There isn’t a whole lot I can do about the fact that Gaza is a giant open-air concentration camp in which legitimate baddies mingle with the innocent, or that Israel is engaged in a brazen act of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. The Sunni Muslim states that have thrown the Palestinians under the bus as a price that they are more than willing to pay in their sectarian war with Shiites don’t seem to care what I think, nor do American evangelicals, who are cheerfully chasing apocalypse, the end of the world, which doesn’t really work for me, because, you know, I sort of like this world most days. I can vote for people who want peace and justice in the Middle East, but this isn’t the only issue I care about, and others have a more direct impact on my life, your lives, the lives of my family and friends. Besides, given the amount of money Sheldon Adelson contributes to genocidal politicians, I’m not sure my vote matters that much.
We are many miles from the halls of power here, tiny fish mostly in a pretty small pond. One thing we can do, that some right here on the Blue Hill peninsula have done, is participate in online organizing and activism. We can join those committed to making it too costly to be a racist, at least an overt racist caught on camera. So it was that I recently posted on the page of a multi-billion dollar New York property company, asking that they distance themselves from Aaron Schlossberg, the New York attorney I spoke of last week, now infamous for a number of extremist rants, asking that the company, which provided Schlossberg with a testimonial for his webpage, distance itself from the lawyer.
The company didn’t respond, their clients are billionaires not some pastor from Maine, but a woman from California did respond, a long post about free speech and some pretty hateful comments about Muslims and Mexicans. I responded to her, noting that Schlossberg had not been arrested, so he had free speech, but free speech does not mean your speech will not have consequences in the marketplace or in the court of public opinion. Then I asked if they spoke another immigrant language, Greek, in the worship services at the Greek Orthodox church she attends in San Bernardino. I was hoping for dialogue, but she got spooked, removed her comments, and blocked me.
There probably wasn’t a lot I could say about the anti-Mexican thing she had going on. Her biggest complaint was that a neighbor flew the Mexican flag over the American flag on Cinco de Mayo, which is technically illegal, though I have a train-load of problems, and that ain’t one of them. But I thought I might get some traction on the anti-Muslim thing. I wanted to tell her that I understood her anxiety, how easy it was to give in to hate when we are afraid. After all, she lives in a community that suffered a terror attack, drives on the same streets where cops chased Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik after they shot 36 people at a public health employees’ holiday party in December of 2015.
That incident reignited a major policy debate in our nation, one that has gone on for years. Investigators wanted access to Farook’s iPhone 5c, encrypted with Apple’s default system. They got a warrant, but it didn’t matter. Even Apple can’t decrypt the phone. So the government demanded that Apple create a new version of of its operating system so that that one single phone could be unlocked.
There are two sides to the encryption debate, and they are dug in. Some see themselves as protecting the public from unauthorized mass surveillance. They fear an authoritarian state, and point out that many of the tools the government publicly targets were developed by the government and are still in use by democracy activists and whistleblowers, in authoritarian countries and right here in the US. The government, in turn, points out that access to the cell phone might help them find other terrorists, prevent other attacks, though its case wasn’t helped by a recent Washington Post article that revealed the FBI had grossly exaggerated the number of locked cell phones it encountered each year. The thing is, both sides are right, and while I agree with Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” the fact is, I don’t want to be blown up or gunned down. As much as I love freedom, I don’t expect the family of someone killed by a terrorist to say that the life of their loved one was a price they were willing to pay…
Enter Ray Ozzie, a 62 year-old tech guru, inventor of LotusNotes, and the only other person beside Bill Gates to ever hold the title “chief software architect†at Microsoft. In a recent issue of Wired magazine, Steve Levy and Cole Wilson report on Ozzie’s effort to find a technical solution that honors the core values of both sides of the debate. Ironic, really, that a guy who made his fortune in programming would be one of the first to get that this is not a binary problem. And it looks like he might have an answer if people can stop yelling at one another and listen.
This has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with religion. European settlement in the Americas was partly driven by centuries of horrific religious wars in Europe, a Catholic queen here, a Protestant king there. Ideas like inalienable rights developed in this context, are protected by our Bill of Rights, no state religion, free speech, the right against unreasonable search and seizure, all in play in the debate about Farook’s iPhone. It was sick and disordered religion that drove Farook and Malik to carry out their attack, and while there have been plenty of other mass murders in the two and a half years since San Bernardino that had nothing to do with religion, we are still on edge, for a similar incident at the Pulse nightclub is seared into our consciousnesses . How absurd is it that your Trustees have had to invest hours toward developing an emergency operations plan?
In the end, this is all about values, often conflicting values, and an age of rising anxiety. I’m all for every Ray Ozzie who can come up with practical solutions to our problems, especially when we find ourselves caught between equally important values, as is true in the case of privacy, safety, encryption.
Today we begin eight weeks considering some of the “minor†prophets. They are called minor because the texts themselves are so short, not because what they had to say wasn’t important. In fact, in the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, they are treated as a single unit, the Book of the Twelve. The works span several centuries, from the period of the divided kingdom, through the defeats of first Israel then Judah, through the Exile and into the Persian period, the first of a series of foreign rulers that would last for over two millennia. The prophets address real life anxiety, real threats. They address faith, public corruption, diplomacy, and war. These servants of God were speaking out about how we could live together, calling people to changed hearts and changed lives, and warning of the consequences if things continued on their current course. Sometimes they were just trying to make sense of what had already happened, as we will see next week with the prophet Joel.
The prophets mixed prediction and oracles with performance art and condemnation. They were troublemakers. The Israelite King Ahab says to Elijah, “So you have found me, my enemy.†But they also offered solutions, offered hope. They were the first to declare that God offered forgiveness and sought reconciliation, and while we might find some of the imagery troubling from our 21st century standpoint, especially in the work of today’s prophet, they are the ones who move the faith from an arbitrary and capricious human-like god among many gods to the ethical monotheism which is still the core of our faith. Jesus can declare God to be a loving parent figure and Paul can declare God to be universal because the foundation was laid by the prophets as they worked to make their faith cohere with their experience of the world.
Hosea can feel like a problem. He can be confusing. These were a people that identified themselves by tribal affiliation, that knew what names were associated with which tribe, but to the modern reader it can feel encrypted. He refers to Israel, the Northern Kingdom that is also sometimes called Samaria, after its capital, by yet a third name, Ephraim, after one of the sons of Joseph and the largest of Israel’s tribal groups.
Hosea is the only prophet from the Northern Kingdom to have an attributed text. Amos, who comes shortly before Hosea, engages in prophecy in the the Northern Kingdom, but he is from Judah, the Southern Kingdom. Amos was a border-crosser. But here is Hosea, an Israelite speaking to Israelites, and it is not happy news. But it is not a happy time.
A long age of stability and prosperity for Israel was coming to an end. Tiglath-pileser III had risen to power in neighboring Assyria, and began a campaign of expansion, wiping out anyone who got in his way. The last good king of Israel, Jeroboam II, died in 747 B.C.E. There would be six kings in the next twenty years, four assassinated. Fear and anxiety can make people do dumb things, individually, collectively, entire nations.
To be honest, I’m not always sure the text should be canonical, not that anyone ever asked me. It ends with Hosea predicting reconciliation between God and Israel, with a restoration in which “they shall flourish as a garden.†The most basic classic test of prophecy, one found in scripture, is “does it come true?†And these final predictions of Hosea do not come true. Assyria defeats Israel and engages in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, giving us the legend of the Lost Tribes.
Some of Hosea’s preaching is political. The prophet denounces the attempts of the final Israelite king to appease the Assyrians. He denounces falsehood and temper tantrums, warning those that smolder in their anger in the night.
God tells Hosea to take as his wife a prostitute, Gomer, and then to give the children, presumably not his, wretched names. The prophet is the stand-in for God and Gomer is Israel in this lived prophecy as performance art. Even as Gomer refuses to set aside her infidelity, to stop her whoring, Hosea offers forgiveness and longs for her. We can throw around words like misogyny and patriarchy, and those are legitimate complaints, but they miss the point entirely. This entire text is about a troubled relationship.
God, through the prophet, carefully catalogs the transgressions of the Israelites. Many are sexual, and indeed the Judeo-Christian obsession with sex may spring from the same source as the prophet’s bill of indictment, for the ancient Hebrews shared land and culture with the Canaanites, and that people still practiced a religion of fertility rites in which the fertility of the land and the fertility of the women were inter-connected, in which sexual acts may well have been included in religious rites, and we know that, again and again, Hebrews participated in other cults, flirted with other gods like Baal. We know that syncretism, the combining of different religions, was the norm, not the exception, despite the protests of orthodoxy.
Hosea is working in an anxious and dangerous time and speaking to what he sees, what is going on around him, the conduct of the nation and public officials, the conduct of every day Israelites. He is trying to find reasons for what is going on, wants to see the Assyrian threat as deserved, as divine punishment. He is trying to make meaning, which is all any of us have every done with religion.
And here we stand, in an anxious time, when many proclaim that we are being punished for infidelity, though for many, that infidelity is based on their pick-and-choose moral code where the transgressions of others are condemned while their transgressions and those of their allies are ignored. They have forgotten all Jesus had to say about first stones and splinters in the eyes of others.
The harvest to be had from Hosea is not this transactional relationship with God. We will circle back to the transactional view of God as rewarding and punishing again later in this sermon series. After the fall of the Northern Kingdom, Hezekiah would come to the throne in Judah, the Southern Kingdom. He would be a righteous king, a reformer, one who would ban the worship of other gods. Isaiah bin Amoz and Micah were both active during Hezekiah’s reign. Yet Judah would fall in the end as well.
The harvest is to be found in God’s willingness to forgive, in God’s desire for reconciliation. The harvest is in the hope that we can make different choices and fix what is broken.
God loves us even when we are wretched. God seeks us even when we have strayed, the shepherd seeking one lost sheep. God seeks healing and wholeness, is willing to let go of that long list, chapter after chapter, of grievances. Reconciliation opens the door to a thousand futures, different, maybe than what Hosea expected, different, maybe, than what we expect, because God can dream dreams we cannot imagine, can dream and speak creation.
May we want what God wants, one with another, healing and reconciliation. “They shall flourish like a garden; they shall blossom like a vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.â€
Reconcile, heal, flourish, and blossom, this day and always.