Love Wins! (Pentecost 24; Hosea 11:1-11; November 15, 2015)

Love Wins!

Pentecost 24

Hosea 11:1-11

November 15, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

All through history people have invented ritual acts, told stories, observed rhythms of daily, weekly, and annual time, and built special structures to gain a sense of safety and significance. We Christians share this in common with all of humanity.

But each religious tradition bears its own uniqueness. In the Jewish heritage that is part of our tradition, we have something that, while I won't dare to call unique, I will say is extraordinarily rare and precious: the tradition of the literary prophet. Now, many cultures have prophets or soothsayers of one kind or another, people whose job it is to interpret the present so that people can make smart or even wise decisions.

The ancient Romans believed that the behavior of birds in flight was intimately related to the way the universe would unfold in the immediate future. They called the ability to interpret this behavior “augury.” Nancy Reagan famously regularly consulted an astrologer for the same reason: to understand the future that is contained in the present. Tarot cards, I Ching coins, the rings of caterpillars, and a host of other objects and techniques were and are used to make decisions. The ancient Hebrews had something called urim and thummim. Nobody knows exactly what they were or how they worked, but urim and thummim would be cast to understand the will of God. Call them “holy dice.”

The ancient Hebrews also had prophets, men and women who had the gift of being able to discern the working of God in the present so that people would know how they might gain success by aligning themselves with God's will. Prophets did not see the future so much as they saw deeply into the present. And they offered advice based on that insight. Kings had prophets on retainer so that they knew when to go to war, when to expect a famine, and other things that had an impact on policy making. Others could--for a fee--consult a prophet for smaller concerns: whether to arrange a marriage with this family, whether to enter into a trade with a foreign merchant, and so on. Prophets and soothsayers (which is just Anglo-Saxon for truth-tellers) are a part of many religious traditions. In having prophets the ancient Hebrews were hardly unique.

But something remarkable happened to prophets in ancient Israel: they became moral critics. Yahweh, the God of Israel, wasn't just a divine figure with control over the physical universe. Yahweh was the covenant God of Israel who had liberated Israel from slavery in Egypt in order to form a covenant with them in which Yahweh would be their God, they would be Yahweh's people and would enjoy a life that was peaceful, just and humane. Yahweh was not an amoral god like the gods of the Romans and Greeks. Yes, Yahweh seemed to have a rather fragile ego, but Yahweh was also passionately committed to justice.

Aligning oneself with God's will was more than a matter of knowing whether the crops would fail or when it might be a good time to attack a neighboring kingdom. It was a matter of doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God, to paraphrase Micah. Prophets attacked covenant failure, especially by the powerful, as when Elijah exposed Ahab's corrupt real estate dealings.

In the middle of the eighth century BCE, the prophetic tradition took another turn: it became a written tradition. Prophets, or their disciples, wrote prophecies down, almost all of them in verse form. Hosea was the second literary prophet. He looked at Israel's present and spoke into it on Yahweh's behalf. And what he had to say wasn't pretty.

Hosea attacked the religious practices of Israel, the northern kingdom. Using the image of a father-son relationship, Yahweh reminded Israel of its past, and how Yahweh had loved Israel from the very beginning, when Yahweh called Israel out of Egypt, out of slavery, out of the regime of the Egyptian gods and their pharaoh. Yahweh cared tenderly for Israel, held Israel in his arms, cradled Israel against his cheek, fed him, raised him with love. And Yahweh's reward? The more that Yahweh called to Israel, the more Israel followed the Baals and worshiped idols.

Now, this isn't a small thing. It's not like when we raise someone from infancy in Sunday School and worship. We teach them our hymns. We tell them about the Wesley boys and circuit riders and bishops and conferences and the reserve clause and all that makes us who we are as Methodists. And then they go and marry a Lutheran. As much as we grieve losing them, we have to admit that there just isn't that much difference between Methodists and Lutherans, or Methodists and Catholics, or Methodists and Congregationalists, or Methodists and any of the other Christian denominations represented in Decorah.

But to go from Yahweh to the Baals was to go from the covenant God with a passionate commitment to justice to gods of fertility whose only concerns were production and plunder and profit. This wasn't a matter of changing denominations, but of exchanging world systems, religion, politics, economics, everything. This exchange had consequences. It is simply impossible to worship gods of production and plunder and profit and have a society based on the covenant; it is simply impossible to worship gods of production and plunder and profit and enjoy a life that is humane and just and peaceful. Therefore Hosea pronounces Yahweh's judgment on Israel: It will return to Egypt; it will be ruled by Assyria. Their cities will be destroyed by the violence they unleashed by forsaking the covenant. Even when they cry out to Yahweh there will be no answer. Israel will be destroyed. As it deserves to be. Yahweh has spoken.

But destruction is not Yahweh's last word. Death is not Yahweh's last word. Doom is not Yahweh's last word. For more even than other prophets, Hosea sees into Yahweh's heart. Yes, Hosea sees the demand for justice, sees the demand for integrity in Israel. But Hosea also sees that just because God's passion has been fanned into a consuming fire, God's love remains just as strong as ever. After the destruction, after the cities have become ruins, after Assyria has eaten up the land, God will still call to Israel. And this time Israel will answer. After judgment and destruction and exile, there will be a home-coming and a reconciliation. In the end love wins. Love wins. Always.

In the last few days we have been horrified as we have been horrified so many times in the last fourteen years by death and destruction visiting suffering on the innocent. This time over a hundred people were killed in several attacks carried out simultaneously. This time the targets were not symbols of economic and military might, like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but cultural sites of music, sport, and food--that most Parisian of loves. The President of France describes these as acts of war, and they certainly are. ISIS is claiming responsibility. Already the repercussions of these attacks and the new strategy that they embody are moving through the military and diplomatic establishments like a tsunami.

Like ancient Israel we imagine that the crisis we face is a political and a military one, a matter of finding a realpolitik solution to a newly emergent Assyrian Empire or an insurgent ISIS. But what if we are misreading our present? What if this political, military, economic, social and cultural knot is, without ceasing to be any of that, also Yahweh's judgment? What if the Assyrian threat against the Kingdom of Israel is also the outworking of God's passion for justice? What if the dreadful series of attacks we have suffered and witnessed is also an unfolding of God's judgment.

Of course we have to object that God's judgment is exceedingly sloppy. It is executed with a battle-ax rather than a scalpel. It lands with dreadful regularity on the innocent. We have every reason to complain about the unfairness and even the injustice of the way that God's judgment works out in our history. Still, the terrible events in New York, and Washington, and Pennsylvania, and, now, Paris, have a moral as well as political history. And God is not absent from that history and its outworking. A century and more of the Western nation's exploiting resources, manipulating events, and squashing the dreams of ordinary people in the Muslim world have set into motion this train of events that we are witnessing and suffering.

I suspect Hosea would have said something like this. But he would not have stopped there. Yes, our world like his stands under the judgment of God. Yes, as this judgment works out there will be real destruction and real suffering and misery.

But it does not end there, because the sentence of God's judgment is not God's last word. God's last word is reconciliation and return. In the end love wins. Always. God is still calling. God is still calling Parisians. God is still calling us. God is even still calling the members of ISIS. And one day, when we're ready, when it's time, we will listen. And we will come home. Because in the end love wins. Love wins. Always.

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