TRINITY SERMONS

Trinity Presbyterian Church

2200 North Bell Avenue # Denton, Texas 76209

Rev. Craig Hunter

August 1, 2010

It has now been a few weeks since I spent a week in New York State, which is time enough for some of my experiences to settle down in the pond of my memory. Other experiences continue to ripple through my spirit likes waves. In particular, the echoes of Emma, my five-year-old niece, continue to reverberate strongly in my silences these days. "Pick me up by my feet!" she would say again and again, with the single-minded persistence that young children seem to be so good at. "Pick me up by my feet!" which was her way of inviting me to pick her up by her feet and twirl her around, somewhat to the chagrin of my cautious mother. Whenever I would pick her up as she asked, she would squeal with delight, and her entire body seemed to be an extension of the laughing smile that adorned her face. I can't do the same with Katelyn, my oldest niece. At eight years old, she is too big for me to pick up by her feet and twirl around. Perhaps Emma will be too big by the next time I see her, or maybe she won't even remember the delight we shared. But for me, at least, I felt like the experience was a little glimpse into the Kingdom of God.

As most of you know, I don't have children. Maybe you don't either. But all of us, I would wager, I would hope, have experience with children, all of us can identify with or understand the process of raising a child.

The baby boy cries in the middle of the night, at 2 a.m. For the fourth night in a row, he has not slept through the night. The mother gets up groggily, stumbles over to the crib, and lifts the baby out, holding him close to her breast. She smiles at him, coos at him, and the baby boy smiles instinctively back. She feeds him from her breast as she rocks him back and forth in the rocking chair, looking at him the whole time. She loves her child, from the ten pink toes to the tuft of brown hair on top of his head, she loves every bit of him. She would do anything for him. When the baby is satiated, she lays him back in the crib. He will fall asleep quickly and he won't remember these moments. She will take longer to fall asleep, and she won't forget.

A slightly older toddler girl teeters along on the living room floor, her face looking anxiously for the assurance and encouragement that her father's smile provides. She looks as though she will fall any minute, and sometimes she does, falling splat onto her soft butt. But, cheered on by her dad, she is making progress. Soon she will be able to walk without falling, or at least not much. Her father is almost sinfully proud, he can't wait to tell everyone at work about his daughter's progress. Of course, babies learn to walk all the time, it happens everyday, but not for him, not his baby. His baby girl will not remember these moments, but he will, and he will treasure them for the rest of his life.

God, Hosea tells us in our scripture passage for today, is just like those parents. God is like the mother that drops what she is doing to change the diaper of her baby girl. God is like the father that takes a day off from work so that he can stay home with his sick child. God is like the parent that bends down to pick up and hug the young boy after he has fallen off his bike and skinned his elbows. To say that God is just like that is to say that wherever you see these things happen, whether at your own house or someone else's or out in the parks or on the streets, wherever you see these things happen, you are getting a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.

Unfortunately for Hosea, and for us, the story takes a darker turn. The problem is not so much that Israel grows up, but that it makes a series of wrong choices. The people of Israel have gone whoring after other gods, to use Hosea's terminology. They have been chronically unfaithful, breaking their covenant to be God's people. Instead, they have worshipped gods of violence, gods of wealth, gods that provide a false sense of security. They have made choices that seek personal benefit at the expense of the common good. It is the same story told throughout Scripture, the story of sin, the story of a people who lack trust in their God and who consequently forge a golden calf in the wilderness. It is the story of a society where everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes, a society where there is no sense of values or purpose that hold the society together.

Whether we recognize it or not, the story of sin that Hosea tells, the story that the Bible as a whole tells, is our story as well. For while we may have different things and a different worldview than the people of Hosea's day, our spiritual condition is much the same. Even the idols we chase have not changed all that much. We still chase growing bank accounts or greater social status in the eyes of our peers. We still measure our worth, or the worth of our peers, by success at work or in some other category. With the highest incarceration rate in the history of humanity as well as the most disproportionately powerful military in world history, our society is arguably at least as drenched in violence as it was in Hosea's day. Long-term prosperity for many is sacrificed for short-term gain for the few. All too often, we seek opportunities to escape from rather than the strength to face the challenges of our society. Every one does what is right in his or her own eyes, few values bind us together or elicit sacrifice. A society that is bound together more by consumption than by values and a sense of purpose, is a society that has indeed chosen the wrong path. I can just hearing God exclaiming in the background, in Hosea's day and in ours, That's not the way I raised you. I raised you to be better than that, different than that.

God's response to our sin tells us something about the nature of God. God is not indifferent, God is not coldly distant, a god who could care less about what choices we make. The god that Hosea describes, that Scripture as a whole describes, is not an "anything goes" kind of god, a god of karma that stands back and says, "you made your bed, now you lie in it." This is not a god of low expectations, a god whose only requirement is that we meet society's standards for what qualifies as a 'nice' person. This is not a god who is simply interested in teaching us some lessons about life. No, it is, in some sense, too late for that now, the situation has gotten out of hand.

In contrast, the God of Scripture is a jealous god, a demanding god, a judging god. The God that Hosea describes is a god that burns with passionate intensity, and this god is ticked off. God's anger is as real as our sin. Any attempt to downplay the former is an attempt to delude ourselves about the gravity of the latter. Indeed, the story of salvation cannot be told without telling the story of God's wrath.

The story of God's wrath didn't go down well with the liberalism of the early 20th century, and it probably doesn't go down well with liberalism today either. We would prefer a nicer, more tidy, less demanding god. But the words of Reinhold Niebuhr in critiquing such a view are as true today as they were in 1937 when he wrote, "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." The god that Niebuhr describes may be what passes for god in certain segments of society, but it is not the god of Scripture, and certainly not the god that Hosea describes in our Biblical text today.

But while the story of God's wrath is an indispensable part of the story, the story that Hosea tells, that the Bible tells, does not end there. Instead, in verse 8 and 9 of today's text, Hosea imagines a glimpse into the inner life of conflict. This is a rare and poignant text, one of my favorites. It depicts a conflict within God between anger and mercy. "How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my first 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."

This passage suggests that as great as God's anger is with God's people, God's compassion is greater. Indeed, the strength of God's compassion cannot fully be understood without understanding God's anger, for it is only in the tension between the two that we can begin to understand the power of God's sacrifice. What this passage depicts, in other words, is nothing less than a broken-hearted God. A broken-hearted God -- what a thought! Chew on that one for a while. A God wounded by love of us. I wish we could just pause here a bit, let that image of a broken-hearted God settle down in the ponds of your consciousness, reverberating like waves through your words and deeds and silences more powerfully than my niece Emma's delight echoes through me. The image of a broken-hearted God --that's the gospel, it seems to me. Our task is not to understand it so much as it is to proclaim it, and we proclaim it best by becoming God's broken-hearted people ourselves.

For some reason I am reminded of a star, growing heavy and more dense with the weight of more grief, then a momentary contraction for a fraction of a second, then it explodes outward in a supernova sending light and energy and love all over the universe.

Verse 10 is like that, as God positively explodes with compassion, God's roar reverberates through the universe. "They shall go after the Lord, who roars like a lion; when he roars, his children shall come trembling from the west. They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria, and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord."

It is almost as if God the Parent is sitting at home on the couch, flipping through the scrapbook with its pictures of God nursing her children and teaching his children to walk, and suddenly, with the memories flooding over God, the tears start to flow. How can I give you up?, says the Lord Then, moments later, with tears still in the eyes, God springs up off the couch, calls out to the assistant saying, "Empty my bank accounts. Cancel all of my appointments and clear out my schedule. Call everyone I know. We are going after my children, and I will do whatever it takes to get them back, even if it kills me. I will not forsake them."

Of course, as Christians we believe is exactly what happened. The love of God that was incarnate in Christ got him killed. As Christians, our primary image of the broken-hearted God is the image of Christ on the cross.

The good news is that the kind of love Christ embodied, the fearless love of another, is a love that saves, a love more powerful than death, a love that resurrects. This love turns everything we thought we knew on its head. It makes the powers of our world seem weak, and the fears of our hearts look petty.

As the followers of the crucified Christ, as the people of a broken-hearted God, we are called to exhibit that same love to the world. We are called to make sacrifices for those around us.

We see that love in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who forsook a comfortable life in the United States to return to Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II so that he might witness to God's love in the midst of an idolatrous culture. He suspected his Christian witness might get him killed, and he was right.

We see that same love in the life of Albert Schweitzer, who gave up his career as an intellectual powerhouse in Europe to go live and work with the sick in Africa.

We see that same love in parents helping their children with homework, in lovers who drop everything to be with their beloved, in spouses and children who re-orient their lives to care for a loved one with Alzheimer's or dementia, in parents who change diapers at odd hours of the night.

In other words, we see the extraordinary love of God all around us, in diluted forms perhaps, but in ways that are no less real. What's extraordinary is how ordinary God's love is.

I hope that God will open your eyes to that love all around you. I hope that you will grow in your ability to share that love to the world, that God would break your heart for love of another and for love of God's world. For it is only through a heart broken by love that we come to know the broken-hearted God of the cross, it is paradoxically only through a heart broken by love that God heals us and uses us to heal the world.