God invests in us

Proper 21-C September 26, 2010

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16;

1 Timothy 6:6-19 ; Luke 16:19-31

Today’s lessons would, on the surface, to seem to have nothing to do with us.

The prophet Jeremiah, whom we have been reading for some weeks – Jeremiah, the prophet who is speaking for God, telling the people of Israel why they are about to be invaded, their temple destroyed and their families moved into exile – Jeremiah now is talking about buying land – in Jerusalem! As the invaders approach! As the Temple is destroyed! In the face of the end of life as they knew it, Jeremiah buys property. Jeremiah invests in the future – in a land that will not belong to the people of Israel for a very long time. Jeremiah buys a stake in the future – a very far off future, to be sure, but a stake nonetheless. Jeremiah buys a stake in God’s future: the people of Israel will be restored to their home. Not now, perhaps, but some day.

The reading from Timothy, and the gospel parable from Luke, are admonitions against the rich: the merciless, wealthy man is sent to Hades, to suffer torment, because he did not share his abundance with the poor man, Lazarus, who after death rests with the blessed Abraham in heaven. In the words of a parable, “a great chasm has been fixed” between the poor and the wealthy, and it is clear what side of that chasm God wants us to be on. Timothy, too, hammers the point home: if we are trapped by our desire for riches, riches and more riches there will be no room in our lives for God. What does Timothy tell us to do?

… to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for [our]selves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that [we] may take hold of the life that really is life.

Why do these lessons seem to have little to do with us? We have just heard the news that our church will close – because we aren’t wealthy enough to keep it going. So, we know the opposite side of these lessons first hand: we are about to go into exile ourselves, like the people of Israel; and we know all too well the life of Lazarus. We know of that “great chasm” between the wealthy and the poor, and we know what side of that chasm we are on.

There are plenty of religious groups who base their faith on optimism. Everything is getting better and better all the time. For some of these people, life is always Easter. You get richer? It’s a sign of God’s blessings. You get poorer? Well, you’d just better work harder and see what God can do for you. I wonder, sometimes, when the tsunami of life hits people in those churches, what they would do? If God is always about sunshine, can they see God in the shadows? If God is always about growth and increase and building, can they see God when things are falling down around them?

Like Jeremiah, I KNOW that God is in a place like St. Paul’s Church. I KNOW that God stands with a family whose house is being foreclosed and taken away from them. I KNOW that God eats lunch at the Table. Like Jeremiah, I KNOW that God invests in the future and that God is with us, here and wherever we go, for the long haul.

St. Paul’s has been a church of remarkable generosity. St. Paul’s has been a church of sincere good works. St. Paul’s has been a church always ready to share.

Like Jeremiah buying that plot of land, God has invested in you. You are the deed that will last a long time, and in your very selves you embody the promise that God will always be here.

Picture Jeremiah, standing in a field which is surrounded by land no longer owned by the people of Israel. He has staked out this little plot in a world now taken over by strangers. In the midst of something that should seem desolate, Jeremiah – and God – have grabbed hold. They have faith, so why shouldn’t we, that even when so much changes here, when other people are in charge, that this very ground on which we stand belongs now and always to God.

We have been entrusted with this plot of land for some time, and now it may pass to someone else. We have been entrusted with a piece of God’s mission for some time, as well, and have faithfully fulfilled that mission with grace, generosity and compassion. We have welcomed the stranger and fed the hungry. God has invested in us, and we, who have been shaped by the work of this place will carry that mission with us wherever we go.

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Proper 20 C September 19, 2010

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9

1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

In the Broadway musical, “Fiddler on the Roof,” the people of the little Jewish village in Russia pray, “God bless and keep the Czar … far away from us!”That very same sentiment is found in our second reading, from Timothy: pray for those kings, rulers, magistrates, police officers, immigration agents, and even bishops (!) – “all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life” – far away from us!

As much as we might want that, especially in church, especially in a place we hold sacred, and on Sunday morning – a time we hold sacred – as much as we might yearn for that quiet and peaceable life, the Word of God is not the thing that will bring it to us. More often than not, the Word of God de-stabilizes us, upsets us, dismantles our expectations, forces us to change our course, give up the things we thought we so important. Let us hope there is some balm in Gilead – a far-off place – because there is nothing here, Jeremiah says. No comfort left in Jerusalem, where the people have gotten so focused on their worship in the temple, that they have not noticed that God is no longer there.

This passage from Jeremiah is a tough one to hear, because it just seems so hopeless. Isn’t God supposed to help us? To give us pleasant words to comfort and uphold us, especially on Sunday mornings?

A little context about the passage: the people of Israel center their worship of God in the Temple in Jerusalem. They say prayers and perform liturgies that have been passed down to them for generations. They expect that when they pray, “God help us,” God will show up. After all, they use the right words, wear the right clothes, make the right sacrifices. On top of that, they are used to God’s good graces showing up on schedule; it’s the end of summer – where’s the harvest? The sure sign of God’s blessings?

But things are not going so well for the people of Israel. Their temple is about to be destroyed, taken over by foreigners, and they are to be sent away, into exile, in some far-off place. They cannot imagine why this is happening to them. That is where Jeremiah comes in.

Jeremiah speaks for God. He speaks words of anger, grief, love, longing – Jeremiah speaks the great pathos of God. More than anything else, God wants these people he has created to be in relationship with him. And God’s heart is just broken when they continue to turn away. God wants them. God doesn’t want them just to go into the temple and perform rituals. God wants faithfulness. God wants that old relationship he set up with the people at the beginning. God wants the world to be a loving place. God wants the poor to be taken care of, the strangers welcomed, the neighborhoods safe. God knows there is enough of everything to go around – it IS God’s creation after all, so share it! God doesn’t really care that much about the temple, and all its fancy stuff. It just gets in the way. God wants them. The people. His people. God wants us.

God is heartsick that the people aren’t getting it, and he is heart-sick that they are suffering. There is no help for their dis-ease there in Jerusalem, in the temple, in the establishment. Maybe in Gilead, maybe far away. But not here.

That is what that passage is about. We’re reading these bits from Jeremiah this fall, and eventually we’ll get to the end, eventually we’ll get to see how Jeremiah helps the people of Israel put their lives and their faith back together after they have been shattered and destroyed and told they have to leave their home. Eventually, but not today.

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the most sacred day in the Jewish religion. It is the Day of Atonement, coming some days after the celebration of the New Year. During those days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Jews think and pray and remember how they have not been right with God, or right with their neighbors. On Yom Kippur they read the difficult biblical stories of judgment, like the story of Jonah, who had to sit in the belly of a whale before he could begin to understand what God wanted him to do.

On Yom Kippur, Jews also remember the exile, that defining event that Jeremiah wrote about. That experience of always being far from home, of yearning for comfort and security, of depending on the kindness of strangers, of not being able to walk on one’s own streets or to plant one’s own garden – that experience of exile and displacement is part of how the Jews understand who they are. But even in exile – and this is the core message of Jeremiah – God was with them. A modern writer put it this way:

It is said that when the Jews went into exile, the Shekinah, the divine presence, went into exile, too – hovering over us, around us wherever we were, waiting for us to invite the sacred into our lives.[i]

There is nothing more that God wants than that. God wants us. God wants this world that God has created to shine once again with God’s glory and abundance. The temple in Jersualem did it for a while, but then it didn’t. It stopped being the place where God met the people. It actually started to get in the way between God and the people. It was great for a while, but then its purpose came to an end. It had to go, and the people had to move away. They left their shell of a building behind, and maybe they didn’t understand this at the time, God went with them, too, and waited there, ever patient, ever welcoming, with arms stretched wide.

[i] Sam Kestenbaum. “Yom Kippur at Sea” (New York Times, September 18, 2010, p. A19)

Jeremiah to us: God is calling, and wants you back.

Proper 18 C Sept. 5, 2010
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139: 1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33

“I am the potter; you are the clay.”

Like a lot of the religious clichés we hear, that can be heard in a kind of “happy-clappy” way. We are nothing; we give up all autonomy to God’s all-powerful hand.

Well, God IS all-powerful, and compared to God, we ARE but clay in the potter’s hand, but if we look more closely at two of our texts today – the one from Jeremiah and the one from the Gospel of Luke – I think we will also see that God does not want us just to give up and be nothing but some wet mud. God expects us to act and to live a certain way.

In our first reading, the prophet Jeremiah is struggling with how to interpret current events to the people of Israel. Their “current events” are quite gloomy – they have been invaded by the Babylonians, their temple destroyed, and they and their leaders carried off into exile. Everything they had built – all their glorious past and their plans for an even more glorious future – have been wrecked. They indeed are nothing more than clay smashed by the potter – they are an inadequate and imperfect first attempt at something the potter does not even want to keep on the discard shelf.

This potter has expectations of the clay: if it starts to repent and act in the way God wants, well there is a chance for it. If it chooses life, then it has a chance; if it chooses evil, then it will be smashed.

And in the Gospel – well, once again we read of a harsh and serious Jesus. This is Jesus the construction engineer, Jesus the military strategist. Jesus has great expectations of those of us who call ourselves disciples. We must cast aside everything in our lives that does not concern this task of building. We must be careful planners, and if our foundation is not secure, well, then we must be ruthless destroyers. We must take our clue from Jeremiah’s potter: smash the imperfect clay vessel if it cannot stand up to the expectations of the potter. We must wage only the war that we can win; if not, negotiate the best peace terms we can get.

What kind of good news is this, either from Jeremiah or Jesus? These are tough lessons. But if we look behind them, behind the high expectations that God seems to be laying out here, we find God who reaches out to us in love, and yearns for us to reach back. We find the God of creation, who has shown us mercy and compassion, the God who took us by the hand and loved us as a parent loves a child. This God yearns for us to act like that, too, to love God back but also to love our neighbors with that same compassion and mercy. If we were the clay, that is the shape the potter wishes us to take: a vessel large enough to hold all the bits of this broken and hurting world.

The prophet Jeremiah can talk a lot about destruction, about what we are not – about how we do not measure up to God’s expectations for us. But Jeremiah also talks about building and planting – even as the old established order is being smashed, he is beginning to imagine the new thing that God wants to bring into being. But Jeremiah is a prophet, not a predictor. Neither he, nor we, know what will replace the things around us that are coming to an end. We can only know that we are in God’s good and gracious hands.

What a contrast our psalm today poses to both Jeremiah and the gospel. The psalm tells of God the potter of the human form, the human form God loves and has created in the image of God’s own self. Having been shown such love and care in our creation, can we not understand how much God wants from us, to show this very same love and care to all around us as well?

Proper 17 C August 29, 2010 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1, 10-16 Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14

When the people of Israel trudged out of Egypt all those many thousands of years ago, God expected something of them. Yes, God was generous, yes, God was gracious, yes, God provided, yes, God led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, but really, this was not a free ride. God expected something of them.

The prophet Jeremiah is trying to explain to the people of Israel, now happily ensconced in privilege and luxury in the Promised Land, that God expected something from them when God led them out of Egypt and brought them to this place that they now call home. Jeremiah is trying to explain to them that God is not so happy with them now. Jeremiah is God’s mouthpiece, calling these people back to their first principles, to the events that shaped and formed them as the people of God.

This call to repentance and return would be fairly easy if the people of God were a collection of individuals. Stories of individuals who repent and return to the Lord are very popular – always have been. There was a tv show in recent years called My Name is Earl. Earl, kind of a ne’er-do-well, finds he has a winning lottery ticket, but at the same time he finds the ticket, he gets hit by a car, and has the revelation that this is a sign – that he should now spend his time doing good things, that his life was spared for this purpose. He turns his life around. Now, this is a comedy, not an inspirational show, so all of Earl’s attempts to do good things are played for laughs. But the theme of an individual who can turn his life around, can return to his origins as a good and generous person, does strike a powerful chord in our hearts.

Think also of the beloved holiday tale, A Christmas Carol, where miserly Scrooge – himself the very definition of greed and selfishness – gets hit over the head with the consequences of his miserliness. He wakes from nightmares on Christmas morning, a new person, determined to be generous to the people he knows who are in need.

The problem with these wonderful tales of individual repentance and change in direction are just that: they are individual. And of course, I suppose, we must all start somewhere, and the place we start is right here. I bet the people of Israel, whom Jeremiah is very busy scolding, -- I bet each individual among the people of Israel thought they were being good people, living good lives. They had really gotten into their good and prosperous life. Jeremiah accuses them of Ba’al worship – not worshipping God alone – which might be kind of like the search for good karma that Earl embarks on – kind of, I’ll do some good things, and some more good things will come my way.

But I don’t think that is quite what God had in mind. God called the WHOLE people of Israel out of Egypt – and as God called them, they BECAME a people. God wants a relationship with those people, not with a collection of individuals, but with all those people. If God was generous to them, God wants them – all of them, as a PEOPLE – to be generous with others. Thousands of years later, Jesus is preaching the same message: Friends, set the table and invite everyone in, and let least among you get the best seats. When Jesus delivered that little sermon on hospitality to his friends, in the back of their minds was the story of the deliverance from Egypt. “When I took you by the hand and brought you out of the land of Egypt,” they hear God say, in the back of their minds. One of the first obligations of this deliverance is to show generosity and hospitality to others – to show it to others as God showed it to them.

Today we baptize Aaliyah Naila. We make her a member of the household of God. She becomes one of God’s people – an inheritor of the deliverance from Egypt – and of the obligation to give to others the generosity and hospitality God showed to all God’s people.

And so baptisms are not private, individual things – they are public, group events. We are people-making here. We are adding to our collective. We are enlarging what it means to be the people of God.

And so to you, her family and friends, we join in this process of welcoming this little girl into something much bigger than a collection of individuals. I said this at the baptism we had a few weeks ago, and I will say it again. It takes a village to raise a child. It takes more than a mom and a dad, thinking they have to go it alone. It takes family and friends and neighbors and teachers and doctors and nurses and a faith community – it takes not just individuals, but the whole people of God to show generosity and hospitality and love to this little person, so she can grow up to be the kind of person who can show generosity and hospitality and love to others.

Jeremiah and the Long Haul

Proper 16 C August 22, 2010
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6 Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

We live in a youth culture, don’t we? A culture of instant gratification. A culture of let’s have it now or it’s not worth having. It’s all about the celebrity of the moment. How about that Jet Blue flight attendant who proclaimed that he’d had enough and he wasn’t going to take it anymore, before he grabbed two beers from the airplane galley and headed down the emergency landing chute? Instant celebrity – last week. This week, I haven’t heard anything about him. We live in a culture of NOW.

So when we read this passage from Jeremiah, about God calling him to be a prophet, we read it as, this must be happening to this young boy, now. This is the story of a young person’s call, about a young person’s life – a life blessed by this close relationship with God.

We are embarking on several weeks of reading passages from the Book of Jeremiah, and we will soon see that this book is not just about blessings of the young prophet’s life. It is a long, troubling book of prophecy, some of it angry, some of it full of the disappointments Jeremiah felt when his 40 years of preaching the Word of God seemed to fall on deaf ears – except when the people to whom he was sent to preach abused him and scorned what he was saying. The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, we shall see, is not the book of a young whippersnapper, but the account of “a seasoned prophet,” a “mature, battle-scarred veteran looking back over a long and tortuous journey.”[1] Over the next few weeks, we “people of a certain age” can read this prophet, and perhaps read some of our own life experience in his words.

Jeremiah lived in the midst of the greatest crisis faced by the people of Israel – the crisis which has defined who they would become as God’s people. Their kingdom in Judah was caught between Egypt and Babylon, the superpowers of their day, and Babylon won. Jerusalem was destroyed, and the people of Israel were marched off into captivity in Babylon. Everything they had worked, hoped, dreamed for, was shattered. Their very identity as the people of God was apparently gone. They were done for – now mere stateless slaves, weeping for their past in a foreign land. Why, why, why, did this happen to them? Did the glories of their past, and how much God loved them, then count for nothing? Where was God now?

In the midst of this horrible crisis of death, destruction and displacement, two great prophets arise: Isaiah and Jeremiah. They speak for God, and begin to tell the people of Israel how to make sense of this terrible calamity. Unfortunately, the people of Israel don’t want to hear the answers to their questions, “Why us? Why now?” As we read Jeremiah over the next few weeks, we’ll get a lot of those answers, and we’ll hear Jeremiah’s anger at not being listened to. But today, in this first chapter, we read of his call by God to this thankless job. What does this text say?

The first few verses we read are powerful and poignant. They affirm God’s care and faithfulness. God has known Jeremiah, and each of us, from the moment of creation. And in contrast to this mighty God, who would not feel utterly inadequate? Jeremiah is not inhabiting that celebrity culture that is so familiar to us, that “me first; I am great” culture of stars and success stories we know all too well from our tabloid press, the blogosphere, and talk radio and tv. Jeremiah does not have “self-esteem” issues that just have to be cleared up with a little positive thinking. Jeremiah and each of us ARE dwarfed in every way by the majesty of God.

And yet look what God says: “Do not be afraid, for I am with you to deliver you.” And why? Not just because God loves Jeremiah, just as he loves us, but because God has given Jeremiah the Word of God to speak. Jeremiah is not just making it up as he goes along. “You shall speak whatever I command you,” God tells him. Who would not be inadequate to such a purpose? And of course, if God wants something to get done in this world, then God seems to have no choice but to work through the people God has created – people like us: thoroughly inadequate. Think about this impossible scenario: Jerusalem is shattered; the people are crushed and sent into exile far away, and God sends Jeremiah the Word to tell these people that what has happened to them is also, somehow, their fault. The people do not want to hear what Jeremiah has to say; who would be adequate to this task?

Look again at the text, where God sums up this Word that Jeremiah must deliver: pluck up and pull down, destroy and overthrow. What a shattering message. Can this really mean, the people of Israel think, that God sent this terrible thing to happen to us, that our kingdom, our city, our temple is destroyed? That what we were doing there all those years was somehow not what God wanted us to do? Why would God do such a thing?

Look again at the end of the passage. God appoints Jeremiah to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, but also to build and to plant. That is the key to understanding the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. The destruction of everything the people of Israel had worked so hard to create was necessary in order for the Word of God to build and to plant what God had in mind for them. God’s last Word is not the destruction that the people would see all around them, but new life. New hope. A renewed and re-created world.

Think about your own life and times. What in your life has been shattered and scattered? What destruction has happened to you out of the blue? And what Word did God send to you, to help you understand it? A Word that perhaps at the time you did not recognize or embrace? A messenger you dismissed as a crackpot or irrelevant? A stumbling block you thought was just an irritant in your smooth trajectory to success? Perhaps it is only now that you can look back and see what it meant, and that out of that experience in which you were shattered and overthrown, God was indeed beginning to build and to plant something new and wonderful inside of you.

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[1] http://www.cresourcei.org/lectionary/YearC/Cproper16ot.html

Saints and Superheroes

Proper 15 C August 15, 2010 Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

We are making a saint today. And all around us are a great cloud of witnesses, cheering us on.

Several years ago, Hillary Clinton wrote a book: It Takes a Village. She got the title from an African proverb: it takes a village to raise a child. It takes all the people who love a child, who care for the child’s future, to support that child into maturity. It’s not just the parents, the little nuclear family, who have to carry this burden alone: it takes a village. Or in our modern American context, it takes all of our extended family, the people we are born related to and the people we choose to be related to – our special friends – to support and love a child, and help him or her grow up to be the adult they want him to be.

We are all here today for Ernesto Jose. We are that modern village, a collection of family and friends – some very close to Ernesto Jose indeed, and some of us who maybe are just meeting him today for the first time. It takes all of us to raise this child, or in the words of the baptismal service, it takes all of us to see that Ernesto Jose is brought up in the Christian life and faith. Parents and godparents have the intimate, day-to-day responsibilities, but all of us here today in this church have a stake in how Ernesto Jose grows up. Today, we are making a saint.

What is wonderful about the church is that there are many more saints with us here today, cheering Ernesto Jose on – the Communion of Saints – the great cloud of witnesses, the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. There are those saints who are known only to us – parents, grandparents, loved ones who have died and gone before us. They are with us today. There are those great saints whose names everyone knows – great superheroes in the faith: they are with us today, as well. Today is also the feast day of Our Lady, St. Mary the Virgin, Mary, the mother of Jesus. Yes, indeed, all the saints in heaven and earth are here with us today.

Those saints are like superheroes to us – the examples of wise and brave ones who help us in our everyday lives. When we wonder if we are making the right decision about something important, when we need help with our family, or raising our children, or worrying about what is around the next corner, we can just call those superheroes to our minds, for help and guidance and wisdom. How would we make it without those special personal saints of ours, those superheroes known perhaps only to us alone?

So, as we baptize Ernesto Jose today, we may be making a new saint, but we are also making some new superheroes: you who love Ernesto Jose the most – you parents and godparents and dear friends: you are being made into superheroes today. To Ernesto Jose you will be those great and wise ones to whom he will look for love and guidance. If it takes a village to raise a child, well, in today’s world it takes a village of superheroes to raise a child. We all know the stresses and strains on family life, and no, no one can do it alone. No two parents can do it alone, no matter how superheroic. It takes friends, family, teachers, counselors, fellow church-goers, neighbors. All of us here are cheering you on.

The bible tells us we are running a great race: a race toward God, really, toward our home, toward our hopes for a world in which all children are as beloved and cared for as Ernesto Jose. There are times when that race is tough, the course is bumpy, when we slow down or get side tracked. Sometimes we think we’ll never get to the end, we’re discouraged or troubled. But it is just at those times when the going gets rough that the superheroes really start to cheer us on. That’s when the saints earn their stars and the cloud of witnesses work up a head of steam. They are not going to leave us to run this race alone. Listen. Can you hear? They are with us.

Ernesto Jose, welcome to the company of the saints in light.

Our own personal Gulf of Mexico

Proper 13 C August 1, 2010

Hosea 11:1-11;

Psalm 107

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.

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[i] Matthew 6:19-20
[ii] http://thelisteninghermit.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/lifting-our-mater-from-our-materialism/