[Propertalk] Preaching Hosea 11:1-11 - for August 1

[Joe Parrish]

Free Resource: Preaching Hosea 11:1-11

I encountered the writings of Hosea many years ago in a college course on the Hebrew prophets. I was no stranger to the scriptures even then as I'd grown up in church and had been absorbed and intrigued enough by the life and promise there to announce to my mystified family and friends that I was headed to college to major in religion on my way to seminary and ordination. In the thriving Midwestern congregation of my childhood during those glory days of the mainline, our pastors told us the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and recounted the great deeds of Moses. Every week they returned to the teachings and parables of Jesus and plotted the adventures of Paul and Barnabas on wall maps of the holy land until the figures, the teachings, and the geography seemed our own. Yet somehow, Hosea's passionate portrayal of the God who is utterly undone by his own love was not part of the canon of my upbringing. Maybe the turning of the year simply never lured our preachers into the depths of the Hebrew Scriptures to explore the twisting alleyways of the Minor Prophets. Or perhaps the thought of exposing themselves and their congregations to this "uncut" version of Hosea's God was akin to Moses sizing up a possible encounter with Yahweh on Mt. Sinai: which one of us can look on this heart of God and live? 

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. 

The more I called them, the more they went from me; 

they kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols. 

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; 

but they did not know that I healed them. 

I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.

I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. 

I bent down to them and fed them.

Decades after my awakening in that college Bible class, the raw tenderness of this passage still touches and troubles me. In the church of my childhood-and perhaps, if we are honest, in the world we wish we could inhabit even now-God's love was perfectly propositional and safely circumscribed, enshrined in hero stories and encoded in gospel homilies, predictably mapped onto foreign deserts in distant pasts. The prodigal was only a bit-part in a parable, and his long-suffering, ever-loving father just a cameo role in the homecoming we all knew would finally occur.that is, until Hosea's God begins to speak his/her mind and his/her heart, shattering the careful conceptualizations that so often have served to keep a powerful and ultimately incomprehensible love at arm's length. Calling out to a disillusioned, frightened people whose monarchy had seen four assassinations in fourteen years and whose anxieties were being assuaged, if only for the moment, by cheap offers of military protection and the magical promises of local deities, Hosea's God cannot afford the luxury of divine disinterest, cannot wait for cooler heads to prevail, cannot abide the idea that truth and justice will simply take their course and these wrong-headed, stubborn people will someday learn their lesson. Neither unyielding nor abstinent, Hosea's God cannot simply turn his/her back in anger nor does he/she sigh softly with passive-aggressive disappointment. Rather, Hosea's God is a God whose love persists and pursues, active and restless, walking the floors at night, weighing justice and mercy, taking the measure of betrayal by his/her people and feeling that bitterness-taking humankind seriously, in other words-and yet absolutely steadfast, unwilling to renounce the relationship, unable to abandon his/her own. 

That quietly transcendent, mildly disinterested God of my childhood would not have had much purchase in Hosea's chaotic neighborhood; nor does that God have traction in our own troubled times. Tempted to criticize tiny Ephraim and Judah for seeking security and stability in political strategies or sectarian rituals, we might recall our own anxious responses to our country's recent chaos during the economic downturn. Eager for a political "fix," we were proud to vote for a candidate who invoked hope and promised change, and just as quick to join the gallery of cynics when the change entailed cost and compromise. Impatient with faith communities that seemed short on practicality and currency, we borrowed the local gods of the marketplace, joining the words "prosperity" and "gospel" in idolatrous and blasphemous union. Ba'al worship is alive and well in the seemingly innocuous, unexamined syncretism of everyday "Christian" communities anxiously trying to offer what a frightened and changeable public desires: a little familiarity, a little security, some predictability, and maybe an answer or two in a complicated, confusing world. Now, as then, God's truth and God's justice cannot be simply handed on as logical propositions, voted yea or nay by denominational gatherings or decreed from some ecclesiastical perch above the fray. The demoralization and distrust of our own time calls for contemporary preachers to give witness to Hosea's God, whose desire for righteousness is refined by the intensity of his/her yearning for the creation he/she claims as his/her own offspring, a God who pursues us in love. The willingness of this God to transgress the boundaries of his/her own logic on behalf of a creation that is beloved beyond all reason is both good news and stiff challenge for the contemporary church. The good news: we are believed in and held and sustained by love, whether we recognize our blessedness and act in accordance with that awareness or not. The challenge: realizing that God's heart has twisted with yearning for us. We cannot help but emulate our God's love by honoring the world that God so loves, believing in the belovedness of every creature, and pursuing the common good of all God's children regardless of our fear of difference, regardless of our own narrow measure of another's worth, regardless of our preoccupation with institutional survival, regardless, at last, of our fear of our own utter dependence on the heart and mind of God.


Cynthia G. Lindner

The Divinity School, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 



Goodpreacher.com 
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