Intimacy, Faithfulness and Other Ways God Loves

Hosea 11:1-9 [NRSV]
When Israel was a child, 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,
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.
They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. The sword rages in their cities, it consumes their oracle-priests, and devours because of their schemes. My people are bent on turning away from me. To the Most High they call, but he does not raise them up at all. 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. 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.

Some folks thought that the affair was the straw that broke the camel’s back but the truth of the matter was that the marriage was in trouble long before that. If you listened to their conversations carefully you could hear what was happening. Disagreements would arise. He complained, loudly, whenever her parents came over to visit. She felt betrayed every time he wanted to go out for a night with the guys. They soon found they couldn’t broach the subject without a huge flare-up. Every niggling problem became the sign that he didn’t care or she didn’t trust him. And the disagreements never seemed to lead to a resolution. They argued in the same tired circles.

Soon a new tone entered their arguments. It was almost as if they didn’t want to find a solution to the problems. There was a hint of derision when she talked to him. “You’re just not capable of taking out the trash are you? You don’t care about that just like you don’t care about anything else around here, including me.”

He was defensive. “Well, why should I care? You never appreciate it when I do do things around here. You hound me with questions about where I’ve been. You yell at me…in front of the children you yell at me.” Soon he developed a habit of clamming up when she got angry with him. Rather than talk back he would say nothing at all and his stonewalling only led her to believe the worst things about him.

They were living in a constant state of tension, both feeling physically anxious whenever the other was agitated. They began to be sick more often, which only contributed to the miserable way they felt. They didn’t try to solve problems anymore because they felt it never worked. After awhile they never even brought them up. They both felt lonely and unloved.

Once when someone asked at a dinner party how they had met neither one could answer quickly. Even their memory of the way they had come together had started to fade. Finally he laughed off the effort of trying to reclaim the memory. “I was young and naïve,” was all he said. So the affair was not the thing that broke the camel’s back. The break had happened long before.

When divorced people reflect back on their marriages they often see these dynamics in their relationships. In fact, one study showed that only 20 to 27 percent of couples talked about an extramarital affair as a primary or even a partial factor in their break-up. 80 percent said the cause was something more gradual – a gradual growing apart and a lost sense of closeness.[i]

Over the last few weeks we have been looking at love and relationships in this sermon series and I have talked about the work of John Gottman, a researcher who has studied relationships for thirty years. Gottman claims he can listen to a couple talking and in three minutes can determine whether or not their relationship will succeed over the long-term. A lot has to do, he says, with the factors in the scenario I just outlined. When couples talk to each other with contempt and criticism or respond with defensiveness and stonewalling, when they resist efforts to repair situations, when they begin conversations with harsh language, when they develop bad memories about how the relationship began…all of these are signs of a marriage in trouble. And they show up long before the infidelity does.

But Gottman doesn’t believe that we have to accept that this cycle inevitably leads to a break up. In fact, he has written a book called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work to help couples identify what things can strengthen their marriage. Most of it is not about how to argue, because a technique for fighting is not going to be the solution. The solution is in restoring ways of being with each other when we’re not fighting. When we can restore the joy, the love, and the friendship that undergird healthy relationships, we are on the way to building the faithfulness and intimacy we all desire.

Gottman can only go so far, though. As brilliant as he is, (and as he thinks he is!), there is a theological base for this as well and we have been exploring this through these last few weeks, too. I stick with theology because really that’s what I’m trained for. I think it is kind of presumptuous for preachers to pretend that they have all the how-to answers for all of the world’s problems, including marriage. As great as the world would be if everyone would follow my advice on foreign policy, immigration, taxation, marriage, land use, and the color of the new Nassawadox library, I recognize that there are times when I might be in error. Suzanne is probably more firmly convinced of that. Preachers, like all of us, are learning what it means to be human in a fallen world and learning what it means to be loving in relationships.

But what I am trained to talk about is God and that is not unrelated to this topic. God, it turns out, has a lot to say about love and relationships. God, it turns out, is love and the relationships in which God engages are models for our own human relationships. So while I can talk about my own experience of marriage…and we can have wonderful exchanges in our small groups and in our Wednesday night class on this topic...and we have: last week we split up the men and the women to ask the question “What makes a woman feel loved?” – that was fun…while we can do all of these things, today I want to talk about Hosea.

Do you know Hosea? Hosea was a prophet to the people of Israel and his book is one of the smaller ones in the Old Testament. But what it contains are some of the most beautiful reflections on the faithfulness of God in the whole Bible. It’s all told through the lens of Hosea’s relationship with Gomer.

The premise of this book is that God’s people, Israel, have been unfaithful to God. They have forgotten God’s covenant with them. They have gone to worship other gods. They had begun to believe that all the benefits of the land in which they lived had come though their own efforts and not by the grace of the God who had loved them. If God’s relationship to Israel could be compared to a marriage, it was a troubled one.

In fact, that’s exactly what God tells Hosea to do – to live out the relationship of God and Israel in his own marriage. Now it’s not unusual for God to tell the prophets to undertake a great symbolic act. After all, poor Jeremiah the prophet had to walk around naked at one point. He also bought a piece of land just as the entire nation was getting ready to be swept into exile.
What God asks Hosea to do, however, is very dramatic. He was to marry a prostitute and to have children with her. It was not going to be a happy marriage. Gomer was the name of Hosea’s wife and there is never any evidence that she developed any sort of loving relationship with the prophet. They had children, but the children had strange names like Lo-ruhamah, which means “not pitied,” and Lo-ammi, which means “not my people.” They all seemed to be portents of something horrible to come.

Gomer, in her unfaithfulness, came to represent the people who turned their back on God, who ignored the love God held out for them. The children represented the fruit of that disregard. Because of their unfaithfulness, God had every right to reject the people, to withhold pity and mercy. If the relationship between Hosea and Gomer was tenuous at best, the relationship between God and the people was on the rocks, too. There was hope that one day the people would be reclaimed and that God’s name would be on their lips again, but there would be a time of suffering, too.

By the time we get over to chapter 11 in Hosea, though, the metaphor has changed. Now the relationship with God is not pictured as a marriage but as the relationship of a parent with a child. God remembers holding Israel as a mother holds an infant. “When Israel was a child,” God says, “I loved him. You know how a parent holds the fingers of a toddler and helps them take their first shaky steps? I did that for you. I lifted you up to my cheek to embrace you and I bent down to give you food.”

Then God’s tone changes. God realizes that what Israel deserves is to go back to Egypt, back to slavery. Because of their faithlessness, God should put them all to the sword. There is intense anger and disappointment here. But then it all evaporates in a moment.

“But how can I give you up, Ephraim? How could I hand you over, Israel? I can’t do this thing. I cannot destroy my people, because I am not a mortal being. I am God and I must bring my people home.” This is the voice of the lover who agonizes over the pain caused by the beloved and yet who recognizes that the only thing that can bring reconciliation is love. “I am God and not a mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.”

Love heals. Love makes us whole. But love can also cut us to the quick. Do you know where that phrase comes from? The quick is the living, sensitive flesh that we are. We often hear this when we refer to fingernails and toenails. The tips of our nails are not very sensitive. They seem dead. But if we cut them down to the quick we have cut them down to the part where we can really feel it. Love, when it is truly love, cuts us all the way down to there.

“There” is where God seeks to meet us. God does not want the tips of our fingernails where we don’t feel. God doesn’t want our meaningless pieties and easy prayers. God doesn’t want the form of religion without the substance. God doesn’t want the sheen of our polite expressions; God wants the heart and soul of our very selves. God wants all of us.

But God does not just ask this of us, God gives us the same thing. The Wild and Holy One gives us God’s own self. Like the mother with the baby, like the father with the toddler on his knee, like the lover seeking out a faithless spouse, like the covenant partner grieving over the pain caused by the one in whom he had invested so much hope, God comes. And keeps coming. What is the story of Jesus expect the story of the God who would not be content until he offered up his life for us? God doesn’t stop pursuing us. God doesn’t stop inviting us. God does not stop loving us and even death cannot separate us from that love.

So what does that mean for our human relationships? Those messy, broken, wonderful, crazy relationships that cause us so much consternation? It means that they, too, can be redeemed by this love. We cannot settle for less than a redeeming love. We can’t be content with relationships that wander along for years without ever being renewed. If we are seeking to be God’s people in our relationships then we need to find the quick…we need to find the life that grounds those relationships and live there.

I’ll tell you a time when I really felt that. It was while I was in Dallas in seminary and the year that I was doing an internship as a youth coordinator with a United Methodist-related community center in the inner-city. It was overwhelming. The needs were so great and the problems so deep, that many days I felt completely drained. I believe I even went into depression during that year.

But there were so many points of life, too, and one of them came on a night when I had just finished a particularly rough basketball practice. (One of the things I did was to coach a basketball team.) We had the only integrated basketball team in the neighborhood with black and Hispanic team members. All the other teams were one race only. But the challenges in keeping my team together were steep. There were always fights and some deep misunderstandings.

So on this night Suzanne picked me up at the community center and we started back to the SMU campus where we lived in a little efficiency apartment with one of those beds you fold down out of the wall. But she must have seen what a day I had and so instead she suggested we go downtown for dessert and a cup of coffee. Now it wasn’t much as dates go. When I mentioned this to her a while back, Suzanne didn’t even remember it. But for me it was a moment of grace and light and a high point of my life. To sit across a table from someone who knows you and loves you anyway. To watch a candle flicker and sip from a cup. To hear the traffic go by on the street out the window. To know that however God-forsaken the world seems, there are spaces where you know that God dwells.

We can’t attain that faithfulness that God shows us. At best we can offer imperfect imitations. But even in our imperfection we give glory to the one who makes us for each other. Thanks be to God.

[i] John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, p. 16.