friend of ours talked, somewhat enthusiatically, about a book he was reading on how future churches should or even would be set up. The book essntially laid out a consumer market so that people attened churches that best suited their needs and personal views. I asked where Jesus fitted in to that and ... well, He didn't.
It seems to me that the modified false images of Jesus are not really the gods people want to worship anyway. If they were those churches would be full wouldn't they? Instead they are dieing off. They frequently have no minister at all and the dwindling congregation is made up of elderly people who seem to be there for the social life.
I'll never forget in my husband's pre-Catholic days, attending a service with him where the nice old lady next to us spent the whole service talking to my children. She was very nice to them, but I was in the process of teaching them how to behave in church, especially in Mass and here we were at 'daddy's church' and the rules obviously did not apply.
Am I digressing?
Perhaps not. In the end false Jesus's are boring and so people do not worship them at all.

The Jesus we are called to worship is the corpus on the cross, pouring Himself out for us; it is the Jesus who demands our faith and commitment and calls us to carry our cross to follow Him; it is the Jesus who heals, who casts out demons, who demands that we are perfect as His heavenly Father is perfect.
How much more interesting that Jesus is, how much more worthy of our love and worship than Jesus the buddy, Jesus the socialist, Jesus the therapist, Jesus the big girl's blouse....

Life on the Rock EWTN showed a youth group-Youth for Truth. They spend time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, learning about their Faith, receiving the Sacraments and being active in the community. It's a well attended enthusiastic group.
The future- worshipping God as God.