"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010 | |||
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Painful Love | |||
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"This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you." Bill Cosby got a lot of laughs pointing out how ridiculous that sounds to a child about to be spanked. Yet any parent knows there is a bit of truth in the old cliche. To demonstrate love by inflicting needed punishment on a disobedient or rebellious child is a painful experience for a parent. In our text this week from Hosea 11:1-11, the prophet allows us to hear God espousing very human emotion in response to Israel's disobedience and rebellion. Throughout Hosea, the northern kingdom of Israel is constantly identified as "Ephraim." Ephraim of course was only one of the ten tribes of the north and was in fact just one of the two tribes which sprang from Joseph. Yet Ephraim played the predominant role in the north. Jeroboam, the first northern king, was from Ephraim, as were Joshua and Samuel. In Ephraim's territory lay the important northern sacred sites of Bethel, Shiloh and in later expansion, Shechem. So "Ephraim" becomes Hosea's familiar and intimate name for the whole northern kingdom. In verse 3 Hosea pictures God remembering that He "taught Ephraim to walk," with the familiar image of a parent bending over and holding a little child up by his arms as he learns to take steps. And it's the name Ephraim in God's mouth when in verse 8 He suddenly turns from his determination to punish His people to an equal or stronger determination that, in spite of all their sins, "How can I give you up, Ephraim?" God is pictured as a parent in the midst of punishment suddenly overcome by tender emotion and love for the disobedient child. "My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused." There was an old man in our Nebraska congregation who had the name Ephraim. We all called him "Eph." A dedicated student of the Bible, Eph loved these verses where God is expressing His tender love for Ephraim, especially the verse about God teaching Ephraim to walk. A similar tenderness for Ephraim is also found in Jeremiah 31:20. I think these verses where God spoke tenderly of Eph's namesake became for the old man a sign of God's tender love toward Eph himself. Reading those verses he could recall ninety years of God's compassionate and gentle guidance of his own life. My hope is that as we read these verses this week we will also recall God's sometimes tough but always at the same time tender love toward us. Even when we are determined to turn away from God, He is still reaching for us, still full of compassion, still calling us to return. Verses 10 and 11 nicely picture the mixture of ferocity and tenderness in God's love with an image of a lion roaring for its children to come back. The lion roars, but then the children return "trembling like birds from Egypt, like doves from Assyria." May you and I experience both God's ferocity drawing us back from our self-destructive ways and His tenderness welcoming us home into His presence. | |||
Wednesday, 14 July 2010 | |||
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Hungry Ears | |||
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This past Sunday Beth and I went to hear Mendelssohn's "Elijah" at our community concert hall. Just before the orchestra began, the first sound we heard was a ringing phone coming over the sound system. It was a prelude to an announcement such as has become commonplace in movie theatres. "Please silence your cell phones and other electronic devices." And rightly so. How terribly distracting it would be to hear someone's Michael Jackson ringtone right in the middle of "If with all your heart, you truly seek me," or "He watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps." Recently I've heard about the "Sabbath Manifesto," which grew out of the "National Day of Unplugging," a suggestion that we all abstain from any use of communication technology (cell phone, computer, TV, etc.) for 24 hours. It seems like a good idea to carve out a little quiet and peace in life, and a space for reading, through a weekly sabbath from all electronic devices. One could almost imagine that if God were to speak from heaven or through a modern-day prophet to our world, that the very first word to us all might be what comes at the end of verse 3 in our text, Amos 8:1-12, "Silence!" Chapter 8 of Amos is a bit of a mixture of images and themes, but overall God is addressing a frenzied, hurried way of life that is bent on buying and selling and which ignores and exploits the needy. The first image of a basket of ripe fruit graphically introduces the announcement that God's time is ripe to judge Israel for its frantic, selfish lifestyle. God declaration of displeasure with those who observe the Sabbath while chomping at the bit to be back in business, and then to do business dishonestly, strikes close to home. Look at the oil companies suing the federal government to end the moratorium on offshore drilling and even Obama's own spill study commission saying that the moratorium will cause economic harm. There can be no rest from the need to produce and generate wealth. With computers at home and Blackberries and iPhones in our pockets, many of us can not get away for even a few hours from the need to work and be productive constantly. It's no wonder that even though the Bible is incredibly more available than ever before, even on those portable electronic devices, that even Christians read and understand it less and less. There's just no time. God through Amos clearly addresses Israel in the 8th century B.C. with the words, in verse 11, "The days are coming when I will send a famine through the land--not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord." It's a prediction of the time when in the midst of being overrun by the enemy Assyrians, the people of Israel will anxiously seek a word from God but will not receive it. Yet verses 11 and 12 might also reflect our own time, when overly noisy and busy lives effectively drown out God's voice and create in their own way a famine of the Word. The contrast and model for us appears nicely in the Gospel lesson from Luke 10:38-42, as we see Mary declining to be caught up in the frantic, busy work of Martha, but instead quietly sitting and listening to Jesus. Here I would suggest a moratorium on defending Martha in this text. Yes, work is necessary, and those who work hard are deserving of respect and assistance. And Martha has her own moment of spiritual profundity (see John 11:27). But Mary is the role model many of us need in the present day in order to hear God's Word in the midst of a culture and economy that has us constantly in motion and constantly listening to other sounds and voices. And the irony is that I'm tapping this out on my keyboard and if you read it, it will be via the same electronic media that is starving us of the voice of God. So I suggest your next act be to shut off the computer and get out your Bible. Peace. | |||
Thursday, 08 July 2010 | |||
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Standards | |||
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At a pastor's gathering this morning, a speaker urged us to
stand up for moral values, the example being his own stance toward a
governor in another state in opposition to a bill allowing gay marriage.
I couldn't help but think of the texts for this Sunday, beginning with
Amos 7:7-17, the vivid image of God's plumb line set in the midst of
Israel, displaying its crookedness in relation to His divine
standards. Yet the anger of the Lord expressed in Amos' prophecy was not directed against sexual immorality, although it surely existed there in the northern kingdom. No, the substance of God's complaint through this prophet is found in chapter 5, Israel's record of injustice and exploitation of the poor. The standard by which God is measuring His people in Amos is echoed by Jesus in the Gospel text for today, Luke 10:25-37, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Asked what the standards are for receiving eternal life, Jesus elicits from one of the Jewish lawyers Jesus' own answer to a similar question, the great commandments: love God and love your neighbor. When, as lawyers will, the man wanted to quibble about the exact application of the second commandment, Jesus responded with a story that hung a living plumb line against our behavior. Will we "go and do likewise," or will the model of the Samaritan show up our spiritual lives as out of kilter? Our epistle lesson from Colo ssians 1:1-14 holds up the same sort of standard in verse 10 as Paul expresses his constant prayer that the work of the Spirit in Christians lives will be such that "you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work. . .." Back to Amos, where the consequences for not measuring up to the standard, for appearing as a building out of true, is destruction of supposed holy places in verse 9. The rest of text is a judgment specifically against the priest Amaziah who tries to quiet Amos. The last verse declares that Israel itself will be judged by exile. When a building ends up leaning, whether through faulty construction or settling into soft ground, it may be the only solution is leveling it and starting over. May that not be the end of our stories either as individuals or as churches or as the Church. May we turn to the truest plumb line of all in the love of Jesus Christ and seek His grace to stand straight for love and justice to all in need. | |||
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I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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