FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

September 20, 1992

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Hosea 11:1-11
Luke 15:1-10

“How can I give you up?...My heart recoils...;my compassion grows
warm and tender." ' ~Hosea 11:8 (NRSV)

His father died when he was nine years old. Before that
time the young boy, Gerald G. May, now a practicing psychiatrist
and professor, was traditionally and comfortably at home with
religious faith. He prayed to God and experienced childlike awe
and reverence and wonder. God, he says, was his friend. And
then the bottom dropped out. His father died. May had expected
that God would prevent things like that from happening or, at
least do something about it - keep him somehow in touch with his
father, for instance. And when it didn't occur, when the reality
and enormity of the loss settled in, the nine-year-old chose, he
Says, to dispense with God. "I would take care of myself. I
would go it alone... Just as my father faded from my awareness,
so did God, and so did my desire for God."

But that's not the end of the story. In college, he fell in
love with literature and philosophy, went to church on occasion
out of habit or curiosity, but without much meaning or satisfac-
tion. In Medical School he tried to make a god out of science.
And after a tour of duty in the Air Force in Vietnam, he returned

to his medical practice, mainly dealing with alcohol and drug
addiction.

He noted quickly what practitioners in the field of addic-
tion all know and that is that the going is very tough, that
there are no quick or easy fixes, that addiction is not a super-
ficial matter but comes from somewhere deep inside, and conse-
quently people who recover, more often than not, do so as a
result of some kind of deeply spiritual experience. Even if the
language is not traditional, May concluded, recovery was a
"turning to God."

As a result of that discovery he began to re-explore his own
spiritual experience, his early decision that he could go it

alone, but he also was able to identify another motif - a life-
long fascination with art, with philosophy, with anything related
to transcendence and spirituality. He was, he says, looking

for something, longing for something, yearning for something
which was absent from his life.

And that is when he comes to the notion that I find so
intriguing: I have printed it on the bulletin cover.

"I am convinced that all human beings have an
inborn desire for God. Whether we are consciously
religious or not, this desire is our deepest
longing and our most precious treasure. Regard-
less of how we describe it, it is a longing for
love. It is a hunger to love, to be loved, to
move closer to the Source of love. This yearning
is the essence of the human spirit." [Addiction
and Grace, p. 1]

Now that is a bold theological assertion. Our deepest
yearning is for God - the source of love. It is of the essence

of our humanness to love and to be loved and God has created us
that way!

If that is true, why isn't everybody happily religious? Why
isn't everybody a contented, trusting, joyful person of faith?
What happens? Like Gerald May, life disappoints us; hurt, anger,
resentment, fear cause us to repress our- basic longing for God or
to turn it elsewhere - addiction, for instance, which May defines
as attachment toc, bondage to, enslavement to things, people,
ideas which restrict our freedom and our ability to love and to
be loved. That is, replacements’ for God;.and-for the longing,
yearning for God that is part of our basic humanity.

That God creates us for love - that God's basic disposition
toward us is love, that God's ongoing relationship with us is
fundamentally to woo us, to pursue us, to gently persuade us to
live in love with God and with one another - is not the oldest
religious idea in the world but it may be the boldest.

The oldest idea is that God creates us to be subjects who
will obey and who will reap God's anger and wrath when we do not
obey. The ancient religions of the world postulate god or gods
who make rules and punish people with droughts, flocds, plagues
and military defeats when the rules are broken. It is not the
whole story, but there is about the ancient religion of Israel, a
little of that. The God of the Pentateuch can be described as a
God of unyielding legalistic justice.

But that is not the whole story. There is another motif in

our oldest scriptures. Like the counterpoint in a complex Bach
fugue - this is a lovely counter melody which is necessary if we

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are to hear the entire piece. This motif is unique and revolu-
tionary and bold. It is that the God who creates and makes
rules, also loves: that God wants not only obedient people but
loving people who will reflect divine love in their common
life... that God wants more than.obedience... God wants a rela-
tionship, a covenant, a reunion, .a- reconciliation.

And the ancient voice who perhaps best presents this radical
and subversive notion is the prophet Hosea, a fascinating charac-—
ter. Let me tell you a bit about him. He lived in the Eighth
Century B.C. He was a farmer, a baker, a husband and father of
three children. He not only had fallen in love with a woman with
a shady reputation, he was convinced that God wanted him to marry
her. So he did. Sometime after thé birth of his third child,
the bottom fell out for him. His wife left - ran off with anoth-
er man and then another man and then another. The law was clear
~ the relationship was over. She was to be cast out forever.

But Hosea didn't want to do it, couldn't do it. He still loved
his wife. He was crushed, disappointed, devastated, but he made
a radical, subversive decision. He would not do what the law -
what common propriety, the Eighth Century version of "Family
Values" dictated, what everybody assumed God expected in the name
of traditional morality. Hosea decided to go after her with
compassion, forgiveness and love - to win back his beloved. And
that, Hosea had the temerity to announce, is precisely the way
God deals with us. Some of the loveliest and most moving poetry
in the Bible will be found in the words of this tragic but stead-
fast love, which has God saying things like - "How can I give you
up? My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and
tender," and portrays God like a parent, or grandparent, lifting
an infant to her cheek.

The distinguished Jewish scholar and philosopher, the late
Abraham Herschel, said it is the boldest religious concept in
history - the "astonishing fact of God's love... a God whose
basic and eternal disposition is love... a God of tenderness and
mercy... a God with whom healing and reconciliation, not harm and
destruction finally prevail." [The Prophets, Hosea, p. 44-49]

It is still a bold idea - a lovely idea. The 14th Century
mystic, Meister Eckhardt, said that human beings are created out
of the laughter of the Trinity. What a lovely thought. That
there is divine laughter at our birth; that our creator is our
gentle and loving source of being.

It is still a provocative and bold notion that there is
something about God's love for us that is reflected in our love
for God, or our yearning for God, or our resentment at God's
disappointing us, or our anger at God's absence, or our emptiness
because we concluded long ago that we have to take care of our-
selves and to go it alone. The bold underpinning of Hosea's
theology is that God's love for us is reflected in the human

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heart in a longing for God, which often takes the form of a
yearning for love.

Eight centuries after Hosea, Jesus returned to the topic.
In an amazing sequence of stories:he:described a God who is
absolutely committed to finding:the:lost;:to bringing home the
wandering sheep, to welcoming the wandering child. The setting
of those stories is very important.

"Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming
near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the
Scribes were grumbling and saying 'This fellow
welcomes sinners and eats with them.'"

{Luke 15:1, 2]

They were appalled that Jesus so freely associated with
social and religious outcasts. And it was in response to their
elitist, exclusive piety that he told the unforgettable stories
about the shepherd who leaves his flock to go after one lost
sheep, and the old woman who turned her house upside down and

inside out to find one lost coin. (Can you imagine the raised
eyebrows at that? "Did I hear right? Yahweh is an old woman?")
And the third story, about a household and two sons - one of whom

runs away from his parents' love and the other of whom stays home
and allows resentment and anger to separate him from his parents’
love.

"There is joy in heaven when one sinner repents - or is
found - or returns home," Jesus told his proper and indignant
audience. It is customary to assume that he was lecturing them -
the Pharisees and Scribes - the religious folk: lecturing them
on the topic of not excluding the sinners, the social outcasts,
the ones who don't follow all the rules, obey all the laws, live
quiet and socially acceptable lives. One wishes Pat Buchanan
would spend some time reading Luke 15 before he declares, in the
name of Christian religion, a "cultural war." One wishes Pat
Robertson would consult Jesus on the topic of excluding people
who disagree with his notions of morality. One has the sense
that there is no room for the people Jesus spent most of his time
with in the party, or - if I heard it right - in the political
systen.

The traditional interpretation was that the purpose of
Jesus! stories about God's inclusive, pursuing love, was to
persuade the Scribes and Pharisees to lighten-up, give the sin-
-ners and tax collectors and prostitutes a break, let them in the
Kingdom theologically if not the Temple physically.

But now I believe the-purpose of these wonderful stories was
to break through to the Pharisees and Scribes, to tell them that
God loved them, and that God's love wanted to find a home in
their hearts, that God was pursuing them because they were lost,

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they had replaced their own yearning for love with a poor substi-
tute - religious zealotry, ideological and theological orthodoxy,
religious and social propriety.

Gerald May argues that we-have a way -of dismissing our
yearning for God and substituting instead.other attachments.
These attachments, he says, are addictions. They limit our
freedom and our ability to love and to be loved. They become god
for us. He writes:

"T am not being flippant when I say that all of us
suffer from addiction...the psychological, neuro-
logical, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged
addiction are actively at work in every human
being. The same processes that are responsible
for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also
responsible for addiction to ideas, work, rela-
tionships, power, moods, fantasies and an endiess
variety of other things... Addiction makes idola-
ters of us all, because it forces us to worship
these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us
from truly, freely loving God and one another."

[p- 3, 4]

Wayne Oates has written very helpfully about a dynamic which
is distressingly familiar - he calls "workaholism" addiction to
work. In The Confessions of a Workaholic Oates speaks for many
of us by revealing that he had trusted his work, his professional
expertise, his physical strength, his ability to work longer and
harder than anybody else, to make him happy, to bring him peace,

' to save his soul. And it doesn't work.

The message of faith is that the source of salvation - or,
if you prefer, peace, fulfillment, joy - is God alone, that God
is the source of love, that God loves you and wants you to trust
that love, to live in that love, to answer that love, by loving
God and by loving your neighbors.

The message of faith is that God wants you to say yes to
something elemental about yourself, that you need and yearn for
love, to be loved and to love. The message of faith is an invi-
tation to claim your hunger, your longing, and not repress it or
replace it.

It is not an insistence that you say words you do not mean,
or claim to have experiences that you have not experienced.
That's what makes many of us most uncomfortable with the "in your
face - are you saved?" approach to evangelism. In a wonderful
essay the late Joseph Sittler described his own discomfort when
people started to talk about their private and powerful religious
experiences. He wrote:

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"I have not seen any burning bushes... John
Wesley's strangely warmed heart at Aldersgate

Street - this is not my street. There is a
precision that is born of knowledge. . - and there
is a precision born.of..deprivation.. just to

hunger and thirst is a. kind-of negative benedic-
tion. Hunger, unabated, is a kind of testimony to
the reality of food. To want to have may become a
strange kind of having."

[Grace Notes and Other Fraqments, The View From
Mt. Nebo, p. 147]

Perhaps you are somewhere in all of that.

Perhaps you were disappointed by loss or tragedy and decided
long ago that you had to go it alone - but you continue to
wonder.

Perhaps you keep flirting with faith, wanting to be
brave and autonomous and self-reliant, but your heart stops
unaccountably on occasion, and your breath quickens when you
see beauty, or hear beauty and you find tears in your eyes
and a lump in your throat when you hear a great hymn, or see
a child's innocent trust, or watch with wonder, an act of
human courage.

Perhaps you are addicted and know it, or more likely don't
know it, except that you are working harder and harder, giving
more of yourself, your heaith, your energy, your soul, your love,
your relationship, and it doesn't feel right.

Or perhaps, like the Pharisees and Scribes, you are
traditionally and comfortably religious, but without much
passion.

Perhaps the only thing you know of the reality of God
is a void, a felt incompleteness, and perhaps the only expe-
rience of love in your life is the palpable absence of love.

We are, all of us, the psychiatrist said, somewhere in that,
and the first word to us is a good word, namely that the
emptiness, the absence, the longing, the yearning is, it-
self, God's love working in our hearts, gently and instantly
seeking for us, pursuing us, coming after us.

And the second word is even better. It-is that because
this gentle love is actually God it will not give up, will
not abandon us, will not ever cease pursuing us until one
day, in our heart of hearts, we say yes to it. Yes to God,
yes to our spirituality, yes to our need to love and to be
loved. Yes, that is, to our essential nature, and then find
ourselves living "For the love of God."

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So hear the ancient and good words again:

"How can I give you up...
My heart recoils
My compassion grows warm and tender."

And when the shepherd comes home, he calls his friends
and neighbors, saying to them:

"Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that
was lost."

t+ ee tetttete st

O God of mysterious love, find us when we are lost, search
for us when we stray in dry desert wastes, claim us, redeem

us, and bring us home to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

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