Understanding God: July 23, 2016

Year C, Pentecost 10                                     

Hosea 1:2-10                                                  

 

            Our nation and our world is divided in ways I never imagined it could be.  I know it is not the worst it has ever been, but it is definitely the worst that I have ever seen.  This may sound naïve, but I believe that we would be a lot gentler with one another if we understood the pain that each one of us struggles with.  We all walk around carrying burdens and sometimes/often those burdens are magnified because we are convinced that no one could possibly understand what we are going through.  Instead of trying to explain ourselves or listening to someone else, we cluster with people who are like us, or we bear those burdens alone and that makes it that much harder.

            As much as we misunderstand one another, it is nothing compared to how we misunderstand God.  That’s not necessarily our fault.  God keeps things a little mysterious, especially in the Old Testament when people were not able to say his name or look in his the face.  There is something sacred and holy about mystery, but it also makes it harder to love at times.  Jesus told parables like we heard in the Gospel reading today to help us understand God and his love for us.  Jesus used his own life to allow us to know God. 

In the Old Testament, before Jesus was born, God used the prophets to help us understand God.  The difference between these prophets and Jesus is that Jesus was God in the flesh.  Jesus understood God thoroughly as he was one with God the father.  The prophets were human, flawed humans, sinful humans….not that different from us.  Yes they were holy and wise. They had special relationships with God as they were especially chosen by God to deliver his message, but they were still human--which meant that they struggled to understand God’s ways and help us, God’s people, understand and know God.

            Because God knew how hard it was for the prophets to understand God and share his message, he got creative at times. This reading from Hosea is a perfect example of that creativity.  It’s a troublesome reading.  The term whoredom is not something we are used to hearing in church or polite company.  In fact, the entire premise of God’s request is profoundly disturbing.  He requires his brand new prophet recruit to: “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” There are more problems with that statement that I have time to address.  It’s not fair to Hosea.  It’s not fair to this “wife of whoredom” who is now being forced to marry Hosea.  And it is certainly not fair to the children who will be forever marked as displays of God’s anger. 

            God not only told Hosea who to marry, he told him and his new wife what to name the children.  The first was Jezreel….which seems like a perfectly fine name.  It means God plants and refers to a lovely city.  However anyone in that time who knew their history would know that horrible atrocities were committed in Jezreel.  It would be like naming a child Hiroshima.  Every time his name was said aloud people would be reminded of the horrible violence that God’s people had committed.  The 2^nd child was named Lo-ruhamah.  Now, if God had just gone with ruhamah, that would have been a lovely name as it means compassion and mercy.  But God added the prefix Lo which meant that the compassion and mercy was negated.  It would be like naming your child Faithless instead of Faith.  Wait…it gets worse. The third child was names Lo-ammi. Once again you will note the prefix Lo which means this is a negative.  This child will remind the people that they are no longer God’s people. God has officially given up on them.

            This all sounds cruel…and a little crazy, does it not?  What person in their right mind would want to be a prophet if this is what it entailed?  Was God’s sole intention to punish Hosea?  First of all, Hosea did not have a choice.  He was called by God to be a prophet and so he would follow God’s advice wherever it led him. And no, God was not trying to punish Hosea.  He was using him as a tool.  God needed Hosea to understand the depth of his pain.  We don’t think about that.  We don’t think that we could hurt God.  We do.  Again and again, we betray God.  We break his heart.  That is hard to imagine…that we could hurt God—the all powerful God’s feelings. 

            Yet we, God’s people have hurt him time and time again.  The people of Israel just could not make up their mind.  One minute they were following the one true God, Yahweh.  Then when their crops needed rain and their prayers to Yahweh were not being answered, they turned to Baal, the god of rain.  One of the things that really ticks off God in the Old Testament is worshipping other gods.  It hurt God on a deep and profound level, and he wanted people to understand that hurt…not just to understand it, but to feel it.  What better way to do that than to force his prophet to marry a woman who would repeatedly cheat on him.  Worse yet, Hosea would know that she was going to cheat on him before going into the marriage and still not be able to help but love her.   He would take her back again and again just like God has taken his people back again and again.

            It would seem from these 8 verses, that God was finished.  This was his good bye.  But that is the crazy thing about God…he just can’t say good bye.  Even when he says he’s done, he’s not really done.  Right after he tells Hosea to name his 3^rd child, “not my people,” he says, “Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ‘Children of the living God.’”

            This is only the end of chapter 1. There are 13 more chapters of Hosea.  Hosea and his wife went back and forth between love and betrayal just as God went back and forth on what to do with this group of people who had repeatedly betrayed him and taken advantage of him.  The part of God who was a just and righteous God knew that these people had to be punished, possibly even cut off from his love.  But his love for them overcame his need for justice.  As Christians, we refer to that idea as grace.  Grace is when God’s mercy and love overcomes the need for justice and righteousness. 

            God will not ask the same thing of us that he did of Hosea.  With Jesus, God brought us a new model of what it is to love and be loved.  However, even with Jesus’ life and death, we will continue to misunderstand God and misunderstand one another.  It’s inevitable to some degree, but that does not mean we have the luxury of not trying—of staying in our own little silos. We cannot continually bemoan the ignorance and cruelty of others before we try to get to know one another. If we are all truly children of the living God, then we all carry pieces of God. When we try to understand and know one another, we get a little closer to knowing God.

We are the body of Christ. It is a strange and eclectic body---but there is beauty in that diversity and the strange parts will seem less strange the more we get to know one another.  We are the body of Christ.  We cannot give up on people because they vote for a different candidate or because we cannot agree whether it is blue lives, black lives, or all lives.  We have to continue to listen to one another.  Much like God refuses to give up on us, we cannot give up on one another.  We are the body of Christ.  Let’s start acting like we actually believe that.    

Jesus' triumph over fear: July 10, 2016

Year C, 8 Pentecost                                                               
Luke 10:25-37                                                                        

            Imagine that you are driving through a dangerous area of town.  You make sure your doors are locked.  You might even drive a little faster than normal.  You have your cell phone right next to you so you can call for help.  It’s a dangerous area and you cannot be too careful.  Now imagine that you are in that same part of town and you are walking alone.  You are walking fast.  Your head is down and you are not making eye contact.  Your hand is clutching something that can be used as a weapon. As you turn a corner you happen to look up and you see something on the side of the street.  At first you cannot even tell if it is a person because it’s just lying there.   As you get closer, you see it is a person and that person is possibly hurt, but you are really not sure.  You could go check, but you decide it’s probably just someone sleeping.  If it is someone injured, what could you do? You are not a doctor. You keep walking, even faster now.  As you pass by you justify your decision.  What if this person was injured in a crime and that criminal was close by? What if it was a ruse and the person was pretending. Once you got close, he would knock you down and steal your wallet.  The more you think about it, the more you realize that you did the smart thing. Besides, once you get out of this dangerous section of town you will call the police and let them know.  That thought makes you feel better and you keep walking.

            The road to Jericho was a notoriously dangerous road. (It still is.) Most people would have avoided walking it alone. It was windy, which made it difficult to see what was coming ahead.  One never knew what was around the next corner.  It was a place where criminals frequented and often preyed on the weak or the foolish.  Occasionally people would even pretend to be injured so someone would slow down.  Meanwhile their friends would hide nearby and attack the person who stopped to help. This was the kind of road where people walked fast and kept their heads down.  This was the road that Jesus was talking about in the Gospel reading. 

In the story, he mentioned several people who passed by the injured man.  It is easy to pass judgment on these men, assume that they were heartless people. The priest, the Levite…these were not necessarily bad men.  There are all kinds of theories about why they did not stop.  If this was a dead body, the body would be considered unclean and by getting near it, they would have been unclean and would not have been able to perform their priestly duties.  Or perhaps they were in a hurry to get to a meeting about how to improve the road to Jericho and make it safer for travelers.  We don’t know.  But my guess is that it all came down to fear.  They were afraid for their own safety.   They were afraid that they would stop and the person would not want their help or even reject them.  They were afraid of the time it would take out of their day. They were afraid.

            When I first moved to Norfolk, I did not know the area at all.  I moved to an area that was not a super safe section of town.  It was a large apartment complex.  It was loud. There were always car alarms going off.  People were often yelling at one another.  I kept my head down and was not especially friendly.  One night Conor and I were in our apartment and we heard a woman yelling.  I was prepared to ignore her. I assumed she was crazy or just being dramatic.  Then she started yelling for help.  Conor immediately put his shoes on and went to the door.  I did not want him to go for all the reasons I mentioned.  She was probably out of her mind. It might have been a trick.  It was not safe.  He was out there for about 10 minutes and I was terrified. When he came back he said that this woman was beaten by her boyfriend.  She was not seriously injured, but she was scared to walk back to her apartment, so of course Conor accompanied her. I reprimanded him.  What happened if the boyfriend came back?  Did she know where we lived now?  I was terrified.  She was quite literally our neighbor.  Even as I was going through all my fear scenarios I thought about this story of the Good Samaritan and I knew I was being a hypocrite.  I am ashamed of my feelings and my actions on that night.  I let fear keep me from helping someone.

            This past week has been a bloody week in our country.  It has not just been a week, it has been years.  Children shot in their schools, men and women (many of whom are African American men)  killed on the street or in their cars, police officers gunned down, gay and lesbian people shot in a night club.  This violence and hatred is almost incomprehensible.  I believe that the source of this violence, hatred, division and mistrust is fear.  It is fear of the unknown.  It is fear for our own safety.  It is fear of things that we cannot understand.  It is fear.  To some degree fear keeps us safe.  It keeps us from taking unnecessary risks and harming ourselves and others.  This fear we are now experiencing is having the opposite effect. Our need to keep ourselves safe and comfortable is hurting our neighbors-- our brothers and sisters in Christ. 

            This story that Jesus told, the story of the Good Samaritan is a story about a man who risked his own safety and well-being to care for someone he had never met and would probably never meet again.  Jesus told this story to answer a question by an inquisitive lawyer.  The question was, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  The lawyer knew the answer and Jesus knew he knew the answer, so he turned the question back to the lawyer.  The lawyer correctly answered:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus responded, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

Here is the irony.  When the lawyer asked how to identify the neighbor (so as to achieve eternal life) Jesus told a story about a man who cared for his neighbor by risking his life. In order to live, to truly live, we have to be willing to take risks for other people. The Good Samaritan risked everything to care for this man on the side of the street, this man who could have easily been an enemy.

            Taking risks to care for our neighbor might not always look like it does in this story.  It probably won’t require risking our life.  It could be about risking our comfort, our feelings, our pride…. It could be allowing ourselves to experience other people’s disdain and even hatred or simply opening ourselves up to experience their pain and their sorrow. 

The story of Jesus Christ is a story of a man who allowed himself to be hated….allowed himself to be scapegoated…allowed himself to experience the depth of people’s anger and fear and pain.  And he returned all of that with love, a love that would seem weak to most of us now.  That was the only way to break the cycle of violence. 

Two thousand years ago God sent his only son to this earth because he realized that punishing human sin with violence was not working.  God could no longer merely punish people for their sins.  Instead he put a mirror up to all of humanity to show them what their sin was doing.  Jesus was that mirror.  In that mirror (if they were willing to look), people saw what sin was doing to the Prince of Peace, the God of Love.  It tortured and killed him.  But not for long.  Jesus transformed the violence and the darkness and the hatred.  He transformed it to love.  

Death could not defeat the Prince of Peace and the God of Love.  Human hatred and agony could not defeat him.  So why are we acting now as though we have been defeated by hate and anger?  Jesus already won this war.  He taught us this lesson--that the only way to live, the only way to experience victory over death is to refuse to let fear motivate us and control us. 

            Perhaps you are thinking, but that was 2000 years ago.  It was a different time….different people. NO. That time is now.  We are those people.  Jesus is still that mirror for us, if only we are willing to look, really look.  That is why we come to church every Sunday and why we celebrate Holy Communion.  We look into the mirror that is Jesus Christ.  We look upon the cross. We talk about how Jesus was broken for us, so that we can be whole.  Jesus defeated hate and death.  It is up to us now to live in to that victory and to proclaim that victory from the mountain tops.