One of the challenges of
doing theology is that, if you’re honest with yourself when you read the Bible,
there are so many peculiar tensions between things. I guess I might even go so
far as to call them contradictions. In one place the Bible says one thing; in
another place something else. Most of the time we don’t talk much about those
contradictions because, frankly, it’s easier not to. Our modern, rational minds
don’t deal well with contradictions and ambiguities and the like; they make us
afraid—that the Bible isn’t what we think it is, even that God isn’t real.
Contradictions can cause us to question our faith.
But they also serve several purposes: For one, they make
us humble. A person can’t figure out
the Bible; it’s un-figure-out-able. And the Bible is just one way of God
manifesting God’s self in the world, so if this most-tangible of God’s
manifestations is sometimes ambiguous and confusing and self-contradictory,
then God is bound to be awfully opaque. Again, rational minds rebel against
this. So, we have fundamentalists claiming, “The Bible says. I believe it. That
settles it.” We have relativists, suggesting that certain things are just fairy
tales. Both miss a splendid opportunity to wrestle with the word of God. But
the word of God is to be wrestled with. We live in a world where we are never
completely safe, where terrorism is both extremists with assault rifles and
even other kids at schools. The fact that we have a God capable of holding two
opposing views at the same time in a way that we are not challenges us to look
deeper—past politicizing opinions and into the depths of what it means to be
human. This is an interesting thing to consider as we turn to Hosea.
The reason this concern arose for me with this reading
from Hosea is because of how God reacts to Israel’s disobedience. In the book
of Genesis, God utterly decimated Sodom and Gomorrah alongside the two
lesser-known cities of Admah and Zeboiim (mentioned in the reading today). God
did this (so the story goes) because they were bad people who disobeyed God’s
commands. This is the relatively karmic God of the Old Testament we expect.
Israel’s history can be summed up by being good and then bad, receiving God’s
blessing and curse, on repeat over and over again. Yet, here in Hosea we find
something different. When we get to the point of judgment—the time when God has
done the same destructive thing over and over and over again—for some reason
God’s heart warms strangely. The God of judgment becomes a God of mercy and
compassion.
This is a story about grace. And grace might be kind of
unexpected in the Old Testament. I think we imagine that the God of the Old
Testament is somehow changed with Jesus to a God of grace when here it is
evident that grace is in the playbook long before; that the “God of the Old
Testament” is the same God we know in Jesus and we know today. It shouldn’t be
surprising that this God is full of grace. The question is why now? Why here?
And perhaps why not earlier?
I was pondering this at the same time I was looking
through the explanation to Luther’s Small Catechism in preparation for a
Confirmation lesson this week, and I came across a strong emphasis on God being
unchangeable. Now, I should say that there’s absolutely nothing binding about
the explanation to the Small Catechism itself, but it does quote scripture from
Psalm 102:27, “You remain the same, and Your years never end,” and Malachi 3:6,
“I the Lord do not change,” and James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is
from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not
change like shifting shadows.” I could also add Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ is
the same yesterday, today, and forever.” There’s a strong biblical argument
that God never changes, which seems perfectly reasonable until we come across
God very clearly changing, acting differently; completely differently; even
reflecting on a situation oddly similar in which God was destructive, yet now
God shows grace.
If you don’t want to think about a God who is the same
yesterday, today, and forever, and yet changes the divine mind from time to
time, then you’re not alone. Rather than wrestling with the contradictions in
the hope of discovering God deeper in we mostly just tiptoe around it and keep
our theological categories. If we believe God never changes on principle, we
just bristle at any notion to the contrary. If we believe that God progresses
over time, we bristle at scripture that suggests otherwise. It’s a rare breed
of Christian who isn’t a hypocrite
about this.
But if you do happen to dive into the mess you may find
something amazing. First you will discover that in Christ God does not become a suffering God but rather God
already had grace as part of God’s arsenal. God is capable of both righteous
retributive justice and astounding grace at the same time. In fact, you might
say you can’t have one without the other. There needs to be something on the
line for grace to matter. If you bristle at the notion of a God who destroys,
then grace will always be fluffy. If you love karma, then grace will seem
unfair.
So, here’s what I want to say about God’s immutability
(which is to say that God never changes). It might be true in some philosophical
sense, but for all practical purposes it is bunk. If God ever forgives, ever
changes God’s heart, ever acts differently one time (as in Hosea) than another
time (as in Genesis), then God changes. This doesn’t need to be earth-shattering;
in fact, I find it comforting, because it means that God is capable of doing
new things all the time. And, more than that, when bombs explode in Paris or in
Beirut or towers crumble in New York City or the next in an inevitable line of
terrible things happen, perhaps even closer to home, the fact that we have a
God who changes the divine playbook, who is active in history, and therefore
active in our prayers, is the only God who can give us any comfort. A
monolithic God ultimately promises nothing. The God of Hosea is a God I find to
be profoundly hopeful, because this is a God I cannot control, and I cannot
anticipate. Which is a God of real life, because I can’t control that either.
We get caught up in this stuff. We imagine that the only
way to have a God who is perfect is that God would do the same thing all the
time, because that’s how we define perfection—by categories. The Bible offers
us an opportunity instead to wrestle with God’s many varying natures. The Bible
invites us to go much deeper.
All of this matters, but I feel I should conclude by
being more specific: It’s easy to have a shallow faith—a self-serving faith.
It’s easy to only believe enough to get through the day, to make yourself feel
better about your life circumstances. It’s easy to spout maxims like “God has a
plan for me” and “God will never give me more than I can handle” and live as if
those are the heart of the good news. But that faith is barely faith at all and
it will come crashing down when faced with actual crises. If your first
instinct is to say something like that about events like what happened in Paris
this week, then you need to dive in deeper. And, if things are nice and settled
in your life, the time for encountering a deep and mysterious God is right now,
because when the crap hits the fan and life begins to feel like scaling a
mountain the depth of your faith will be revealed. And if life is a mess right
now, the time to dive in deeper is right now because that is where you will
find how deep it is that God holds you. If you have nothing but simple
truisms—Hallmark card Christianity—then your faith is not going to be enough to
matter when it’s actually needed.
I think people imagine that losing one’s faith happens
dramatically—with somebody declaring loudly in a fit of despair that they no
longer believe in God—but that’s not generally how it works. It happens by
slowly drifting away—both from the community of the church and the awareness
that your faith matters. It happens largely because the God you imagined in the
first place wasn’t very big—a God defined by truisms; unchanging, omnipotent, holy,
just. A God you never bothered to meet any closer; a God you kept always at
arm’s length. So when bombs go off across the oceans or down the streets and
you say something well-intentioned, that God has a plan or God won’t give you
more than you can handle, you know, deep-down, that this faith is weakly rooted
and it takes only a breath to blow you away.
To have strong faith is to dive headlong into the
messiness of a God who once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah but now spares Israel.
This is a God actually worthy of our faith, actually worth our contemplation
and reverence. This is a God who evokes big questions, demands not just simple
answers but a life’s pursuit. Do you care enough to ask questions of this God?
Does this God matter enough to you to bother? These are big questions for a
Sunday morning. Questions, though, that are worth our time.
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