Providence PC 08-01-10 Steve Pace

Sermon: “Wideness of God’s Love and Mercy” 11:1-11 Ever wonder what it’s like to be God? Looking, so to speak, at us? Do you suppose the world to God looks like one of those Sudoku puzzles? There’s us as numbers filled in certain squares on the grid in a pattern, only God can truly appreciate. And God wants the world to look perfect and complete but we keep messing up the order, getting out of place. Or maybe God’s vision is more like the old PacMan (or PacWoman) video game. God is the cursor trying to catch us long enough to change us, and sometimes he does with the help of the Holy Spirit (the blue button) but then we change back again and go racing off threatening to take away his progress points or killing that round or ourselves entirely. Well, the prophets of the Hebrew had their own visions of what God is like and how God envisioned his plan working. Some of those visions were pretty strange even by my standards, like Ezekiel and the dry bones. Hosea is one prophet we don’t spend much time with. That is unfortunate. I read this week that one of my favorite OT scholars, Walter Brueggemann, thinks Hosea has been greatly overlooked and neglected for his insights into the Holy One. Hosea wrote his short book of prophecy around 750 BC from the Northern Kingdom, when there were two Israel’s so to speak, North and South, or Israel and Judea. The Northern King of his time was Jeroboam II and the major enemy and threat was to the east. We suspect that Hosea was a farmer and loved the simple life, because his writing is replete with farm and family references. He had a wife, and three children, unfortunately named to reflect his theological/political conflictedness. He says his wife is a prostitute, or whore if you choose the NRSV, probably a temple or cult prostitute working for the priests of , the chief Canaanite god. God told Hosea to marry this woman, says the Scripture in chapter 1, and how to name his children, Jezreel, which symbolizes punishment for violence by Israel’s royal house, Lo Ruhamah, a girl that mean ‘no mercy’, and Lo Ammi, a boy whose name means “not my people.” You can read all of that in any good study Bible. Hosea’s chief complaint and central idea as spokesperson for the Holy One was that Israel, the people and the nation, a chosen one, had broken its covenant with God. They, including their leaders, had responded to God’s faithfulness with faithless-ness. And God was going to destroy the nation. This, in fact, did happen by means of the Assyrians in 721 BC. No more Israel, until 1948, but that’s a totally different group you see. But in today’s reading, in Chapter 11, God is seen as a father, one of many images, a parent who loves his child, Israel, who had been called and saved from bondage in Egypt in Moses’ time. Promises had been made and broken over and over by the child, or children of God. Here the father loves his son, who acts out, over and over, but is still loved. There is a maternal image too. God says, “I was to them like those [mothers] who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.” God breastfed us, says Hosea. But the “sword rages in their cities, it consumes their oracle-priests [false ones to Baal], and devours because of their schemes.” Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Or pretty current maybe. “My people are bent on turning away from me.” I listened to one of those old radio shows the other night. It was the comedian, Red Skelton, doing his character, “the widdle kid – Junior who repeatedly says- ‘if I doed it, I get a whupping, I doed it.’ Are we like to God? 1

Providence PC 08-01-10 Steve Pace

And yet, says the LORD in Hosea 11:8, “how can I give you up, ? How can I hand you over, O Israel?” [to the enemy, the devourer] “My compassion grows warm and tender.” Sounds like a good and patient parent. Like the father in Jesus’ parable in Luke, the faithful father and the prodigal son. “There is a wideness in God’s mercy,” wrote Frederick Faber in the hymn of the same name in 1854. It is hard to fathom God’s mercy towards us. It is hard to imagine God’s love for us. Yet, there it is over and over, as witnessed by the prophets of both testaments. John would put it, “God so loved the world, that he gave it his Son.” Here’s another verse or two in Faber’s hymn, which we will sing after taking the Lord’s Supper today. It is God: His love looks mighty, but is mightier than it seems; ’Tis our Father: and His fondness goes far out beyond our dreams. But we make His love too narrow by false limits of our own; And we magnify His strictness with a zeal He will not own. Was there ever kinder shepherd half so gentle, half so sweet? As the Savior who would have us come and gather at His feet?

Alleluia! Amen.

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