Homily for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost 24 July 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
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
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 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 harder for the wealthy who do not care.
Pray for those who are homeless.
Pray harder for those who deny them shelter.
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 harder for those who will not give them comfort.
Pray for those oppressed by unjust wages.
Pray harder for those who exploit them.
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 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 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.
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.
