It started during the summer between my 8th and 9th grade years. I was a good kid. I always had been. I was raised in the church. I’m at least fourth generation in the Stone-Campbell Movement on both sides of my family. I had a long history of church camps, bible classes, of VBS and “churchy” events under my belt. I’d been liberated through the waters of baptism after years of walking with my parents and learning the rhythms and moves of faith. I’d learned by watching and listening to them because they were the very presence of God in my life. But there was something that summer, there was something about that group of older teens, something about them that intrigued me.
It started at a work camp, actually. I haven’t seen a work camp here in Detroit like we had back in Tulsa, where youth groups from all over town would come together to partner for a week to go into downtrodden neighborhoods and scrape and paint houses, just as a way to try to help bring a gift of life, a little new blessing into neighborhoods.
And it was during that week of work camp that I worked beside a group of juniors and seniors that were from my own youth group. But as a junior high kid, I just didn’t know them. Our middle school and high school groups were split apart and so I hadn’t had a chance to meet this group of teens.
I was at that age, at that point in my life, where I was desperately longing to be drawn in and accepted. I wanted to be able to trusting others. So I decided to trust in these new friends. They were older. They had cars and could get me wherever I wanted or needed to go. They had jobs and more money and could help pay for me when I didn’t have it. They were popular and simply getting noticed by them gave me a whole different sense of self-worth. It made me feel important. It made me feel certain. It made me feel secure.
All the while I was slipping further and further from who I was. I was becoming more and more alienated from my family. I started moving to the music of another life, not to the rhythms of the self-emptying, God-like love my parents had shown me.
As my 9th grade school year rolled around, I know my parents had hoped for a new beginning. I was heading to a new school and getting a new start in so many different things in life. Much to their chagrin, I was increasingly a frustration to my parents…. I was an ornery kid; I was volatile; and I was more than a little too big for my britches.
Soon enough, as you can imagine, the tension in the family hit the breaking point and culminating in a fight on stairs with dad. We’d been in the kitchen. My parents simply wanted to talk to me…. To make the effort, the plea to me to think about what I was doing and who I was becoming. I refused to listen. And when they kept talking, kept pleading and insisting, I decided that I’d had enough and I walked out of the kitchen and headed up the stairs. My mom stopped at the bottom of the stairs, but my dad followed me up. Half way up the stair on the landing he put his hand on my shoulder, gently trying to get me to stop. I turned and shoved him away. And we instantly broke into a wrestling match on the stairs, right next to an eight-foot tall stained glass window. My mom stood at the bottom weeping. My dad, wrestling for me. My mom, broken-hearted and crying for me. And I was wrestling for my independence.
Things seemed to calm down from that point on. There was less tension, less fighting, less… well, less of a relationship. Looking back, I think that my parents had decided that they needed to turn away, not to refuse to love me, that was something they never could do, but because they loved me. And while we lived in the same house, there was a lot of silence for a while, while I kept turning from my parents, from the ones who gave me life, to other things.
Yahweh and the Northern Kingdom
Over the past several weeks, Klint’s helped us to enter into the experience of God and Israel through the eyes of the prophet Hosea. The Northern Kingdom of was at the height of rebellion. They had turned from the Lord their God, their only savior and comforter, and put their trust in so many other things:
They kept turning to the great foreign power, Assyria, from whom they erroneously expected help again and again. Even though it was the Lord their God who delivered them from Egypt.
They kept turning to the Baals to make their land and their fields fertile and to give them a good crop. Even though it was the Lord their God who provided them with their daily bread, with manna and quail in the wilderness and water from a rock.
They kept turning to their own military strength, which had surely grown as the nation of Israel grew stronger and wealthier and more established. Even though the Lord their God had proven it was not their own might but God’s that brought them into the Promised Land.
Because of their rebellion, God had wrestled with Israel, pacing internally over God’s wayward child, struggling to know how best to respond, torn between the compassionate love of a mother whose womb grows warm and tender at the sight of her child and a parent who knows that a child’s incessant turning must eventually bring about his collapse.
So Israel, like a child dizzy from turning and turning after all of the ephemeral and fleeting and failing things she’s trusts and wants, fell….
And many years down the road, with the fall of the northern kingdom as good as complete, the word of the Lord again came to Israel through the prophet Hosea…
Hear the Word of the Lord from Hosea 14:
Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
Take words with you
and return to the Lord;
say to him,
‘Take away all guilt;
accept that which is good,
and we will offer
the fruit of our lips.
Assyria shall not save us;
we will not ride upon horses;
we will say no more, “Our God”,
to the work of our hands.
In you the orphan finds mercy.’
I will heal their disloyalty;
I will love them freely, I will love them spontaneously
for my anger has turned from them.
I will be like the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom like the lily,
he shall strike root like the forests of Lebanon.
His shoots shall spread out;
his beauty shall be like the olive tree,
and his fragrance like that of Lebanon.
They shall again live beneath my shadow,
they shall flourish as a garden;
they shall blossom like the vine,
their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?
It is I who answer and look after you.
I am like an evergreen cypress;
your fruitfulness comes from me.
Those who are wise understand these things;
those who are discerning know them.
For the ways of the Lord are right,
and the upright walk in them,
but transgressors stumble in them. “
The disaster has already taken place, but Yahweh, the God of Israel, desires a new beginning, for it was not the Lord their God but Israel’s guilt, Israel’s fickle turning, that brought his collapse.
But Israel is not the center of this story; God is.
And in the strange economy of God, a fall is rarely final. The Lord their God was there. The Lord their God had already turned. The Lord their God was waiting with open arms to embrace God’s dizzy and stumbling son.
This is the center, the kernel, the heart of our entire passage today. As the threat of collapse follows God’s verdict from chapters 12 & 13, so the announcement and promise of abundant life springs unexpectedly out of Israel’s fall.
Like a mother offering a hand to a little child looking at a room that is still spinning in his head, God promises to take Israel from his dizzying turning to the secure presence of God. God’s steadying voice declares:
I, the Lord your God, will heal your wayward turning, your disloyalty.
In the midst of your sickness and near death, I will breath new, resurrection life into you.
I, the Lord your God, will love you spontaneously, freely.
There is nothing that you can do, nothing you can offer that will earn you my love. Trust in me, for in my holiness I am setting in motion a completely new future for you!
I, the Lord your God, will turn from my anger and turn right back to you.
Even while you were turning from me, I was turning back to you. I will no longer haunt you like the lion, the leopard, or the angry bear. I the Lord your God am the dew, which gives life and growth, which is always present even when not seen. You will be nourished by my healing and life-bringing love. Israel will blossom forth anew. His roots shall be deep and he shall flourish and rest in the shelter of my shade.
From his dizzied turning, from desolation, from dryness, and from death, waters will fall and new life will spring forth for Israel. Israel will rest again in the shade of a tree. Israel’s faithfulness, his fruitfulness will come from God, not from Assyria, not from the gods he made by own hands, not from within himself. It is God who looks after Israel. The Lord his God will give him life.
So, here, after letting Israel fall, on the brink of total collapse, the strange God of Israel has the last word, a word of hope and promise to Israel… if only he will listen.
BACK TO TULSA:
I think that this is the wisdom that my parents knew. You see, they had been learning from the ways of Israel’s strange God their whole lives. They were brilliant parents, even in the midst of my growing longing for independence and my rebellious turning. They understood that sometimes you can’t steady someone who is dizzy, but you must let them fall, no matter how hard. Sometimes that is the only way that their idols will crash and be revealed for the idols they are.
Yet, my parents were there. They were always there. Even before I had fallen, even in the midst of the battle, my parents had already turned away from their anger and turned back to me. They were ready to heal my disloyalty; they were anxious to love my freely and spontaneously. Not because of anything that I’d done, but because I was no orphan but their child. I was the child of their womb and they longed to have compassion on me.
To many of you, this may seem unimaginable. You’d never struggle with your family. You’ve never had a fight. You’ve never wandered from a very straight and very narrow path. You couldn’t imagine your children doing anything rebellious or ever questioning you.
To others this may sound like a page off of children’s book. I know that there are others who are sitting here who have been to places far darker than I’ve ever been. You’ve turned to far greater challenges. You’ve trusted in things that are far more insidious than I ever did.
But the truth is that the story we encounter in Hosea, and the surprising act of the grace of God in chapter 14 is not just Israel’s. It is our own. This God, the Lord their God, is not just their God but is ours.
Much like Jonah, the prophetic ministry of Hosea ends abruptly, with little resolution. Instead, of “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey might give us, we read a word of exhortation to us.
Those who are wise understand these things; those who are discerning know them.
For the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them.
This is a word to us. This is our “summons to understand and to follow. Every reader, every one of us, is called upon to decide between discipleship and revolt and thus between walking or stumbling in our dizziness…. “These words are not just for Israel for also for us, that we might discover and the following the way of Israel’s God as the way of the present and of the future” (Wolff).
We each struggle with our own idolatry, with trusting in and turning to things that are not God for safety, for security, for pleasure, for what feels like life.
But even in our dizziness, even in our dizziness, if we turn and reach out our arms to embrace God again, we’ll discover that God has already turned, opens God’s arms, and enwraps us with the healing embrace of his love.
This is gospel… the Word of the Lord.
Let's pray together:
Oh Lord God,
Our lives are spent turning
Like children dizzied by the colorful array of toys
Lining the toy store shelves
We turn.
Voices from within and without promise to bring us
Hope
Joy
Security
Fulfillment
Hollow pleasure.
We hear their siren’s call and spin to find them.
But in our dizzied turning,
Amid the cacophony of voices
We stumble,
Not knowing which way to turn
Not knowing which voice to trust
Amid the seductive calls and hollow promises
We hear your voice again
Prompting
Inviting
Promising
Stilling
Yet it is hard for us to turn to you
It is hard because we put our trust in so many other places
In the future of the market
In the possibility of our jobs
In people and in relationships that we can manipulate
In our own ability and gifts and skills
In the security of our own religious traditions
We trusted in these because we believed they were predictable, controllable, familiar.
It is hard to turn to you because the gods we’ve made,
The gods that we’ve crafted, that we’ve given life and trusted,
Keep calling
Arresting our attention
Commanding our devotion
Demanding our energy
So that they might live.
But we long for liberation for our idols’ demands, for they are
For they are overwhelming
For they are exhausting
For they are dizzying
They are bringing us death
But above it all we hear the promise of your voice
From our dizzied spinning we stop and turn definitively to you
We turn from the gods created by our own hands to you,
To the uncreated and eternal one who turns from your anger and turns back to us.
To love us
To forgive us
To embrace us
Redeem us through your lavish, liberating forgiveness
Renew us by your relentless, free love
Steady us with your healing embrace
We return to you…, turn to us.
Amen.
1 comment:
Beautiful.
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