Grace and peace to you from our loving and compassionate God, and from our Savior Jesus, who is our Christ. Amen.
So, it’s been a few hundred years after last week’s reading with Elijah. After Elijah ran for his life from Mount Carmel, where the True God of Israel had proven to be the only God that Israel could trust. Now, just a few hundred years later, the people already had returned to worshipping the gods of Ba’al. Their memories are short. Hosea’s words are impassioned metaphors of God as parent, as husband, and even as lion, and describing Israel as child, wayward spouse, and dove. Through these, we hear Hosea pleading for Israel – who Hosea also calls Ephraim, the largest of the northern tribes – to return to the Lord, to be faithful only to God before it’s too late.
* * *
One part of Hosea that opens my heart is that Hosea describes God as a PARENT. Compared with so many times the Bible calls God “Father,” Hosea describes God teaching the child Israel to walk, feeding Israel, and lifting the child up to God’s cheek. Tender. Relatable. Of course, that kind of care can be given by either parent, but, to me, it leans feminine. When the Bible says each of you bears the image of God, it’s helpful when our readings show images of God that relate to all people.
* * *
But I digress.
I don’t know about you, but when I picture God, I generally don’t picture God at the breaking point. But in our verses today, that’s exactly what I see. A parent grieving over the wrongs a child has done: broken-hearted, disappointed, despairing, betrayed. God sent judges, kings and prophets to Israel. God dwelled with them in the desert, walked them through the sea, provided food for them every day in the wilderness. Still, they turned away.
Perhaps you know a wayward child. A friend’s child. Your child. Your sibling. Perhaps you were that child. There were a few in my family: Even I was not immune from my time of headstrong anger. I’ve sat with friends whose child had become someone they didn’t recognize. Turning their back on every show of love and compassion by their parents. Spitting mercy back into their faces. Kicked out of school, fired from jobs, in trouble with the law. Until that moment when the parent is faced with a choice. Keep taking it on the chin, accused of enabling their bad behavior by half of the family, or keep responding with unconditional love, which the other half of the family believes will eventually change them. It’s a tough place to be – to have to make that choice.
* * *
God knows where Israel’s rebelliousness is leading: if Israel continues to worship the gods of Ba’al and rely on its own might, directly defying the prophet’s pleading to turn back to the God who loves them, the Assyrians are going to overpower them. For a moment, God considers letting go:
“How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?” Can you see God visualizing every person, every city that ever turned away? We hear the names Admah and Zeboiim, two cities destroyed at the same time as Sodom and Gomorrah.
I picture God pained at the idea of even one lost child, much less whole villages. And now before God – the entire wayward people of Israel. It’s just too hard for God to consider not loving them. The one thing God CANNOT do is stop loving them.
Hosea continues:
“My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim,
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.”
God chooses compassion.
God chooses mercy.
God chooses love.
Even when it makes no sense. Even when the people have betrayed God, again and again. Even when God knows the Assyrians will eventually overrun Israel. God chooses love.
* * *
When I was a chaplain in Chicago, the toughest question families would throw at me is “Where is God in this?” Where is God when their 30-year-old son will never walk again after a shooting? Where is God when an infant is born too early and despite technology cannot survive? Where is God when Covid takes both of one’s parents?
And my answer: Right here.
Right here in this trauma bay. Right here in the NIC-U. Right here among you as you gather to pray before ending life-support. God is right here wherever there is suffering.
So, as we watch the headlines:
- God is with Ukrainians, and God is with Russians.
- God is with Israelis, and God is with Palestinians.
- God is in the corporate boardroom, and God is everywhere Creation suffers.
God chooses compassion.
God chooses mercy.
God chooses love.
It is uncanny how much this story reminds me of the Prodigal Son parable. Perhaps I never realized it before, because, honestly, Hosea usually is not on the top of my Bible reading list. But I could not miss the connection this time. Hosea’s God cannot give up on Israel, and the Prodigal Son’s father runs to meet this child who has disappointed him so deeply. This God who cannot give up Israel cannot give up on us. God, in Jesus Christ, chose love, again and again, all the way to the cross and to Resurrection Sunday.
* * *
What about us? How many here struggle with choosing compassion, choosing mercy, choosing love? Every time, or even most of the time? Even in the ordinary?
- Driver cuts you off on Clayton Road? Mercy?
- Customer is holding up the line at Schnucks because the total is more than he has. Compassion?
- Someone challenges you with a political view that differs from yours. Love?
I know it’s hard. Sometimes it’s easier to help people in Tibet, or Tan-zan-E’-a or at Lantern Hill than to practice being disciples in our daily lives. Easier to do the big stuff at times than the day-to-day demands of life together. And you’re doing fine. God explained it well: “I am God and no mortal.” We’re not God. Mercy, compassion and love require us to WORK at being followers of Jesus every day.
* * *
I finish with a story from the NY Times this week. It’s halfway around the world from the Middle East but hate showed up in San Francisco.
“When she woke up on the morning of Oct. 25 and read her text messages, Robyn Sue Fisher couldn’t stop crying and shaking.
She learned from an employee that overnight someone had smashed the front windows of her shop, Smitten Ice Cream, in the Mission District of San Francisco and spray painted the store with graffiti. One message read “FREE PALESTIEN” — apparently spelling Palestine wrong — and another read “OUT THE MISSION.”
Fisher, 44, is Jewish. The vandalism is being investigated as a hate crime.”
Robyn boarded up the shop. Wasn’t even sure she would reopen it. Then she decided what she wanted to do.
She told the reporter: “At first I felt fear and then I felt anger and then I felt a deep sorrow.”
“And then I felt empathy, and that’s how I got to love.”
Robyn hopes to have her shop open by Thanksgiving. And along with the scoops, she’s adding shirts. The slogan: “In the spirit of ice cream, I CHOOSE LOVE.”
Proceeds will benefit the Courage Museum, set to open in 2025. Its focus: “to encourage visitors to imagine a world without violence, hate and discrimination.”
It would have been easy for Robyn to close her business and tuck the vengeance in her heart. It would have made sense to reopen her business with bars on the windows and upgraded security cameras, answering the fear with fear.
It would have been easy for God to give Israel up, to respond to the people’s betrayal with indifference.
It is easy to act in haste and judgment when I feel disappointed or wronged. God’s call for mercy, compassion and love are harder for me.
And then an ice-cream shop owner preaches the gospel to me.
“At first I felt fear and then I felt anger and then I felt a deep sorrow. And then I felt empathy, and that’s how I got to love.”
Amen
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