Constructive Faith

Service of the Word

10:00am 12 October 2025

Luke 17:11-19

SERMON Present Moment

If you heard me describe the absence of interfaith awareness in my childhood, you might think I grew up in Frog Holler, Alabama or some such place. 

In fact, I grew up in the Tidewater area of Virginia, and while not exactly multi-cultural Chicago, it was a populated and diverse metro, even back in the era before the globalized Neo-liberal economy. 

We were far from Native American populations and the rich cultural mix of the border regions, but the huge military presence brought people to Norfolk and Virginia Beach. I knew where there was a Jewish congregation, was part of a Boy Scout troop sponsored by a Catholic Church, marveled at the Chinese newspapers of the longtime immigrant who bought the house behind us, but knew nothing about those other religions. The closest I came to a multicultural experience was the religions and cultures of Middle Earth, for like any little nerdy boy of my era, I was into all things Tolkien, and before long, all things Dungeons and Dragons.

It would only be as an adult that I would learn about variations in Christianity, and eventually non-Christian religions. The first that really caught my attention was Buddhism. A friend encouraged me to read “Seven Years in Tibet” by Heinrich Harrer, opening the door to Tibetan Buddhism and the cause of the Tibetan people: the nation swallowed by Communist China, the culture slowly erased by Han Chinese. While Harrer’s story turned out to be problematic, and by problematic I mean Nazi, I went on to learn about other forms of Buddhism, at the moment Zen and Japanese culture became a fad in business thinking. 

One of the first books on Buddhist practice that I read was “The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat Hanh, already a classic by the 1990’s, having first appeared in 1975. Those first audiences would have known him in his original cultural context. Though he had spent time studying and teaching in the United States, at Princeton Theological, Columbia, and Cornell, he returned to Vietnam in 1963, and was a peace activist throughout the war years, though he was forced to flee to France in 1966, as the United States-backed regime equated “peace” with “communism.” 

Some things never change.

Though I would not know it until many years later, Nhat Hanh was connected to two other important members of my Twentieth Century Ordo, visiting the Trappist monk and contemplative teacher Thomas Merton at the Gethsemani Abbey, and meeting with the Rev. Dr. King, who Nhat Hanh urged to condemn the Vietnam War, something King would do the following year at a historic United Church of Christ congregation in Manhattan. Funny how it is all connected.

It was from Nhat Hanh, and especially his 1997 teaching and book “The Heart of Understanding,” that I came to understand inter-being, sometimes labeled “emptiness” in the English language, and from all of his works, going right back to “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” I came to understand the power of the present moment.

This afternoon, I’ll once again chase after Micah 6:8, though again use Nhat Hanh as a touchstone. This morning, it is Nhat Hanh that I turn, or maybe that other great school of philosophy I admire, Pearl Jam, with Eddie Vedder singing “It makes more sense to live in the present tense.”

Nhat Hanh might say something like this: When you wash the dishes, only wash the dishes. When you peel an orange, only peel the orange.

This is mindfulness, and pretty much the opposite of the way we live, completely the opposite of end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism, which must always tell us we are less so that we will buy more.

Continue reading “Two Homily Sunday: Anniversary Service”

Lamentations 1:1-6

SERMON

In the Protestant tradition, we tend to think of “the” Reformation as beginning when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses for an academic disputation to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. The 508th anniversary of that supposed event, Reformation Day, will be Halloween. I don’t know how we are supposed to reenact the Diet of Worms, an important part of the Reformation, with children ringing the doorbell every five minutes, though if you do your candy shopping right, you might offer a diet of worms of a different gummy sort.

You can predict what I am about to say next. We are not certain that exact thing happened on that exact day. Luther did mail his document to Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz, on October 31st. He may have also posted it on church doors, at All Souls and other parishes, sometime in the following days and weeks, as was customary. But this initial act was not quite as dramatic as tradition would have us believe.

Luther’s was not the first attempt to reform the Christian church, nor would it be the last. We trace our particular history as Congregationalists to the Swiss Reformation, and Huldrych Zwingli. That reform began with what was quite literally a sausage party, though one held during Lent, and so violating the fasting requirements of the Roman church. 

Centuries earlier, Peter Abelard advocated for human reason in reading scripture instead of unquestioning belief, and was condemned as a heretic. Italy’s Waldensians refused to baptize infants, and denied transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and wine become actual flesh and blood. The Lollards also rejected transubstantiation, and also, daringly, rejected papal authority. 

I could go on, for there were dozens of reforming movement in the regions controlled by the Roman church, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the four patriarchs who never submitted to the patriarch of Rome in the first place, the original tradition we broadly label as the “Orthodox” church.

But this is not a Reformation sermon. Today, we celebrate two contemporary American saints, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, and one traditional saint, Francis of Assisi. I’d like to suggest that Francis, in particular, led his own kind of reform movement, and that he did so from a place of brokenness.

We have the stories, the paintings, the various religious orders, from the original Order of Friars Minor to the countless offshoots, as well as Franciscan movements in other traditions. There are Lutheran Franciscans, Anglican Franciscans, and Ecumenical Franciscans, this last group including lay members like our own Crystal. 

The stories, some true, some maybe not so much, are lovely, and do what great stories are supposed to do, serve as mirrors so that we can see ourselves, and beyond ourselves the world, connect our tragedies and our blessings, our oppression and our transcendence, to the great story. 

It is no surprise that a culture that has lost the ability to read, even to sit through a full length movie, that is drowning in a tsunami of Tik-Tok videos, has lost empathy and relationship. Story has always been about meaning making and connection. 

Francis di Bernardone was the son of a wealthy merchant in an age when what we now call Italy was torn with warring factions and city-states. Scholars would eventually lump the largest groups into two broad categories, though in reality the divisions meant little politically. In 1197, the “popolo” party with which the di Bernardone family was aligned initiated a civil war in Assisi, driving the opposing faction from the city and destroying their towers, for as anyone who has been a tourist in northern Italy knows, towers were a thing. The losing faction fled to Perugia. 

In 1201, Assisi launched an offensive against Perugia. It did not go well. In fact, by some accounts, it was a slaughter. Francis and many of his companions were captured, and though he was wealthy enough to afford a horse, and therefore was kept with the knights to be ransomed, Francis was traumatized by the experience, and his health declined dangerously while in custody.

Francis was released from the Perugian prison after a little over a year. Back home, he experienced what we now call flashbacks. His sleep was torn by violent dreams. He had post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. 

Continue reading ““What is it good for?” : 5 October 2025”

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

Jeremiah was not, in fact, a bullfrog. That is a generational jokes for us old folks…

He was far more cranky than he was croaky. He was so cranky that his name has become synonymous with a long mournful complaint, known as a jeremiad.

He had a lot to complain about. Modern folks tend to focus on the personal piety stuff, and he did rant and rave about that. We even see evidence in his writing that the practice of child sacrifice had not been completely abolished among the Jewish people, despite the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac. Like other prophets, Jeremiah believed that personal infidelity and collective injustice together would result in divine punishment.

But a significant portion of his prophetic activity was focused on politics and diplomacy as Judah tried to maneuver around the powerful forces to the southwest and northeast. The particulars may seem of limited use to us, as we are not caught between Egypt and Babylon, though frankly we are caught between Israel and Palestine, and should be mindful that the hard line between private values and public policy is a fiction that was no more true in the past than it is in the present. There are no parts of your life that do not utterly depend on God, so there are no parts of your life or our lives collectively that are exempt from the law of love.

In today’s reading, Jeremiah purchases a piece of property. Those who were here last week may remember that the family land, a farming plot known as a small-hold, was economically and culturally important, passed from generation to generation. There were strict rules about the transfer of this land, rules meant to keep it in the family. We are not told why Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel is selling his plot, though the nation is in crisis and the enemy is at the proverbial gates. Custom says that Jeremiah has the right of first refusal, and he exercises it, purchasing the field at Anathoth, and insuring copies of the deed are safeguarded.

At first glance, this looks like a mundane transaction. Of course, it isn’t. It is recorded in scripture because it is far more than it seems.

First of all, Jeremiah was incarcerated at the time of the purchase. Like Donald Trump, King Zedekiah wanted to silence anyone who dared to point out the obvious failures of his despotic regime and idiotic diplomacy. Just a few chapters after today’s reading, the king allowed a lynch mob of his supporters to throw Jeremiah into a cistern in hopes that he would sink into the mud quickly or starve slowly, murder without bloodshed to avoid Torah prohibitions. It was a minority court official from the Horn of Africa, a Cushite, who appealed to the king and rescued Jeremiah, though the prophet remained in custody.

Second, Jeremiah’s entire message was that the nation would be destroyed. Zedekiah was only on the throne because Babylon had conquered the nation, pillaged Jerusalem and the Temple, and taken Zedekiah’s brother, the rightful king, hostage. Zedekiah, who was on the throne because Babylon allowed it, had a knack for picking the wrong side, so he stopped paying tribute to the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, and aligned with Egypt. The Babylonians responded by once again laying siege to Jerusalem, and once victorious, destroyed the city and the Temple completely. The remaining elite and craftsmen of the Jewish people were taken to Babylon, where they would remain for half a century.

The basic facts of the story are well supported in the archaeological record. Not only are the destruction and captivity fact, there are ancient tablets, seals, and pottery shards naming key characters in the story dated to that era.

Given this, it seems foolish of Jeremiah to buy land. He will never enjoy it. 

But this is precisely why this story found its way into scripture. Jeremiah had predicted the continuing collapse of the Kingdom of Judah. But he had also predicted restoration. This mundane transaction was a prophetic action, a bit of optimism, an affirmation of hope. It was planning for what came next.

Continue reading “After: 28 September 2025”

Luke 16:1-13 

Though the word “radicalize” has been around for two centuries, it came into common usage with the rise of the internet, and especially social media in recent decades. 

We’ve heard so many reports of terrorists radicalized by online calls for jihad that it is almost an expectation at this point. This past week, it has been misapplied to Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of murdering the hatemonger Charlie Kirk. 

Of course, radicalized depends on your definition of radical. Two years ago, we would have described the murder of DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose in an attack on the Centers for Disease Control as the work of a radicalized assailant, Patrick Joseph White. These days, he’s just one extreme on a continuum that includes our Secretary of Health and Human Services, the son of a man assassinated in 1968 by a Palestinian Christian radicalized by U.S. support for Israel. 

Historically, the word “radical” has referred to those members of the social and political left who press most aggressively for equality and the common good. That is to say, a radical is someone who challenges the consolidated wealth and power of the few. Which makes me a radical.

Let’s spend a few moments zooming in on a particular case of “radicalization,” one that might offer us a way to interpret today’s messy reading from the gospel.

The Roman communion experienced about a decade and a half of liberalization, from the start of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 to the election of the man who would take the name John Paul II in 1978. During that brief time, a theological movement developed in Latin America that came to be known as “liberation theology.” 

Some may remember that South and Central America experienced numerous civil wars and coups d’etat during those decades, often with the most oppressive forces supported by the United States, an interfering hemispheric role we have played since James Monroe first articulated his eponymous doctrine in 1823.

The most active thinkers in liberation theology were members of Catholic religious orders, including the Dominican Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Jesuit Jon Sobrino, and the Franciscan Leonardo Boff, who was repeatedly silenced by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, until Boff eventually left the priesthood.

El Salvador was ideal soil for the message of liberation, with one of the highest poverty rates in the region and control of most arable land by only fourteen families. There had been a political resistance movement for decades, and a series of sham elections keeping the oligarchs in power.

In 1977, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Luis Chávez, reached the mandatory retirement of 75. As his replacement, the Vatican chose the boring and scholarly Bishop of Santiago de María, Óscar Romero. He was a safe pick, a social conservative, and suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. He was neither charismatic nor likely to cause trouble.

Continue reading “Radicalized: 21 September 2025”

1 Timothy 1:12-17

An unverified legend claims that shortly before the Second World War, a puff piece by an American journalist wrote that Magda Goebbels made a great strudel. The wife of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, Magda was held up as the ideal German woman. Her husband, who gained power and wealth by promoting hatred and inciting violence, was as guilty in the Holocaust as the men who operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Magda joined Joseph in murdering their own children before committing suicide in the final days of the Nazi dictatorship cult.

Charlie Kirk was the Joseph Goebbels of our age. Would you ask Jews to mourn for Goebbels? To do so would be gaslighting of the highest order.

Like Goebbels, Kirk gained power and wealth by promoting hatred and inciting violence. He described the stoning execution of LGBTQ individuals as “God’s perfect law.” He did not need to throw a stone. All he had to do was activate an unstable member of his own lunatic cult. His assassination at the hands of Tyler Robinson, a follower of a different branch of America’s Neo-Fascists, is nothing to celebrate. But he was not a hero. 

When people like Donald Trump, Representative Nick Langworthy, and Chemung County Legislator Joe Brennan use it to further divide and antagonize, they tell us a lot about who they really are. As do organizations like the National Football League, which held a moment of silence for Kirk on Thursday night, and has invited teams to do so today. It is increasingly clear that much of professional sports in the United States is just a modern version of the ancient Roman “bread and circuses,” all in the service of oligarchs.

It is sin, and we would be advised to do an examination of our consciences, for each of us is complicit in our own way.

It is estimated that the cancellation of the international PEPFAR program under the Trump-Musk race war will kill twenty-two people while we sit here this morning, two of them children. Analysts expect eleven million preventable cases of HIV/AIDS.

Sin is a tough topic. It is a sort of unwritten rule among progressive Christians, those of us who lean into the expansive justice of the prophets and the unearned grace of the gospel, that we do not preach about sin, and if we do, we make it a vague societal sin, avoiding the intimate and personal, and therefore avoiding personal responsibility.

Continue reading “What Is Sin? : 14 September 2025”

Philemon 1:1-21

I was, as previously reported, raised in the South, with both grandmothers from old southern families. That meant being initiated into the cult of the Lost Cause, the narrative in which slavery was mostly benign, Confederates mostly noble, and the war anything but civil. 

Of course, I know the truth now. I am also, I like to think, capable of handling a bit of nuance. I can acknowledge George Washington, a distant cousin actually, as an enslaver, as less than ethical in some of his real estate transactions, and at the same time, as someone most white men experienced as a honest and heroic leader, even before his story was embellished and he was canonized as the holiest of the Founding Fathers. 

Re-thinking another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, requires the same sort of nuance, especially when it comes to Sally Hemings. The great political and religious thinker likely fathered several children with Sally, a person he enslaved, who was his property under the evil laws of that age. 

Apologists for Jefferson want to claim that despite the DNA evidence and the rumors going all the way back to Jefferson’s own lifetime, it was another male in the Jefferson line, and any male relative will do, but certainly not Tom himself, who fathered the children. 

At the other end of the spectrum are those who look at the power dynamic between the two and declare that Jefferson was just one more brutal rapist, for so many enslavers and white overseers in an economy based on human trafficking were exactly that, rapists.

There is no denying the power imbalance, but in truth, we know nothing about the domestic relationship between the two. We do know that Jefferson never really recovered from the death of his wife and four of his six children, that he had promised Martha on her deathbed that he would never remarry. We know that Sally had only one enslaved grandparent, and that she and her children by Jefferson were set apart from others enslaved at Monticello. While we do not have a record of manumission for Sally, her children were all freed, and she was allowed to live as a free woman in Charlottesville after Jefferson’s death.

The institution of slavery was absolutely evil. No question. Jefferson was an active participant in a system of evil. I need neither wholly innocent Tom nor wholly evil Tom. I’m okay with imperfect Tom, and I am okay with knowing that we will never know whether Sally was a victim of sexual violence or a beloved life partner in that wretched system. 

Those who insist that they do know tell you more about themselves than they do about day-to-day events and domestic relationships long erased by time.

Today’s reading from the Christian Testament deals with slavery in the Biblical Age. It is one of the authentic letters of Paul preserved in scripture. Of those authentic letters, one is a theological treatise to a community he has never visited, one is this personal letter to Philemon, and the rest are pastoral interventions in congregations he helped establish.

Paul is imprisoned when he writes to Philemon, a member of the Colossian church. He is writing about a slave, Onesimus, who is carrying the letter back to his owner.

Slavery in the Biblical Age was different. First, and most important, it was not racial. Race did not even exist, would not be invented until it was needed by Europeans in the 16th century to justify their colonialist depravity. There were tribes, but tribes were about belonging, not being.

Continue reading “Imperfectly Tom: 7 September 2025”

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Though I am still a few years from Medicare, there is little doubt that I am getting old. My body tells me every day. Then there is my mailbox, snail mail not email. Most afternoons there is at least one, sometimes more than one, print magazine. I also read news online, but I still like long-form journalism and good writing on paper, and despise the meme wars, which seem a one way road to stupidity and evil.

I receive a range of publications, from the Christian Century, the magazine of record for Mainline Protestants, to the Guardian Weekly and the Nation, progressive news and opinion, and mainstream cultural magazines like the New Yorker.

And it seems like every one of them these days has a full page advertisement for a nationwide speaking tour by Lech Walesa, former president of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Walesa was the trade union activist who confronted and eventually unwound state communism in Poland, then a satellite of the Soviet Union. 

For our younger worshippers, that was a communist nation-state that controlled all of northern Asia and much of eastern Europe, either directly or through puppet governments. It was centered on Russia. And if you wonder why I just had to explain that, you are in the geezer club right along with me. The Soviet Union has been gone for 34 years. There are parents with no memory of the Soviet Union who have kids in high school.

I have no idea what Walesa has to say to our current situation, whether he will speak to crowds or empty halls. There is an irony that it was workers who brought down state-communism in Poland when communism was supposed to be a worker’s paradise, and that Poland itself descended into nationalism and adopted a rapacious capitalism along the United States model instead of embracing the pro-worker social democracy model to be found just across the Baltic in Scandinavia. 

The union and movement Walesa led was called Solidarity. The word indicates common interest and mutual support, which is to say, the word indicates what it is to be part of a social species. 

And since it is Labor Day Weekend, originally a celebration of organized labor, I will land there after a brief detour into scripture and theology.

Scripture tells us that when the ancient Jewish tribes were afraid of the new immigrants arriving on the coast, they went to Samuel and asked for a king. God’s response, as popularized by a recent meme, was “You don’t want a king. Kings suck.” 

But the people insisted, making them just like every other dictatorship in the region, ironic since their own collective story was about escaping an evil king, the ruler of Egypt. 

Continue reading “Solidarity: Labor Day Sunday 2025”

Luke 13:10-17

Elizabeth Agassiz did a good thing. She was co-founder and the first president of Radcliffe College, the one-time women’s division of Harvard University. Today, you can find her name attached to a professorship, a building, and a gate at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the successor institution now that the university itself is co-educational. 

Elizabeth was also the spouse of the Swiss-born Harvard scholar Louis Agassiz, a much more difficult figure. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1847, and served as a professor and as curator of the school’s Museum of Comparative Zoology until his death in 1873. The Agassiz name is still on the museum building, though it is unclear if it originally honored Louis or he and Elizabeth’s son, Alexander, who succeeded his father as curator.

A bit of a celebrity scientist in his day, Louis Agassiz is now remembered mostly for his work in race science, including his support of polygenism, the long-debunked idea that human races evolved separately. He proposed that God created new and improved human races after each ice age. This supported his belief and the belief of other racists in his day that the white race was unique and superior. In fact, he claimed that the black race had never produced a civilization. 

Agassiz also helped establish Harvard as a hotbed of eugenics, the pseudo-science of selective human reproduction embraced by white supremacists from the enslavers of the 19th century to the Nazis of the 20th and even Elon Musk today in the 21st.

In the United States, government policies in support of eugenics resulted in the involuntary sterilization of more that 60,000 individuals, including Carrie Buck, the victim and plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme Court decision that upheld the practice. Buck had been declared feeble-minded and was sterilized after a relative of her foster family raped her. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. infamously wrote in that decision that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

This toxic history still haunts us, as so many remember state institutionalization as a tool used by the powerful against those deemed inconvenient or dangerous to their privilege. Today, it is human services orthodoxy that involuntary commitment is always wrong, no matter how deadly the consequences.

While pseudo-scientific racism, including eugenics, was used to justify slavery and colonialism, it really reached its gruesome zenith with the Third Reich, and not just in the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and Queers. The groundwork for later crimes against humanity was laid three years before “The Final Solution” was articulated at the Wannsee Conference of 1942 with what came to be known as Aktion T4, named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the street address of the relevant government office. 

Aktion T4 was the systematic murder of Germany’s disabled, ordered by Adolph Hitler in October 1939 and giving the disabled what the Nazis euphemistically called a Gnadentod, a “good death.” Like recent cuts to Medicaid here in the U.S., this freed up money that could be redirected to state violence, and of course, served the cause of eugenics. Over 93,000 beds were emptied in just two years. T4 allowed the Third Reich to perfect the art of mass killing with gas, saving the bullets that had been used in the regime’s earliest crimes against humanity. The gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau used technology developed in Aktion T4.

Continue reading “Gnadentod: 24 August 2025”

Luke 12:49-56

Humans move. 

This basic concept, the reason our species spread beyond Africa and eventually mated with other species to create what we are today, a hybrid species, seems to escape many of our fellow Americans, every one themselves the result of migration. 

While migration is a biological fact, the form of migration known as colonialism is a particular evil. It relies on the notion that some ethnic groups are superior and entitled, or worse still, that some individuals are superior and entitled, something that goes against the core values of multiple religious traditions, including Buddhism, Islam, and of course, Christianity, where we are taught that everyone is our neighbor.

Imperial Rome had a colonial system that in some ways foreshadowed what would develop in the 17th century, though the colonial enterprise in its racist form reached its zenith in the decades before the Second World War, when Britain and France led the world in the exploitation of overseas colonies and peoples, and the United States was managing its first significant overseas colonies in places like the Philippines. 

Even at their worst, which was pretty bad, the crimes of the British and French overseas paled in comparison to Belgian King Leopold’s personal colony in the Congo, which he ruled as an absentee dictator from 1885 to 1908. The atrocities there prompted the Rev. George Washington Williams, a distinguished American of African descent, to use the term “crimes against humanity” in an 1890 letter to the U.S. Secretary of State. That term had first been used in December of the previous year by President Benjamin Harrison in speaking about the ongoing slave trade in Africa.

Though the international order after the Second World War, especially the formation of the United Nations, was intended to prevent future crimes against humanity, that system failed, and we see reports of atrocities and genocide daily, especially in places like Ukraine, Palestine, and Sudan.

The Book of Joshua in the Jewish Scripture recounts and endorses crimes against humanity, specifically genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Canaan, the Promised Land of the Exodus people and the location of today’s Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Scripture tells a tale of ethnic purity that is a complete fabrication, a lie exposed not only by archeology, but by the text itself. Today’s reading, from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, hints at the reality. 

Continue reading “Hammer and Fite: 17 August 2025”

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. 

Continue reading “3 August 2025”