The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, 2016 – Hosea 1:2-10; Colossians 2:6-15; Luke 11:1-13
Father, Hallowed be your name.
When we turn to Jesus and ask him to help us know how to pray, the first word Jesus says is this: Father.
He does not tell us first of all “how”; he tells us first of all “who.” Father. This word is where all prayer begins. Know this, this one word and the weight of love it speaks, and prayer will follow.
Some of you this year have just become fathers. So you know already, I am guessing, something of what this word means. Jeff, Dad of the adorable Jonah, recently wrote this about becoming a father: “I have never experienced such overwhelming spontaneous emotion as when Jonah popped into the world. I was overcome with tears of intense joy, relief, amazement…everything.”
Jonah and Lewis, Nayla and Estella, these new babies; these new dads. Those of you who have been dads a little longer can also say this: it is a love that does not end. This love will go with you the rest of your lives, in good times and in bad. It will be there when your child is happy and when she is sad. It will be there when he is good and when he is really very bad. It will be there as she gets older and becomes amazingly, beautifully, herself; each child growing into the fullness of their own lives; a miracle. This love only grows. Always it is there, in good times and in bad, a crown upon your head…and a sword that shall pierce your heart also.
When Jesus names God “Father” to the people who long to know how to pray, it is all this that he says.
Our God is Father first of all, and he carries us in his heart.
Such a weight of love there is in this word, such joy and grief together. Joy because we are God’s own children; it is he who has made us and not we ourselves; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. That is the ancient song of Israel, and it is the song of the Lord too. Joy is there in this love of the Father, joy before and behind all things. But there is grief too. As anyone who has been a father knows, there is grief too. For our children do not always do the good that we long for them to do. And sometimes they turn away. Never for a moment are they any less our children, these miracles of beauty whom we love, but the do sometimes turn away.
This is the Father’s grief. This is the grief the Father knew in the days of Hosea long ago.
When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.”
Hosea speaks from the Lord an anguished vision of the devastation of the land. The valley of Jezreel is covered with blood from the internal warring of God’s people, from the strife of the nation now split in two; the people of God finds Baal an attractive alternative to their God and certainly more au courant. The people shed blood at the high places of Baal; they turn away from the Lord. Lo-ammi, God says through the prophet Hosea: not my people. You do not wish to be my children anymore.
The result is devastation, the blood of the valley of Jezreel shadowing the land. An army gathers at the borders of Israel and it will, Hosea says, overwhelm the people.
Lo-ammi: not my people. There is a huge cost in turning away from the God who has made us. Israel falls apart, and the 10 tribes of the northern nation are scattered and amalgamated by the Assyrian conquerors…and God’s people still to this day await their return.
But this cost is a sword that pierces the heart of the Father too. The cost is not only for God’s people.
What Hosea reveals in his life of witness is this: even when God’s people turn away, precisely then God is their Father too. This is the love that never ends.
So Hosea does not just speak the words of God’s judgement, the sword that pierces the nation and the heart. Be a sign, God says. Live in your life the cost that is real. So Hosea marries a woman who is not faithful and in his children who are forsaken, Hosea knows Israel’s abandonment. Hosea lives God’s faithfulness and God’s grief, for the wife who forsakes him, for the children who are forsaken. Hosea lives and does not just speak the love that is grief, because this is the way God loves. God does not stand afar off, pronouncing judgement. In his prophet, God stands in the midst of his people.
God loves them like a husband loves his wife, and he is grieved to the heart.
If God declares judgement on Israel he does not leave his people alone. He is with them, Hosea’s life says, in love and in grief.
The constancy of God, the great heart of the Father, is known most of all in Jesus the Christ.
Father, forgive them, Jesus says.
Here is God with us, standing here in our midst, even when we do not want to be with him. Here he is, hauled before Pilate, mocked by the soldiers, condemned by the people. Jesus suffers in his own body our rejection of God. And he suffers its cost.
While we were yet sinners, Paul says, Christ died for us. When you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him. Even then, when the people wanted only to spit on him, Jesus loved us. He stood there, God with us, even then. He forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He took it away, the whole weight of our God-abandonment, lifted it off our backs, nailing it to the cross.
Father, forgive them, Jesus said. This is the love of God.
If there is one thing Hosea says to God’s people today it is this: do you see the kindness of the Father, the depth of God’s love? Do you see its faithfulness and its anguish? Mark the cost of our turning away. It is written in the nailmarks on Jesus’ hands.
And mark on his hands, too, the Father’s love.
Jesus loves us, this we know. In him who died for us, the Father’s love.
Father. This is the first word and the last. To God our Father we pray. At all times and in all places we pray. Father, God with us, hallowed be thy name. God our Father, we thank you for your love. Show us how to be your children. Show us how to love you in return.
AMEN.
