As you all know, I had a minor medical procedure on Friday, which is temporarily impacting my voice. I’m so grateful to for the help of our currently serving leadership so that I don’t have to talk for an hour straight this morning, but I still felt it was important to preach the sermon myself. Since most of my weekend has been taken up by the procedure and recovery, I’d originally planned to recycle a sermon on Hosea that I wrote four years ago. But apparently, as is so often the case, the Holy Spirit had other plans.
As I read through the passage this week, I was struck by the intensity of the divine emotions that it describes. The Hebrew is uncertain in several spots, which leads to an impressive variety of translations (and as always, I encourage you to read and compare them yourself), but the overarching story is always the same. God has loved Israel from its earliest days, healing them, feeding them, teaching them to walk, and caring for them, but Israel has taken all of this for granted. The more God calls to them, the more they pull away. Now, in exile, the Israelites are suffering from the consequences of their choices – but God simply cannot dispassionately stand by and watch it happen. God loves Israel far too much, and so even as the people are beset by war, defeated by foreign powers, and banished into foreign lands, God refuses to give up on them. God is heartbroken by Israel’s choices, but God chooses compassion instead of anger.
The heart of Hosea isn’t history or theology, but divine emotions. It tells us that God is not abstractly invested in humanity for strategic reasons, but that the Lord genuinely desires to be in relationship with us, in spite of our chronic faithlessness. The beginning of the book uses the metaphor of marriage (specifically, Hosea’s marriage to a sex worker) to convey this idea of infidelity in a way that’s shocking and unsettling to its readers.
But in chapter 11, the metaphor shifts. God suddenly starts describing Godself as a parent reflecting on their relationship with their child. What was a previously unsettling context suddenly becomes an intimately relatable one. Of course, those who have experienced parenthood themselves will immediately relate to God’s sense of frustration and heartbreak over Israel’s rejection (because what child hasn’t pushed their parents away at one point or another?), but this isn’t the part I want us to focus on. For our purposes, it’s more important to see ourselves in this passage as the disappointing child.
I can’t say for certain, but I would imagine that most of us have felt like “a disappointment” at one time or other. Maybe you made a series of poor choices in your teens; maybe you made a life decision your parents never understood; maybe you’ve just become convinced that there was or is something fundamentally “wrong” with you. Maybe life experience and perspective has helped you to outgrow this feeling, or maybe you’ve still never quite gotten over it. After all, some families use guilt as relational currency.
But God isn’t just any parent. God is a parent who is infinitely compassionate, infinitely patient, and infinitely loving. As Hosea indicates, our relationship with God will always be complex, but the way God feels about us is simple: we are infinitely beloved, exactly as we are. No matter what you might have done to let God down, it cannot change the way God feels about you even the tiniest bit.
Thankfully for my voice, this sermon is a short one because the message is simple. But even so, there’s still a question left hanging in the air that needs to be addressed. Scripture exists to help us to better understand God, BUT ALSO (and arguably more importantly) to teach us how WE should respond to God’s goodness and love. We know that God will always love us, no matter what we do; that is an enormous comfort and relief. But relationships aren’t supposed to be one-sided; they’re supposed to be conversations, not monologues. Here, in Hosea, we have one half of the conversations. When it comes to God’s relationship with us, God is all-in. What will our response be?
Some of you may recall that I have a penchant for reimagining popular music as conversations between humanity and God. Although Hosea is prophecy, not poetry, I heard this passage as a love song to humanity, God putting God’s heart on God’s sleeve and awaiting our response. I’m no composer, so I was lucky to be able to find what I think is the perfect response communicated in a song that already exists. It’s a gift to be able to express our emotions through the beautifully crafted words and music of someone else who has shared a similar experience. So even though I have no idea how this is going to work with my post-procedure voice, I’m going to let the words of the Imagine Dragons song, “I Bet My Life” serve as our response to God in Hosea.
This song was written by lead singer Dan Reynolds (along with his bandmates) about his relationship with his parents, and ever since I first heard it, I knew that it was a response to the kind of unwavering love that endures through rebellion, heartache, and disappointment - the kind of love that God has for us. So when God says, “Oh, how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go? My heart is torn within me, and my compassion overflows. No, I will not unleash my fierce anger, for I am God and not a mere mortal. I am the Holy One living among you, and I will not come to destroy,” we can respond by offering the only thing that we have of worth: our complete trust and our whole lives. Hear this song as a prayer, and feel free to join me in the chorus if you feel moved to pray along with me. The words should be in the digital bulletin:
I know I took the path that you would never want for meI know I let you down, didn't I?So many sleepless nights where you were waiting up on meWell, I'm just a slave unto the nightNow remember when I told you that's the last you'll see of meRemember when I broke you down to tearsI know I took the path that you would never want for meI gave you hell through all the yearsSo I, I bet my life, I bet my lifeI bet my life for youI, I bet my life, I bet my lifeI bet my life for youI've been around the world and never in my wildest dreamsWould I come running home to youI've told a million lies but now I tell a single truthThere's you in everything I doNow remember when I told you that's the last you'll see of meRemember when I broke you down to tearsI know I took the path that you would never want for meI gave you hell through all the yearsSo I, I bet my life, I bet my lifeI bet my life for youI, I bet my life, I bet my lifeI bet my life for youDon't tell me that I'm wrongI've walked that road beforeAnd left you on your ownAnd please believe them when they sayThat it's left for yesterdayAnd the records that I've playedPlease forgive me for all I've doneSo I, I bet my life, I bet my lifeI bet my life for youI, I bet my life, I bet my lifeI bet my life for you
May we ALWAYS bet our lives on the holy one willing to pursue and love us through it all. Amen.
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(Want to read more about God pursuing us no matter what? Check out this sermon from 2017, based on the children's book The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.)
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