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Sunday, August 1, 2010

Lost and Found

Colossians 3:1-11; Hosea 11:1-11

Reverend Richard E. Allen Jr.

I’ve seen them in homes of friends, neighbors, and church members, and maybe you have too.  Snapshots of children:  you walk down the hall or up the stairs, and the children grow before your eyes.  A mother holds a newborn; a toddler in diapers keeps knees bent, holding on to a chair cushion, and looks back over a shoulder; a school portrait displays one child whose smile missing both front teeth; wind whips through hair as an older child kicks a blur of what might be a soccer ball; and a two teens dressed in formal clothes stand beside the car that will take them to the prom.  Those pictures document growth, achievement, and promise.  They hang on walls to remind children that they are loved, no matter what. The pictures repeatedly say that the ones who took and hung those pictures love them as only a family can.  And the pictures promise that the love will last, no matter what the future may hold.

Imagining these pictures can help us understand what Hosea is trying to tell his people. As the forces of Assyria gather at their border and they begin to wonder, “Does God still love us?  If our entire world falls apart, who will care?”  Reflecting on the reality of the situation and Hosea’s words, a pastor comments that Hosea reminds the people of “God’s grace that once amazed.”  In fact, as this pastor notes, Hosea actually gives images of God’s love.  “Hosea does not tell; he shows.  What he shows are portraits of a love whose beginnings we cannot remember and whose end echoes with the roar of transforming power.  [Hosea] walks us down the long hall of our communal memory and points to the pictures hanging on its walls.”  (Stacey Simpson Duke, “Pastoral Perspective:” Hosea 11:1-11, in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, page 292.)

Hosea’s images picture a God who is like a loving mother or supportive father. Hosea speaks prophetically, in God’s voice:  “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” (Hosea 11:1, New Revised Standard Version) The picture is a boy, coming home for dinner at sunset.  Do you see it?  And it’s a picture of deliverance, as God uses Moses to bring the nation from slavery to a promised and promising land.  And more pictures, a wobbly toddler and skinned knees:  “It was I who taught Ephriam to walk, I took them in my arms; but they did knot know that I healed them.  I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.” (Hosea 11:3-4) Hosea even uses a motherly image for God:  “I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.  I bent down to them and fed them.” (Hosea 11:4) Like a kind, nurturing mother (or father) God is there.  Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann advises readers of these texts to notice the verbs.  Hear again the verbs of compassion, caring, and love, as God hangs pictures of our time together on the walls of our collective memory:  “I loved…  I called…  I taught [them] to walk...  I took them up in my arms…  I healed them…  I led them…  I bent down to them…  [I] fed them…”  If you look closely at the photos on the wall, you can see the food on the floor around the high chair.  “Yes, look closely,” Hosea seems to say.  “See the amazing love of God.  We humans quickly forget.  But God remains steady, true, loving.  God is faithful, even when we’re unsteady, unsure, or as rebellious as teens.”

Comforting words, when we find ourselves in a world out of our control.  It’s hardly news, really, when “WikiLeaks” tells us that our war is beyond our control, beyond even the control of our generals or two presidents – one from each warring party.  We’re not surprised.  Life itself is chaos much of the time, and war even more so. 

Nor are we shocked that the large, once robust ecosystem that comprises the waters and coastlines along the Gulf of Mexico now finds itself endangered by a corporation’s risky, cost-sensitive decisions:  “One ‘blow-out preventer’ is enough,” they decided, analyzing cost and risk.  The decision is BP’s responsibility, of course.  But they decide as they do to provide for us what we’ve come to expect as a right: inexpensive and inexhaustible energy supplies.  We have built lives that depend on such energy, and these our lives are rapidly spiraling out of control.  In this time, as in every time, “this is God’s world,” and God calls us to steward this gift of a planet, a world we casually walk through, like defiant children, worshipping the idol of consumption.  Yes, some photos on our walls capture is as self-absorbed emotional adolescents.

When such chaos looms at our borders and knocks on our doors at night, just as an invading Assyriain empire loomed over tiny, defenseless Israel in his time, Hosea reminds us to look at the photos of God’s steadfast, abiding love hanging on the walls of our faith.  Even as God delivered our ancestors who languished as slaves in Egypt, and brought them to a good land, Hosea wants us to know, God is also with us in the broken, chaotic lives we build for ourselves. God is with us when find ourselves trapped, either by accident or the simple bad timing of having been born here, now, and to our broken, wounded people we call parents.  Our children.  Or neighbors. Life breaks us all, and chaos knocks at every door.  No wonder, really, our favorite song of faith fits our lives as well as the life of the slave-trading, sea-faring sinner who wrote it:

 “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

that saved a wretch like me. 

I once was lost, but now I’m found,

was blind, but now I see.”

As we gather at the table of our Lord this day, we gather as God’s people.  Our lives are imperfect, broken, and even sinful.  But God acts for us.  God loves us.  God calls us.  God takes us in loving arms.  God heals. And God bends down to feed our hungry bodies and famished spirits.

As we come to the table, Christ our Lord walks with us.  Here in the household of God, if we look up with eyes of faith, we see the pictures on the walls, snapshots of the love of God with us through our lives.  When we were children, God gave us good parents; or maybe God gave us teachers or neighbors to teach us love in ways our parents could not.  When we matured, God guided our careers and nudged us toward loving partners we might never have found on our own.  When we made mistakes, God provided loving friends, and even brothers and sisters in Christ to remind us that God never withholds “amazing grace,” even from sinners like us.

So we come to the table in hope, in spite of the messes in our lives, or the messes our lives have become.  God still is God, “and no mortal” whose compassion remains, as it has since the time of Hosea, “warm and tender.”  Come.  See.  Taste.  Know the goodness of God.

So come.  Come with hope, today, and always.

Amen.

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