<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18928">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff><FONT size=4>
<P style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px" align=center><FONT
face="Microsoft Sans Serif"><STRONG><B><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Free
Resource: </SPAN></B></STRONG></FONT><FONT face="Microsoft Sans Serif"><FONT
face="Microsoft Sans Serif"><STRONG><FONT size=4>Preaching Hosea
11:1-11</FONT></STRONG></FONT></FONT></P>
<P align=justify><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">I encountered the writings of Hosea many years
ago in a college course on the Hebrew prophets. I was no stranger to the
scriptures even then as I'd grown up in church and had been absorbed and
intrigued enough by the life and promise there to announce to my mystified
family and friends that I was headed to college to major in religion on my way
to seminary and ordination. In the thriving Midwestern congregation of my
childhood during those glory days of the mainline, our pastors told us the
stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and recounted the great deeds of Moses.
Every week they returned to the teachings and parables of Jesus and plotted the
adventures of Paul and Barnabas on wall maps of the holy land until the figures,
the teachings, and the geography seemed our own. Yet somehow, Hosea's passionate
portrayal of the God who is utterly undone by his own love was not part of the
canon of my upbringing. Maybe the turning of the year simply never lured our
preachers into the depths of the Hebrew Scriptures to explore the twisting
alleyways of the Minor Prophets. Or perhaps the thought of exposing themselves
and their congregations to this "uncut" version of Hosea's God was akin to Moses
sizing up a possible encounter with Yahweh on Mt. Sinai: which one of us can
look on this heart of God and live? </SPAN></FONT></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of
Egypt I called my son. </SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">The more I called them, the more they went from
me; </SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">they kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering
incense to idols. </SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took
them up in my arms; </SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">but they did not know that I healed them.
</SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">I led them with cords of human kindness, with
bands of love.</SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">I was to them like those who lift infants to
their cheeks. </SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><EM><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">I bent down to them and fed
them.</SPAN></FONT></EM></P>
<P align=justify><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">Decades after my awakening in that college Bible
class, the raw tenderness of this passage still touches and troubles me. In the
church of my childhood-and perhaps, if we are honest, in the world we wish we
could inhabit even now-God's love was perfectly propositional and safely
circumscribed, enshrined in hero stories and encoded in gospel homilies,
predictably mapped onto foreign deserts in distant pasts. The prodigal was only
a bit-part in a parable, and his long-suffering, ever-loving father just a cameo
role in the homecoming we all knew would finally occur.that is, until Hosea's
God begins to speak his/her mind and his/her heart, shattering the careful
conceptualizations that so often have served to keep a powerful and ultimately
incomprehensible love at arm's length. Calling out to a disillusioned,
frightened people whose monarchy had seen four assassinations in fourteen years
and whose anxieties were being assuaged, if only for the moment, by cheap offers
of military protection and the magical promises of local deities, Hosea's God
cannot afford the luxury of divine disinterest, cannot wait for cooler heads to
prevail, cannot abide the idea that truth and justice will simply take their
course and these wrong-headed, stubborn people will someday learn their lesson.
Neither unyielding nor abstinent, Hosea's God cannot simply turn his/her back in
anger nor does he/she sigh softly with passive-aggressive disappointment.
Rather, Hosea's God is a God whose love persists and pursues, active and
restless, walking the floors at night, weighing justice and mercy, taking the
measure of betrayal by his/her people and feeling that bitterness-taking
humankind seriously, in other words-and yet absolutely steadfast, unwilling to
renounce the relationship, unable to abandon his/her own. </SPAN></FONT></P>
<P align=justify><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">That quietly transcendent, mildly disinterested
God of my childhood would not have had much purchase in Hosea's chaotic
neighborhood; nor does that God have traction in our own troubled times. Tempted
to criticize tiny Ephraim and Judah for seeking security and stability in
political strategies or sectarian rituals, we might recall our own anxious
responses to our country's recent chaos during the economic downturn. Eager for
a political "fix," we were proud to vote for a candidate who invoked hope and
promised change, and just as quick to join the gallery of cynics when the change
entailed cost and compromise. Impatient with faith communities that seemed short
on practicality and currency, we borrowed the local gods of the marketplace,
joining the words "prosperity" and "gospel" in idolatrous and blasphemous union.
Ba'al worship is alive and well in the seemingly innocuous, unexamined
syncretism of everyday "Christian" communities anxiously trying to offer what a
frightened and changeable public desires: a little familiarity, a little
security, some predictability, and maybe an answer or two in a complicated,
confusing world. Now, as then, God's truth and God's justice cannot be simply
handed on as logical propositions, voted yea or nay by denominational gatherings
or decreed from some ecclesiastical perch above the fray. The demoralization and
distrust of our own time calls for contemporary preachers to give witness to
Hosea's God, whose desire for righteousness is refined by the intensity of
his/her yearning for the creation he/she claims as his/her own offspring, a God
who pursues us in love. The willingness of this God to transgress the boundaries
of his/her own logic on behalf of a creation that is beloved beyond all reason
is both good news and stiff challenge for the contemporary church. The good
news: we are believed in and held and sustained by love, whether we recognize
our blessedness and act in accordance with that awareness or not. The challenge:
realizing that God's heart has twisted with yearning for us. We cannot help but
emulate our God's love by honoring the world that God so loves, believing in the
belovedness of every creature, and pursuing the common good of all God's
children regardless of our fear of difference, regardless of our own narrow
measure of another's worth, regardless of our preoccupation with institutional
survival, regardless, at last, of our fear of our own utter dependence on the
heart and mind of God.<BR></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P align=justify><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">Cynthia G. Lindner</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P align=justify><FONT size=4 face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: white">The Divinity School, The University of Chicago,
Chicago, IL </SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px" align=center> </P>
<DIV><FONT size=3 face="Microsoft Sans Serif"><B><A
href="http://www.goodpreacher.com/index.php">Goodpreacher.com</A>
</B></FONT></DIV>
<DIV></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>