Scriptures:
Hosea 11:1-11
There’s a line in the play Love Letters by playwright A. R. Gurney that came to mind as I was reading Hosea this week. This play, which premiered in 1988, is performed by just two actors playing two characters, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. They sit side by side at tables on the stage for the whole production and read the notes, letters, and cards they have sent each other over the 50 years of their relationship. At one point, while talking about his love of writing and particularly of writing to Melissa, Andy penned to her:
“This is just me, me the way I write, the way my writing is, the way I want to be to you, giving myself to you across a distance not keeping or retaining any part of it for myself, giving this piece of myself to you totally, and you can tear me up and throw me out, or keep me, and read me today.”
I feel like God could use this as a sort of disclaimer for the prophecies of Hosea -“you can tear me up and throw me out, or keep me, and read me today.” We might not throw the prophecy away for the heartfelt declaration of parental and divine love that we heard this morning, but we might feel that impulse for the the other 13 chapters that make up the whole book.
Hosea is a prophet addressing the situation in the northern kingdom of Israel after the people of God have divided into two parts. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that God had never really wanted their followers to have a king. After the exodus from Egypt and the wilderness wandering, the twelve tribes that spread across the land the Israelites moved into had local leaders who shepherded the people, and, when the need arose – because of conflict or the people faced an important discernment point – judges were raised up by God to take a more active role in guided the people into the future.
But the neighbors of God’s tribes had kings, so they wanted a king, too, and eventually God gave in and gave them a king. The king ruled over a united kingdom, consisting of all twelve tribes, but the glory days weren’t so glorious for too long. God’s worst dreams started to come true. With a king just like their neighbors, God’s people started acting just like their neighbors. They took on the worship of the gods of their neighbors. They stopped taking care of the vulnerable in their own kingdom. There was inter-tribal competition as each sought to own God and show their divine favor by making claims to declare mountains within their boundaries as the true mountain on which to worship God.
Unable to maintain unity in the face of these claims, eventually this united kingdom divided into northern and southern kingdoms, the northern one mostly called Israel, but also referred to in our reading as Ephraim, the name of one of its constituent tribes, the other one mostly called Judah. Neither of the two regal lines leading God’s people did a very good job. Again and again they led the people in the opposite direction of God’s desire. This allowed their neighbors and enemies to threaten them at points of weakness, ultimately leading to the overtaking of Israel to the north by the Assyrians in 8th and 7th centuries before the birth of Jesus and Judah to the south by the Babylonians in the early 6th century of the same era.
The books of the prophets, like Hosea that we heard today, are the words of people who are called to speak for God in this environment, trying to make sense of this political drama and point to the spiritual roots of it. The prophets held up mirrors to show the people and their leaders where they went gone wrong. They both warned people of the natural consequences of their unfaithful actions and sometimes offered comfort and hope to the people who were living through those painful consequences.
So! The prophet Hosea, as I said before, is talking about the situation in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and he speaks for God through most of the prophecy with some particularly damning, angry words. It’s not an easy read. Of it’s 14 chapters, all but the one we read and a maybe a section of the final chapter of the book, are a pretty strong, no holds barred, indictment of God’s people and particularly their choice to abandon their worship of God for the gods of their neighbors, represented by the god Baal. The opening chapters, for example, are a graphic, extended metaphor that leans on the imagery of infidelity in a marriage, comparing God to a faithful husband and Israel to a harlot. God is not happy, to say that least.
While expressing God’s anger, these passages also drive home how deeply hurt God gets when God’s people are not faithful, when God’s provision and security, God’s attentiveness and love are rebuffed, in favor of the quick fixes, easy answers, and self-determination we go looking for in other gods.
In Hosea’s time those other gods have names – particularly Baal. But in our time, in our own unfaithfulness, we may not recognize it because it doesn’t look like crafting physical idols to worship, participating in fertility cults, or agricultural rituals. It looks more like what the Rev. Daniel Wolpert calls “functional atheism.” Functional atheism, Wolpert proposes, is, unfortunately, alive and well in Christian people and Christian churches. It’s the term he uses to describe that reality that exists when we come to worship, sing our songs of faith, pray our prayers, and confidently declare that we believe that God is in charge, Jesus transforms us, and the Spirit leads us to new life, but then we walk out the doors and live as if the principles of the world at large rule in our lives. We might agree that Jesus has some pretty things to say, but we don’t change our lives based on them. And the Spirit… well, the Spirit is practically non-existent because we don’t know quite what do with the an uncontrollable impulse of God at loose in the world.
Functional atheism is when we say we believe in God, we believe that God will show up in the world, but theeeeeeen, when we can’t see it right away we substitute our own judgement, our own action, our own desires for God’s and act on them. That is, we say we believe in God, but we function as if we don’t. It looks like wringing our hands about the state of the world without seeking the Spirit’s guidance toward our own personal or communal responsibility for making it better. It’s the way we allow our discomfort with the unknown push us toward decision-making based on the world’s values of productivity and efficiency, rather then discernment based on God’s values of radical love and justice. Even, in a way that might feel counterintuitive, it’s what we’re doing when we make the central pursuit and focus of our faith life about getting into heaven and enjoying an afterlife with God, rather than building the kingdom of heaven with God right here and right now.
When we act as functional atheists, we elevate other powers in the world, whether they are powers beyond ourselves or the power of ourselves. And we, like the people of unfaithful Israel, let these other gods guide us, when our invisible God feels too difficult to follow. The invisibility of God, Wolpert likes to point out , is “God’s most annoying quality.”
And so, Hosea announces for God, this reality, this broken state of the human condition it angers God. It angers God a lot, about 13 chapters of this book tell us in no uncertain terms. But this 14th chapter (even those it comes to us as chapter 11), but this chapter of Hosea shows us, that this anger, it’s borne of a deep, deep sadness. A grief of a relationship lost, a love that feels unreturned or abandoned. Hosea 11, it is a passionate love letter, not from one spouse to another, but from parent to child, and let’s us peek behind the curtain of God’s frustration. In it, if we listen, we can hear God’s heart breaking, God’s heart broken open for the child Israel, symbolized by Ephraim, the great-great grandson of Abraham, the grandson of Jacob, son of Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son. Hosea’s prophecy draws this direct line to the divine covenant God made with the matriarchs and patriarchs to be their sole God as they will be God’s people, blessed to be a blessing in the world, in order to draw our minds back to that unbreakable oath of loyalty, that commitment to an eternal relationship, that great promise that God will never leave God’s people. Never. God will never turn away. God has always held up the divine end of the covenant, holding fast to faithfulness in all times and all situations, and God always will. Even when we, God’s people, make sacrifices to the Baals or offer incense to idols, even when we shift our loyalty to internal powers and external principalities, even when we look to sources more immediate and more tangible for comfort, provision, and security, in our lives, God is faithful still.
God has not forgotten teaching us to walk by holding our hands, how he lifted us up when we stumbled on difficult paths, how she held us to her cheek to kiss the tears away or to her body to feed us when we were hungry. God has not forgotten their promise to be the Holy One in our midst. When we seek other wisdom, even to our own detriment, when we substitute our own judgement for God’s, when we act like there is no God at all, even then, even still, God cannot give us up. God cannot and will not hand us over to the enemies of God’s kingdom. God cannot wish destruction on us and will not execute fierce judgement.
This is God’s promise of love to God’s people. This is God’s love letter in the middle of a sometimes rocky relationship. We may choose to tear this love letter up and throw it out because the 13 chapters of difficult correction and brutal honesty feel like just too much, but I sincerely hope we won’t. Because if we do, we will throw away the beautiful expression of love that God calls to us with.
I don’t want us to miss this stripped down declaration of God’s commitment when we are uncommitted, God’s way of showing up when we are absent, God’s grace-filled claim on us when we try to shake it. I don’t want us to miss this full throated love letter from our divine Parent who cries out in anguish and grace with the roar of lion, in desperate hope that we will hear his call, that we will return to our place held close to her cheek, that we will melt into their tender compassion in which we find our home and purpose. I don’t want us to miss this out-pouring of grace for us and all of creation. It is for us to keep and read today, that we may know God’s love always. Amen.
