Hilton Head Island, SC – June 10, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Hosea 1:1-7; Hosea 3:1-5
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord.” Hosea 1:2 (RSV)
HOSEA 1 – THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF BIBLICAL LITERALISM
The prophecy of Hosea is the first of twelve biblical books which are collectively known as the Minor Prophets. The word “minor” in this context does not mean they are less important than the Major Prophets, but rather that each of these books is shorter in length than Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel. They are the five books of the Major Prophets.
After the death of King Solomon, around 900 BCE, the previously united kingdom of the Israelites split --- Judah in the south, and Israel in the north. For reasons which the Bible never clearly explains, the northern Israelite men tended to marry Canaanite women more than the men of Judah did. That was always forbidden, because it was feared that intermarriage with Canaanite women would lead people astray from Adonoy, the Lord of Israel. Furthermore, over time, the people of Israel built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, near the cities of Shechem and Samaria. That further alienated them from the people of Judah, who believed that Jerusalem was the only proper place for the only temple in which priests should sacrifice animals to God.
Hosea lived in the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. During that same period another prophet, Amos, lived in Israel. Isaiah and Micah lived in the southern kingdom of Judah at the same time. The eighth century BCE was the pinnacle of biblical prophecy.
Thus by the time Hosea came onto the biblical scene, Israel had existed apart from Judah for at least a century and a half. During those many decades more and more men of Israel had married local Canaanite women, and they turned to the gods of Canaan, especially a god called Baal and a goddess called Astarte, or Ishtar. In the language of Canaan, Baal means “Lord,” just as Adonoy means “Lord” in Hebrew.
All the prophets, Major and Minor, were uncompromising spokesmen for the God of the Hebrews, whom they insisted was the only true God. They declared that the purported gods of the other nations around them were mere idols.
Many of the prophetic writings were composed as poetry. Most of Hosea is poetry, not prose. Poetry does not express things in the same way as prose. To speak of “nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson did, means that nature can sometimes be brutal, but “nature red in tooth and claw” is a much more memorable and descriptive way of saying that. Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It gives wings to the notion of hope, whereas “Hope is nice” or even “Don’t give up hope” are statements far less soul-stirring and are less likely to remain lodged in our memory. Poetry relies on similes and metaphors and colorful words to express its thoughts. As it says in the quote from Matthew Arnold on the bulletin cover, “Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.” Thus the Hebrew prophets were also poets.
The Israelites or Jews saw themselves as The Chosen People of God. For reasons known only to God, the Bible proclaims that God selected Israel to be His singular or unique or peculiar people.
For reasons known only to Hosea, Hosea decided poetically to describe God’s relationship to Israel as that of husband and wife. To Hosea’s mind, it was as though God chose Israel to be His bride. But in order to put flesh on the bones of that idea, Hosea created a poetic flight of fancy in which, fictionally, he put himself into God’s shoes, so to speak. This poetic metaphor begins in the second verse of the first chapter of Hosea: “When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord.’”
Whoa! This is the Bible, for heaven’s sake! Are we to believe that God told one of his prophets (no less!) to go to the red-light district of Shechem, there to find a lady of the night and to marry her, for heaven’s sake? That’s what it says! It’s the Bible, so it must be true!
Well, it is true, it speaks truth, but it didn’t happen, at least not in the way Hosea tells it. This is Alice in Wonderland; it’s Peter Rabbit; it’s Harry Potter. It is impossible to imagine that Hosea is telling us about something God actually and factually told Hosea to do. That’s absurd. And if God did tell him that, we should be very leery of God. Instead, Hosea is using poetic imagery to try to describe how flawed had become the relationship between God and Israel. It wasn’t because of any mistakes God made, but because of many mistakes the people of Israel made. God’s people had become like an adulterous wife to their poetic husband, the God of Israel, said Hosea.
So, in this fictional, made-up marriage between Hosea and his fictional, poetic wife Gomer, Hosea wants us more clearly to understand how badly things can turn out between us and God. Therefore, said Hosea, this fictionalized couple had two sons and a daughter. God told Hosea the first son should be named Jezreel, which means “God Sows.” God plants a crop, namely, Israel, and he hopes that His crop will turn out well. Next came the daughter, and God said her name should be “Not Pitied,” because God was going to have no more pity on the kingdom of Israel, since they were a bad crop indeed. They continually disappointed God, and He had become totally frustrated. Finally there was the second son, whom God said should be named “Not My People,” because --- “You are not my people and I am not your God.”
It is ridiculous to think this actually happened! Nobody can take this literally! It is poetic; it is fantasy. Hosea is attempting to describe to his fellow countrymen how God feels. They have forsaken God, and this is the means, poetically, by which He has chosen to make his point.
I have called this sermon The Impossibility of Biblical Literalism. I have used the first chapter of Hosea to illustrate that point. But that’s all I am going to say about biblical literalism. It is intellectually and theologically misleading to insist on taking the Bible literally, because that cannot honestly be done. If you have tried to do that, don’t continue. Stop. It is bad for you.
Now, back to Hosea the poet. He says that Gomer, his fictional wife, kept lusting after her lovers (Baal and Astarte). He locked her up, he says poetically, but that didn’t work either. So he tried to woo her back to himself (which, by inference, is what Hosea said God had been doing with Israel all along, to no avail.) Therefore, at the beginning of Chapter Three, God tells Hosea, “Go again, love a woman who is loved of a paramour and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins” (3:1). (Maybe raisin cakes were a Canaanite, not an Israelite, delicacy, and therefore forbidden; I can’t say.)
Now for an historical aside. For several centuries after the Israelite conquest of the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, shrines on mountaintops to the Canaanite gods continued to exist throughout Israel and Judah. There were women in those shrines who were cult prostitutes. Farmers would go to the shrines before the crops were planted, and they would have sex with the cult prostitutes, deluding themselves into believing that would make their crops flourish. If that sounds like a very odd idea to you, there are lots of very odd ideas in every religion, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Nevertheless, that’s what they did. And if the crops grew and the harvests were plentiful, the randy dandies thought their weird activity worked.
God did not actually tell Hosea in the first place to marry a prostitute, whether she was a red-light-district hooker or a mountaintop hooker. Nor did God tell Hosea to hook up with another lady in red, but Hosea figured if he wrote this down, people would be sufficiently captivated to read it. I have urged you to read the prophecy of Hosea, but if you didn’t, I’m telling you now what its early chapters say, hoping that you too will be titillated to listen closely. Unfortunately, it didn’t go any better with the second, un-named woman than it did with Gomer, and by the end of Chapter Three, that’s all we’re going to hear about either of these two story-book ladies.
The problem is idolatry. That’s the main point of this sermon; the problem is idolatry. For everybody throughout history, the problem potentially is always idolatry. There are millions of people who used to go to church regularly who are now worshiping at the Church of the Bulging Bank Account or the Chapel of the Sunday Sleep-in or the Fellowship of the Holy Health Club. Cash, cars, boats, bars, enjoyment and serious study all can become idols. They are substitutes for El Elohe Yisroel, God the God of Israel. They can seem to be even better than God. Wholeheartedly devoting ourselves to anything other than God is a sin against God.
The first two of the Ten Commandments forbid idolatry. All of us are guilty of breaking those commandments from time to time. The trouble with the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea saw it, is to that too many people were committed to too many idols all the time. They had given up on God for two-bit, phony, false gods. They were exchanging the Pearl of Great Price for gods of stone or wood or metal. Hosea was heart-broken and irate and beside himself with fear, wondering what would happen to the beloved nation of his birth.
At no time are things ever perfect for anyone anywhere. But when things get bad enough, or, more correctly, when things get so bad it appears everything will soon fall apart, the prophets of God arise, raising their cries of alarm. In our nation and culture, prophets are now more likely to be found in the pages of newspapers and magazines or on TV news shows than in the pulpits. The pulpits no longer have the power to persuade they once had. Fewer people frequent the places where pulpits have existed for generations. The churches are becoming empty.
Arthur Cleveland Coxe was an American Episcopalian priest and bishop. In 1842, with the Mexican War looming on the horizon and the slavery question threatening to tear the nation apart, Bishop Coxe wrote a poem whose opening line declared, “We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful time.” The idolatry of land grabs and the ownership of other human beings were becoming mid-nineteenth-century idols. Those issues were similar to how Hosea felt toward Israel about 842 BCE. To him, everything seemed to be coming unglued. The relationship between God and His people Israel, which Hosea perceived to be something like a marriage, had reached the point of what we now term “irreconcilable differences.” Maybe divorce was the only way out for both sides. That’s how it looked to God, according to Hosea. He couldn’t really know how God felt; only God can know that. But Hosea believed he was called to be a prophet of God, so he said what he believed God wanted him to say.
Maintaining constant allegiance to God is really hard. We can’t see God, and most of us don’t hear God, at least not in clear, unmistakable, twenty-first-century American English. But because intuitively we know we need a connection to some kind of deity, we may end up fashioning our own kinds of gods, if God seems too elusive to us. These idols are not little figurines or large and impressive statues. Our kinds of idols are much more subtle and alluring and engrossing. They even can be very praiseworthy, things like community involvement or volunteer service or altruistic activities. All the same, they can become our own personal idols, if we allow anything other than God to be our god.
Idolatry means making something, anything, more important than God. Is going to church on Sunday important? It is, but even that can become an idol. Only God is all-important, and the prophets hammered on that theme again and again and again.
Those who worship at any altar other than the Altar of Almighty God are worshiping at the altars of false gods. With good reason are the first two commandments the first two. On Mt. Sinai God told the people of Israel, “You shall have no other gods before me.” He followed that up by declaring, “You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above , or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God….” (Exodus 20:3-5).
The trouble with twenty-first century CE idols is that few of them are tangible in the same way that eighth-century BCE idols were tangible. The Canaanites and some of the Israelites who fell off the wagon actually carved figurines or statues that they worshiped. To us that seems silly. Our idols are not like that. Money, power, sex, pleasure, bridge, expensive purchases with universally recognized logos, Swiss bank accounts, shares of Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft, memberships in the most exclusive clubs or organizations or retirement homes: those are our kinds of idols.
Was it an apt analogy for Hosea to say that God intended to be related to Israel as a loving husband should be related to his loving wife? I’ll be honest: I never would have thought of it in that way. Nevertheless, I long ago concluded this is a theologically profound analogy. It puts a unique perspective on how God chooses to connect Himself to us.
Hosea is my second-favorite prophet, after Isaiah, who is my Number One Favorite Prophet. Jeremiah is Number Three. However, Jeremiah makes Isaiah and Hosea look everlastingly cheerful compared to himself. They don’t call blistering broadsides about any subject “jeremiads” for nothing. Everybody needs a jeremiad every now and then.
Next week Hosea is going to make things look even more bleak than he did this week with his particularly peculiar poetic imagery. But don’t despair, friends; Hosea, like every other prophet, always holds out hope, even when he was in despair. Two weeks from now, you’ll hear heaps of hope.
Hosanna, Hosea!