Hosea 11:1-11
SERMON “Son of a”
America’s most sin-sick have been whining about “cancel culture” for years, though it is hard to feel sorry for them when rapists and racists have more power and wealth today than at any other point in our nation’s history.
In fact, as far as I can tell, for every Bill Cosby who is “cancelled” for being a rapist or Rosanne Barr who is cancelled for being a racist, there are a half dozen progressives driven from the public eye by the Left’s circular firing squad in pursuit of what one person recently described to me as “ideological purity.”
The Chinese had their Cultural Revolution, and we have ACLU attorney Chase Strangio declaring that there is no such thing as a “male body.” Then again, there are elements of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Trump’s cult of personality as well, for it too attacks scientists and intellectuals.
Cancel culture also cancels culture, not just people, and sometimes for good reason. It is almost impossible to stage “Othello,” “The Merchant of Venice,” or “The Taming of the Shrew” without addressing the racism, antisemitism, and misogyny of those plays by the playwright we call Shakespeare. Though efforts have been made to surgically remove these barbarisms from the text, it never really works.
In the same way, it may seem easiest to just cancel the Jewish Scripture’s Book of the Prophet Hosea, to avoid it altogether, for a flat reading of the text is unkind to women. Yet, there is another layer there, one that signals a theological innovation, one that has meaning for us in our progressive tradition.
Hosea’s active prophetic mission takes place in the Northern Kingdom, Israel, and in roughly the same era as Amos, who we recently considered and who precedes him, and Isaiah Bin Amoz, the original prophet whose name is attached to that text tradition, who comes a generation later.
Hosea may have lived through the reign of as many as seven Israelite kings, a combination of personal longevity and national turmoil.
Neo-Assyria, located to the northwest, was gaining power in the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley. Israel and the neighboring kingdom Aram tried to draw the Southern Kingdom, Judah, into an anti-Neo-Assyrian coalition. When the king of Judah refused, they declared war, with one Jewish kingdom invading the other.
Amos had issued dire warnings about economic inequality in Israel, and Isaiah would spend much of his energy on this dangerous geo-political situation, but Hosea was primarily focused on religious fidelity, condemning the people for worshiping other gods. Or maybe that is over-simplifying.
Like a biblical detective, Hosea is looking at the evidence, and building a case against the people. If Yahweh is a good god, then the looming catastrophe must be deserved.
Hosea models the crisis in his personal life in a way that is extremely problematic by today’s standards, marrying a woman named Gomer who he knows will be unfaithful. We are led to believe that her three children are not Hosea’s, and they are given names that reflect the prophet’s mission, including a daughter named “Not Pitied” and a son named “Not My People.”
While we may rightly stumble over the patriarchy and misogyny here, we’d be missing something important, leaving us unprepared for the major theological shift that takes place in this morning’s reading. Hosea’s faithfulness to Gomer, despite her infidelity, is meant to reflect God’s faithfulness to Israel. Yahweh remains the faithful and forgiving spouse, while Israel is sleeping around with other gods.
This is not Yahweh as powerful king who smashes anything in the way of his divine will. Love is a type of powerlessness, as you invest value in something outside of yourself, something that you do not control, either because you cannot control it or because you reject the violence of control. It may seem trite, but love is an open-hand and an open-heart.
Then, in today’s reading, the relationship is recast again. Suddenly, Yahweh is a parent, and the Jewish people are God’s children, language Jesus will also use. God moves from anger to compassion and promises restoration. “Our Father,” “forgive us as we forgive others”… the prayer we say every week, that we parsed last week, reflects this theological framework.
While the language here is still the masculine default of that age, the description is maternal in that historic context, feeding and cuddling. This is not the only maternal depiction of Yahweh. God is described as a mother quieting a child at her breast in Psalm 131, an image also used twice in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.
Not only did pre-Rabbinic Judaism put us on the trajectory from polytheism to ethical monotheism, not only did it move from a god depicted in a carved idol to a god who could not be depicted, not only did it break the idea that human warlords were gods, but it established Yahweh as the opposite of a warlord, capable of divine violence, but refusing it, choosing the patience we will see modeled again in Christ’s Parable of the Prodigal Son, the parent who gives the wayward son freedom, then welcomes him back when it is squandered.
True confession: I always walk on eggshells when we come to traditional family holidays, none more so than Mothers Day and Fathers Day, because we did not all have idyllic childhoods. Some lost parents, to death, to prison, or to plain old abandonment. Some had parents who were themselves broken. Some grieve for children lost or children they could never have.
In the 1989 film “Parenthood,” the character played by a very young Keanu Reeves makes a keen observation. Cleaning up the language a bit, he says “You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car – hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any [old jerk] be a father.” And it is true. We deal with the reality of second and third-generation sociopaths in our national life every day. But we also see amazing and caring parents who love and empower and teach, biological parents and parents by choice, parents who welcome back the child who returns broken, by their own decisions or by the cruelty of the world.
The model, for humans and for our relationships with our Source, is that love that starts, but does not end, with biological necessity, species like our own that produce a small number of vulnerable offspring that require a period of nurture.
Then, we move beyond the biologically required, to that mysterious X that is transcendence and entanglement and co-creativity, for it is not necessity that welcomes the lost son home.
Despite the claims of divine preference, God did not need the people of the Northern Kingdom, Israel, had no reason to promise restoration.
The theology of pre-Rabbinic Judaism gets it wrong sometimes as it tries to twist the realities of this life into a framework of election, into the idea that they alone are Yahweh’s chosen, and that hubris, that arrogance, is a very real factor in the crimes against humanity being committed by the Israeli Defense Force in Gaza and the West Bank, for two of the parties in the current four party coalition are Jewish supremacist parties, and many American Evangelicals support a twisted version of “chosen people” theology, imagining themselves as heirs by election who will convert Jews to the religion they have constructed, white supremacist and capitalist.
The Divine Mystery we name as God, that we celebrate at The Park Church, that we refuse to pound into little human-shaped boxes, is nurturing and parental, is the source of these miraculous bodies and all that is life in this world, will continue to be resilient and evolving if only we can rise up and prevent its destruction. The theology that sees in God the sort of creative love of a parent, selfless and sacrificial, that is real, is the love of the Suffering Servant found in Isaiah. God’s love, Yahweh’s love, is no violent, not abuse, but is found in compassion, the rejection of wrath.
When we destroy Creation, we do violence to God.
When we destroy each other, we do violence to God.
When we terrorize immigrant children in Los Angeles and starve Palestinian children in Gaza and place cabins of little girls in a known flood zone in Texas, we do violence to God.
When we protect predators, we do violence to God.
May we, a people who pray each week for God’s forgiveness, be people of restoration, not revenge, May we, like Hosea’s lion, call Yahweh’s children home, all of Yahweh’s children, regardless of labels, even, even… the wayward. Amen.