Hosea 1:2-10
Our
nation and our world is divided in ways I never imagined it could be. I know it is not the worst it has ever been,
but it is definitely the worst that I have ever seen. This may sound naïve, but I believe that we
would be a lot gentler with one another if we understood the pain that each one
of us struggles with. We all walk around
carrying burdens and sometimes/often those burdens are magnified because we are
convinced that no one could possibly understand what we are going through. Instead of trying to explain ourselves or
listening to someone else, we cluster with people who are like us, or we bear
those burdens alone and that makes it that much harder.
As
much as we misunderstand one another, it is nothing compared to how we
misunderstand God. That’s not
necessarily our fault. God keeps things
a little mysterious, especially in the Old Testament when people were not able
to say his name or look in his the face.
There is something sacred and holy about mystery, but it also makes it
harder to love at times. Jesus told
parables like we heard in the Gospel reading today to help us understand God
and his love for us. Jesus used his own
life to allow us to know God.
In the Old
Testament, before Jesus was born, God used the prophets to help us understand
God. The difference between these
prophets and Jesus is that Jesus was God in the flesh. Jesus understood God thoroughly as he was one
with God the father. The prophets were
human, flawed humans, sinful humans….not that different from us. Yes they were holy and wise. They had special
relationships with God as they were especially chosen by God to deliver his
message, but they were still human--which meant that they struggled to
understand God’s ways and help us, God’s people, understand and know God.
Because
God knew how hard it was for the prophets to understand God and share his
message, he got creative at times. This reading from Hosea is a perfect example
of that creativity. It’s a troublesome
reading. The term whoredom is not
something we are used to hearing in church or polite company. In fact, the entire premise of God’s request
is profoundly disturbing. He requires
his brand new prophet recruit to: “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and
have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the
Lord.” There are more problems with that statement that I have time to
address. It’s not fair to Hosea. It’s not fair to this “wife of whoredom” who
is now being forced to marry Hosea. And
it is certainly not fair to the children who will be forever marked as displays
of God’s anger.
God
not only told Hosea who to marry, he told him and his new wife what to name the
children. The first was Jezreel….which
seems like a perfectly fine name. It
means God plants and refers to a lovely city.
However anyone in that time who knew their history would know that
horrible atrocities were committed in Jezreel.
It would be like naming a child Hiroshima. Every time his name was said aloud people
would be reminded of the horrible violence that God’s people had
committed. The 2nd child was
named Lo-ruhamah. Now, if God had just
gone with ruhamah, that would have been a lovely name as it means compassion
and mercy. But God added the prefix Lo
which meant that the compassion and mercy was negated. It would be like naming your child Faithless
instead of Faith. Wait…it gets worse.
The third child was names Lo-ammi. Once again you will note the prefix Lo which
means this is a negative. This child
will remind the people that they are no longer God’s people. God has officially
given up on them.
This
all sounds cruel…and a little crazy, does it not? What person in their right mind would want to
be a prophet if this is what it entailed?
Was God’s sole intention to punish Hosea? First of all, Hosea did not have a
choice. He was called by God to be a
prophet and so he would follow God’s advice wherever it led him. And no, God
was not trying to punish Hosea. He was
using him as a tool. God needed Hosea to
understand the depth of his pain. We
don’t think about that. We don’t think
that we could hurt God. We do. Again and again, we betray God. We break his heart. That is hard to imagine…that we could hurt
God—the all powerful God’s feelings.
Yet
we, God’s people have hurt him time and time again. The people of Israel just could not make up
their mind. One minute they were
following the one true God, Yahweh. Then
when their crops needed rain and their prayers to Yahweh were not being
answered, they turned to Baal, the god of rain.
One of the things that really ticks off God in the Old Testament is worshipping
other gods. It hurt God on a deep and
profound level, and he wanted people to understand that hurt…not just to
understand it, but to feel it. What
better way to do that than to force his prophet to marry a woman who would
repeatedly cheat on him. Worse yet, Hosea
would know that she was going to cheat on him before going into the marriage
and still not be able to help but love her.
He would take her back again and again just like God has taken his
people back again and again.
It
would seem from these 8 verses, that God was finished. This was his good bye. But that is the crazy thing about God…he just
can’t say good bye. Even when he says
he’s done, he’s not really done. Right
after he tells Hosea to name his 3rd child, “not my people,” he
says, “Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the
sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was
said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ‘Children of
the living God.’”
This
is only the end of chapter 1. There are 13 more chapters of Hosea. Hosea and his wife went back and forth
between love and betrayal just as God went back and forth on what to do with
this group of people who had repeatedly betrayed him and taken advantage of
him. The part of God who was a just and
righteous God knew that these people had to be punished, possibly even cut off
from his love. But his love for them
overcame his need for justice. As
Christians, we refer to that idea as grace.
Grace is when God’s mercy and love overcomes the need for justice and
righteousness.
God
will not ask the same thing of us that he did of Hosea. With Jesus, God brought us a new model of what
it is to love and be loved. However,
even with Jesus’ life and death, we will continue to misunderstand God and misunderstand
one another. It’s inevitable to some
degree, but that does not mean we have the luxury of not trying—of staying in
our own little silos. We cannot continually bemoan the ignorance and cruelty of
others before we try to get to know one another. If we are all truly children
of the living God, then we all carry pieces of God. When we try to understand
and know one another, we get a little closer to knowing God.
We are the
body of Christ. It is a strange and eclectic body---but there is beauty in that
diversity and the strange parts will seem less strange the more we get to know
one another. We are the body of Christ. We cannot give up on people because they vote
for a different candidate or because we cannot agree whether it is blue lives,
black lives, or all lives. We have to
continue to listen to one another. Much
like God refuses to give up on us, we cannot give up on one another. We are the body of Christ. Let’s start acting like we actually believe
that.
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