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Semper Fi

Hosea 1:2-10

July 25, 2010

God feels devastated.

Have you heard about the personals website designed to facilitate extramarital affairs? One who logs on has immediate access to thousands of men and women willing to kick their vows to the curb for a no-strings-attached sexual tryst. . . So far the site has been a through the roof success. In June of 2009—just one month—679,000 men and women used the site to have an affair, and since 2008, site membership has doubled to 4 million people… According to the personal profiles of those who use the site, 92% of the males and 60% of the females are, in fact, married. The CEO of the site, Noel Biderman, shrugs off any criticism, saying, “We’re just a platform. No website or 30-second ad is going to convince anyone to cheat. People cheat because their lives aren’t working for them.” He went on to insist “humans aren’t meant to be monogamous.” But when asked how he would respond if his own wife were to use thie site? “I would be devastated” [Brian Lowery, PreachingToday.com; source: Jeremy Caplan, “Adultery 2.0,” time magazine (7-20-09), p. 59].

God feels devastated at our slipshod, idolatrous, morally repugnant behavior, individually and collectively. “Aint no big thing.” Is NOT how God responds or feels. So it was in Hosea’s day, so it is in ours.

And so what we look at today is WHAT does God do with the devastation he feels? And is there any hope for us.

The situation that Hosea talks about here is Israel in the 8^th century before Christ. Hosea is a contemporary of Amos. And unfortunately even though Israel felt pretty strong economically, the situation was that their moral, ethical and spiritual lives were crumbling to pieces. There was just a lot of weird bad stuff going on. Last week I talked about how in the covenant that God had with the people three things were very important and all linked together: closeness to God, social justice, and personal responsibility. Whereas Amos emphasized closeness to God and social justice, Hosea emphasizes personal responsibility and closeness to God. Whereas we have glorified the breaking of all kinds of covenants in our society and have internet cheating sites, Hosea’s people had worship of Baal the fertility God and cultic prostitution which gave people an excuse to commit adultery. So they liked following Baals rules for that kind of thing but they still tried to keep worship of God alive just in case he might bless them too. And of course God says there are consequences to that. Through Hosea God basically says – I feel devastated like a jilted lover, there are temporal consequences you’re going to have to deal with and yet what transcends both the warm painful hurt and anger God feels is the gracious, merciful, unfailingly loving character of this God. God hurts. God is wounded, yet he is the always faithful one – semper fidelis who always offers restoring grace. God is NOT the dispassionate, robotic dispenser of faithfulness and grace. He is NOT like a computer that always works, but more like, says Hosea, a dad who just always loves even as he disciplines, like a lover who never give up, like a mother who never stops caring, always waiting to give a hug.

So that’s what God does with his hurt and anger at our moral harlotry; he parlays it into temporal discipline and restoring grace. In contrast to our sometimes despicable unfaithfulness, he is the always faithful one. The question becomes, what do we do with that? How can we respond? And what Hosea does in this first chapter, which is an outline for the rest of the book, he uses his own family as an illustration of how God would restore morally and spiritually crumbling Israel. Hosea’s three children have names that change, and this give us insight into how we can live not in our own unfaithfulness and failure, but in and by God’s never failing faithfulness. How do we do that?

The first thing is to claim the place. Learn to claim wherever you are at any given moment as holy ground, as grace-soil, a place where the restoring faithfulness of God is not just a concept but a warm reality. God meets us in specific places at specific times. Learn to claim the place. Hosea and Gomer’s first child is named Jezreel. Jezreel was the name of an actual place. It was really kind of an ugly place. If you remember Naboth’s garden it was the place where that was stolen from him. It later became the place where Jezebel was assassinated. It was just a sad ugly place for Israel, what a thing to name your child, right? It would be like somebody naming their child today Abu Graib or something like that. And yet before this chapter is out it says the people will arise from Jezreel. God is a God who meets us in specific times and specific places and God is a God who can even make ground of former disobedience and devastation become for us a place where he restores. God is a God who can take the soil in a hill of execution and make that soil the grace-soil out of which comes forgiveness and resurrection. Learn to claim the place, wherever you are at the beginning of every day, as grace soil.

How do we live in and by the faithfulness of God? Every day, first claim the place. Second feel the embrace. Their second child is called Lo-Ruhamah, which literally means not motherly loved, not embraced, not given compassion. In the Hebrew it really is a more forceful again almost ugly term than even those translations, it really borders on the words neglected or abused. It’s just a really, really painful, ugly, harsh name. Can you imagine naming your child ‘abused.’ And yet before Hosea’s prose gets really going in this book, she, as an illustration of Israel and now of us, is called Rumah, embraced, motherly loved, warmly loved, recipient of compassion. Feel the embrace of God. Remember God is not a giant computer, God is not a programmable robot, God is not a pez dispenser, God is not a compassion machine. God is a warm loving, living being who hugs. Feel the embrace, your forgiveness that drips from the cross is not merely a legal transaction. It’s the restoration of a relationship. It is a real, living embrace! I never cease to be amazed at the insights I receive from persons going through recovery. I was sitting with someone this week who had hit rock bottom. He had an old tattered brochure with first names and phone #’s of group members he was allowed to call any time any where. And he called this guy and he answered his phone and it was a real person and I could hear his voice and my friend said to him, thanks man, you’re real, you’re the first one I thought of. He was thanking him for his faithfulness, he was real. Not just a concept, not just a name on a cold piece of paper. Even over the phone he felt the embrace of his friend. Every day, feel the embrace of a living, loving, forgiving, warm, real, faithful God. Feel the embrace.

Claim the place, feel the embrace. And finally utilize the grace. The third child was named NOT my people. NOT my people. When I was a child I was not particularly suave or sophisticated, physically or mentally. I was known to have my moments of clumsiness. And some kids in our neighborhood took to calling me Dudley do-wrong or some derivative of that. Kind of a cruel name to call any child, wouldn’t you say? And yet I knew somewhere deep inside that that wasn’t me. My mother never called me that, my Father never called me that, they called me by a different name. Lo ammi, not my people, you’re not with me, you’re not my kind of people. It’s like saying you are a nobody, you’re nothing, you are not worth a you know what. Cruel thing to name a child – and yet, before the chapter is out God is saying to this child, and to his people collectively, you are sons, daughters, children of the living God. The whole of the covenant between God and his people, and this is picked up in the new Testament as well in 1 Peter, is God saying I am your God you are my people, children of the living God, a royal priesthood, a holy people, and I will dwell in your midst. How do we live in and by the faithfulness of God? Utilize the grace of who you are.

Remember the woman caught in adultery that Jesus dealt with in John 8. They wanted to stone her, Jesus said, let the one who is without sin throw the first stone. They all slunk away. And Jesus said neither do I condemn you. It was forgiveness, it was an embrace. But then he said, go and sin no more. It was an invitation not from a regulator, not from an enforcer, not from a judge, but from a friend – to do the right thing. God’s faithfulness is not merely the power to forgive; it is the power to get up and do the right thing. Utilize the grace. At Calvary from that holy grace soil, Jesus didn’t merely die and stay in a tomb forever so we could be forgiven and that is all, God’s graceful faithfulness also raised him and us with him into a new life. In baptism we don’t merely go down in the water and stay there washing up for the rest of our lives, we are raised into a new life and the closeness with God and the power to take personal responsibility for our moral actions is given as a gift.

Utilize the grace. Here is the challenge though in utilizing the grace. The relationship that God restores us to and woos us back into is not a relationship where we are really still in control and God is a co-dependent and we manipulate God to suit our fancy or meet our felt needs at any given moment. That is not utilizing grace. God is not in any way co-dependent to our agenda. God is a loving spirit who constantly woos us back onto his agenda where we become truly free to do as we ought as the children, servants and friends of God. Utilize the grace to do what is right.

There once was an indentured servant who had messed up and the consequence was he ended up having to serve a particular family as a virtual slave for a given period of time in order to pay his debt. The family took him in and treated him, not as chattel, but with dignity as he did his work. At first he just went through the motions but the more they treated him with dignity and respect the more he found himself actually liking and putting in effort into all his tasks. After many years his time of indentured service came to a close, and the husband of the family said, you’re free to go. You mean I’m free to leave and go wherever I want? Yes you are. Am I free to go and do whatever I want? Yes you are. Then he said am I free to stay here and serve you and be adopted into your family. And the father said, yes you are and they all proceeded to give him a group hug.

How do you and I live in and by (not our own faithfulness) but God’s faithfulness? Learn to claim the place, feel the embrace, and utilize the grace everyday wherever you are. You know it may seem like we live in a time and place where if we were to grade our society on closeness to God and personal moral responsibility we might not get a very high grade. We may not worship Baal but crossing every conceivable personal moral boundary seems to be the norm and cry of our culture, and internet sites for conducting illicit and extramarital affairs is just the tip of the iceberg. And yet I keep getting hints that perhaps could it be, that the semper fi, heart melting, gracious faithfulness of God is still at work in our midst?

One of my favorite pictures to paint at weddings and in premarital counseling is to tell of the image I will always have in my spirit of an elder colleague who was dealing with his wife’s diagnosis of alzheimers disease. He was and is one of the most competent wisest clergy-man I’ve ever known, been and done more than I’ll ever hope to do. At yet at this point in his ministry the love of his marital vows required him to give most of his waking attention to the needs of his wife. On this particular afternoon, he and I had shared in a graveside service over on Kent Island. His wife had accompanied him, and I remember when it was all over as the sun was setting on the far horizon, the gentle care with which he was leading her across the green but rolling and uneven ground back to the car. All of his attention was given in that moment to loving her well. How, I wonder can he love her so well? I don’t know what was going through their minds in that particular moment, but I do know that for both of them, by habit of life, bent of spirit, they were claiming that place as holy ground. They were feeling the embrace of forgiving acceptance. And they were utilizing the grace to put one foot in front of the other and do what they needed to do.

How did they do it? They were walking in the faithfulness of Hosea’s God.

Friends, in all our life with God and people, will you endeavor to do the same?

David B. Humphrey

Asbury United Methodist Church

Smyrna, Delaware

July 25, 2010