All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness,
for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.
The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him,
and he makes known to them his covenant [sealed promise].
(Psalm 25: 10 & 14)
And may you have the power to understand,
as all God’s people should,
how wide,
how long,
how high,
and how deep his love is.
May you experience the love of Christ,
though it is too great to understand fully.
Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power
that comes from God.
(Ephesians 3:18, 19)
Sex stories in the Bible
God is not nearly as prudish as some of His followers are and He doesn’t avoid metaphors and imagery that make us uncomfortable. The Bible uses plenty of stories, polite and impolite, to get a point across. English translators tidied up some of the scatological and sexual terms, but the situations are still there. (My Grandma once said if you read the whole Bible to a kid there wouldn’t be much left to tell them about sex, but a whole lot of ‘xplaining to do about why it’s not meant to be a manual.)
Some of the prophets were way out there when it came to being politically and socially correct. Jeremiah didn’t exactly hold back on his descriptions of Israel as a whore. God had his sold-out guys with eyes and ears use some pretty provocative performance art in their attempt to get His message across. Ezekiel’s mother must have rolled her eyes sometimes. I don’t imagine it was easy to parent Isaiah or John the Baptist either. (What do you do with a son who prefers grasshoppers to your brisket and wears that stinky camel skin when your friends drop by for tea?)
Sometimes a prophet’s whole life became the metaphor. I feel sorry for Hosea who was told to love a hooker who didn’t love him back. And I do believe he had a true love for her, sent from the Father and placed in his heart, that drove his life-as-metaphor.
Allured
One day, while waiting for my kids, I picked up a Bible someone left lying on the car seat. For years I found the Bible had been about as exciting as a phone book to read, but this time the words I saw on the random page stood out as if they were in neon lights. That hadn’t happened much before that day, but that time there was no doubt in my mind Himself was talking. I read:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
Bring her into the wilderness
And speak kindly to her.
“Then I will give her her vineyards from there,
And the valley of Achor as a door of hope.”
It made such an impression that later I looked up ‘Achor’. It meant ‘trouble’. Great.
I read more of that second chapter in Hosea:
“And she will sing there as in the days of her youth,
As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.
‘It will come about in that day,’ declares the Lord,
‘That you will call Me Ishi [husband]
And will no longer call Me Baali [master].”
I’ve written before about my years in that valley of trouble. They were long dark years of depression and anger at a God I grudgingly acknowledged as a master –a cruel master. I missed the ‘allure’ part when I read those verses. I didn’t know he was taking me to a desolate place to remove distractions so I could hear his love song. I didn’t know he wanted to be like a lover. I never really understood the verse about singing to him other than as a job description.
The phrase translated as “she will sing there” in the version I first read is from the Hebrew word “anah”. It’s translated differently in other versions. Some use the word answer, or respond –as to a lover and not a master/owner. Elsewhere it is frequently used in the context of ,”Oh God, hear our cries! Please answer us! Take us seriously and come to us!”
I don’t know how to love him.
I used to teach this song from Jesus Christ Superstar to musical theater students because of the challenges of interpreting its emotional complexity.
In Lloyd-Webber and Andrew Rice’s own fictional version of the story of the life of Jesus, Mary Magdalene is another prostitute who is used to having a power over the men she has both needed and held in contempt. She has used and been used. She has been the object of desire and the object of loathing. She, like Hosea’s wife, can go through the motions without giving her heart. Jesus is someone who is wholly different to all her previous experience. He is “Holy Other.”
She sings, “I don’t know how to love him” because she has no idea what love is. She can’t tell love from manipulation, or fantasy, or the need to scratch an ego itch -or a physical itch, or from something to trade for a bauble that might distract from the pain for a while. Her “lovers” have always let her down. Now she faces the frightening prospect that if this man, who is more than a man, offers her his kind of pure, unselfish, un-needy love that cannot be manipulated or exploited, it would demand an authentic response –an “anah.”
This kind of love is terrifying.
“But if he said he loved me, I’d be lost, I’d be frightened. I couldn’t cope. Just couldn’t cope. I’d turn my head. I’d back away. I wouldn’t want to know.”
That’s the response of most people to the pure love and goodness of Jesus. Love like that requires a response –and we know we can’t love back like that. We are entirely inadequate. We feel like we have to clean ourselves up, to earn his attention somehow. We don’t know how to love him. Yet we know deep inside we cry out for union with perfect love.
“He scares me so. I want him so. I love him so.”
When is sex not about sex?
In Christian dream interpretation people are embarrassed and often reluctant to talk about dreams with sexual content, not realizing that intercourse in a dream is usually symbolic of union or being in a covenant with whatever the other participant represents. God will use powerful, evocative imagery that we understand on a personal level to speak deeper truths. He will give us upsetting or embarrassing dreams to make a point. This symbolic response, this “anah” to God is no mere one-way intellectual nod to his sovereignty. This is a total giving of oneself. This is a promise to remain in permanent union. This is a marriage. This is an unbreakable covenant we are making when we sing to him. It’s our “anah” moment.
But look what He says further down in that passage in Hosea.
“It will come about in that day that I will respond,” declares the Lord.
“I will respond to the heavens, and they will respond to the earth,
And the earth will respond to the grain, to the new wine and to the oil,
And they will respond to Jezreel.
“I will sow her for Myself in the land.
I will also have compassion on her who had not obtained compassion,
And I will say to those who were not My people,
‘You are My people!’
And they will say, ‘You are my God!’” (Hosea 2:21-23) NASB
Again he uses the sexual imagery of a husband who makes his wife a part of his people, who sees her as a rich fertile land full of possibilities, as someone who will partner with him in creation. He uses the same word “anah” when he says, “I will respond.” I will hear! I will answer! I will sing to her! I will be moved in my whole being by her response to me! I will purify her and make her the perfect bride.
It was easier for me to spend hours in intellectual debate about the attributes of God and His legal requirements than it was to hear his voice as he knocked at the door. When I began to wake to his relentless love I was terrified. A theoretical God, a master, did not require my entire self –my body, my mind, my emotion, my will, my heart; that god required only that I obey his instructions. This God, revealed in a man who has experienced everything I have, and still loves purely, is not satisfied with that. He is not be satisfied until I know the laser heat of his pure love that penetrates right to the center of my being.
Jesus has a beautiful voice
I hear Him sing to me sometimes. In the night -and in the day- I have heard him sing love songs. Don’t get me wrong; Jesus is not my boyfriend. I married mine. Jesus is not my sex partner; I have one of those – the same one I’ve been married to for over forty years, bless his beautiful heart. Jesus is the Lover of my soul. His love is far, far greater than any human can imagine and the longer I know him, the more he loves to demonstrate that no matter how wide, how high, and how deep I understand his love to be, it is much greater still.
God is good.
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,
since as members of one body you were called to peace.
And be thankful.
Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly
as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom
through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit,
singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.
And whatever you do, whether in word or deed,
do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks to God the Father through him.
(Colossians 3: 15-17)
The prairies that sidle up to the Canadian Rockies feel the brunt of truck-tipping winds, forehead-slapping cold and frequent horizontal snowstorms, but they also bask in sudden rises in temperature when warm winds, called Chinooks, come shooting down the leeward slopes. While folks in other parts of the country are still pulling their heads into their down jackets like sullen turtles, kids in western Alberta ignore their cautious mothers and fling hats and mitts onto soggy piles of snow to dance and play in the sun.
For me, it’s been a long dark winter, with sudden breaks of unseasonable joy. I know God is teaching me to rest in his finished work and to trust that He is the one who wins the victory, but sometimes, when it hurt and when negative words swirled around me like a prairie blizzard obscuring my view, all I wanted to do was retreat my head into my poofy parka and stop feeling for a while.
The problem with blocking out pain is that we also block out joy. James wrote, “Consider it all joy, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”
There are times when all I have the strength to do is turtle, to work on endurance. And then there are times when I am surprised by unseasonable joy right in the middle of my winter, when it’s okay to pop my head out again and throw my parka aside.
It’s a wild road, this life with Jesus thing, with ups and downs and sudden turns, but every step is one where He is behind me and before me, above me and below me, and best of all –within me.
God is good father. It’s not all about discipline and learning new lessons. He also likes to play, because what He has done for us is already a done deal.
Remember Your word to Your servant;
You have given me hope through it.
This is my comfort in my affliction:
Your promise has given me life.
(Psalm 119:49, 50)
I’ve received a lot of God’s comfort and joy and faithfulness in the last two months.
On Monday I had minor surgery to biopsy something that ought not to be there. The early doctors’ consultations were not at all good. Because the specialist was out of the country the wait was much longer than I would have liked, but it was exactly the length the Lord planned. That’s how long it took for me to stop listening to the fears and start listening to the promises He has given me. It will still take ten days for the final report, but the surgeon found something fix-able and said these kind were nearly always benign. For that I praise God and am extremely grateful, but more I thank him for his comfort in the night and his assurance that he would never let me go.
I love you, Lord.
Be clothed with humility, for
“God resists the proud,
But gives grace to the humble.”
(1 Peter 5:5)
You have given me the shield of your salvation,
and your gentleness made me great.
(2 Samuel 22:36)
You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.
You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy,
that I might sing praises to you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever!
(Psalm 30:11,12)
I’ve decided to break with tradition. I’m not going on a fast for lent. I’m going on a feast -a joy feast.
A positivity banquet.
A favour party.
At the table spread for me in the presence of my enemies.
In the valley.
That’s where the battle is fought -and won.
While on the long drive home from Alberta today I was listening to my iPod on a shuffle setting. Two pod-casts I didn’t realize were even on there showed up between songs. I have enjoyed the speakers in the past so I listened. Both were on the same topic of law versus grace and how mercy triumphs over judgment.
This stood out to me: The letter of the law is like a doctor who gives only a diagnosis. The spirit of the law (love written on the heart) is like a doctor who can offer a cure. The rules (thou shalts and thou shalt nots) can only show us where we went wrong, but they cannot show us how to change at our core, not in any major permanent way. We need mercy and grace for that. We need a supernatural work inside our very being.
As I was thinking about this illustration, a song from Cavalleria Rusticana started playing on my iPod. I have pretty eclectic tastes, but even I was a bit jarred by the juxtaposition of a sermon on grace and mercy and a scene from an opera with themes of adultery and murder. But as the song progressed I felt a correlation in my heart. The scene of the Easter church service became another illustration of the difference between justice and mercy.
In this scene Santuzza is standing outside the church on Easter Sunday. She has been judged and excommunicated because of her affair with a married man. (Some productions have the chorus singing from off-stage after the processional to highlight her rejection and isolation). The excommunication was meted out by those demanding justice, and she was indeed guilty. The sentence labeled her a sinner and amputated her from the fellowship of other believers, but it offered her no way to change nor hope of restoration. Yet Santuzza cannot help but be moved and sings from the outside, “Innegiamo, il Signor non è morto.”
(Translation)
Let us sing His praise, the Lord is not dead,
let us sing His praise, the Lord has risen
and today ascended to the glory of Heaven!
Resplendent, He has spread His wings.
She is on the outside of the religious establishment, yet sings praise to the risen Christ from her heart, while many others on the inside may be participating in ritual for less devoted reasons.
I wonder how many broken, humbled people who don’t fit in a regular “church” still desire to worship His Presence from their hearts on their knees in the street (or on a mountain side.) I wonder if more “outsiders,” those Jesus called the poor in spirit, find it easier to experience God’s love in a place where they are not diagnosed as terminal sinners. I wonder if the grace and mercy of the risen Jesus Christ will soon touch more genuine seekers in mercy and restore them to the way God sees them, as He says gently, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
He did for me.
Charis: Subject to Change 