When I was doing my study on the Apostle Andrew, I found that in 1964, his head had been a thoughtful gift from Pope Paul VI to a Greek Orthodox church in Patras, Greece. Andrew’s bones have been distributed as relics to other churches who claim Andrew as their patron saint. Relics are typically a body-part of a saint and their presence consecrates (makes holy) a Catholic or Orthodox church. The faithful are to venerate the relics meaning they bow down before them and revere them with ritual actions. Church teaching is that when you venerate a relic, “..many benefits are bestowed by God on men.” In actual practice, there is no real difference between “venerating” and “worshiping” and the worship of human relics is practiced by many Christian and non-Christian religions. It doesn’t seem to matter if we’re Christian or pagan. We all have this intrinsic need to worship something or someone.
In the early days of Hollywood, movie stars and singers were described as “goddesses” and “gods” with spellbinding power over their audiences. If you’re of my generation, you might remember hysterical, screaming girls watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. If you’re younger than me and can’t relate to the worship of John, Paul, George and Ringo, think of the young girls (and their mothers) hysterically screaming at Justin Bieber concerts. Nothing has changed but the names and faces of the celebrities we worship.
We even collect their relics with the same fervor as the early Christians sought the relics of saints. In 2002, a former barber of Elvis Presley sold a clump of the singer’s hair for $115,000. A lock of Justin Bieber’s hair was a comparative bargain at only $40,668. A piece of bubble gum chewed by Britney Spears recently sold for $160. And a tissue used by actress Scarlett Johansson went for $5,300. If I were a famous celebrity, I’d do a fund-raiser for our church. I’m pretty sure that my old, used toothbrush would be worth at least $25,000.
We are wired for worship. It’s in our DNA. That’s why we have that intrinsic desire to worship something or someone. Yet, only someOne can truly satisfy that desire. Blaise Pascal, a famous French mathematician and philosopher, put it like this: "There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ." If we try to stuff anything but God into that God-shaped hole in our lives, we'll end up dissatisfied, restless, and discontent. But when we fill that God-shaped hole with God, we will always find the peace and contentment that we had been seeking all along.
Listen now to the Apostle Paul debating in Athens with the philosophers and polytheists about God: "Men of Athens, I notice that you are very religious in every way, 23 for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines. And one of your altars had this inscription on it: 'To an Unknown God.' This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I'm telling you about. 24 "He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since He is Lord of heaven and earth, He doesn't live in man-made temples,27 "His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him –though He is not far from any one of us. (Acts 17:22b-24,27 NLT)
Paul told them that God does not live in temples, He lives in our hearts. In the 4th century, a bishop named Augustine wrote, “Lord, You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find You.” We have an emptiness inside us. An aching loneliness without God. A restless search for something to fill that void. We try to fill that void with unbiblical religions, drugs, alcohol, parties, material things and other people. And we remain empty and find ourselves restlessly seeking...
Only the one true God clicks into that God-shaped void. And when that happens, our search is over and our worship is for Him and Him alone! Amen?
