A Love Story A Sermon from August 21

A Love Story
Hosea 11: 1-11/ Colossians 3: 1-11/ Luke 12: 13-21
10th Sunday of Pentecost/ Year C/ August 1, 2010

The Old Testament lesson from last week was one filled with images that were troubling. God had commanded Hosea to take a prostitute as his wife. He told Hosea that the people of Israel had gone after other gods and forgotten the covenant that had been established with Abraham and with Moses. And now judgment would fall, the people would be the sent away into exile. Today’s lesson is very different. It speaks of God’s deep and abiding love for the people of Israel. One writer has said that this is the oldest story there is. It is the same story that is told in a 1000 ways throughout the pages of the bible. Another writer has said this particular passage is a love story, a love story that begins with the creation of the world and the ends with the salvation of humankind through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. The story tells us that God loves us, entirely. God creates us, delivers us, and tends to us. It is a story of God’s continuous pursuit of humankind, the more we turn away, the more God pursues us. It is a story of grace, God’s grace and we know how it ends.
Hosea tells the story using images, portraits if you will, of God and God’s love for all of humankind. He tells us the story whose beginning we cannot remember, and who’s comes with the roar of transforming power. He walks us down the long hall of our communal memory and points us to the pictures hanging on its walls.
One does not have to be a parent to understand what Hosea is showing. Here are snapshots of tender, perfect, loving moments. Mother bends over her baby’s crib, lists his Chevy body to our face, smells is sweet baby breath, and presses our lips to his cheek. His dark hair, his pain bowl lips, his tiny arms-she loves every inch of him completely and entirely. Her love flows not simply because he is beautiful (although he is), but because he is hers; she helped create him and gave birth. The image that Hosea gives to us of God is one of a loving parent, who adores, and pledges everything he has to the nurture and care of his own child.
Who has not seen wobbling toddlers cheered on by beaming parents? Who of us have not held a tiny child against our cheek and breathed in the soft smell of a newborn? Or what parent is not run shouting after a child, “Come back here!” and the child keeps on running. What one of us has not comforted a child who ahs fallen and skinned a knee or cracked head on the ground. What one of us would not do all we could to heal a child who was ill. Hosea shows us images of a God who has these memories;
“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt to I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went away from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them in my arms; but they did not know that I heal them. I lead 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 I fed them.”
God remembers young Israel, recalls bending to feed him, teaching him to walk, leading him, holding him, and calling out his name. And as with most children, the child has no such memories of these things happening. Who of us recalls our first steps or the faces of those who held out our hands at the time to catch us? Those who nurture us, who care for us, whether parent or guardian, hold these recollections, like old photographs, of who we once were and of how the early days predicted, or did not predict, the people we have since become.
Hosea tells us, God’s parenting memories are filled with pain. If Ephraim has run away, has turned away and become enslaved in a world that does not respect humanity. The once liberated nation of Israel has invested its freedom in bad religion, bad politics, and bad social arrangements. Now their mothering, fathering liberator is affronted, heartsick, and angry. Judgment has come.
But Hosea shows us a God who is walking down the hall of memories, looking at the photos of Ephraim’s childhood, but God’s the eyes do not focus on the things that we would expect. They’re looking less at the child that the one who feeds, coaches, and calls the child: I loved, I called, I’d talked, I took them in My arms, I healed them, I let them with cords of kindness, I’d bet down, I fed them. They’re a parent’s recollection of our-self a return to the memory of our hearts deep this commitment to the child at the moment of birth. These are the parent’s truest verbs. The text discloses to us is nothing less than God remembering God.
And so God asks the pained a question: “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over?” It is the question that every parent asks themselves when their child goes on a direction that is different from what the parents would like them to go. What parent among us has not asked the same question when a child has done something that gives us grief and pain? In this passage, we find the truth about God. In these words from Hosea, we find a God who remains faithful, loving, healing, comforting. We find a God who as the text says is no mortal. We find a God who struggles within God’s self over what to do with the wayward child Israel. There is something almost violent in the struggle, “My heart would recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim. For I am God and no mortal, the holy one in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” The outcome is compassion. God remembers. God remembers and god comes to liberate, to call the people back, to give them life and freedom. God comes like a great lion roaring freedom for the captives of this world. And that roar fills the earth; animals pick up their ears and bolt, human conversation ceases, faces lift, weapons are lowered, war ends, and doors open bringing hope and a new exodus. In the beginning God created with the spoken word and sought to lead as a parent leads, calling by name in teaching to walk. This time the holy one will come as one of us, freeing a failed people with regal ferocity. Our failings will not be the final word; our obliteration will not be the last picture on the wall. The last picture will be up of a people returning home singing and dancing with joy in their hearts.
They will make a return with trembling. They had been like children running into traffic; they will come home shaken. Will it be their brush with death that makes them tremble, or will it be their new knowledge of wildness and danger in the holy ones compassion that will lead them home? Who can say? All we know is that God has promised to bring us home and return us to that place where we are loved best of all, to that place where God resides, in God’s very own heart. Amen.