The thing about prejudice is that there’s just a tiny sliver of truth in it, otherwise we would dismiss it as stupid. But prejudice takes a tiny insight and makes it into a colossal generalization that obscures the complexity, texture and goodness of its object.
Many, perhaps most, Christians have a prejudice about the Old Testament. One version is the abiding idea that the God of the Old Testament is a God of war and revenge while the God of the New Testament is a God of peace and love. Another version is that the Old Testament is largely made up of prophecies of Jesus’ coming and, once Jesus came, its use is largely to demonstrate that Jesus was part of God’s plan all along. Yet another version says that the Old Testament is full of arcane laws and that these are exactly the kind of rules that the gospel releases us from.
But this morning’s reading from the prophet Hosea shows how impoverished all these perceptions of the Old Testament really are.
A man told the story about how his Mom died while he was still a teenager. He said one sad moment came when my mother knew she was going to die, she carefully wrote a letter to him to read after she’d gone. What she did was to buy a present for my 21st birthday and write me a letter that I would open on that day. She let my father and I know the location, so we knew where to find them.
The sad thing he said was that a year before I turned 21, while my father and I were out of town on vacation, his father’s house was burglarized and the 21st birthday present and its letter were stolen. So he said I never read the letter nor found out what the present was. I’ve always wondered. I’ve always somehow assumed that letter would have cleared up some mysteries of my mother’s life and that the present would spoken to her hopes for my life.
Just imagine if that were your story and you really did find that letter many years later. Wouldn’t you hold it reverently in two hands, as if blessed by its existence? Wouldn’t you have butterflies in your stomach hoping it wouldn’t tell you a secret? Wouldn’t you expect reading it to be one of the most revealing moments of your life, a moment when wisdom and passion met on a single page?
That’s the state of mind we need to be in as we read these words of the prophet Hosea. What Hosea gives us is a letter from God saying to Israel, “This is what it’s been like over all these centuries to have a child like you.” And this is an amazing thing in many ways. Step back and reflect for a moment on the ways we talk about having children in our culture.
We live in a hero, achievement oriented culture, where we trade stories as to how our kids are going from one achievement to another. But for parents, between all the hero talk about my kid doing this or that, rarely do we really give one another space to identify and explain what being a Mom or Dad is really like? We love to brag about our kids but when do we say how much a parent shouts, how much a parent weeps, how much a parent feels isolated and alone and a failure and a fool?
Many years ago I remember a conversation with a man who shared his frustrations with his teenage son. He shared how his son lied to him. He started talking about the drugs he took. How his son was beyond his reach – tremendous fun and good company one day in five, but most of the time not living on earth. I said to him, “How much of this sense of failure is wrapped up in your divorce.” He shook his head, adamantly, but when he opened his mouth to deny it, no words came out.
This is a guy who’s had more professional recognition than most of us could dream of, but his experience of being a parent had unraveled every part of his soul, leaving him with the self-image of a mashed potato.
This is the kind of story Hosea records God telling about what it was like to be Israel’s parent all those years. But it’s not a simple tale of woe. It comes in four distinct parts, and I want to look at those four parts with you for a moment because they give a profound shape to the story.
The story starts in the past, moves into the present, and finishes in the future, and offers us a model of how we might tell our own stories in a similar way. Let’s look at what God says about the past. “When Israel was a child, I loved him.” A tiny child can call out the deepest feelings of pride and protection and heart-bursting wonder and joy.
Feel God’s chest filling with emotion as you ponder these words: “It was I who taught Ephraim to walk.” (Ephraim is another name for the Northern Kingdom that split from Judah after the death of Solomon.) “I took them up in my arms.” It’s like an old recording of a child’s first steps. “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.” You can feel God stroking Israel’s soft skin and getting out the little spoon and trying to put some soft food in Israel’s mouth as it sits in its high chair. What a tender scene.
But then the picture shifts to Israel’s present. And suddenly the mood changes and it’s like we’re in the bar with my friend again, and he’s telling me about what his son gets up to when he’s supposed to be at school. You can see God hunched forward, head in hands, saying these words. “The more I called them, the more they went from me… they kept offering incense to idols… they have refused to return to me. My people are bent on turning away from me.” And God is under no illusions that turning a blind eye will make such things go away by themselves.
This behavior has consequences.
The people are already facing, or are going to face, exile, and conquest, slavery, and civil war. God is devastated to see how the intimacy of parent and child has gotten to this terrible state.
And then we come to the third picture, the most poignant one of all. We’re given the awesome privilege of a window into the heart of God. And in that heart we see an all-night struggle between sober, realistic pragmatism, passionate, wild fury, and overwhelming, tender compassion.
“How can I give you up, Ephraim?” says God. “How can I hand you over, O Israel? … My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” How many parents know what such inconsolable soul-searching feels like? But God emerges from it with a firm conviction. “I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no human being, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” This is God’s present tense, as the Old Testament writes it.
God is torn between wrath and mercy, knowing that mercy will cost everything. Yet we see the writer struggle to say God is mercy.
God will roar like a lion. Israel will come trembling from the four corners to which they had dispersed, and be reunited with one another, with their homes, and with God. Israel will be as timid and tentative as cooing doves in the face of the mighty roar of God. There’s no question Israel’s return will be God’s doing. But like the prodigal son returning to the father, Israel will come back from exile and be reunited in God’s home and in God’s heart.
I wonder if there’s a word of hope for you in this story. I wonder if you know what it means to have a child, or maybe another person whom you love, follow a self-destructive path which hurts everyone. No doubt your own positive or negative experience of being a child or a parent shapes the way you hear this story. I wonder where you are in this story.
Are you thinking back to the beautiful, tender times? Or maybe you’re right in the thick of the terrible tormented times. Or perhaps you’re experiencing the sleepless nights and restless moments of not knowing whether to follow wrath or mercy, whether to try yet another one last chance or whether to say you’ve had it with them and there’s no way back. I wonder if there’s consolation in God’s words of reunion in the future – not a reunion maybe you can’t see right now, but one that God will bring as irresistibly as a roaring lion.
I want to take you back to that lost letter I mentioned at the start. The guy said I’ve come to believe that in fact I have read that letter. I don’t mean the letter wasn’t really stolen or that it miraculously appeared. I mean maybe this is that letter. Maybe Hosea chapter 11 is that lost letter. Maybe Hosea 11 is what his mother wanted to tell him. Not that he was a difficult child or that she’d been a patient parent.
Hosea story is not every parent’s story. It’s a poem and a prayer and a promise from God that says “You’re my beloved child and you’ve wandered and strayed and I’m in pieces, but one day you’ll be reunited with me, although you’ll never know how much it cost me to make it so.”
The guy said now that’s what I think my mother wanted to tell me. Not that she gave everything for me – but that God did, and still does, and always will. Those words tell me who I am and who God is. God is mercy.