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The God Who Waits For Us
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 2, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Hosea 5:14-6:6 Revelation 5:1-14
“‘We are in a world of mystery,” wrote John Henry Newman, “with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our proceeding forward through all difficulties. Take away this light and we are utterly wretched: we know not where we are, how we are sustained, what will become of us and of all that is dear to us, what we are to believe, and why we are in being.’ The Christmas star,” continues journalist Jon Meacham with seeming authority “is just one such light: there are others.” No doubt this is the case and has always been the case if the subject before us is religion or as we say currently “spirituality”: the human search for God or for Truth or for meaning or for a Unified Field Theory that will dispel the darkness and solve the mystery. We are pilgrims who by the Chanukah lights of Judaism and the Star of David or the crescent moon and star of Islam; by the Enlightenment of human reason or by the post-light of our own subjectivity; by way of a constellation of stars and planets aligned just so or by the light of a candle lit on Christmas eve to the tune of Silent Night, we are pilgrims who walk in some degree of darkness. So it goes with our human search for God. But what of God’s search for us? What of God’s patient waiting for the moment when a human life turns not toward every other light, but toward the love for which each of us has been made? Scripture, by and large, is about this search and and only speak about it in what George Steiner has called “the grammar of the overwhelming.” Such grammar is missed both by readers who are trying to be too religious and by those who would stick to the facts when mystery abounds. Open the Bible almost anywhere and you must do business with words that lead a double life. From the first few chapters of Genesis to the final “Come, Lord Jesus” of the Book of Revelation, the truth revealed to the literal believer—be that person a fundamentalist clinging to inerrancy or an academic bent on uncovering the historical Jesus—comes in the form of narrative veracity: give me the facts, ma’am, just the facts. But for those willing to dare this strange dance wherein God’s choice in freedom to love us and be with us seems still to be powerless in the face of our freedom to live and move and have our being without God in the world, mystery abounds. So this morning I invite you to let the words of a forlorn prophet from the 8th century set you to wonder as you wander how it is that the waiting in the season we call Advent is not yours but God’s. For in the grammar of the overwhelming, Hosea reveals the impossible possibility, namely that the eternal God waits for us. This is, of course, an impossible possibility because waiting implies existence in time. We are creatures who have been given our being in time and in the time we are given, we wait. We wait in the hope that something new may happen. There is war, but peace may come, disease persists, but we live always expecting a cure on the horizon, loneliness anticipates our one true love, hunger groans for satisfaction, pilgrimage presumes an arrival. Our waiting would seem to be a distinctively human pastime. The eternal God, on the other hand, cannot wait. To raise the question of God’s waiting for us is to place God in this matrix of past, present and future, to understand God to be vulnerable, to define God by the limits of finite existence. Yet if Scripture tells the truth, then this mysterious Presence who is love has chosen from the beginning to pursue the beloved right up and into our time being racing toward death. We encounter that pursuit most poignantly in the book of the prophet Hosea. Of God’s waiting for us, says Hosea from out of his own biography, consider the agonizing wait of a husband for the return of his whoring wife. Hosea knew of such waiting… intimately. His marriage to Gomer—a questionable choice for a partner from the start--had ended in divorce. Her adulterous affairs had become unbearable. Yet we soon read that Hosea is told by God to woo her back, to begin a new marriage with her. Hosea’s description of the desperate love and passionate anger vying for his heart is both wrenching and unspeakably tender. But when in retrospect Hosea sees that his marriage was willed by God so that God’s beloved Israel might return, then as no other writer in the whole of Scripture, Hosea is given words for the pathos of God’s almighty, powerless heart. God’s heart was broken, first as a parent’s heart is broken by a child. “When Israel was a child,” God says to Hosea, “I loved him and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals (to other lights), and offering incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.” The book of the prophet Hosea is, at once, the most terrible and tender glimpse we are given of God before the dark night of Christ’s birth and the darker day of Christ’s death. Whereas other prophets railed against the sins of the people and priests and politicians in a vain attempt to return history to the purposes of God, Hosea speaks of the agony of a love gone awry and here here only the grammar of the overwhelming will do. Prior to Hosea’s prophecy, according to Old Testament professor Walther Eichrodt, “Old Israel spoke primarily of God’s goodness, faithfulness and justice when it wanted to describe the inner amity and feeling of the God who had revealed himself in election and covenant….But Hosea breaks through this sober reticence and dares to speak of Yahweh’s affection for Israel using the chief expression for the powerful passion [the passionate surrender] which joins [husband] and wife.” The word in Hebrew is ’hd and means complete surrender. “Hosea does not shrink from the dangerous proximity to the erotic divine love of the Baal cult (the other lights of the day),” says Eichrodt, “but designates the irrational power of love, which determines the lover in all his expressions and drives him to complete surrender.” In the grammar of the overwhelming, Hosea speaks of God’s surrender in love to Israel. Then in order to distinguish God’s love for Israel from Israel’s love for God, Hosea characterizes Israel’s love using the Hebrew word ’yd which means to know. Hosea is saying that the deepest correspondence to God’s love in human experience is “the knowledge of God.” Yet, as I am sure you know, the ’yd is also the verb used in Scripture for sexual union as in “The man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain.” Such knowledge is powerful, passionate, intimate, and dangerous! I think of the betrothal question asked of those who are about to promise their futures to one another: Wilt thou have this woman, this man, to be thy wife, thy husband, thy life-partner and wilt thou pledge thy troth, thy faithfulness, in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and tenderness. Here I take faith to mean trust. In a relationship of trust we behave in a radically different way: our guard is down, truth is dared and one is terrifyingly vulnerable to the other. For love means, in the words of theologian Robert Jenson, “that I emerge from the security of what I am in myself, and risk myself out there in the world that is neither my inner world nor your inner world but precisely the world between us in which we can be together.” That is why, according to the question of betrothal, a relationship of such trust must be held in great tenderness since, as the song goes, “You only hurt the one you love.” Because Hosea had been willed by God to know—’yd—in radical vulnerability such hurt in relation to his wife, Hosea was given a heart for the pathos of God’s love, ’hd, the complete surrender of God toward God’s beloved Israel. Though all is not tenderness for, as Hosea says in our text, God’s broken heart is also the heart of a wounded lion. God, in fact, wrests the role of lion from Israel’s feckless rulers, prowling the earth for the harlot who is his: “I will be like a lion to the house of Judah. I myself will tear and go away; I will carry off, and no one shall rescue.” But then literally in the same breath, God cries out as a powerless lover cries: “What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you O Judah? …For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God [’yd: a relationship of trust and tenderness and intimacy] rather than burnt offerings.” “This is not the God untouched by human perversity and throned in unapproachable majesty with whom Israel has to do,” says Eichrodt, “but the suffering, anxious, and hopeful lover who is infinitely interested in [who is desperately in love with] the object of his election.” Hosea, of course, did not know the half of it. For the God who asked “How can I give you up Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger…for I am God and no mortal and I will not destroy,” this same God—in the grammar of the overwhelming—is about to enter time and becomes mortal. That is to say, the God who still is waiting eight centuries after the prophet Hosea for the people to turn in love can wait no longer and so trusts the Son, the only Son, the beloved into the waiting arms and longing hearts of God’s people. In all faith and tenderness God surrenders completely and we behold with the eye what Hosea had beheld with the heart: not a God who “roars like a lion that his children may come trembling” but a God who suffers as a lamb sacrificed, a God whose love surrenders even unto death, in all faith and tenderness, for the beloved: for you and for me. As this season begins and we count off the days of our waiting, counting with a culture more taken with a holiday than with the holy and vulnerable God, know (’yd) the waiting is not yours but God’s. God waits in fierce love and unbearable tenderness for you to turn from the cultural lights of this season to the light that shines in the darkness of your mind as a mystery you are not worthy to dispel. This is the mystery of One whose wounded hands and side alone illumine the heart of God whose love (’hd) remains a mystery even to God. “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” |