Sunday morning worship: Majoring on the Minors wk 3/ Hosea and the loving heart of God

This morning we're in week 3 of our series on the Minor Prophets.
Our prophet today is Hosea, working in the mid 8th century BCE - a contemporary of Amos...
We also shared in the sacrament of Communion together.

READING: Hosea 1:1-11; 6:1-11 and Hosea 11:1-11; 14:1-9

SERMON
Let’s pray: may the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Just for a wee bit of fun, I want to play you all a piece of music –
and basically, you get a chance to ‘name that tune!’
       [music & fade...]

So, who can name that tune?
[the Flamingos with ‘I only have eyes for you’]

If ever a book in the Bible were to have a theme song,
I suspect that the theme tune for the Book of Hosea theme tune might just be this one.
While there are a number of strange things said – and done – in this book,
the overarching message is of God’s faithful love.
Just as the admiring lover in the song, so in Hosea, God only has eyes for his people.
Nothing can distract God from that love,
nothing can dissuade God from loving them;
no matter what the people do,
no matter how short their attention span,
or no matter how badly they behave,
God will still love them.
It doesn’t mean God won’t get angry, or hurt, as we hear from the text,
but God will never let anything get in the way of his love for his people.
And to show that, God sets the prophet Hosea a very particular task:
to not only proclaim the message of God’s love verbally,
but to proclaim it visually.
Hosea must live his life in a way that demonstrates God’s message.
His own life will be like a parable in action that shows the message of
that unfailing love of God.

Now, on occasion in the Bible, other prophets are asked to do particular
actions by way of proclaiming God’s message.
For three years, Isaiah spends his time walking about barefoot and naked...
to demonstrate that the Assyrians would strip away everything that
belonged to God’s people,
and that they’d be marched away from their land naked and in chains.
The prophet, Micah, also spent some time doing this – for the same reason.
...Possibly it’s helpful that the climate is mostly hot...
Meanwhile, Jeremiah wears a wooden yoke –
this is to symbolise the yoke of captivity that Judah will wear when Babylon has conquered it.
Ezekiel – well, he does a whole lot of really weird stuff:
he cuts his beard with a sword.
I mean, a razor’s tricky enough, but to use a sword is pretty edgy.
He shaves off his bead and divides it into thirds.
One third of his beard is set on fire;
he scatters another third around the city and stabs it with the sword – as you do;
and the final third he casts into the wind.
Or, another example from Ezekiel:
he draws a picture of Jerusalem under siege on a clay tablet.
He then gets an iron pan and puts it between him and the drawing,
and spends 390 days on his side just lying opposite the drawing.
When the 390 days have passed, he basically rolls over and spends
another 390 days just lying there –
not the most exciting of messages to watch, I suspect.

And what of Hosea?
Hosea shows God’s love in two ways:
as the faithful husband,
and as the loving father.
First, Hosea is called by God to get married.
On the surface, that doesn’t seem too difficult a task but the marriage is to demonstrate
the unfaithfulness of the people of God towards their God.
The woman that Hosea marries is ...
well, let’s just say she’s not like the lover in our song earlier,
she’s not the kind of person who’d only have eyes for her husband:
she likes to keep her options open,
to hang out with other guys.

Just as Gomer, Hosea’s wife, will chase after other men,
so, God is saying that the people of Israel chase after other gods:
the love of God is not felt to be enough – they want more,
even though their God is the One who is able to supply all their needs.
Maybe they don’t like to feel like they’re keeping all their spiritual eggs in just one basket?
For the person wanting good harvests, sure, pray to the God of Israel,
but hey, there are all these other fertility godsvto pray to – Baal and company:
don’t just place your bets on the one god, right?
'Actually,' says God, ‘wrong. You’re like Gomer, unfaithful.’
At some point, Gomer leaves Hosea.
She 'belongs' to another man.
To demonstrate God’s faithfulness, Hosea pays a price to bring her back and reconciles with her.
Here, we see God’s desire to reconcile with his people:
yes, they will turn away but God’s constant love will cause them to turn back.
So, in a nutshell, in the first part of the book:
God calls Hosea to marry Gomer,
and to keep on loving her,
to never give up on her,
and in so doing,
to show to God’s people that this is like God’s love.

Later in the book – especially seen in chapter 11,
is the other demonstration of what God’s love is like:
we see the father heart of God.
Hosea, as father to his children, knows them –
has been there with them since birth,
has taught them to walk,
nurtured them,
championed them,
held them in the dark reaches of the night when they’ve cried out in fright;
has guarded and guided them.
As Hosea has been a loving father to his children, so God is loving father to his people.
Having brought them out of slavery in Egypt,
God has adopted them as his own,
has looked after them
and given them a chance at a new life –
and not because of anything they’ve done:
God just chooses to love them.
It’s not a reward for good behaviour, it’s just pure, undeserved grace.
And throughout Israel’s history,
God, as any loving father, will go to the uttermost lengths to take care of them.

And what about us?
What can we take away from this prophet from the 8th century before Christ?
Hosea teaches us about the constancy of God.
Just as God only had eyes for his people in the 8th Century BC,
so God continues to only have eyes for his people in the 21st Century.
We may find ourselves distracted:
by gadgets,
by money,
by weather or work worries,
by all sorts of things that we think we need to make our lives better, more meaningful.
We may find ourselves chasing after gods of our own making to fulfil our needs,
or even to hedge our bets like the people of Israel.
But we don’t need to;
God’s love is all we will ever need:
our anchor and our safe harbour in any storm.
In a time of deep unrest in our nation,
in a time when even our very democracy looks to be in question,
when the whole world as we know it seems to be shaky
and everything we’ve thought of as reliable is sinking,
the message here in Hosea is to turn your eyes back to God –
who only has eyes for you,
who is the constant in the midst of the change that’s all around us;
who calls us to come back and to make our home with him.
It’s a message about One who is faithful,
One who has loved us since time began and who will love us for the whole of eternity,
and, who, in and through his Son,
invites us to sit at the banqueting table as honoured guests and friends,
and to share in the great feast of love:
a feast brought to us at a great price,
paid for in a stunningly sacrificial act of love on a cross
on a hill
long ago and far away...
not because of anything that we, ourselves have done,
but because we are God’s people,
and because he is our God.
Amen.