Sermon, Year C,
Proper 13
Personally, I love
that we have been reading the prophets of the Old Testament as we have done for
the past weeks. We will continue to do
so for the next few weeks as well.
There is great
power and emotion in the words of the prophets.
The language and imagery are visceral and striking.
Yet it is
sometimes difficult to follow what is going on as we skip from prophet to
prophet. A few weeks ago we had Amos, now
Hosea, next week Isaiah. Perhaps the
skipping around also leads us to wonder what is going on with the prophets. And while the prophets often have overlapping
concerns, the prophets all have a different emphasis and set of opponents with
whom they are arguing, but we often do not get enough of the text to clearly
picture what is really going on. For
instance, Ezekiel was concerned with the priestly class and ritual purity, Hosea
spoke of Israel’s (in)fidelity to God with the imagery of husband and wife (and
today, parent and child), Amos (actually all of the prophets) were concerned with
social justice for the abused and neglected.
But simply
catching snippets of the prophets leads to a sense of dissonance. The power of
the language, which is often strong and condemning, may make us wonder why we
follow this God at all.
Why read the
prophets?
The prophet is
angry.
God is angry—wrathful,
in fact.
What is uplifting
about this?
And the image of
the angry God brings an uncomfortable question:
How do we reconcile a notion of a God of mercy and love with a God
capable of wrath?
In trying to deal
with what sometimes seems to be an unbridgeable contradiction, it seems to me
that--sometimes—Christians may err too far on the side of wrath or love to the
exclusion of the other.
This may be an
odd both/and to argue for, but stay with me.
I think you may
know what I mean. There are Christians
who seem to take delight in the idea of others in suffering. They at least seem apathetic to the suffering
of others. I remember, one night in
Gilbert, I passed a street corner where a youth group was standing, shouting
and holding signs up to the passing cars and assuring us of our place in Hell. There was not even an attempt to offer a way
out; which one might expect from them. (Oh God! Where’s my fire insurance!) That is
near the top of my list of “bad evangelism techniques.” It’s not number one—someday I might tell you
what is—but it’s close to the top.
I have heard
Christians speak of wanting to see atheists burning in Hell, because “that will
show the atheist who was right.” I
somehow think these Christians have missed some basic understandings of loving
our neighbors as ourselves, and they attribute human wrath (and a longing for
vengeance) to God. St. Paul admonishes
us to put away things that are earthly, and set our minds to things above. I submit that longing for God’s wrath to fall
upon others is a misplaced and earthly hope.
On the other
hand, there are Christians who claim God is love and mercy with no hint of
disapproval of anything. I might lean
more towards this view, because it has been important for Christianity to
reclaim a sense of the goodness of the world God has made. Yet, I am also troubled by this view. If God gives an unqualified ‘yes’ to all we
do, then God is essentially giving license to all forms of discrimination and
abuse we see. That is not good news to poor and the oppressed, who often suffer
for the sake of the comfortable and the powerful.
How do we
reconcile a notion of a God of mercy and love with a God capable of wrath?
This question is
why I want to stay with the reading from Hosea, because in this passage from
Hosea, we have one of the very few inner monologues of God recorded in
scripture. And in this passage God has
to reconcile those very notions of wrath and mercy in God’s own mind.
Let us return to
the text. After describing Israel’s
abandonment of God, We hear God describe God’s tender care for Israel as though
a parent caring for a child. The
language is evocative and heartrending as God says:
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,I took them up in my arms;but they did not know that I healed them.I led them with cords of human kindness,with bands of love.I was to them like thosewho lift infants to their cheeks.I bent down to them and fed them.
Can you picture such
a scene?
Perhaps you have
lived it.
The care for an
infant.
The devotion to a
life not your own.
Sometimes, the
pain of separation.
God remembers
taking Israel out of Egypt.
God remembers
protecting Israel in the wilderness,
God remembers
feeding Israel.
God remembers establishing
relationship through covenant.
God remembers
Israel’s turning away.
God remembers
what once was.
God struggles, and
gives thought to deserting Israel who has strayed so far. Wrath and anguish, memory and love collide
within God. God suffers a contradiction.
Until God
remembers who God is. God speaks in the
text again:
How can I give you up, Ephraim?How can I hand you over, O Israel?My heart recoils within me;my compassion grows warm and tender.I will not execute my fierce anger;I will not again destroy Ephraim;for I am God and no mortal,the Holy One in your midst,and I will not come in wrath.Theologian Stacey Simpson Duke describes the passage this way: “This is not the story of the prodigal son who, having struggled with his own bad choices, finally turns and comes home. This is the story of a prodigal God who—in anguish, heartbreak, and the fiercest love—comes seeking out the children who have strayed.”
God violently
recoils at the thought of abandoning Israel.
And the components of the divine life, specifically divine wrath and
divine love come together. They fuse to
each other in a new purpose.[1] God will seek out and liberate Israel again with
the ferocity of a lion…with a roar to which God’s people will respond with
trembling, but God will not
abandon them.
Beloved of God,
listen carefully.
The simplicity of
the Gospel is that God loves us.
The difficulty of
the Gospel is the recognition that God loves all with the exact, same, equal
loving regard, and so all are
worthy of our love and care. This is a
powerful claim of the Christian faith--a powerful truth which deserves
unreserved proclamation.
Our God is a god
of love who has promised to stay beside us and never abandon that which God has
made. It is a love deeper
than wrath yet fired with passion by anger at the human capacity to injure
others--and in injuring others we subvert God’s equal regard for our neighbors.
But there is a
difference between God’s wrath and human wrath. We’ve seen human wrath in the world. While human ways
of showing power seem to be demonstrations of destruction, the imposition of
will upon others, and the hording of resources, borne of malice and greed, God
says ‘no’ to these forms of power and call us to a different way.
For the power of
God is love, a life-giving power stronger than anything the world can summon. The
power of God is the power to bring about the fullness to which we are called to
reach through the indwelling of the Spirit of God.
All of the divine
life--especially love, but also anger--come to the creative purpose of restoring
the world which God has made--
to liberate those
under oppression,
to mend that
which has been broken
to call into
being healing and peace where sorrow and division fester.
To bring
generosity where greed reigns.
To bring
forgiveness where situations are thought to be irredeemable and hopeless.
The deepest trait
of God is that all else about God gives way to a ferocious love fused with a passion for all that beckons us to follow. As St. Paul
says, we are clothed in a new self which restores within us the image of Christ
and our Creator. God relentlessly seeks
us, desires to recommit to relationships with us, invites us into--and empowers us
for--the renewal of the world, which is God’s labor of love. It is a fierce love that seeks to work
against that which destroys what God creates us to be. It is a love with a sense of urgency, drawing
us to God even as it propels us into the world and toward our neighbors.
May you listen
carefully for where God calls you to act in love for another.
May you may know
it when a godly anger at injustice stirs within you God’s call to act.
May you know when
it is your turn to be a prophet.
Amen.
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