Sunday, August 19,
2018
I was talking recently with a woman
whose discipline in prayer I greatly admire.
She writes down her prayer requests in a notebook and dates the
entry. Then she reads scripture and
prays. This is how she starts every
day. Whenever, she sees God respond to
her prayer request, she writes God’s answer down, next to the original
request. This is how her on-going
conversation with God happens.
I was with her a few weeks ago, and
as we talked, I told her of my admiration for her discipline. She looked at me and said, “O, I stopped
doing that about a year ago.” I was
devastated. She said, “Now, when I get
up in the morning, I check my email.” As
we continued discussing it, she committed to a return. She would go back to her practice of
beginning the day in conversation with God.
I committed to spending a bare minimum of 10 minutes per day in
concentrated prayer. And since, I have I
returned to Chapel Hill from the visit, I have kept my commitment. From my correspondence with her, I know that
she has too.
She
has returned to morning conversations with God – the God who loves her. God’s been waiting all along and was ready to
welcome her and to welcome me back with open arms. That’s the theme this morning –
returning. Return to God – the God who
loves you. Return to a life with God at
the center. Maybe this is a life you
have never lived before. Maybe you don’t
know what it is to live with God at the center of everything.
God’s
there, in your life, waiting for you to stop fixating on gadgets or new romance
or career goals or the miseries you’ve endured.
Gadgets and phones are fun; everyone wants to be able to tell “Alexa”
was to do and see her do it. A new
romance is wonderful. Career goals are
admirable. And personal miseries cannot
be ignored. But God has to be bigger
than all of this in our lives; God loves us and will not tolerate being second
to anything.
I
titled this sermon, “New Season.” I
don’t mean a new football season, although I, of course, am excited about that
too. No, what I mean by this title is a
new season of life. I was single until I
got married at 32. Life dramatically
changed for me. I had entered a new
season and there was no going back to the old me. Whatever I liked or hated about being single,
after January 11, 2003, that was all behind me.
This is what I mean by a “new season.”
It
can come for us at any time, but Fall in Chapel Hill is a special time of
transition and of the beginning of new eras in people’s lives. Of course students are back at UNC. We rent parking spaces to UNC students. All week, the church office was abuzz with
students and their parents coming in to pick up their passes. Many that Dina and I met are freshman, off to
school, away from home for the first time in their lives.
It’s
not just the freshmen who enter a new season.
Upper classman have had a year or a couple of years to get used to
Chapel Hill, and now return with a greater sense of purpose. They come with sights set on the degree and
the career that degree will prepare them to begin. Graduates arrive in town to begin post
doctorate fellowships. New faculty move
into town. Many visiting scholars from
other nations have just begun their time at UNC, in Chapel Hill.
The
university is an enormous community and when things get rolling in the fall,
the entire town feels the difference.
There’s a different vibe.
Yet,
many people in our church family and in our area have nothing to do directly
with the university, and yet this is also a time of new things for them. Anyone with school-aged children will send
those little lovelies back to school a week from this Tuesday. Maybe one of your kids is beginning
elementary or middle or high school for the first time; or maybe, kindergarten,
for the first time. If you aren’t
associated with UNC and don’t have school aged kids at home, immediately after
Labor Day, it’s time for you to go on vacation; everywhere, the rates go down
and the crowds are smaller.
In
church, Wednesday night dinner starts back up in September; family missions’
projects start back up in October; Sunday supper clubs get going again. This is a time for each of us to look deep inside
our lives and see what new thing God is doing in us. We have the opportunity to respond to the
grace of God and live life with God at the center; God shapes our sense of self,
our identity; God defines all our relationships; and, our idea of success and
fulfillment. We discover what life looks
like with God at the center of it all.
It
might be odd to talk about a new season as we come to the very last chapter of
the words of the prophet Hosea, who we’ve been hearing from all summer. But, Hosea has been leading us to this
point. Up to now, Hosea has made two
major claims. First, the ancient people
of Israel have turned away from God.
They have worshiped idols – statues of stone and wood that neighboring
peoples, the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, have passed off as gods. In direct disregard of the first of the 10
commandments, Israel had worshiped ‘other gods,’ false gods. Along with this offense to the one true God,
the Creator of all that is, injustice was everywhere in Israel. The poor suffered greatly. Hosea drove this point home with the graphic
imagery of Israel as a prostitute, unfaithful to her husband.
Hosea’s
second major point, has been to insist upon the absolute dependability of God’s
love. God is angry. God is hurt.
But God loves Israel. Though
punishment is coming, God will not give Israel up to destruction. The punishment of exile, which is an event
that happened in history, was a part of what God was preparing for Israel: a
new season in which the people would once again live in a relationship of love,
trust, and dependence upon God.
In
her great commentary on the Minor Prophets, the late Elizabeth Achtemeier,
offers a daring interpretation of the exile that Hosea predicted and that
ultimately befell Israel. She likens it
to the Jews in slavery in Egypt many centuries earlier. God led them out of bondage and, eventually,
into the Promised Land. However, between
Egypt and Promised Land was 40 years in the wilderness. There, the only thing the people could do to
survive was depend on God. Achtemeier
proposes that Hosea’s words show that exile is a second wilderness. God is leading Israel there, and there God
will once again woo Israel as the object of God’s affection.
God
did not need a temple in Jerusalem or shrines at Samaria or Bethel. God did not ask the people to offer more
animals as blood sacrifices. What God
wanted from his people was their love and their trust. In exile to Assyria in 8th century
and then to Babylon in the 6th, the people had been stripped of all
possession, all position, and all power.
All they had left was desperate prayer that they lifted to God. Achtemeier suggests that God caused exile or
at least allowed it because we are at our very best when we live dependently.[i] When we see God at the center of everything
and depend on God for success in everything, that’s when we have joy and
hope. That’s when we see the power of
the Holy Spirit transform our lives.
The
form of Hosea 14:4-7 is what leads Achtemeier to her interpretation. The the images that fill these verses come
from traditional romance poetry. God
says, “I will love them freely. … I will
be like dew to Israel,” refreshing the people each day. “… They shall live beneath my shadow, they
shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine, their fragrance
shall be like the wine of Lebanon.” God
is romancing his people. But God won’t
give such attentive love to a people who ignore his advances.
Israel
had flirted with Assyria and her gods, and then Egypt and her gods. Each insistence of infidelity to the only
true God went as badly it possibly could.
Only when the people had lost everything and could see their own sins
and could see the evil of the pagan empires that tried to dominate them could
they then, finally, focus on the God who is truly all-powerful and who truly loved
them.
What
distractions have grabbed our attention and caused us to move God out of the
center? What in life has deceived us
into thinking we could take our faith and our relationship with God, set it on
a shelf, and let God collect dust there as we pursue other interests? The images of arresting beauty in Hosea
14:4-7 hint at the good God has in store for His people once they have been
fully brought back from their sins. The
ultimate fulfillment for Israel comes in the birth, life, teaching, death, and
resurrection of Jesus, God’s son, God-in-the-flesh.
He
didn’t die on that cross so that it would become a piece of jewelry. He didn’t come so that we’d make church and
faith a part of our lives. He came to be our very center. Have you focused on success in school or in
career? Shift that focus! This is your time, the new season, the day
when God moves to the very heart of your thinking. Set your eyes on Him and let Him bring the
success. O, work hard, for sure! Study, put the effort in, and strive for
greatness; but do it in a way that never allows you to forget that God is ever
before you, and ever with you because God loves you so much.
Has
your pain or the losses you’ve endured or the frustrations you’ve had to bear
become what defines you? Ambition is one
idol that occupies the space God is supposed to occupy in our lives. Suffering is another. Many fall to the point that they only know
themselves by the daily ordeals they have to endure. Shift your focus! It’s a new season in your life, one in which
God wants you to flourish and to blossom like the most beautiful of
flowers. To God, that’s what you
are. I know, the pain is still there. Doctors and the church family should come
around you and try to help put that pain behind you. When that’s impossible, then the community of
God-worshipers, the church family, is to help you live with whatever is that makes
life such a struggle. That hurt, that
condition, can’t bring you down, because now, you realize God is with you,
loves you, and will give you purpose and joy in your life.
What
beginning is beginning in your life today, right now? Hosea told Israel, “Take words with you, and
return to the Lord.” He meant words of
confession and words of faith. They had
brought animals to sacrifice many times.
God was done with that. He wanted
His people to come with words that revealed hearts turned to God in faith.
It
is time for us to bring our words to God, words that tell our stories. Are you a student? What words tells who you are? What words do you bring? Dean’s list?
Scholarship? Or, failure? Academic
probation?
Are
you retired? Retired people enter new
seasons with God; it’s the perfect time.
What words can you bring to God, words that communicate your heart? Relaxation?
Accomplishment? Smiles and
grandchildren? Or, worry. Or, tears, regret, and disappointment?
Are
you new to town, literally beginning a new season? What words do you bring? Hope? Or,
uncertainty?
Gather
the words that tell your story. Then,
return to the Lord because He is beauty, he is welcome; He gives fruit and
shade. He is a father, and He is
love. Decide today that this is, for
you, a new season, one of honesty before God, full confession, and trust;
believe that God will make you new and fill you with His Spirit.
The
final word from Hosea – “Those who are wise understand these things; those who
are discerning know them. For the ways
of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them.”
AMEN
[i]
Achtemeier, Elizabeth (1996), New
International Bible Commentary: Minor Prophets I, Paternoster Press
(Peabody, MA), p.111. She writes, “In
the future, God will begin a new saving history, leading Israel once again into
the wilderness, where he will woo her tenderly, and make her his own.”
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