Faithful Relationship                                The Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

Our Scripture readings this morning seem to be all over the place, giving us very different messages, with very different emotional overtones and very different spiritual expectations. The first reading, from Hosea, is a prophetic condemnation, an angry word from God against the people. The second reading, from Colossians, is a large-scale, almost metaphysical, evocation of discipleship. The gospel reading, from Luke, gives us one of the most sustained instances of Jesus’ teaching on the subject of prayer. These three readings really do seem to be all over the map.

And yet there is a kind of common theme running through them all. Each of these passages, in its own important way, talks about being in relationship with God, talks about tending and growing that relationship with God, talks about finding life for ourselves and with each other in relationship with God.

The passage from Hosea talks about relationship with God chiefly in terms of what happens when it is broken. Hosea lived and prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel in the 700s BCE, at a time when the government and religious life of Israel had grown quite corrupt. For the past several weeks, ever since we began the season after Pentecost, we’ve been reading First Testament stories about the northern kingdom of Israel, specifically the history of Israel as seen through the eyes of the prophets. Stories of Elijah, Elisha, Amos have shown us the problems of a kingdom where unfaithfulness and injustice seem to have taken the upper hand — and especially religious infidelity, the people’s worship of Baal and other local deities, when God had called them to worship only God and to follow only God’s way of justice. Hosea’s prophecies pick up and continue the message of condemning the people’s infidelity to God — but Hosea acts out that message in a particularly graphic and troubling way. Hosea hears God calling him to marry a prostitute, to create a relationship of faithfulness with someone who is professionally unfaithful. The very phrase “wife of whoredom” is meant to shock and disturb people; the marriage itself is meant to be an uncomfortable, even offensive, image for how the people have abandoned their faithfulness to God. But Hosea doesn’t stop there, with that disturbing marriage: he has three children in this marriage, and he hears God telling him to give these children names which speak of God’s wrath. Jezreel is named for the place where Elijah predicted Ahab’s faithless descendants would die a bloody death. Lo-ruhamah has a name which, literally translated from the Hebrew, means “No compassion” — it would be like naming your daughter “Merciless” or “Doesn’t Care” or “Child Abuse.” And the third child, Lo-ammi, has a name which literally means “Not my people,” a horribly cold and frightening name to give a child born to a family supposedly among the called and chosen people of God. Hosea’s entire marriage and family life becomes in this passage a sign and symbol for God’s message condemning the faithlessness of the people.

And I have to say that, for me, on a personal level, I find Hosea’s form of prophecy to be very disturbing, even repugnant. Hosea turns his wife and his children into instruments, tools, for getting his message across, he reduces them from being human persons to being debating points — and I don’t think it is fair to reduce any human person to an instrument or a tool just for making a point. I think the way Hosea used these other persons was wrong. But perhaps that very wrongness is part of the message: Hosea’s family relationships are all screwed up and twisted, but that’s because the people’s relationship with God is all screwed up and twisted. Hosea and Gomer and Jezreel and Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi are all trapped in unfaithfulness and injustice, because the whole people, the whole social environment, is wrapped up in unfaithfulness and injustice before God. Hosea’s prophetic and messed-up family shocks and disturbs us into recognizing that it is only by being in faithful relationship with God that we can find faithful relationship with anyone. It is only by being in faithful relationship with God that we can find any kind of just and faithful life for ourselves.

Our second reading today, from Colossians, picks up that same theme and yet also turns it right around. Hosea’s message is that because the people have abandoned God, God will now abandon the people. But Colossians talks about how God reaches out to people, even in their sins, and God brings them back. “When you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh,” the passage says, “God made you alive together with Jesus, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.” This message is the very opposite of abandonment. This message tells us that God’s faithfulness is so great, God’s faithfulness is so generous, that God remains faithful to us even when we have trouble being faithful to God, and in faithfulness God reaches out to us through Jesus, and through Jesus God draws us into relationship — relationship with the Trinity, relationship with each other, relationship with everything (because in Christ all things hold together) — and in that relationship we can be rooted and established and built up and growing, until we all come to fullness of life in Christ. What Hosea put negatively, Colossians now puts positively: the message that faithful relationship with God is what opens the way to a just and faithful life with everyone.

Finally, in the Gospel reading, Jesus teaches that the way to grow a faithful relationship with God is through prayer. When his disciples ask him to teach them to pray, Jesus gives them a form of words to say, a form of words which of course nowadays we now know as The Lord’s Prayer. But Jesus’ teaching on prayer is a lot more than just a form of words. Jesus teaches that prayer is all about building up a long-term, growing, faithful relationship with God. Jesus says that even we flawed and frail human beings want to give good things to each other when we are in relationship: a parent will give a child a fish instead of a snake, an egg instead of a scorpion; a neighbor will get up and give a friend bread, even if it may take a little while. In just the same way, Jesus says, even more than that, Jesus says, God wants to give us good, God wants to give us the Holy Spirit, when we are in relationship with God, and when we grow in relationship with God. And growing in that relationship means bringing more and more and more of ourselves into the prayer we offer to God, it means asking about everything, and searching out God’s presence in every moment, and knocking at each new door God opens before us. And if we will pray in that way, Jesus says — if we will be patient and persistent and faithful in building up that kind of a prayer-relationship with God, Jesus says — then that praying will become the opening, that praying will become the conduit through which the Holy Spirit can come more deeply into us, through which the Holy Spirit can breathe more abundant life into us, through which the Holy Spirit can draw us more fully into living the communion that is the very life of the Trinity. Prayer, Jesus teaches, is how we live consciously a faithful relationship with God — and so prayer is also the basis for living a just and faithful life with our neighbors.

In a few moments, after the Eucharistic Prayer, we will pray together this prayer Jesus taught us. Our scriptures today invite us to ask: How can praying this prayer draw us more deeply into faithful relationship with God and with each other? When we pray “Hallowed be your name,” what relationship with God would let that hallowedness be realized in us? When we pray “Your kingdom come,” what relationship with God would let that reign of justice and peace be made manifest in us? When we pray “Give us each day our daily bread,” what relationship with God would help us realize we can live more with less, so that we can share more with others? When we pray “Forgive us our sins,” what relationship with God would set us free from the burden and the bondage of old wounds and old hurts and old wrongs? When we pray “Save us from the time of trial,” what relationship with God would let us live in such a way that salvation would shine forth from us for all the world to see and know and learn and love? When we pray this Lord’s Prayer and keep on praying it faithfully time and time and time again, how does this persistence in prayer build the relationship with God that helps you become more of the person and the disciple and the neighbor God wants and yearns and longs for you to become?

And so our all-over-the-map scriptures today do bring us Good News: the Good News that God wants us to be in faithful relationship with God, the Good News that God reaches out to us even in our sins and draws us into faithful relationship, the Good News that God gives us the gift of prayer so that we may grow in faithful relationship with God and with each other and with every creature. Let us receive that Good News today with joy, and let us act out that Good News in all our faithful prayers. Amen.