A Marriage Made in Heaven?

Homily for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost   24 July 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Hosea 1:2-10 (God stretches matchmaking norms)

“Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.”

Hosea 1:2

You’ve probably seen the ads: “Christian and single? Ready for love? Find God’s match for you.”

That’s the hook ChristianMingle.com uses to attract single individuals ─ primarily evangelicals, I’m guessing ─ to use their dating services. ChristianMingle.com’s product? If you’re in the market: software, online assessments, and a database of thousands of photos and profiles to help you find “The One.” That is, “The One” God has destined ─ we presume, since time immemorial ─ for you to marry.

Now, before you take up the pitchforks and torches, a disclaimer: This isn’t a plug for ChristianMingle.com. It isn’t a Rotten Tomato for ChristianMingle.com or any other cyber-alternate to the bar scene. If you found the perfect spouse through ChristianMingle.com, more power to you. Love, love, love. If you think it might be the solution to your search for companionship, knock yourself out.

But I’m stuck on the bordering-on-arranged-marriage premise: “Find God’s match for you … The One.”

Now, if we think God’s will is all about specific life choices ─ discerning somehow the precise Google Maps route God has already charted for how each of us gets from Point A to Point B and beyond ─ what are we to make of what appears to be God’s will for Hosea when it comes to finding God’s perfect match for him ─ finding and marrying and having kids with The One?

That is, is it God’s will that Hosea marry a prostitute? Because that’s exactly what God seems to want. “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom,” God demands, “and have children of whoredom.”

I can’t remember the last time I used “whoredom” in a sentence, can you? So connecting it with finding The One is just baffling. Why would that even be an option?

Picture this: It’s roughly the middle of the eighth-century BCE, long, long after King David and Solomon. Their kingdom is now divided in two, north and south. Israel in the north, hotbed of paganism ─ specifically, Ba’al worship. And Judah to the south, grounded in the worship of God.

Hosea’s vocation? Prophet. Now, remember, prophets aren’t fortune tellers. They’re truth tellers. “If you people keep turning your back on the dream God has for you,” the prophets say, “be prepared to stew in your own juices!” Simple cause-and-effect. Basic truth-telling.

The focus of Hosea’s commission? To re-introduce the northerners (the people of Israel) to their first love, the God of their ancestors.

To impress upon Hosea what’s at stake, God tells him to marry not just any prostitute, but Gomer. Gomer, who probably isn’t a street-corner hooker hailing down traffic, but a Ba’al-temple-sponsored prostitute.

Leaving us to ask, “Is Gomer God’s match for Hosea and vice-versa?”

Not exactly. We’re in a teaching moment, where nothing succeeds like excess. And nothing is as excessive as metaphor. It’s all metaphor here and not Ba’alMingle.com.

Truth-in-advertising: There are any number of interpretations about what is going on here. One way is to look at Hosea as a stand-in for Israel as God dreams it can be: faithful to God alone. And Gomer, the prostitute gone Ba’al-istic? Israel as it is: a people who have forsaken fidelity to God in order to practice the highly-popular Ba’al religion ─ a fertility religion … primarily, fertility in agriculture, the economic base in the north.

That means: The seed-to-bumper-crop fertility of the soil drives the economy. And what drives that fertility? The “sex lives of plants.” Sex. It’s always on the mind of the fertility god Ba’al.

To take these drives to their logical conclusion, Ba’alism is a ball! Its liturgy offers sex with temple-sponsored prostitutes, mimicking the wide-ranging randiness of Ba’al.

And, in its exploitation of women, it runs smack up against God’s will that all be treated as neighbor.

Hosea’s “marriage,” then, to Gomer: It’s God’s way of saying that, if Hosea isn’t successful in dismantling the steamy worship of Ba’al, the metaphorical offspring of his liaisons with the metaphorical Gomer will be:

Jezreel. Named after a horrifyingly bloody massacre in the Jezreel Valley.

Lo-ruhámah. “Not pitied.”

Lo-ámmi. “Not my people.”

Fabulous names for kids. May as well call them Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels.

God’s point here, through Hosea: “Israel, keep it up. That’s right, keep it up. Make a mockery of what has been your heirloom relationship with God — a relationship that values all persons as neighbor ─ and here’s what’s going to happen:

“You will be attacked by war-mongering Assyria. As at Jezreel, your blood will soak the earth, your towns and cities turned to rubble, your remaining people carried off into exile.

“No one will come to your rescue.

“God’s relationship with you will be severed.”

Grim.

And we are left to conclude that ─ metaphor being what it is in Hosea’s case ─ when we pray, “Thy will be done,” perhaps God’s will isn’t the sort of thing that is as specific as the plotlines of our lives, as if life were a board game … a cosmic version of The Game of Life, in which God has determined all the rolls of the dice, plotted out all the moves, the decisions, the prizes, the consequences: career, spouse, college (or no college), college major, job move. Because, where does it end? Picking the right daily special off the menu?

Meaning: God’s will isn’t as complex or manipulative as that. I doubt that God cares what daily special we pick … as long as it’s healthy and leaves a minimal carbon footprint! Similarly, God doesn’t have The One, the perfect and sole someone, out there for each of us to discover, as ChristianMingle’s advertising would have us believe.

Because, if that’s the way God’s will works, what happens when you make a choice contrary to that specific “will”? Let’s say, you marry the “wrong” person. Does that make God edgy? And, as if that weren’t enough, how do you ever pick up the thread of God’s alternate reality? Keep marrying and divorcing until you get back on track? Anyone who’s a fan of science fiction knows that only time travel can fix bad decisions and their infinitely-multiplying fallout. Getting the funding to invent time travel? We can’t even fix bridges!

And yet, we pray, “Thy will be done.” We pray it a lot, pointing to the fact that all the time, energy, and sweat we invest in prayer speaks volumes about us and what we consider to be truly important … and how we understand real need ─ the needs of our neighbors and our own needs, often the simple need to hear and say the comfortable words prayer offers.

And when done right ─ not following the board game/God-as-manipulator route, but exchanging being comforted for exercising comfort ─ our prayers track Jesus’ own pattern of measuring our needs and our neighbors’ needs against God’s needs. What, then, emerges? A relationship with God that is shaped in word and application by the very contours of God’s will, God’s dream.

Why else in the same breath would we bother to pray, as Jesus teaches us, “Thy kingdom come”?

The point: According to Jesus’ own advice on how to pray and how he acted in real time, what God wants ─ what God needs ─ is our participation in God's project of shared abundance:

Daily bread: sufficient and affordable food for absolutely everyone.

Tangible justice, what all are owed (like the elimination of racial profiling so that, like all lives, Black Lives will matter equally).

Meaningful work and a just minimum wage.

Universal and unlimited access to healthcare, learning, and opportunity.

What God’s shared abundance doesn’t look like? Walls. There are no walls in God’s will.

Praying, then, “Thy will be done”: Its first step looks like a litany written by Rebecca Sutton, Program Coordinator of Global Women’s Exchange:

Pray for those who are hungry.
Pray harder for those who will not feed them.

Pray for those who struggle each week to pay their bills.
Pray harder for the wealthy who do not care.

Pray for those who are homeless.
Pray harder for those who deny them shelter.

Pray for the sick and lonely.
Pray harder for those who will not give them comfort.

Pray for those oppressed by unjust wages.
Pray harder for those who exploit them.

Pray for those who bear the yoke of prejudice.
Pray harder for those who discriminate against them.

Pray for those whose basic needs are denied.
Pray harder for public officials who cater to the greedy and ignore those bound unjustly.

Pray for those who cry out for dignity.
Pray harder for those who will not listen.

Bottomline: Pray that God’s will be done. Then do the hard work that will make God’s “kingdom come.” Because ─ as God imagines it ─ that’s a match!

Amen.

Splitting Hairs

Homily for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost  10 July 2016

The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Luke 10:25-37 (Jesus resets the boundaries of a lawyer's neighborhood)

“And who is my neighbor?”  Luke 10:29b

In politics, splitting hairs is always in season. No more so than in this election cycle.

Example: To avoid guilt-by-association and electoral suicide, you can claim the contradictory “Of course, I support the presumptive nominee. I just don’t endorse him.”

Or take a six-pointed star and attendant attack ad, lifted ─ by one of the campaigns ─ from a blatantly white-supremacist site. In context, is it a Star of David, pitched to anti-Semitic voters? Or ─ ignoring altogether the tweet’s provenance ─ is it a sheriff’s badge? And then, too, sometimes a star ─ improbably in this case ─ is just a star. Well, then, what is it? Splitting hairs.

Of course, the hair-splitting bar was set pretty high when a former President was charged with lying to Congress. His tortured defense? “Depends what ‘is’ is.”

But today, not from CNN’s sunny Anderson Cooper … not from Fox’s perennially petulant Bill O’Reilly … or my favorite, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow … but from Luke the Evangelist, no less, we have an exercise in hairsplitting that has the most-hairsplitting of politicians beat. It involves Jesus and a lawyer whose business card boasts, “No hair too thin to split.”

The good news is, the lawyer discovers that Jesus operates under a different motto: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

And that’s what triggers the lawyer’s challenge, “And who is my neighbor?”

A case of honest curiosity? You must be kidding. It’s hairsplitting. Because, sure, the lawyer agrees in principle that God’s Law requires you to love your neighbor.

(Truth-in-advertising: Jesus didn’t invent this stuff. Moses did. In the Law, the Torah.)

But the lawyer wants Jesus to answer the question: “When it comes to loving my neighbor, just how far am I required to go?”

Depends on what “neighbor” is.

Because when you dig a bit deeper into the lawyer’s question (“And who is my neighbor?”) what you've really got is outrageously lawyerly-but-logical hairsplitting. His line of questioning reads as, “Let’s say my neighbor is defined as someone ‘close’ to me. Can we agree on that, Jesus? My neighbor is someone who lives near me. Just how near, then, is ‘near’? One block? Two blocks?

“Or is my neighbor people just like me? Are people I wouldn’t dream of getting close to my neighbor? I mean, is the dishonest tax collector my neighbor? Is the trigger-happy Roman soldier my neighbor? What about an untouchable leper? Just how do you define ‘neighbor,’ Jesus?”

But Jesus has little patience for splitting hairs. So, he reframes the question ─ for a moment, away from the “neighbor” part of “love your neighbor” to the “love” part. “What you’re really asking,” Jesus determines (in so many words), “isn’t a definition of ‘neighbor.’ You’re asking, ‘What are the limits of love?’”

Or, “Who ─ specifically, who ─ is not my neighbor?”

And to help the lawyer answer that one, Jesus weaves the most hard-hitting parable of his entire career ─ perhaps the most hard-hitting parable of all time: “A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers….”

And ─ spoiler alert! ─ you just can’t walk away from this parable with a prayer of splitting hairs!

Because we learn the inconvenient truth of what we’ve always suspected: We’re in the story. And at one time or another we play all the roles: the victim in the ditch … the religious elites whose default is to ignore him … the rescuer, who, from the victim’s point of view, is the most improbable neighbor of all, a “good” Samaritan.

And because we’re all in the story, Jesus’ point is that we’re all neighbors. That’s because we learn from the parable that Jesus lives in a neighborhood that doesn’t even have the kind of fences that make good neighbors. In Jesus’ grasp of economics, walls ─ between people or running the full length of a border ─ come at a price too high to pay.

That also means Jesus lives in a neighborhood that can’t afford the costs ─ the human costs ─ of systemic racism that makes inevitable the violence we’ve witnessed in our neighborhoods this past week:

Alton Sterling. Killed ─ execution-style ─ by police Tuesday while he was selling CDs outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Philando Castile. Killed by police the next day ─ at close range ─ during a routine traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.

And then, Dallas, Thursday evening. A peaceful ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest. Twelve police officers ─ protecting and working with the protesters ─ 12 police and two civilians gunned down. Of the police, five murdered in cold blood by sniper Micah Javier Johnson acting out his own racist rage against white police officers.

Tracking how we got to this point ─ and acknowledging the violence in many minority communities ─ New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow suggests, with uncommonly clear eyes, its inevitability:

Our American “ghettos” were created by policy and design. These areas of concentrated poverty became fertile ground for crime and violence. Municipalities used heavy police forces to try to cap that violence. Too often, aggressive policing began to feel like oppressive policing.

Relationships between communities and cops became strained.

A small number of criminals poisoned police beliefs about whole communities. And a small number of dishonorable officers poisoned communities’ beliefs about entire police forces.

And then, too often, the unimaginable happened.

And we are left to conclude:

The way those Baton Rouge police acted, they broadcast: “Alton Sterling is not my neighbor.”

The murderous Falcon Heights police officer weighed in unambiguously: “Philando Castile is not my neighbor.”

With each round, each bullet, Michael Javier Johnson left no doubt: “The white police officer is not my neighbor.”

This isn’t news, then: We have to get out of this mess. We have to move forward, if we are to survive and fulfil the promise of our professed liberating impulses. But the way forward will remain unattainable as long as we in our communities ─ and those of us who claim to follow Jesus ─ engage in the kind of corrosive hairsplitting Jesus abhors: “Who is not my neighbor?”

That means, as some rightly suggest, we take appropriate steps in criminal justice and police training, in schools and in public conversations, in the moral formation of all our citizenry, so that each of us experiences what we each deserve:  to be treated as neighbor by neighbor.

In practical terms and at its most basic, that means ─ as Charles Blow suggests ─ for each and all to make it home safe each day or night to be with the people we love.

Now, that would look like Jesus’ neighborhood … a neighborhood filled with people all of us at one time or another have placed beyond the limits of our love because of age, physical limitations, income, race, sexual orientation, gender, intellect, profession, religion.

Bottomline: With the horrifying gunshots of Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, and Dallas still ringing in our ears … before the next shots split the air … Jesus demands that each of us answer the most consequential question of all time: “Who is not our neighbor?”