The Minor Writing Prophets II: Hosea – a romantic
January 22, 2012
BMC- Hosea
Introduction: Romances
I want to begin this morning by inviting you to take a moment to think of the greatest love stories known to human kind. Perhaps it is the story of historical figures or of a classic piece of literature. I could imagine Beth suggesting Pride and Prejudice as her choice for instance. Or perhaps it is a more modern book or movie that comes to mind. I’m sure that my best friend in high school would have named The Princess Bride as his choice. At Thursday night’s Bible study, someone suggested a novel that has also been made into a movie called The Notebook. Any one care to name one that they have thought of? {take responses}
Having named some of these love stories that probably typify our understanding of romance, I would imagine that there are many of you out there this morning that are looking at my sermon title and thinking to yourselves that Hosea and romantic should not be used in the same sentence, right? At least that sentiment arose a bit at Bible study on Tuesday when I began with the same open-ended question for people to name great romances. One of the first responses was “not Hosea.” And certainly the book of Hosea does not read like any of the romance novels that we tend to think of today or the other suggestions that came up the other night like Romeo and Juliet.
And yet it seems to me that when we read the actions of Hosea in relation to Gomer and consider the words of the Lord spoken through Hosea to Israel, that if we are able to distill things down, what we find is a romantic. What we find is a love story between God and the people of Israel that is lived out by the prophet Hosea in his relationship to Gomer.
Yet unlike many of our love stories, Hosea is not a hopeless romantic that longs for a love that can never be. Rather, I believe that Hosea is a HOPEFUL romantic who through prophetic imagination is able to recognize the problems of the current relationship and name the potential that is possible through the power of God. Though difficult times lay on the horizon for Israel, Hosea declares hope for what is to follow. And in these words, we receive a powerful window into the passionate heart of God.
Who was Hosea?
We don’t know much about Hosea really. We read of his call to prophecy to Israel. We can infer that he may have been a contemporary of Amos, but likely was active a little later between 745 and 722 BCE. We know that his call included marrying a promiscuous woman and naming his children in ways that carried a message to the people of Israel and perhaps scarred them for life.
We also know from Hosea’s text and from the book of II Kings that the political scene in Israel was likely very turbulent when Hosea was writing. After Jereboam II died around 745BC, his son Zechariah took the throne. But after only 6 months Zechariah was assassinated by Shallum. A month later Shallum was assassinated by Menahem who held the throne for 10 years and was succeeded by his son, Pekahiah, who was assassinated by Pekah. Many of these power shifts were really about whether Israel should ally with Assyria or Aram. Yet the end result was the fall of Israel to the Assyrians in 722 BCE.[1]
Now perhaps after hearing all of this, you may begin to think that Hosea is more of a soap opera than a romance and there may be some truth to that, but bear in mind that while the soap opera back story of II Kings is important, it is not the focus of what Hosea is trying to share. Hosea is sharing about the love of God for God’s people and the unfaithfulness of Israel in that relationship. And as I shared in our Bible study this week, whereas Amos’ only hope was a glimmer at the end; Hosea offers us an ebb and flow of judgment and hope. We get a window into the passions of God’s heart for purity and faithfulness that is held in tension by God’s passion of keeping the covenant and a love for God’s people that results in mercy and restraint.
As Abraham Heschel puts it in his book The Prophets, “Amos had proclaimed the righteousness of God. His iron will to let justice prevail. Hosea came to spell out the astonishing fact of God’s love for man. God is not only the Lord who demands justice; He is also a God who is in love with His people.” (pg. 44)
Lesson 1: It’s all God’s
Throughout this ebb and flow, we receive several lessons that I would like to invite us to consider this morning. The first thing that I believe we can learn from Hosea is hopefully more of a reminder to us than anything because we have talked about this theme in other passages as well. We see in the words of Hosea 2:8, that the people of Israel had come to believe that all that they had came from their own provision or from their connections to other people groups. They lost sight of the fact that God is the creator and provider of all things. They began to pursue these things rather than God and broke their relationship with God.
What’s worse is that they not only forgot where their things came from, but they also began using what they had in ways that were offensive to God. They would use their resources to worship other gods. They added insult to injury as they moved from simple forgetfulness to outright rejection. They moved from depending on God for all they had to living life for the purpose of accumulation.
This week, Steve Lapp, Pastor Rick and I had the opportunity to go to Eastern Mennonite Seminary for their annual School for Leadership Training. This year’s speaker was Walter Brueggemann, a prolific Old Testament scholar. The topic he was addressing was “God and Mammon: Reframing Stewardship amidst abundance, scarcity, and conflict.”
Over the course of three days, Brueggemann suggested that in so many ways, we like the Israelites in Hosea have bought into our culture’s lies about the need to accumulate things. It is all around us and so familiar that we hardly question it anymore. Television commercials tell us that we are not good enough the way that we are and that we need their product to be complete and happy. Brueggemann called this the narrative of accumulation and tied it to the story of Joseph in Gen 47 and Jesus’ parable of the rich fool who built bigger barns to store his grain.
Brueggemann then suggested that the Bible calls us to a different way, to a different narrative. We are called to abundance. We are called to trust in God’s provision as in the story of the widow and Elisha and the feeding of the 5,000. It is all God’s and God is able to provide for us what we need. Because of this, we should reject the scarcity mentality of the world that tells us to hold on to everything because there is not enough. Instead, we should share abundantly.
I find myself falling into the trap of accumulation repeatedly when I begin daydreaming about all that I could do to improve our house if I just had the time and money when what we have is really good as it is. I have all of these grand ideas of what could be, ideas that would be nice but are far too grand and selfish. It’s not that we shouldn’t take care of our homes and even make modest improvements; but we need to be cautious about when we cross that line from a narrative of abundance that is focused on sharing God’s stuff and enter into a narrative of accumulation that builds bigger barns for our own personal benefit alone.
As Hosea reminds us, we need to remember where all that we have comes from. And we need to be intentional about using what we have for God’s purposes rather than our own.
Lesson 2: Trust in God
The second lesson that I believe we can learn from Hosea relates to trust in God. We see this in Hosea’s reminder of the limits of military might to keep us safe. This is a bit of a hot button issue for some right now with the budget debates about military spending and I am struck that Hosea 10:13-15 points to Israel’s dependence on their military might to feel safe.
In reality Israel’s might, nor the might of any nation, is fully able to protect them from what may come. Only God is able to do that. And as Hosea warns, soon God will not be protecting Israel. Soon Israel will be overrun by the Assyrians and even their great army will not protect them from the mistakes they have made.
I fear that we too fall into this trap as we spend annually more on our military than all the other nations in the world spend on their militaries combined. We do so in large part out of fear and the belief that a large military will keep us safe when in reality only God can do that.
What’s more is that we allow this fear to result in a struggle as a nation to balance our budget and to provide for all of our needs because we are spending so much on military efforts. This seems significant to me on Sanctity of Life Sunday because it seems to me that if we are trusting God for our safety, we are thus more free to use the resources that God has entrusted to us for God’s life giving purposes. We will not only put our trust in God for our safety but also inherently create greater safety in how we use what God has given us.
Now typically Sanctity of Life Sunday is focused solely on the issue of abortion. It seems to me, however, that the sanctity of life should be directed more holistically on a theology of life and God’s abundance. While I believe that we should work to protect unborn lives, it seems to me that Hosea calls us to much more than that. Hosea calls us to dependence on God for all of life and Hosea calls us to move beyond empty sacrifices to Godly living.
It is one thing for us to call for legislation to create policies that we believe will result in the death of fewer pre-term babies. And I do believe that there is a place for us to speak to government about matters of faith and justice. But I believe even more that we first need to be walking that talk. That we need to be working to come along side mothers who are faced with a choice and love and support them through those challenges. As Walter Brueggemann suggested this week, if the church is modeling a better way, we won’t need to convince others about it. They will see it and want to become a part of it.
Likewise, if the church is living out a theology of the sanctity of life not just talking about it or telling the government how to do it, we will model a way that trusts in God rather than our military. We will model a way that uses our resources to share life with those that are in need around us whether they are the poor, the immigrant, or the single parent. Thus as we place our trust in God rather than our military, we live out God’s call and inherently create greater safety for ourselves and the world.
Lesson 3: God’s Love
The third lesson that I see for us in Hosea is God’s love for us. It is easy for us to believe that we don’t really learn about the love of God until Jesus comes and sacrifices all for us. And certainly I don’t mean to minimize this immeasurable display of love. And yet even in the Old Testament, we learn about God’s love through the model of romantic love in Hosea (2:13-16). It is a love that extends mercy to us after we stray. (3:1-5). It is a love that causes God to show restraint in executing God’s judgment (11:8ff) for our short comings. As Abraham Heschel notes, “It is Hosea who flashes a glimpse into the inner life of God as He ponders His relationship to Israel. In parables and in lyrical outbursts the decisive motive behind God’s strategy in history is declared. The decisive motive is love.” (pg. 47)
We cannot deny the fact that Hosea uses rather harsh language and that we gain a window into God’s pain resulting from unfaithfulness. But we also get a window into God’s internal dialogue about how best to respond to all of this. At first, God’s focus is on punishment. We might even say revenge. Like some jilted lover God ponders the ways that He could reject and destroy Israel, but far too many of us stop and dwell on this part of the story in our reading of Hosea. In the process, we see God through Hosea as nothing more than a hopeless romantic who’s ideal for love has not come to fruition.
But the story does not end there. We also see another side of God. We see a God that is passionately faithful to God’s promises and to God’s love for God’s people. We see a God that desires to woo Israel back to him. This culminates in Hosea 11:8-9 in which we read, “Oh, how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go? How can I destroy you like Admah and Zeboiim? My heart is torn within me, and my compassion overflows. No, I will not punish you as much as my burning anger tells me to. I will not completely destroy Israel, for I am God and not a mere mortal. I am the Holy One living among you, and I will not come to destroy.”
Now let’s be clear here. Israel is still going to go through defeat to the Assyrians, but God is mediating God’s rage. God is choosing to show mercy and compassion as well as judgment. God is choosing to show love even when vengeful wrath is warranted.
In the midst of this, we see a window into the deep passion of our God. We receive a glimpse into the internal struggle of our God. We get a sense of the deep and unwarranted mercy that God extends to God’s people. We come to realize through Hosea, that God is a hopeful romantic. God loves us and there is hope for things to work out in the end in spite of all that has gone wrong.
I’m also struck by the fact that God uses the marriage relationship as a model for our relationship to God. Now many of us have not experienced marital infidelity; but for those who have, perhaps we see through Hosea that God has some sense of how we may feel.
Even if that is not our circumstance, we live in a culture that suggests there is a perfect marriage out there for us and it seems to me that when we are honest with ourselves our marriages are less than perfect. In the midst of that, we may sometimes have thoughts or dreams of something better. Yet here God has modeled for us deep love that rises above tremendous circumstances of unfaithfulness.
We see that God can identify with our pain, but more than that, we can see that God models for us the choice to allow love and compassion trump justice and wrath, not to remove it but to emphasize love more strongly. I doubt that many of us would think to look to Hosea for a model of Christian marriage and I can’t honestly recommend that we go out and choose our partner as Hosea did. And yet there is a depth of love here that our modern understandings of love often fail to comprehend. There is a hopeful romantic that perseveres through the challenges of a loving relationship.
Conclusion
In the words and actions of Hosea, we are able to see that Israel has failed in so many ways. They have failed to recognize that all that they have comes from God and they have failed to acknowledge that safety comes from God alone. Ultimately, they have failed to recognize the love that God has for them.
Through Hosea we learn of these failings on the part of Israel. But more than that, we learn of the internal strife that these failings cause in the heart of God. We learn of God’s initial emotional response. But we also learn of the depth of his romantic love for us and God’s intentional choice to move beyond His wrath to destroy Israel into a hopeful attempt to woo Israel back to Him.
Knowing God’s heart in this way, are we able to live this out in our own lives? Are we able to show this same kind of love to the people in the world around us? Are we able to show this same kind of love to people in our congregation or family members that we don’t always get along with? Are we able to live out this kind of love in our marriages with out spouses? May God open our eyes to see as He sees. May God open our ears to hear as He hears. May God open our mouths to speak His words and use our hands and feet to do His work.
Amen
[1] Theology of the Prophetic Books: the death and resurrection of Israel Donald E. Gowan pgs. 37-38
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