Hilton Head Island, SC – May 28, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Hosea 11:1-9; Psalm 13:1-6
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me forever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? - Psalm 13:1 (RSV)
Well, David is in one of his cheery moods again, isn't he? In the first of this series of sermons on a few of the Psalms, whose overall theme is Questions for People of Faith, I have previously offered the unproven and unprovable theory that King David suffered from bipolar illness, that he was a manic-depressive. If so, Psalm 13 was certainly not written in a manic phase, and in fact not many of his Psalms were written when he was "up."
"How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me forever? How long wilt thou hide your face from me?" These are not the sentiments of someone who, when he wrote these words, was convinced that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world, as Robert Browning poetically declared.
If the truth is told, though, most of us sometimes feel like David felt when he composed Psalm 13, don't we? We imagine that God has forgotten us. We suppose that the Master of the universe has walked out on us. We feel as though He has deliberately avoided us. If all these things are happening to us (whatever "these things" might actually be), we wonder how God can possibly have remembered that we are even alive. No God who is truly God would allow terrible things to happen to us --- would He?
Oscar Wilde, who was never accused of being a ladies’ man, said, "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." When you're married, and things are not only not going well, but seem to be in horrible disarray, you may wonder whether God has forgotten you. How can things be so bad when we say that God is so good?
Mary Bly wrote, "Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you." Having known many dogs and cats in my time, I would most certainly agree. Sometimes when we communicate with God by means of prayer (the celestial telephone), we seem to hear the divine voice saying, "This is God. Neither I nor any of the heavenly host is available to take your call. Please leave your name and number, and we will get back to you as soon as we can." How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
Pickles is one of my favorite newspaper cartoons. An elderly couple and their young grandson are its main characters, but sometimes their daughter and a few other people appear. A few weeks days ago Earl, the old guy, told his wife Gladys that their credit card company had written him a form letter to tell him that he was dead. He called them up to get the computer glitch straightened out. Gladys says to him, “So did you tell the credit card company that you’re not dead?” Earl said, “Yes. I said, ‘I’m not dead. I’m sitting right here talking to you.’” In the next frame Earl said, “They said their records indicate I’ve been dead for five months.” Gladys, who is always after Earl to do things he doesn’t want to do, responded, “Well that would explain why the Christmas lights never got taken down.”
Sometimes it feels as though God is dead. When life goes south on us, as it does to everyone at various points along the way, like Earl, we want to try to remind God that we’re alive, even when He doesn’t seem to acknowledge that. And if He doesn’t, why doesn’t He make Himself more spiritually known to us? Why does He keep us in the dark?
In such moments we need to ask ourselves this: Has God forgotten us, or have we forgotten something about God? Where did we ever get the notion that if we were faithful to God, nothing would go wrong for us? Why do we think that life should always be fair for those who believe, or that troubles will miraculously disappear for us, or that nothing and no one will ever get us down? We might forget God, or we might forget or misunderstand certain crucial things about God, but does the forgotten God forget? Because we feel forgotten by God, are we forgotten? Are we? We ask ourselves how long must we bear physical pain or pain in our soul and sorrow in our heart, and if it should last all day long, or for weeks or months or maybe years, does our sorrow indicate that God has forgotten us?
Everybody from time to time feels neglected by God, but those who regularly or always feel that way have very short and very selective memories. Even those who have the most stressed and painful lives have many moments of contentment or happiness or even bliss. Without question some people have far harder lives than most others, but even unfortunate people are given times of deep joy and high optimism. To suppose that God has entirely forgotten any of us is to imagine that God promised us carefree lives, which He didn't, but it also is to forget the good times God has mysteriously provided for us and we choose instead to dwell upon the bad times. When the bad times are really bad, and particularly when they persist for a long period, it is perhaps inevitable that we should think God has forgotten us, but that does not mean He has.
Christians often declare that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, and that the God of the New Testament is a God of love. Such a notion is suggested in a New Yorker cartoon where an angel says to the celestial secretary just outside the divine office door in the clouds, "Is he the God of the Old or the New Testament this morning?" How shall we find God today: as the forgetful Psalm 13 kind of God, or as the ever-present, all-loving God who is described in the eleventh chapter of the prophecy of Hosea?
My Old Testament professor in seminary was a Scotsman named George Angus Fulton Knight. George Knight has had a profound influence on my life. When I went to Scotland for my second year of seminary, he arranged through a minister friend of his to line up a position for me as a student assistant minister in Paisley, Scotland. Having perhaps half of the blood coursing through my veins as ancestral Scottish blood, I was prepared to love Scotland before I even got there, but being in the Glenburn Parish Church greatly deepened my appreciation for the Scots and all things Scottish. In many ways that year abroad was the happiest and most broadening experience of my life.
Professor and Mrs. Knight had a summer home in Bayfield, Wisconsin. He thought the Bayfield Presbyterian Church would be a good place for me to begin my ministry, so six months before I graduated from seminary, I met with the pulpit committee of that congregation, and they agreed to call me as their pastor. It still amazes me they were willing to wait six months for me to begin my first pastorate. George Knight preached at my ordination service. The next summer he and Nancy moved to the Fiji Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, where he became the founding leader of the newly established Pacific School of Theology in Suva. On July 16 we are going to have David Thomson, a friend of mine who used to live on Hilton Head Island, play his classical guitar as part of the service that day. David was born in Suva, and his father was then the British High Commissioner of the Fiji Islands. I talked to David on the phone to ask him if he would play his guitar at a Chapel service. During the conversation, he reminded me of how much George Knight impressed him, even though, as the Scots would say, David was just a “wee lad” at the time.
During my last year in seminary, I took a course taught by George Knight called The Eighth Century Prophets. It featured Isaiah and Micah in Judah and Amos and Hosea in Israel during the 8th century BCE. He made prophecy and those particular prophets come alive for me. And of everything that all of them wrote, the eleventh chapter of Hosea imprinted itself within me the most deeply.
Frequently the prophets wrote as though they were the voice of God speaking to us. Thus their words may become to us as the words of God. Writing as though he is the voice of God, Hosea begins this marvelous passage by saying, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” In one short sentence, Hosea encapsulated the four-hundred-plus year history of Israel in slavery, and their difficult and bloody conquest of the Promised Land over the next two centuries. When things got tough for the Israelites, they broke away from God, and worshiped Baal, the god of the Canaanites. “The more I called them,” said God, “the more they went from me” (11:2).
Hosea portrays God as doing everything He could to woo Israel back to Himself, but they continued to resist Him. Then, sounding more like a forsaken human being than the Creator of the vast reaches of space, in anger God (Hosea) says, “They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king” (11:5). And that is what happened. In 722 BCE, toward the end of the eighth century, the Assyrians conquered Israel, the northern kingdom, where Hosea lived, making them virtual slaves. Therefore Hosea has God say “My people are bent on turning away from me; so they are appointed to the yoke, and none shall remove it” (11:7).
But, says Hosea (says God), “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God, and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy” (11:8-9).
The God of the New Testament is the same as the God of the Old Testament, the same as the God of the Quran, who is frequently described there as “The All-Compassionate, The All-Merciful.” We sometimes forget God, but God never forgets us, nor does He abandon us. That we imagine He would do that is a matter of perception, or more accurately, of misperception. As with the Psalm and sermon two weeks ago, David perceived that all the godly were gone, but that simply was not so. Hosea poignantly described how we may suppose God forgets us, but He doesn’t. We may forget God, but God never forgets us.
What we believe strongly affects what we feel and how we live. If we believe God has forgotten us, then we will act as though He has. If we believe He is always with us, that He always remembers us, even when we are in extreme pain or sorrow or agony, we will act differently. What we think helps determine who we are, and what we think during the good times should particularly affect who we are during the bad times.
When things seem their darkest, and life is its grimmest, we may feel that God has forgotten us, that we are mere flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life. But when we feel that way, it means that we will have forgotten something about God, which is that He never forgets any of us. He has plans for us, for each of us, for all of us, and His plans cannot ultimately be thwarted.
On December 1, 1955, a Black woman got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and sat down in a seat near the front. When the bus filled up with white people, the driver told her to get up and move to the back of the bus. It had been the accepted practice in Montgomery for decades that Black people had to sit in the back of the bus. But Rosa Parks was really tired, after having worked hard all day, and she refused to move. Within days the nascent civil rights movement in the United States would suddenly soar skyward because of what that strong-willed lady did. The pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, a 26-year-old newly ordained man who had been born in Atlanta, was to take up the cause. His masterful eloquence would forge him a path into American and world history. Near the end of that path he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Later he would march in Selma, and he would go to jail in Birmingham, and he would die in Memphis.
In between, on August 23, 1963, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he would say, "In spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal.'
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
“I have a dream today....
“So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire!...Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
“...When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"
If the man who said that thought that God had forgotten him or his people or his cause in the midst of that terrible and glorious struggle, he never would have been inspired to say those immortal words. He might have thought occasionally that God had forgotten him, and considering his circumstances, such thoughts would have been understandable, but he never gave up hope. At the very end, the night before he was assassinated, he said, "I see the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. I am happy tonight that I am not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory!" And it was the last thing Martin Luther King, Jr. ever said in public.
In his book I Am a Happy Theologian, Edward Schillebeekx, the great Belgian Roman Catholic scholar, said, "God's presence is fundamental, above all in reference to the presence of evil and suffering in the world. It is not that God wills suffering, but he remains present silently. In the moment of Jesus' death God was present, but silently. Death when God is silent is the supreme suffering. Those who believe in God know that God's silence is not absence.... The absolute silence of God reveals his absolute presence."
So, when David asked God whether God had forgotten him, did David sense God's absence, or His silence? And when we encounter the terrors which erupt from imagining that God has forgotten us, is it His absence we so strongly feel, or is it His silence? Hosea felt crushed by the apostasy of the kingdom of Israel, but he insisted that God would not forget them, even when they forgot Him. Thus Hosea spoke up on behalf of the omnipresent but often silent God.
What was it at the beginning of Psalm 13 that David so keenly felt: God's absence, or His silence? I don't know. I can't speak for you, but I can speak for myself; at times I have felt each, the absence and the silence, and sometimes both together. Hosea also felt that way, but the great eighth century prophet recovered his spiritual compass, and he assured the people of Israel that despite their failure to remember God, God remembered them with a divine compassion and love.
That was also the way David ended Psalm 13, and it is the destination at which people of faith need to arrive. Maybe penultimately we might feel forgotten by God, but never ultimately. Therefore the Sweet Singer of Israel concludes his psalm by saying to God, "But I trusted in thy steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me" (Ps. 13:5-6). Nor, said Hosea, would God give up on Israel. Hosea refers to the kingdom of Israel as Ephraim. “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of compassion, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them” (11:3-4)
And this God does for us all. Though in moments of despondency or despair we might forget who God is, God never forgets who we are. God never forgets us; never. Never forget it.