Dethroning Our Idols

 

This will come as no surprise to my congregation, but my wife and I have been obsessed with Hamilton on Disney+.  We’ve watched it numerous times; sometimes with friends and sometimes just the two of us.  We canceled our subscription so that we can move on.  Have you seen it?  It is historically accurate and terrific entertainment, to be sure.  And the film director did an incredible job catching closeups and angles that transcend even the theater-goer’s experience.  But beyond its entertainment value, the musical has multiple layers of meaning.  For my wife and I, that is the reason we watched it so many times.  It kept unfolding like a beautiful flower to reveal new insights and surprises each time we viewed it.  Most satisfying to us, it is a story of redemption.   

Alexander Hamilton was born an illegitimate child on an island in the Caribbean. He was orphaned when his mother died and raised by a prosperous merchant where he learned a trade in accounting.  Mentored by a pastor/journalist, Hamilton’s genius as a writer emerged late in adolescence.  The islanders raised funds to send him to the American colonies to receive a proper education.  Unable to gain entrance to Princeton, he enrolled in King’s College where he was attentive in his religious duties and fervent in his prayers.  But rising up out of abandonment and impoverishment instilled an insatiable ambition in Hamilton.  That same ambition burned in the hearts of John Paul Jones and Benedict Arnold who were contemporaries of Hamilton.  Jones died in bitterness and semi-obscurity in France and Arnold is our country’s most infamous traitor. 

Hamilton worshipped fame and fortune and he pursued it relentlessly through his exploits in war and politics.  The fervent Christian faith he had as a young man ebbed away as he sacrificed everything at the altar of success.  Along the way, he engaged in a long-running sexual affair which nearly destroyed his marriage to his long-suffering wife, Eliza.  Years later, their son died defending his father’s honor in a duel.  Hamilton was brought to his senses and to his knees.  In the years before Alexander died, Eliza forgave him, he reconciled and gathered his family together, and rekindled his faith.  Ron Chernow, the author of Hamilton’s biography that inspired the musical wrote, “It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years.”  Through unimaginable hardship, Alexander Hamilton had finally dethroned his idols of fame and fortune. 

We Americans have a lot of idols.  Money, power, technology, sports, and scientific achievement are at the top of our list today.  But like Hamilton, who found himself in “the eye of a hurricane” when his life fell apart, our nation seems to be in the grip of a massive cultural storm.  The evidence is all around us.  Our deep divisions have devolved into ugly hatred evident in our speech towards others and violence in our streets.  We are dealing with COVID-19 but our sickness lies much deeper than the effects of a biological virus.  We have a spiritual cancer that has metastasized into virtually every aspect of our society.  God is out.  Our idols have taken the throne and have become our singular source of hope. 

It has been my prayer that 2020, with all of its upheaval, might bring us, like Hamilton, to our knees before the God who is sovereign over everything.  Of him, the Bible says, “He judges the great people of the world and brings them all to nothing.  They hardly get started, barely taking root, when he blows on them and they wither. The wind carries them off like chaff” (Isa. 40:23-24).  Do you see how vulnerable we are?  We’ve already had a hurricane and unquenchable fires are destroying much of the West.  A massive earthquake – “the Big One” – Californians call it, would probably tip us over the edge into fiscal and social anarchy.  God has control over all these things and it is only by his grace and mercy that we haven’t suffered the unimaginable. 

2020 has brought us plenty of trouble.  It’s time to reflect deeply, turn to the Sovereign God, and dethrone our idols. Healing is on the other side.