7th Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 12, Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect of the Day
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Lesson: Hosea 1:2-10
When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” So he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son…
In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all…Amen. Good morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this seventh Sunday after Pentecost, and a day on which we have a challenging text from Hosea. I confess that I am often drawn to texts that are simultaneously disturbing and intriguing, and this is certainly among them. Indeed, a quick survey of a few clergy colleagues revealed that not one of them planned to talk about Hosea this morning. One, whose comments I will edit for both brevity and contextual appropriateness said, “Harkins, what are you thinking? Why go there and only make things harder on yourself?” Good question and, well, I may have dug myself a theological hole from which extrication is impossible, but I’ll let you all be the ones to decide. So here goes.
As a former professor of pastoral care and still practicing as a marriage and family therapist, the context of the passage from Hosea is to me a clinical mess. It is not unlike that covenant made between God and his people at Mount Sinai, that “wedding in the wilderness,” where God took Israel by the hand and said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not bow down to idols or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God (Ex. 20:2-5). Do you understand?” And the people of Israel, like a bride blushing behind her veil, said, “We do.” They made a covenant, and the covenant between God and his people, at its simplest, was this: “If you will be my people I will be your God.” But it was a conditional covenant. It began with the word if. Another way to say it, then, on the other side of the Hegelian dialectic, was “If you will not be my people, then I will not be your God. Understood?” “Understood,” the people said. “We will be your people and you will be our God.” And off they went, God and his people, toward their honeymoon in the Promised Land.
But it didn’t last long. And by the time we get to our text for today, some 500 years later, the people of Israel have worshiped every foreign god they can find, as if their lives depended on it, and it’s probably because they thought their lives really did. If the rains didn’t fall, if their crops didn’t grow, they wouldn’t have anything to eat. And if they didn’t have anything to eat, they couldn’t last long in the land that God had given them. When they entered the land of Canaan and learned that there was a local god, Baal, who was responsible for rainfall, they figured it couldn’t hurt to toss a prayer in his direction, the way you might toss a coin into a wishing well. And when they learned that there was a fertility goddess named Anath, they figured it couldn’t hurt to light a candle at her shrine, either. Who knew? It might just help the crops grow. But don’t miss the significance of what was happening. Although it might seem like a harmless flirtation with foreign gods, it was the beginning of the end of the marriage. How often, even in our own culture, are we willing to sacrifice our core values for the sake of short-term gratification? Alasdair MacIntyre, among my former professors at Vanderbilt, suggested that our moral life is kind of like that. We use words like virtue and phrases like the purpose of life, but they are often just random fragments that don’t cohere into a system you can bet your life on. People have been cut off from any vision of their ultimate purpose. This is one of the subtexts in today’s story from Hosea.
How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them now, and sometimes this takes the form of immediate gratification and confirmation bias and a deeply misguided leader who says, “I know what is best for you, and that’s all you need to know.” This robs us of true dialogue, and discernment, and collaborative community, core values which foster growth. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences and, often, motivated by our fears.
In the passage for this morning, when the people of God began to bend their knees to other gods, they were saying in essence, “You, Yahweh, are not enough god for me. I can’t count on you to provide for me, to fulfill my needs. So, I’m going to worship these other gods as well, just to be on the safe side, just to make sure.” But what may have begun with a casual prayer, or the lighting of a candle soon became forms of idol worship. If one prayer was good, two prayers were better, right? And if one candle seemed to help, why not try a half dozen? And if the rains hadn’t come or the crops were in danger, the people would head for the hills to “worship” other gods. They would spread their blankets beneath the trees and engage in fertility rituals that went on for days, hoping to inspire the gods by their behavior. This broke God’s heart, not so much because of what they were doing, I think, as why they were doing it–because they didn’t trust God to provide for their needs. In the fourth chapter of Hosea, God says: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land. My people consult a wooden idol and are answered by a stick of wood. A spirit of prostitution leads them astray; they are unfaithful to their God. They sacrifice on the mountaintops and burn offerings on the hills”
What will God do with this narrative? According to the terms of the covenant, God may have every right to abandon Israel. God said, “If you will be my people, I will be your God.” But they had not been God’s people. They had behaved like prostitutes, as the profoundly disturbing text says, chasing after every foreign god who walked down the street including Baal, hanging on to the false hopes of Anath, offering themselves to any god who would give them a taste of the good life. “If you will not be my people,” God might have said, “then I will not be your God.” God could have thrown them out of the Promised Land. He could have locked the doors and left them weeping on the threshold. But that is not what God did.
Instead God went to Hosea and said, “I want you to do something for me. I want you to go and marry a prostitute, and I want you to have children of prostitution, because my people have prostituted themselves by worshiping other gods” (Hosea 1:2). Unlike his fellow Israelites, Hosea was a faithful follower of Yahweh: what God said, Hosea did. And so, he went down to the red-light district of Samaria to look for a wife, and it was there that he found Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim. If I imagine seeing the couple in marital therapy, I find my head spinning at the possibilities for the dialogue:
Hosea: Why do you insist on continuing this behavior after we have been married? What about our marital covenant, and what about our children?
“Doesn’t any of that mean anything to you?”
“Any of What?” Gomer asks.
“Our marriage,” he said. “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”
“Well of course it does,” she says, looking furtively at me, the therapist who is supposed to be of help to them. “But I’m the primary breadwinner here. Somebody has to feed the bulldog. You knew what my line of work was when you married me. We are not going to get rich in the prophecy and preaching business, and somebody’s got to make some money around here, especially since we’ve got a baby on the way.”
Hosea looks at me plaintively, and says, “I thought things would be different after we married.” Gomer, getting angry, says “What you mean is you thought you could change me. What happened to unconditional love, for better or worse? I never said I would quit my day…um, my night job. Where do you men get off thinking that women have to give up everything for the marriage? Have I insisted that you give up prophesying and preaching? You could make a lot more money in carpentry or even being a shepherd. You knew I came from an abusive home…now you are saying I’m not what you wanted. You made a promise.”
At this point the therapist suggests a brief break. And as the clinician here, I must be mindful of the gender imbalance, and remember that in a patriarchal society, autonomous female sexuality is a threat and Hosea’s patriarchal perspective on marital infidelity and shapes his understanding of God’s response to a sinful community. I wonder, what if the prophet had been a woman? How would that change the views of Israel’s ruptured covenant? What might Gomer have to say?
And then there were the children, who only made things more complicated, as they always do, and they gave them those quite descriptive and instructive names. And if Hosea hadn’t gotten the message before, he got it now; that God has had just about all of Israel’s unfaithfulness God can stand. Do you remember the covenant? “If you will be my people, I will be your God. But if you will not be my people….”
Well, by now I am recalling a patient, many years ago, who worked at night as, well, an “exotic dancer” as I once said to her. “Call it by its proper name, Dr. Harkins,” said to me. “I’m a stripper. I am here to get help to imagine other options.” Born in a repossessed trailer to a meth-addicted mother, and a father who abandoned the family shortly after she was born and abused by more than one of her mother’s boyfriends, she eventually aged out of the foster care system, got her GED, and by the time I met her she was a stellar doctoral student in biochemistry. She made enough money at night to support herself, pay her tuition, and send some money back home to her mentally ill, addicted mother. And she had found religion. Not the “spiritual but not religious” polite, once removed kind of religion, but a deep desire for a God who demanded the best we had to offer. She had come to me for help in finding a home she never had, with a God who would forgive her having done what she had to do to survive sexual abuse, poverty, and parental indifference and still hold her accountable by expecting something better from and for her. And the first step was whether I, whom she sought out as both clinician and priest, could hear the scandal and tragedy of her story and not blink. And she wanted me to forgive her. She wanted to forgive her mother. She wanted to forgive herself.
The relationship between Hosea and Gomer is like the relationship between God and Israel—heated, acrimonious, and fierce, because Yahweh is so deeply committed to Israel that Yahweh takes the infidelity personally. God demands that Hosea marry a prostitute. Seriously? And can we allow this deeply disturbing story to lead us to a fresh understanding of God’s relationship to the church? The story of Gomer and Hosea demands of us that we read between the lines of our polite, nice, spiritual but not religious ethos to see a deeper and more embodied relationship between God and the church…and that means us, because we, too, share any references to sinful behavior here. We have much in common with both Gomer, who as bell hooks said, speaks from the margins of a sinful, patriarchal culture, and with Hosea’s blind, controlling confirmation bias. Begging the question, in relation to what are we willing to sell our souls, and in relation to what kind of God? Jesus told us stories about a shepherd who relentlessly abides in his search for the one lost sheep until it is found, and a father who waits until the lost son is back home, because that is how God’s relentless love seeks us out too. Yes, today’s text is difficult, even shocking, patriarchal, and scandalous. And difficult as it may be, the clinician part of me appreciates the comparison of our relationship with God to a messed-up marriage in which a promiscuous spouse is repeatedly forgiven, taken back, and loved. Paul says that a God who loves so much that God is willing to be crucified for the unfaithful beloved is, in the Greek, a skandalon to the world. Yet for those among us who are sinners, among whom I count myself, the real scandal is our salvation.
If I close my eyes, I can almost see Hosea getting up in the night for a glass of water and stopping by the children’s bedroom. He checks on Jezreel, his oldest; pulls the covers up under Lo-ruhamah’s chin and kisses her cheek; strokes Lo-ammi’s head and sings him back to sleep. And then he pulls a chair up to the window to watch and wait. Maybe this will be the night she comes home early and tells him she’s giving up her night job, that she has realized at last that he’s everything she needs and all she ever wants. And maybe he considers that at times, his patriarchal need for control might have driven her away. Maybe things will be different for them from now on. Regardless, he abides. Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.” As the Gospel for today says, “Ask, and it shall be given.” In asking, we are called to be clear about what we are asking for, and why, and to what ultimate end. Let’s keep doing that good work, dear friends at Holy Family, and as Julian of Norwich said, “all manner of thing shall be well.” Amid these difficult moments, however, Hosea assures us that God remains active in the search for justice for all people and that that justice will ultimately prevail. Amid pain there is always hope. As the poet Szymborska said,
Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
Let’s be curious, shall we, and not judgmental, as we seek to move toward lives of inclusive wholeness with all people, all of whom have been created and loved by God…a God who has promised to never, ever leave us. Blessings, and Godspeed. Amen.