Hosea 11:1-11; 
Psalm 107
Humans just seem to have a hard time with having enough. We all want to have more. And as St. Paul reminds us, that act of “wanting more – and more, and more” takes us away from God. The act of wanting becomes our god; we idolize greed. We worship it. We end up choosing all those things that money can buy over God. Amazingly God wants us anyway. Even with all that greed-worship, God still chooses … us.
The whole book of the prophet Hoses is about that love affair God has with us wayward humans who over and over again make the wrong choices. Hosea reminds the people of all the things they have done, and how angry this has made God. But in one of the most poignant verses in all of scripture, Hosea uses the intimate language of home and family to describe just how deep God’s love is for us:
When Israel was a child I loved him … It was I who taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up in my arms … I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down and fed them …
The people of Israel have been faithless and foolish. They have worshipped other gods, they have not followed the law God gave them through Moses. They have been greedy, unjust, selfish, murderous, adulterous – you name it. You know the drill. But through it all, this is how God talks about these people: with words of poignant passion, with the never-ending love of a parent for a child.
But as for us – well, there are some lessons that we never learn. Somewhere in all of our lives is a place like the Gulf of Mexico, a place that absorbs all of our baser instincts. I have heard that as terrible as this oil spill is, it is just the last assault in a long line of problems: pollution, excessive drilling, over-fishing. The dead spot in the Gulf is the result of fertilizer run-off from the upper Mississippi. The levees on the Mississippi keep the river in its banks (mostly) but also cause the erosion of the fertile and protective wetlands. The Gulf has been the place where if we wanted more, we just got it, no matter what the consequences. We greedy human beings know that place well; somewhere in all of our lives is a place like the Gulf of Mexico.
But also somewhere in our lives is a place where the love of God is known, a place where we know just how much God loves us in spite of our tendency to be greedy. There is always a chance to turn around. Even in the Gulf of Mexico many people are saying, Now, maybe, we can start really to clean it up, to figure out ways to end the complicated chain events that so pollutes that body of water and hurts the heart of God. If we can begin to turn things around there, don’t you think we can begin to turn things around here? God is waiting. Like a parent teaching a child to walk, God is cheering us on.
[i] Matthew 6:19-20
[ii] http://thelisteninghermit.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/lifting-our-mater-from-our-materialism/
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures in heaven …”
When I was a child, the priest switched around the words of that verse from the Gospel of Matthew. He quickly rectified his mistake, we all laughed, and he continued with the offertory sentence in the familiar way:
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”[i]
I think one of the reasons we laughed is that many of us probably wanted to lay up treasures on earth, despite all those risks Jesus mentioned. We would nod sagely at the prospect of the true treasure that would lie in our hearts, but isn’t the desire to accumulate things just built in to human nature? A dictionary search on the word “greed” reveals the Old English word grædig, meaning “voracious” or “covetous.” The root is found Old Saxon and Old Norse, in words meaning hunger, or eager. In Greek, the word was philargyros, literally, “money-loving.” A German word for it is habsüchtig, from haben “to have” + sucht “sickness, disease,” with sense tending toward “passion for.” The word “greed” has long conveyed, in many languages, the power of just how eagerly we desire things – indeed greed “is a sickness to have something.”[ii]
Or, in the words of Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of the 1987 film, Wall Street, “Greed is good.” If such a tendency toward greed is an old human trait, so too do equally ancient sacred texts urge us to turn from these wicked ways. Jesus is very much in this very real world here, with his conversation with the unnamed man he calls, “Friend.” Jesus is not particularly nice to this “friend,” teasing him ironically, and then denouncing the man’s concerns with the wealth he seems to be assuming is rightfully his.
Humans just seem to have a hard time with having enough. We all want to have more. And as St. Paul reminds us, that act of “wanting more – and more, and more” takes us away from God. The act of wanting becomes our god; we idolize greed. We worship it. We end up choosing all those things that money can buy over God. Amazingly God wants us anyway. Even with all that greed-worship, God still chooses … us.
The whole book of the prophet Hoses is about that love affair God has with us wayward humans who over and over again make the wrong choices. Hosea reminds the people of all the things they have done, and how angry this has made God. But in one of the most poignant verses in all of scripture, Hosea uses the intimate language of home and family to describe just how deep God’s love is for us:
When Israel was a child I loved him … It was I who taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up in my arms … I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down and fed them …
The people of Israel have been faithless and foolish. They have worshipped other gods, they have not followed the law God gave them through Moses. They have been greedy, unjust, selfish, murderous, adulterous – you name it. You know the drill. But through it all, this is how God talks about these people: with words of poignant passion, with the never-ending love of a parent for a child.
But as for us – well, there are some lessons that we never learn. Somewhere in all of our lives is a place like the Gulf of Mexico, a place that absorbs all of our baser instincts. I have heard that as terrible as this oil spill is, it is just the last assault in a long line of problems: pollution, excessive drilling, over-fishing. The dead spot in the Gulf is the result of fertilizer run-off from the upper Mississippi. The levees on the Mississippi keep the river in its banks (mostly) but also cause the erosion of the fertile and protective wetlands. The Gulf has been the place where if we wanted more, we just got it, no matter what the consequences. We greedy human beings know that place well; somewhere in all of our lives is a place like the Gulf of Mexico.
But also somewhere in our lives is a place where the love of God is known, a place where we know just how much God loves us in spite of our tendency to be greedy. There is always a chance to turn around. Even in the Gulf of Mexico many people are saying, Now, maybe, we can start really to clean it up, to figure out ways to end the complicated chain events that so pollutes that body of water and hurts the heart of God. If we can begin to turn things around there, don’t you think we can begin to turn things around here? God is waiting. Like a parent teaching a child to walk, God is cheering us on.
[i] Matthew 6:19-20
[ii] http://thelisteninghermit.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/lifting-our-mater-from-our-materialism/
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