Thursday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Last week, Bill’s laptop suddenly developed an aversion to the internet. It just couldn’t make the connection. We might have taken that as an act of the Holy Spirit on behalf of life with a lot less screen time. Instead, Bill spent the better part of a day on the phone with various tech support staff to no avail. Feeling bad for him (as he lost an entire day of work and I had a productive day), I decided that I would take it in to the Apple Store out at the Greene the next day for an in-person tech support session.
As I approached the entrance to the Greene from Dorothy Lane, I could hear shouting. I couldn’t figure out if it was just one person shouting or maybe two people having an argument. I was concerned but, since I was unable to see who was doing the shouting, I just turned into the entrance to the Greene. Oddly, as I proceeded to the Von Maur parking lot, I could still hear the shouting. It was that loud.
I had my appointment and, thankfully, the two Apple geniuses were fantastic! They resolved the problem quickly and at no cost to us! It was just a VPN software glitch.
Delighted with my success, I exited the Greene, the same way I came in. And that’s when I saw him. He was a white middle-aged man with an over-the-shoulder PA system. I still struggled to make out exactly what he was yelling, but he had posters that said something about fighting vaccine mandates.
Wow. I was rather stunned that a grown man would take to an intersection in exurbia on a weekday to don a PA system so he could shout about vaccine mandates. And I thought—wow—we live in an angry culture.
As I read the passage from Hosea today, a thought occurred to me. Christians who say that God is seriously ticked off at us have a point.
Jesus said “my peace I give you” yet we humans love guns and shoot each other in schools, at concerts, and along 4th of July parades. Jesus said “turn the other cheek” yet we humans think justice is served when another death row inmate is executed.
Jesus challenged the disciples when he said that he was hungry and they did not feed him. What you do for the hungry, he said, you do for me. What you fail to do for the hungry you fail to do for me. And yet, one in six children in the US don’t know if they’ll eat dinner tonight.
God has lots of good reasons to be angry with us. And I haven’t even touched on the suffering of our planet—God’s incredible creation and our shared home.
What is incredible in our reading today from Hosea is that God couldn’t be more clear. God has every reason to be angry. And given that God is God, God could act on that anger and, in fact, do us all in, if God felt like it.
Instead, God says: “My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred. I will not give in to my blazing anger.”
Thank you, God, for again giving us humans another chance. We don’t deserve it. That is for sure. May we make the most of your grace today. May our hearts be overwhelmed. May our pity be stirred. May we live into the peace that Jesus died on the cross to give us.
Amen.
Sue Trollinger