Someone's at the door

Andrea Gibson's "Boomerang Valentine"

Photo by Margit Umbach on Unsplash

Pr13C - (Track 1) Hosea 11:1-11, Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21

This Sunday’s first reading is a sequel to last Sunday’s in which our mothering* God was heartbroken because her child had walked away. Last Sunday, she was angry: “I will not have compassion. I will not be your God.”

This Sunday her love wins and she says “How can I give you up? . . . My compassion grows warm and tender.” (Hosea 11:8)

Good news for us for when we are feeling distracted and off-course. And how could we not feel that way from time to time. We are bombarded by sales pitches and siren calls of all kinds selling us abundance, safety, security, respect and acceptance. We very much want those things. We forget that a sales pitch is designed to generate a sale, not our best interest, and that it might cost us things we really don’t want to lose.

It can be difficult to turn away from sales pitches and the lure of living up to other people’s expectations. But perhaps we — who are created in the image of a God who is so essentially love that even her own anger doesn’t stand a chance — can look in the mirror and like the poet say . . .

. . . What if you
are the love of your life? I think, Oh my god, I hope

that’s not true,
because I am absolutely
not my type.

But let’s say for a moment I am.
Let’s say I am my dream girl-

ish boy, and I'm standing on my front porch
ringing my own doorbell waiting for me to answer

so I can hand myself a mason jar full of water lilies
I have rescued from a millionaire’s Monet.**

In Luke, Jesus says that what makes us rich — what brings us life — is not necessarily what someone else expects of us or what others want to sell us: not safety, security, respect or acceptance. And like the poet, he says that the best time to remember who we are and what matters most is now.

Peace.

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* Last week, the imagery was of God as loving parent caring for an infant. In her hurt and anger, God says “I will not have compassion.” (Lo-ruhamah.) “[Translating the Hebrew “racham” as “compassion”] is inadequate and misleading; it does not mean sorrowful compassion with its frequent overtone of condescension; rather it means love, a personal devotion eager to help and protect, for ultimately it derives from the attitude of a mother to her child (rehem, “womb.”). Dennis J. McCarthy, SJ & Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm. Hosea 14:4, The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990) at 218.

** From “Boomerang Valentine” by Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies, (Button Publishing, Inc. Minneapolis, 2018) 29.