Community Church Sermons
August 5, 2007
Pentecost
10
Hosea 11:1-11
Rev. Martin C. Singley, III
Listen to
this Sermon!
God is mad at the world.
We have gone after other gods. We have taken up behaviors and lifestyles that are against God’s will. We have broken the commandments. We have thrown God out of our lives, our schools and our nation. We have made gods of ourselves, and the world we gods have created is filled with violence, injustice and despair.
God is mad at the world.
And God is going to get us. God is going to give us just what we deserve. God is like a lion on the prowl and we are the prey. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the lion growling.
God is mad at the world.
That’s the religion I grew up with. When I was a child it was easy to imagine that God the lion was crouching down behind the next bush, just waiting to suddenly pounce on me for that terrible thing my best friend Dennis Astrella and I had done – running out of Slattery’s 1941 house without paying for the cheeseburgers we had eaten – setting fire to the field by the high school and almost incinerating a nearby neighborhood while trying to launch a rocket – running through the girls locker room in hopes of seeing something interesting…
You know what I’m talking about. Even though neither my childhood church nor my parents taught me such things, I somehow picked it up on my own – almost by osmosis.
God is mad at the world.
And as I grew up, I joined the ranks of those who thought that the bad things that come into our lives must somehow be connected to God punishing us for some sin we must have committed. This is why many of us – when tragedy strikes, or illness comes, or things fall apart – ask the questions we do: “Why is God punishing me?”…”What did I do to deserve this?”…”How can a supposedly loving God cause such a bad thing as the bridge collapse in Minneapolis?”
And we preachers perpetuate this perception of God being mad at the world and inflicting punishment upon it. We sometimes try to explain it away. We defend God’s right to do it. We say that God must have some purpose for doing it that we can’t understand right now, but we will know the reason in the sweet by-and-by. And so we make excuses for God when cancer comes, or terrorists strike, or for when a loved one dies – God must have needed another star in the sky, we say among other things.
It all flows from the same basic idea and that idea is that God is mad at the world.
I recently heard that in England during World War II there were signs posted all around the cities that read, “All persons must register for the draft except women, children, idiots and clergymen.”
While I personally wish that preachers were placed higher on that list, I’ve come to understand that we clergymen probably deserve that placement just after “idiots.” And I say that not because we preachers have serious deficiencies of intellect, but rather because we have not done a very good job of helping people encounter the truth about God – and that is that God is NOT mad at the world – and God is not mad at you!
In fact, God is rather in LOVE with the world! That’s what John 3:16 says. And not only that, but God actually LIKES people! Don’t you remember how when God created humankind – men and women and children – God stepped back to take a look and said, “Wow! This is REALLY COOL!” That’s the Marty Singley translation of, “Behold, this is very good!” And you remember the story of King David, don’t you, and how he messed up his life, his nation, and one of his military commanders when he got tangled up with Bathsheba? As broken down as David’s life was, still God said that David was a man after God’s own heart. Oh, God could see through the sin to the MAN he had created. And God liked David!
God likes you, too!
Are there any parents here today? Any grandparents?
The only way to truly understand what God is like is to remember that the primary image the Bible gives us of God is of a parent in relationship with his or her children.
How do you feel about your kids? How do you feel about your grandchildren? What is your attitude toward them?
Reflecting on that question will get you closer to understanding God and God’s relationship with us human beings.
Are you lurking behind the bushes just waiting for your kids to fail so you can leap out and punish them? Of course not! If you were, we would say there is something wrong with YOU, not with your kids! Are you plotting to give your children terminal illnesses in return for their telling a lie, or thinking a bad thought, or for not going to church on Sunday? Are you planning to fly airplanes into your children’s houses because they have made immoral choices, or don’t comply with your religious beliefs, or because prayer has been taken out of public schools?
Of course not. Although people often attribute such things to God, we know that no human parent would ever do such things to their children unless they were sick of mind and soul.
If you want the closest glimpse you can get into what God is like, you have to ask yourself what kind of parent you are or – if you’re not a parent, what you think a parent ought to be like. And when you do that it becomes clear that the image of God on the prowl – like a lion after its prey – is just not a true or good way of describing God’s relationship with his daughters and sons.
As I think about this, it occurs to me that even in those times of my greatest anger over my own children’s misdeeds, I wasn’t so much angry at THEM as I was about the CONSEQUENCES of their mistakes. You see, I want my children to be happy people, and to be safe, and to have good and abundant lives, and to reach their fullest potential as people. And when they don’t live up to who they are and what they can be, I get mad. Not at them, really, but at their loss, at the unrealized potential, and at the pain they experience when their sins and mistakes catch up to them.
I would never want my kids to think that I’m a lion on the prowl, waiting to leap and devour them. I would never want my kids to grow up believing that I’m perpetually mad at them and out to get them.
So why do we put this sick image on God?
Well, sometimes religion does this to gain control over people. You know, if a preacher can convince you that God is mad at you and is going to send you to hell if you don’t straighten out and do exactly what the preacher or church tells you God wants you to do, that preacher or church can gain control over your life. One of the real dangers of religious institutions is both their willingness and skill at using fear and guilt to get people to do whatever they want – whether it is to get poor widows to send money, or children to perform sexual favors, or people to not address social injustices that the men who run the church benefit from.
But the only way fear and guilt can work is if people buy into the premise that God is mad at the world and – like a hungry lion – is strutting about looking for someone to devour.
What do you suppose might happen, though, if we built our faith on another premise? What if we started our faith with the idea that is found in the birth and life ands message of Jesus – that God actually LIKES people – LOVES people – and will do anything in his power to make his children happy and whole?
Such a faith can be seen in the story of the prophet Hosea.
Hosea – Joseph in English – was a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel during a very difficult period. A series of tragic events, and a string of bad kings had left Israel in dire shape. As folks sometimes do in times like these, the people tried to fend for themselves. It was a period of great selfishness, and that led to people seeking out religion that promised to prosper them, and that prosperity gospel led to permitting injustice take root in the land. It was every man, woman and child for themselves. And society began to crumble.
You’d think God would just blow up the place, wouldn’t you? I’m sure that’s what some religious people expected to happen. But that’s not what God did.
God called Hosea to bring a message to the people. It was a message that came in a rather bizarre and dramatic presentation. God told Hosea to get married. Now that in itself is not a strange thing but the fact that the woman’s name was Gomer seems a bit odd to me! G-O-L-L-L-Y, what was God thinking?! And stranger still is this fact: Gomer was a prostitute.
Now I don’t know if Hosea was just a little love-starved or REALLY faithful to God, but he went and took Gomer to be his wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and health to love and to cherish. They had three children together – two boys and a daughter – and God gave Hosea strange names for these children: the first boy was named Jezreel, which means “cast away”; the middle child – a daughter – was given the name Loruhamah, which means “not pitied”; and the youngest son was called Loammi, which means “not my people.” Kind of depressing names, don’t you think? You might think that the names suggest God was out to get these children. But God gave Hosea these names because they were symbolic of God’s children Israel who had become so disobedient to God that they were indeed “cast away”, “not pitied”, and “not my people” anymore.
And then, to make matters even worse than having children with depressing names, Hosea experienced the agony of his wife Gomer leaving him for another man…and another man…and many other men. Just like God’s people Israel had been unfaithful to God, so Gomer was unfaithful to Hosea. She finally ended up in a very bad relationship with a very bad man and a life that was hardly worth living.
And then a strange thing began to happen in Hosea’s preaching. Where previously he had sternly warned Israel of the dire consequences of ignoring God and God’s ways that lead to true life, now Hosea’s preaching turned to love and forgiveness and restoration. The voice of God rose up from within Hosea, and this is what God said:
“How can I give you up? How can I hand you over?…My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate you. For I am God and not man, the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath.”
And if you know the rest of the story of Hosea, you know that Hosea – acting out God’s unswerving love for God’s wayward people- goes into the city and buys back his wife from the man who now owns and abuses her, and he takes her home to rebuild their marriage.
So God goes to each of us when we are far away – not in anger but in love – not to punish but to show compassion – and God bids us in love to come home again.
And then – in the story - we again encounter the image of God as the lion.
Perhaps you think the lion’s roar is the last sound you hear before being eaten alive by the king of the jungle. It certainly can be that, for sure, and I would not recommend that you walk through the jungle alone at night! But there is another way to understand the lion image, and it is a far better way.
The lion’s roar is only a fearful roar if you are prey – and not a lion yourself.
But if you are one of the lion’s children – one of the lion’s cubs - that roar means something else altogether. Listen to God in Hosea:
“For I am God and not man – the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath. They will follow the Lord; he will roar like a lion. When he roars, his children will come trembling from the west…I will settle them in their homes, declares the Lord.”
There is a tremendous difference between the lion that roars and devours its prey and the lion that roars to gather its cubs to protect them.
And knowing the difference between the two is the beginning of the faith that Jesus came to give us.
God is mad at the world…God so LOVES the world that he gave his only begotten son.
Which kind of roar does YOUR God have?
And what difference will it make in how you live this week?