God and the Two Year Old

Sermon given at Grace UMC 8/23/15

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^NRS Hosea 11:1 When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. ² The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols. ³ 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. ⁴ 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. ⁵ They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. ⁶ The sword rages in their cities, it consumes their oracle-priests, and devours because of their schemes. ⁷ My people are bent on turning away from me. To the Most High they call, but he does not raise them up at all. ⁸ How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. ⁹ I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. ¹⁰ They shall go after the LORD, who roars like a lion; when he roars, his children shall come trembling from the west. ¹¹ They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria; and I will return them to their homes, says the LORD. ¹² Ephraim has surrounded me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit; but Judah still walks with God, and is faithful to the Holy One.

God loved the people of creation. And they disobeyed God and loved the idols of their culture. Sounds a lot like the story of today when so many of us immerse ourselves in the culture of today and forget what God calls us to do. To love one another! So we have a story of repeated disobedience as the people of Israel blended into the culture of the world around them. And God allowed them in their choice to be beaten by an enemy that God could have conquered. And in their history they knew this but still felt they were in control. And God allowed them to be scattered to the four winds. And yet God also loved them so much that God promised them God would bring them back to the Promised Land again. Because within the remnant of God’s people were some that were faithful.

But more importantly, God had promised and God never breaks Gods promise.

Our prism for understanding the heart of God is Hosea 11. The prophet ministered during the 9th/8th century BC. That was an age of apostasy, an age of open rebellion against God by the special elect people, Israel. Prophet after prophet was sent in a futile attempt to stem the tide of sin and evil that was propelling Israel to its ultimate doom. By virtue of his personal experience, Hosea, more than any other person, understood perfectly the heart of God. His wife, Gomer, had proven to be an unfaithful a spouse as could be found. It appears that at least two of their children were not Hosea’s. Gomer’s trysts finally led her to leave her husband and children. She eventually ended up in a slave market. Following instructions from God, Hosea went to the market and bought his wife back and restored her to her rightful place as his wife. Through his eyes we will now gaze into the heart of God. So often in life we are Gomer. We search for love in all the wrong places. We give ourselves and our bodies, our money and our allegiance to the world in hopes that the world will give us back the kind of love that we desperately want. And every single time we give all that we have to the world, what we get back is somehow lacking in what we expected, wanted or desired. God’s story is the story of the bible. I want this morning to talk with you about God and humanity. It is a story of a people who had the love of God who found ways to share that love with the Hebrew people. And repeatedly they blended into the culture of their world and disobeyed God.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis tell us the story of God saying yes and the people saying no. It begins with Adam and Eve being given the Garden of Eden. A perfect existence where they could live, no pain and no struggles, everything taken care of. And then they disobeyed. And then we have the twelfth chapter when God asks Abraham and Sarah to live in communion with God. And what does Abraham do? He tries to pass Sarah off as his sister and disobeys God. In the book of Jonah we have a story of God wanting Jonah to go to Nineveh and bring healing and love. Jonah wants justice. Jonah meets a big fish. You know the story.

So what does this have to do with me you ask? I heard a story of a shopkeeper that was in competition with his competitor from across the street. They constantly marketed their own goods and talked badly about the other one. They raised and lowered prices in order to cause the other harm. One day an angel arrives in an effort to stop this madness. The angel offers the one man anything he wants with a caveat. The caveat is that whatever the man gets, his competitor gets double as long as the request is for good, not evil. The man asks if I ask for a million dollars what will I get. Two million the angel replies. What if I ask for lifetime health, he asks. The angel replies he will live beyond you. Any guess what the owner asked for? He refused the offer because he could not bring himself to accept God’s gift if it meant that his competitor benefitted. Isn’t that how we are? We hope for people to have good things happen to them. That is, as long as those things don’t happen to our enemies.

Do you know the three favorite words of a two year old? Me, Mine and No! If we follow the story of the bible from beginning to end, what we see over and over again are those three words. I want the world to be about me not God! I want everything to be mine, not someone else’s. Why else do we have wars?

And when confronted with rules for living, we yell, not simply say, no to God. No we don’t want the Ten Commandments. No we don’t want to love our neighbors. No we don’t want to be told how to live. God constantly wants to share with us the three words we, us and our. We have been created for communion. Communion amongst our neighbors! Communion in the world with all of God’s people! God wants us to share in God’s love and to share that love with the entire world.

A friend of mine said in one of his sermons that love is the thread to ties all of these stories together. And this thread, this communion is a part of our brokenness. While we want grace to be earned, God wants to give it to us. It isn’t free you understand. But God knows that. So we look to the power of God shown to us through Easter. Not Easter morning, rather we find the answer in Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We find the answer in the communion service of Jesus to his disciples that we will celebrate the first week of every month. We find the answer in the cross on Golgotha on Friday and the placing of a body in a tomb before sunset on that day. We find the story there because that is God’s gift to us. The atonement of sin, of our very nature, the nature of a two year old, me, mine and no. We want our grace to be earned; God wants to give it to us. And then we find Mary standing in the presence of the living, resurrected Lord. And she wants to hold on to him, just as we want to hold to our past. And Jesus tells her and us, take on a new identity.

Become the new person that God wants you to be. So what do we do?

Some will run as fast as they can in the opposite direction.

Some will accept this gift and be blessed. Some will walk away from God because they believe the world offers them a better deal.

And everyday we will act like two year olds. We will answer God’s offer with me, mine and no.   

In a testimony an evangelist one time described his mother as being love personified. As a boy he found her sitting at the table with an old tramp one day. Apparently she had gone shopping, met the tramp along the way, and invited him home for a warm meal. During the conversation the tramp said, "I wish there were more people like you in the world." Whereupon his mother replied, "Oh, there are. But you must look for them." The old man simply shook his head, saying. "But, lady, I didn’t need to look for you. You looked for me."

When that mother reflected her Christian kindness toward the tramp she did something more than simply offer him welfare. It was a compassion that went out of its way to love the unlovely. And that’s the story of our Savior’s live, death and resurrection. He came looking for us in the sick, the maimed, the lame, the bruised, the broken hearted, the wretched wanderer, the poor and forgotten, the prisoner, and the lonely rich. Has he found you?