Children of the Living God - July 29, 2007
Hosea 1:2-20Having grown up in about the most un-famous household I can imagine, it is hard for me to imagine the childhood that a friend of mine had. I have a friend whose father was a United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia in the 1970s. She grew up knowing that she had a famous last name in certain circles. She has a cousin who is a well-known theologian who shares that last name—a name she carries in her heart, but no longer uses on a daily basis. She’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to being pals with a Kennedy, but for the longest time I just knew her as Martha, not the daughter of a late Democratic Senator.
One of the things that my friend and I found out early in our relationship is that we shared something important in common. Martha, the Senator’s daughter, and Julie the middle child of a union-dues-paying factory worker were both adopted as infants. Over the time that our friendship has grown, and I have found out that we truly have more similarities than differences, I have come to refer to us as “twin daughters of different mothers”.
As different as the “raising” part of our childhoods were, there is something deeply meaningful in the commonality of being an adopted person, especially an adopted person who happened to be adopted before open adoptions were as common as they are today. Adopted adults often have shorthand we use with each other to get at the pertinent details of the circumstances of our ending up in our families. The questions we can ask each other are simple: Infant? (Yes.) Did you ever meet her? (No.) Health history? (No.)
In those eleven sparse words, I can communicate to another adopted person that I never knew the person who gave birth to me, that my parents acquired me as an infant, that I have never had an opportunity to meet the person who gave me life—in fact I do not know anything about her—and that when it came time to have my children, I referred to myself as a “genetic grab-bag”, not really knowing what health conditions, personality quirks or physical traits I was passing along. (So far, the evidence is that I have passed along somebody’s thick hair, expressive eyes, and big feet, a voracious love for vocabulary, a tendency towards artistic geekiness, a flair for the dramatic, and a rockin’ sense of humor. Of course some of those could have come from the other side of the family. Except for the sense of humor.) {insert rim shot here}
Like many adopted people, I have spent many a day just looking in the mirror, wondering just who in the world I look like. The image I see reflected looks like clues to the story, but not the story itself. Until had my children, who bear more than just a passing resemblance to me, I was convinced that I was the only person in the world who looked anything at all like me, and somehow convinced myself before I had children that they would look exactly like their father, and not at all like me. It was as if there was just something about me that wouldn’t pass down—some broken link. Or so I thought.
That probably sounds really strange and illogical to most of you—you who can look both backwards and forwards to see how your genetic story unfolds. But imagine if when you look back there is a blank space. That’s how it is for many adopted persons.
So I think about my friend, who grew up in a family that was well-known in a specific place and for a season, and wonder if people who knew her parents expected her to look and act like her Senator father, someone whose image surely was prominent in their community. What is it like, I wonder, when Daddy is famous?
Hosea’s prophesy takes place in a time of Israel’s history that was fraught with turmoil, in what might have been the last great days of that kingdom before the fall to the Assyrian army. Israel was a rather cosmopolitan place, compared to its sister kingdom to the south, (Judah) but as such lived under the constant threat of invasion. Hosea saw a lot of Kings come and go during his reign as prophet. Because of this, and due to geographical and topographical features, the kingdom of Israel was more open to foreign trade. And where there is foreign trade, there are foreigners, and where there are foreigners there is a greater risk of religious pluralism.
There is another important difference in the monastic succession of Israel during this period. In Judah, who enjoyed a relatively stable Davidic line of kings, the title of king was inherited; the power in Israel was passed down by divine authority—the designation of Yahweh’s Spirit.1 In other words, God hand-picked the kings. The kings did not inherit the throne from Dad.
Into this environment: a relatively cosmopolitan kingdom with relatively unstable leadership, where religious pluralism exists and invasion can happen at almost any time, Hosea is called to pronounce God’s disappointment with how the children of Israel have ignored where they came from. Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is irritated at the children who have abandoned the ways they were taught. Through the prophet Hosea the people are likened to Hosea’s own wife, who apparently had developed a wandering eye. In response to Gomer’s behavior, the three children of Hosea and Gomer are given names that signify Yahweh’s anger and disappointment. Things haven’t quite turned out the way God had hoped for Israel; the kids are running amok. They have forgotten where they came from.
I don’t know about you, but as someone who never really got the full story on where she came from, I’m very curious about people who forget such information. I do know that even in my family, my non-famous family, there were certain expectations about how we should act in front of others. I’m told that when a parent is famous, as my friend’s Senator father was, there are certainly expectations about how one will reflect on the family’s good name. The downside of never having to stand in line in Disney World and having private backstage tours everywhere (In her house in Maine she has a wall of “brushes with greatness”. One of the photographs has her sitting on Nixon’s lap. Her father never cared for that one.) is that she sometimes had to squash her own wants and needs so as to not appear to damage her father’s upstanding reputation. She never really was able to forget who she was in the family in which she grew up, even though her biological origins were not made clear to her until she was an adult.
The children of Israel were behaving as naughty children with a famous—generous, loving, benevolent, but famous— parent. Their behavior did not reflect well on Yahweh, even though they were made in the image of Yahweh, lived in a land that Yahweh provided them, and were living under leadership hand-picked by—you guess it--Yahweh.
And yet. And yet. There‘s this tremendous gap between verse nine and verse ten of the first chapter of Hosea. One minute God is proclaiming justice and repayment for the careless ways they had forgotten who they were and Whose they were. And in a snap God is reversing the sentence. God is declaring that those who forgot shall be remembered. They shall be called Children of the Living God.
There’s this gap between what I know about myself, and what I long to know about myself. That gap has been softened by being able to look in my children’s faces and see the details I might have missed had I not had them. But there‘s a gap, still. There’s gap between how we know we are to act as the children of a living God—made in God’s very own image— and how we actually act. There’s a gap between the image we see when we look upon ourselves reflected by our culture, and what God sees when God looks lovingly upon God’s own children.
In Christ, God declares that there will be no broken links, no gaps that incarnation and redemption and grace cannot bridge. Though we forget who we are and Whose we are with an alarming frequency, in Christ God declares that those who once were called “not my people” shall be called Children of the Living God.
I’m often asked if I wish I knew my “real parents”, and I think I know what the person asking the question really means when they ask it—they’re not trying to be cruel, or trying to make a comment on how I was raised. There is a natural curiosity about that sort of thing. I know that people who knew about my adoption when I was a child looked carefully at me to see if I would act like either my brother or my sister—who are my parents’ biological children. Somehow people wanted to see if my adoptive parents were reflected positively in how I acted, though I was not genetically related to them. I think most of the time they were reflected positively because they raised me with love and great care.
We who are Christians have a famous last name—it is Child of God. I wonder some times if the world looks at us and tries to see our heritage reflected in our actions, in how we treat one another? Are we living up to the family name?
The family legacy is this: wanderers, forgetters, those who have tremendous gaps in our lives, those who grew up without the benefit of loving family, those who have been wanting and searching our whole lives long for the rest of the story: sinners alike, in Christ we are reminded forever that we have a name , a heritage, a loving home. We are children of the Living God.
Thanks be to God.
1 Harper’s Bible Commentary, editor James L Mays, p 707. The overview of Hosea in the preceding two paragraphs are gleaned from this volume.
