Relationship as Key

3 Pentecost -  June 5, 2005

(Hosea 5:15-6:6; Psalm 50; Romans 4:13-18; Matthew 9:9-13)

I talked last week about the process of religious evolution that took us from magic to morality to just letting go into the grace of God.

The lessons this week point to a different line of evolution that, maybe, could be thought about as more “spiritual” than “religious”, more looking inward than outward.

It starts where most issues of spirituality start, with the separation, alienation, and loneliness at the heart of the human dilemma.  I’ve talked about that before when we’ve look at the Garden of Eden story.  Being human means being conscious, but being conscious makes us aware of our separation from everything else – the natural world, other people, and especially God.  That separation makes us objectify that natural world and those other people, but God won’t be turned into an object, so God just disappears. There goes Eden.

The way that separation, alienation, and loneliness are healed is through relationship.  The Bible is essentially a story about relationship.  It is not a science book.  It’s not a history book.  It’s not a law book.  It’s a love story.

Now it’s not a straight forward, boy meets girl, they fell in love, and live happily ever after type of love story.  It is much more complicated then that.  Hosea, for example, whom we hear from today, married a prostitute as a way of showing what God’s relationship with Israel was really like – and she didn’t have a heart of gold (unless it was a golden calf.)  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The first example we have of relationship is that of our family.  Especially mothers and fathers, mothers probably first, then fathers.  So the first metaphors for relationship with God were parental.  First mothers again, most probably, then fathers.

And those metaphors still stand.  We are always in relationship with parents, or parental figures, or internal parental images, sometimes good, sometimes not.  And the nature of that relationship strongly influences our view of God.  Is God nurturing?  Is God strict?  Is God arbitrary?  Is God forgiving?  But more subtly, that relationship affects our sense of our own self.  With a sense of connection to mothers, to fathers, to family we are not completely separate.  We are not totally alienated, we are not ever really alone.

The next step comes in relations of romantic love or sexual love; however you want to describe it.  As the Bible puts it, “A man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife.”

Now, as a culture and a church we may be in the process of broadening that a bit, but wherever we stand on the issue of sexuality the importance of this relationship should never be minimized.

It too is a model for relationship with God.  It was for Hosea and it was for the writer of the Song of Songs, or at least for those who decided the Song should be in the Bible.

And the difference between this relationship and the parental, family of origin relationship is that it’s taken, not given.  It’s entered into, not just received.  It’s a choice, a leap of faith, if you will, a giving up of our defenses to the vulnerability of intimacy, a taking of a risk that is essential to take if we’re ever to fully overcome the effects of our spiritual isolation.

I’m reminded of the parable of the talents later in Matthew (like any good tax collector he often used money as an example).  A man had three servants and when he went away on a trip he gave one 5,000 talents (coins), another 2,000 talents, and another 1,000.  The first two invested their coins and made a profit.  The third one buried his, earned nothing, was chastised and “thrown into outer darkness to weep and gnash his teeth.”  (Matthew must have had a strict father.)

Unless we risk love for one another, unless we break out of our fear that love is a zero sum game and we’d better keep it all buried inside in order to stay safe, we won’t be spiritually open to the love of God.  Loving God may be the first commandment and loving our neighbor the second, but unless we can love our neighbor as our self we won’t be able to begin to love God.

Now, when I talked about the Bible being a love story not a history, that wasn’t really 100% accurate, because the love story is told by the telling of the history…not the kind of history that we are used to, with checkable facts and artifacts, but history told so as to convey deeper meaning.  The family that came from Abraham and Sarah was first a tribal family and then a family of tribes.  All the stories of the patriarchs are stories about relationships of various groups of people. 

The story about Sarah and Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac is told, for example, from the Hebrew perspective to say something about the relationship of the Jews and Arabs.  The story about Jacob and Esau, although about much else as well, is a story about the relationship between Israel and the Edomites. Looking at the interplay of Jacob’s sons, who was close, who was distant, who was full bother, who was half, fine points of tribal relationship come into focus.  These stories tell much, and probably told much more to the people who wrote them, about the coming together of these tribes to finally become one people; of the common experiences that bound them together; the slavery and exodus, the exile and return; the losses (the whole Northern Kingdom remembered only by their absence and the awkward relationship with their Samaritan successors).

We may not have “tribes” today, but we do have communities and generations and we say we are one nation under God.  It’s the relationship we have at that deep cultural level that makes even our antagonisms speak of our connection.  There’s something disconcerting about the antipathy of red states and blue states that we don’t sense with an antipathy to the French.  And there is more disconcertedness in our antipathy toward the French than in our problems with Iran or North Korea.  Part of me just can’t disown Texas or even forget La Marseilles.  Patriotism, cultural values, are part of who I am – whether I want them to be or not.  And my participation in those relationships opens up my soul a little more, makes me less separate, less alienated, and less lonely.

Now all these relationships, parental, romantic and sexual, tribal, national, and cultural work in one way, they incorporate into my sense of who I am a wider and wider definition.  They move the boundary between self and other to incorporate more in my sense of my self.

But what’s hinted at in the prophets, whispered in the wisdom literature, and stated flat out clearly again and again by Jesus is that the boundary doesn’t exist.  In Jesus’ teaching we are in relationship with the other, we are connected to the other, we love the other even as they remain other and are never incorporated into this wider and wider circle of self.  In fact, it’s by this relationship with the other as other that we lose the self-centeredness of life at the heart of the human dilemma.

That’s why Jesus picks tax collectors, and prostitutes, and Samaritans, and enemies, as examples – He’s not just saying we are all just one big happy “brotherhood of man beneath the fatherhood of God.”  He’s saying we are connected to people to whom the only way to be connected is deep down in the root system, in the aquifer of humanity where we touch the other as we lose touch with  our separated selves, individual and collective.  And we need to connect to the other in ourselves as well – the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the Samaritans, the enemy within.  And the payoff for all of this is that that is the place where we meet God as well.

In Karl Barth’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, God is defined… no, described…no, spoken of… (you don’t define or describe God).  God is spoken of as being “wholly other”, totally other.  That’s why God disappeared with our ego-centered fall.  The real God, the living God, the wholly, holy other God will not be a “part” of “our” world, as I have said many times before.

That’s why God is not “accessible” to us no matter how high we climb the mountains or build the towers.  It’s why we had to become accessible to God, in the reaching out across the abyss of difference in the life of Jesus.  “That’s why it all depends on faith,” as Paul says in the Epistle today, “in order that the promise may rest on grace and the guarantee…in the presence of God…who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Thanks be to God.