Sunday, November 12, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (reading starts around 23:23; children’s sermon starts around 24:50; sermon starts around 32:16)
Reading: Hosea 11:1-9
For the children’s sermon today, we talked about how we sometimes do things that drive our parents crazy. I showed the kids a picture of me when I was young; I used to have really, really long hair and I was always getting in trouble with my parents for not washing it. We talked about how our parents forgive us and keep teaching us to do better because they love us. God in our reading for today is like a parent frustrated with their wayward children, but whose mercy goes far deeper than any human mercy.
If you are a parent – or if you act in some kind of parental role in your life – I wonder if you’ve ever found yourself saying things like: “How many more times do I have to tell you not to do that?” or “If I have to tell you this one more time, so help me, God…” Probably a few times? Or, if you’re someone who doesn’t do a lot of parenting, I wonder how often you’ve heard your own parents say things like this. I’m betting the answer is: more than once. I have definitely caught myself saying similar things to my cats, lol. Or even with my younger siblings growing up, it was just natural to slip into that bossy older sister kind of role and get fed up with my siblings when they didn’t listen. It just seems to be the case that there’s no one who can get under your skin quite like the people you love the most. And parenting in particular tends to be an exhausting and mostly thankless endeaver. It’s not hard to lose your patience and get exasperated.
That is definitely the vibe God is giving off in our reading today from Hosea. God has had it up to here with God’s people. And it’s not just the northern kingdom, like we’ve been talking about. Hosea mentions “Israel” and “Ephraim,” which were both names used to refer to the northern kingdom, but it is clear that it’s the entire people of Israel who are on their way to a much-deserved time-out.
God says, “I have tenderly loved these people since they and their ancestors were children. I fed them and healed them and showed them kindness. I taught them to walk. I freed them from their enemies. I lifted them to my cheek and held them close to me like babies in their mothers’ arms. And what do I get in return? These ungrateful little turds keep turning away from me! First they’re all, ‘We want a king; everyone else has a king, boo hoo’ – and then they keep obsessing over the stuff that I’ve given them. I’ve even seen them taking shiny things and making them into ‘gods’ and worshiping them! Like, helloooo, I’m right here! Rude.”
Suffice it to say, we see all throughout the book of Hosea that God is extremely ticked off.
In most of this book, Hosea actually writes about God’s relationship with God’s people in terms of a marriage, which was pretty common with the covenant. In fact, in kind of an extreme move, at the beginning of the book Hosea goes so far as to intentionally marry a prostitute, or an unfaithful woman, as a way of illustrating this point about Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. Yikes. But in this chapter, the rhetoric shifts a little bit and God is instead cast as a parent who is fed up with their children’s bad behavior.
And it’s not hard to see why God is so mad. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve started to see how repetitive some of these Old Testament stories can get – especially when you get into the books of Kings and Chronicles and the prophets that go with them. In both kingdoms, you have king after king after king after king – and some of these kings are halfway decent, but most of them suck – and you see again and again and again that the people keep turning away from God. And it’s not just the idol worship that gets God all steamed up – it’s also their failure to care for their neighbor, especially for the poor, the sick, widows, orphans, immigrants, all who are most vulnerable. They keep forgetting their neighbor and forgetting the God to whom they owe everything in the first place.
And God has finally had enough. So God finally throws up God’s hands and says, “You know what? FINE. Have it your way. You don’t need me anymore? Have fun bowing down to your new Egyptian and Assyrian overlords. I’m sure that will go great for you. I’m done.”
And yet, as soon as the words are out of God’s mouth, God’s heart immediately wrenches. And, tenderly, God says, “But how can I give you up? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How could I just leave you to your fate and let you be destroyed like Admah and Zeboiim, like Sodom and Gomorrah?”
God is overwhelmed with love and compassion for God’s people, despite all they’ve done. And as angry as God is about Israel’s unfaithfulness – and God is angry – that anger just can’t hold a candle to the strength of God’s love. With God, love wins out every single time.
Now, imagine for a moment that you were reading this passage completely out of context (I mean, granted, that kind of is what we do every Sunday). But imagine you had no idea where Hosea falls in the timeline of God’s story. If I asked you to guess whether this passage we read today – this story of God’s mercy and compassion – appears in the Old Testament or in the New Testament, what would you guess?
Probably New Testament, right? That’s where we expect to see more of this kind of soft, merciful side of God. We tend to think of God in the Old Testament as being super angry and vengeful. I think comedian Taylor Tomlinson said it best when she described the Old Testament as her favorite Taylor Swift album. (lol)
But here in the writings of this Old Testament prophet, we see that this is who God has been from the very beginning. The whole reason we later get Jesus in the flesh as this merciful, compassionate, self-sacrificing incarnation of God is because this is who God has always been. We humans are the ones casting our own pettiness and vindictiveness and anger on God, assuming that God’s patience with us is as limited as our patience with each other often is. But instead, God says, “I will not execute my fierce anger – for I am God and no mortal.” God’s ways are not our ways. And our mercy is not God’s mercy
This love is who God is. The abrupt change of heart God has in this passage, from fury to compassion – it has nothing to do with who God’s people are or with what they’ve done or haven’t done. It doesn’t matter how lovable or unlovable they may be. God loves them because God is love. This is the good news of grace that is at the very heart of our gospel witness.
And it’s also good news to us to be reminded that this is the love in whose image we were made. We may live it out imperfectly at best, but this unconditional, unshakable love of God is also at the core of who we are. We were always meant for love.
It’s encouraging to know that we are capable of the kind of love to which God calls us. We are capable of showing self-giving, unconditional love even to the people we find most unlovable – whether that’s those who disagree with us, or those who do not share our politics or ideology, or those who cut us off in traffic. We are capable of loving others not just because of who they are or what they do, but because it’s who we are and what we are called to do. As God’s people, we have a capacity for love that is vitally important, especially in such divided and polarized times as these.
We’re not gonna get it right every time. We’re still human and we’ll keep testing one another’s patience – and the people who are closest to us will always know exactly how to push our buttons – but love is written indelibly on our hearts: love for our neighbor, for our dear ones, for our siblings, our parents, our kids – even if we have to dig deep, deeeeeeeep, deep down, the love is always there.
And we will always have the living example of God’s tender love and compassion for us to inspire us to keep trying. Because God’s love for God’s people is unfailing. God’s never gonna give us up, never gonna let us down. God’s love is for us and forever. ❤️
This is the Day 
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