by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Hosea 11:1-11, Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21
Transcribed from the sermon preached on JULY 31 2022
On Thursday I had the opportunity to join a group of mostly African American pastors to form a cohort for discussing and living out the Gospel post Covid. Cornel West zoomed in from the Bronx in New York to talk and discuss with us, while he cared for his wife who has covid.
One of his main points was that as Christians, we are anointed by the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom of God is within us. And so, as the anointed, we are to leave a little of the Kingdom of God everywhere we go. Primarily, that is done by loving people. He said there are a lot of mega church pastors, a lot of mega churches, but not a lot of mega love. We don’t have to be a mega church to have mega love. We just have to live like the Kingdom of God is real and leave a little everywhere we go. We can be as tiny as a mustard seed and if we follow the way of Jesus, we have mega love.
In both in Hosea chapter 11 and Luke 12 we get images of family love and conflict. Hosea paints a picture of God as father and husband who was exceptionally loving, taking them out of slavery and giving them the opportunity for a good life. Nevertheless, his wife and family were not faithful in return. They cheated on him, rebelled, and went their own way. God was very angry, but he just can’t get himself to throw them out or destroy them. It is similar to the story of the prodigal son with a prodigal wife and prodigal children.
There is a very intimate image of God as parent, lifting children up to their cheek, leaning down to feed them. That is over. Now war is coming. The historical context is from the late 8th century in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Remember from our discussion of Amos, that the kingdom had been divided after Solomon into two, with Israel in the north and Judah in the south. So, Amos and Hosea are preaching at close to the same time and place.
Israel is being forced by Assyria to pay tribute to avoid being invaded. But one the other side, it tries to establish an alliance with Egypt to resist Assyria. God is not happy either way. While the patriarchal metaphor of God as husband who is justified in violence against a cheating wife is not the best image for a feminist conscious faith, in this case the wife represents the men who are the ruling elite, and the children are the common people.
This is like small nations playing the US against Russia or China. The Ukraine wanting to be a part of NATO to protect against a Russian invasion which further leads Russia to want to invade. So, God, according to Hosea, is not happy either way. Rather than the ruling elite of Israel getting into bed to please these other nations and their gods, they should be faithful to their own God and children in their own land. Rather than trying to establish a stable government to help the whole society, there is political maneuvering and coup attempts going on. They are backbiting, slandering, and assassinating each other. In the last years before Assyria invades, multiple kings are overthrown one after another.
5 They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. 6 The sword rages in their cities, it consumes their oracle-priests, and devours because of their schemes. Things are falling apart internally, in the family so to speak.
Now I mentioned Bob Coote’s notion of the three stages of Amos, with the original being from the late 8th century, Amos B from Josiah about a hundred years later, and Amos C from the end of exile. Like Amos, Hosea has similar editors. I suspect verse 8 reflects a post exilic time, when the people want to come back, and God relents from his anger and accepts them back. He is justified in his anger and wrath, but his own heart and love for them won’t let him reject them.
In Luke, Jesus is confronted by a man who tells him to tell his bother to divide the family inheritance with him. Jesus replies, “Who made me judge or arbitrator over you?”
Note that response from Jesus. The man tries to triangulate Jesus into the family mess. When a two-person relationship becomes anxious or conflicted, one or both of the people will try to pull in a third party. Help me and fix this they ask. If you jump in to help by fixing it, you are not only unlikely to fix it, you can easily make it more difficult to resolve. What Andy says to you about Barbara is more about your relationship with Andy than Barbara. We can be in a relationship with two people struggling, but we want to foster direct communication rather than help them avoid it.
So, Jesus dismisses this attempt to drag him into family business. Multiple times in my ministry I have met with a Christian member of a conflicted family, and they try to use some scripture or Christian point of view to justify their position. In a few cases I have had different family members quoting scripture at each other, but they are both doing it with a desire to win the argument and get their way, to prove they are right, the other wrong, and to get me to take their side. Shaming family members with the Bible or Jesus is not likely to get the desired response. Using Jesus or the Bible to convince ourselves that we don’t need to take a look at ourselves or make any change ourselves is more common than it should be. And it is a misuse of the faith.
The real issue is almost always about process rather than a specific content. Focus on the relational issues rather than the specific issue of the will. Is everyone included in the conversation? Have you met face to face. What are the old underlying issues you haven’t spoken about?
More than once I have heard the trend to text out conflict rather than talking face to face. Excuse me for bucking the trend, but this is a bad idea. Email and text are horrible ways to communicate real, complicated feelings, and frequently make things worse. We can text logistics about the necessity to talk and the time and place but hold off on the feelings. Save those for real, honest, face to face encounters where you can see and feel a real human being, and where you can adjust and qualify misunderstood sentences. Email and texting of feelings is a way of deflecting anxiety of real relationship. In the long run it does not reduce anxiety or solve the problem.
When Paul says set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, he is not talking about being disembodied in some spiritual virtual reality. But he does sound Stoic or Greek in that he seems to think things that trigger emotion often lead us astray. He is arguing for staying clear headed. It is very easy to be led by our animal impulses and to act without thinking. Some philosophers today are arguing that what you feel now is who and what you are. Therefore, you should act on your immediate impulse. Yet very often we are not conscious of why we feel a certain way in any given moment, and our current feelings are often related to our stuck and unacknowledged feelings from traumatic relational moments from our past.
There is this great survivalist program called Alone, in which the best survivalists in the world are sent into a freezing wilderness alone, and the one who can stay the longest wins. All of them are tougher than me. I would be lucky to last three days before I would be an emotional wreck. Anyway, this one guy stayed for quite a while, around 45 days and finally was going to give up. The participants are given several cameras and batteries and have to film themselves. So, in contemplation of his impending tap out and then again when he did tap out, he was talking about failing to win and giving up. He was worried that it would affect his survivalist business as people would see him as a failure and a quitter. So, he said that he didn’t care, that people could think what they want but he would do what he needed to. Four times he recorded himself saying these things, always strongly insistent that he didn’t care what the critical people thought.
Now we might think he was very strong and believe him at his word, that he didn’t care if people thought he was a failure. And we might say, good for him for being so strong. But I had two thoughts in response. First, I never thought he was a failure for surviving 45 days. He displayed great skill. He put the thought of considering him a failure into my head. Second, nobody else in the group who was forced to tap out was nearly as worried about the possibility that others would think they were failures. They had great disappointment at not lasting and winning the money, but not nearly as much focus on being judged by others. They didn’t want to disappoint others, but they weren’t worried about rejection. They didn’t feel the need to insist over and over that they didn’t care what critical people thought.
So, in his very act of insisting that he didn’t care about the judgement of others, he showed that this was in fact something he cared a lot about. Clearly, he had critical voices bouncing around his own head. And it is almost certain that those voices started long before he had the concern of a survivalist business or of winning a survivalist championship prize money. He had some judgmental people who were hyper concerned about the opinions of others in his family, probably his father or mother. So, as he was strongly insisting that he didn’t care and wouldn’t worry what others thought, he was showing that he did in fact care and he was worried.
When a young person rebels against their parents and does things they know will disturb their parents, and then claim to reject or not need their parents and their parents values, it is much more likely that they locked into a fused relationship with their parents. They may wish they could let go but at the same time are in fact afraid to let go. Our impulses will often lead us to dead ends that lock in unhealthy behavior and relationship. It does not matter if we cut off from them and go to the wilderness, or to Egypt or San Francisco we still have them fused in our head.
When you are triggered and hyper focused on something, and all your internal thinking and talking can’t get it out of your head, your feelings are probably off and the issue you are focusing on is not likely the core of the problem. It is deeper.
When we have these impulses to act out, with sex or gluttony or greed, and we think “I want this and gotta have it no matter what problems it may cause,” it is highly likely to be animal impulse or some deeper-seated psychological issue we haven’t faced or resolved.
Note that Paul calls greed idolatry. The desire for something, the desire for more becomes our god.
So, it is not that our animal impulses are bad, that our earthly needs are wrong, it is the unselfconscious obedience to them that gets us in trouble. It is tossing out morality or consideration of others’ rights and needs in an effort to get our stuff and get our way by any means necessary. That is what Paul is talking about as the things of the earth.
As followers of Christ, we weigh our desires and impulses on love for others. We weigh what we are willing to do in order to meet our impulsive needs on love. While love is our goal, our focus, we use reason to analyze what is the loving thing to do. We stop and think. And since we are saved by grace, we don’t have to worry about failure or judgement or how we show off or measure up. We die to that judgement and are reborn in grace. Our measurement is with God. God loves us. God forgives us. God calls us.
When others are mean and nasty, when they lie and cheat, when they use false balances and we feel unfairly treated or hurt, it takes great maturity to not reciprocate by being mean and dishonest back.
But as Christians our focus is not them. We are not going to let someone who is mean and dishonest determine how we are going to act. We look to the things that are above, where Christ is. Put away anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language, even when others are doing it. They are not your role model, Jesus is.
Our local pastor Mike McBride introduced Cornel West on Thursday with this story. They became friends in Ferguson, Missouri. During the protest and riots following the death of Michael Brown they were arrested and thrown in jail together. Mike said as they were being processed by the police, West was super kind to all the police officers, greeting them with a smile and saying thank you often. Mike said he was steaming mad at the police and the intransigence of systemic racism in our society. So he asked Cornel why he was treating the police so nicely. Cornel said, “You’ve got to keep the porch light on, just in case they want to come home.”
Cornel knows that we as Christians may be susceptible to the worlds power, but we are operating on God’s power. As Paul says, “We have stripped off the old practices of the world and clothed ourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.” In that renewal, there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, black or white, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.
They just don’t know it yet. That is what God is doing in Hosea too. He is keeping the porch light on in case the people of Israel want to come home to the loving God. May we all Keep the porch light on just in case they decide to come home. Amen.