Be with us, Lord Jesus, for if you are with us nothing else matters; and if you are not with us, nothing else matters. Amen.
If you’re our guest at St. Luke’s this morning, perhaps because you felt drawn here or because you are here as a part of the Music & Arts Camp from this past week, welcome. This is an interesting time at St. Luke’s because I’ve recently announced that I’m leaving to serve a church in Colorado Springs. So, this sermon isn’t quite a standard one due to this context.
Last Sunday was the first since the announcement and that sermon was intended to reassure us that all shall be well because Jesus is at the center of all things. Next Sunday, I plan to preach a sermon to offer inspiration and prepare us for the mission ahead. Then on August 10, my final Sunday here, I’ll offer words of gratitude and blessing. But that leaves this Sunday – a sermon in which I’m going to say some challenging things.
This challenge flows right out of last Sunday’s sermon in which I noted that Jesus is in all things. And so, if Jesus in all things, then it means that all situations, all decisions, all allegiances are either aligned with the love of God, or they are idolatrous distortions. In a world in which we’ve been trained to “have it your way,” this is a challenge.
And if you don’t like the challenge, you can blame the prophet Hosea, because I’m just following his lead. There’s no getting around it – this is a hard text. A really hard text. One scholar has said of this passage, “If this is factual, it’s horrific; if it’s an allegory, it’s still horrific.” God speaks to his chosen people of Israel through Hosea and tells them, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” It’s coarse, shaming, and abusive language – there’s simply no getting around that.
And my job as the preacher is not to defend God or Hosea, and I won’t. One of the challenges in this text is learning to wrestle with Scripture without feeling the need to redeem it. There’s a passage in Genesis in which Jacob wrestles with angel of God all night long, and through that struggle, finally receives a blessing at daybreak. That’s a metaphor for what we are to do with this text. As the Womanist scholar Wil Gafney puts it, we don’t let the Scripture go until it blesses.
And let us not forget that ours is a God of blessing. This is exactly the point that Jesus makes in the passage we heard from Luke – “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” God is the one who gives us our daily bread, forgives us our sins, saves us from the time of trial, and brings us into his kingdom. God is in the blessing business, but we’ve got to stick around long enough to receive it.
This is the difficulty of a text like Hosea – we want to skip over it and avoid the struggle. Given that today we’re welcoming children from our Music and Arts Camp to sing, it would have been understandable if I made the decision to ignore the appointed readings for today and chose something else. I could have tried to find a more genteel translation. And certainly, as the Rector of this parish, I could have changed the server schedule to avoid having my 12-year-old daughter be the one who did that reading. But we talked about it, and we press on because we expect the LORD God to give us a blessing in our wrestling.
So, the first challenge this morning is to not turn away when faith would have us look at things that we’d rather ignore. For example, have you ever calculated how much of your income you give to charity as a percentage? No, I don’t want to look at that! Or how about when you see someone sleeping on a sidewalk, do we, like the characters in Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan, cross to the other side of the road to avoid them? How about when it comes to questions around reproduction and end-of-life – do we always to default to “Well, that’s between a person and their doctor,” and ask God to wait in the waiting room? Or, perhaps the hardest thing that Jesus ever teaches, “Forgive us as we forgive those who wrong us.” We hang onto our resentments as if they were our most valuable possessions; we love to keep a tally of rights and wrongs. And it’s funny how, somehow, we always come out on top.
Look, I said this was going to be a challenging sermon. And I only offer these challenges because I deeply love you all and I know that there is a blessing that comes only through wrestling with such challenging questions. Because if Jesus is in all things, then his love can make all things well. But if we put up firewalls between parts of our lives and God, well, there will be consequences.
And that’s essentially Hosea’s point – it’s not so much that God punishes us for our idolatry or rejection of God’s ways, it’s just that God gives us enough freedom to make that choice to go astray. Love, fundamentally, is non-coercive. God isn’t going to force the gift of salvation on any of us. Yes, our love, dignity, and vocation to follow Jesus are given as gifts – but they are gifts that we choose to accept or reject. It’s sort of like unplugging something from the wall – don’t be surprised or upset if you unplug the refrigerator and it no longer stays cold, and don’t blame the electric company. God’s blessings flow abundantly and without restriction. And yes, if we close the valve, God can and will find other ways to shower us with grace. But why avoid the well when we’re thirsty?
What Hosea is saying is that these are the consequences we can expect when we turn away from God and put our trust and priorities in other places. Hosea is a prophet of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BC. He says, you want to be unfaithful to God, well, here’s the product of such unfaithfulness – the fruits of those idolatrous relationships will be named Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, and Lo-ammi. Jezreel was a beautiful valley, but it became a place of a bloody massacre. The name is a reminder of our human propensity to take something good and pure and destroy it. This name would be like someone naming their child Hiroshima or Auschwitz.
The name Lo-ruhamah means “no mercy.” The people forgot that God had saved from slavery in Egypt, had brought them into the promised land, and had defended them from their enemies. When they trusted God and lived in accordance with God’s will by defending the defenseless, caring for the widows and orphans, and treating the land with respect, they were blessed with the gifts of living a beloved community. But when the people turned inward and no longer walked the way of love, they paid the price for being a people who lived mercilessly, selfishly, and greedily. Again, God isn’t punishing them, rather God is saying “Fine, you want to live in a society that exploits and ignores the poor, destroys the environment, and is ruled by violent leaders – have at it. But don’t expect to be spared when the tables are turned on you.”
And the name Lo-ammi means “not my people.” It’s a reminder that “Christian” isn’t a label, it’s not a title, and it isn’t a status. Christian, or disciple, or follower of Jesus, or whatever name we want to give ourselves, is a description of how we live, not what we think or what religious rituals we’ve been a part of. As John the Baptizer reminds us each Advent, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.’”
These names confront us with the challenge of a faith that is not intellectual, but rather incarnational. The Incarnation is the word we use in the Church to describe that God took on flesh and lived a human life in Jesus. The Incarnation means that the tangible matters, that faith is to be embodied, that Jesus really is in all things. Faith in the living God who we know in Jesus Christ is not and cannot be about disembodied ideas or nice sounding platitudes. No, faith involves the challenge of following someone who was rejected by his own people and crucified by the government.
The question that Hosea would have us to wrestle with is where our faithfulness lies. In whom do we put our trust? When we are uncertain about what to do, where do we turn to for guidance? What priorities and allegiances do we live for?
I heard a sermon recently in which the preacher said, “Show me your apps, I will tell you what your value.” It’s a good line. And true. Our screentime on our phone says a lot about us. Or how about our internet browsing history. Or YouTube’s recommended videos. Or the credit card statement. Now, I’m not suggesting that any of these things are bad, just that they are mirrors that help us to see more clearly where we are aligned with God and where we have gone astray. The challenge is to look at ourselves with the same critical eye that we judge others with – with a result both of repenting in own lives and seeing others with more compassion.
Another challenge when it comes to our trust and allegiance, especially if Jesus is Lord of all, is politics. I get the feedback, and I hear the gossip – I know some people find it very challenging to hear about politics in church. And I could spend the next 10 minutes giving a defense for why Christianity is inherently political and why avoiding politics in our theology, preaching, and witness is akin to telling God “Mind your own business,” but I’m not going to do that because the fact that we have a cross at the front of our church speaks more clearly than I ever could.
Instead, I simply want to point out that just when we say that Jesus is Lord of all, there are no exclusions. And I really hope and pray that we don’t want to be a parish in which Jesus is uninvited to challenge and rebuke us when it comes to our sinful and sorry political life right now. This doesn’t mean that we all have to agree about which political solution is the best, it doesn’t mean we all have to vote for the same candidates, or belong to the political party. But it does mean that we wrestle together, trusting that God is in our disagreements, our struggles to find consensus, and our competing values.
It also means that when our political leaders are failing to respect the dignity of every human being, it is our sacred duty to pray that God would lift up the lowly and bring down the mighty, as Jesus’ own mother prayed. It is ours to stand with those who are trampled upon by injustice and work for a more just society. Notice, Hosea doesn’t condemn individuals, but the entire nation. Following Jesus does not afford us the ability to stick our heads in the sand and say, “not my problem.” As Jesus tells us, just as we do it to the least of these, we do it to him. And that’s the very definition of politics. Politics is simply how we live in community with one another. As many have noted, the poor should be the Church’s reference. And I wonder what would be said about us. I’m challenged by that, and I hope you are as well.
Now, in all of these challenges, we are not left alone. We have been given the very Spirit of Jesus to guide and empower us. And we face these challenges not as a way of earning our salvation or proving our worth. No, Grace always comes first. Instead, we wrestle with our faith as a way of receiving the abundant blessings of God. Faith is a gift that is received in its usage. What a gift it is to belong to a God who blesses us through the struggle.
As Hosea notes, “Yet the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea… in the place where it was said ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said, ‘Children of the living God.’” Though we distance ourselves from God by chasing after idols, God relentlessly pursues us. We may reject God, but God never rejects us. And this gracious love is what enables us to meet the challenges of faith not with fear or as a burden, but rather as an opportunity to align ourselves with the love that is making all things well.
