Love Walked Among Us

When I was growing up my mom was always very concerned with the types of things that I watched on television and the ratings of movies that I saw. She was vigilant about policing the music that I was listening to and was not afraid to take away CDs that she decided were not appropriate for me to be listening to. I kind of knew that I had made it full circle in life when a few years ago I was back home, and we were driving in the car together. She was listening to the same soft rock radio station that she listened to when I was a kid. And then a familiar song came on the radio and she was singing along to it and I looked over at her and said “I just want you to know I used to own this CD. But you took it away when I was 16.”

But she always wanted me to read the Bible, and I never did. And 30 something me is really mad at 16-year-old me, because if I would have known some of the stuff that was in here, I would have had some really good reasons to argue with my mom about what she was censoring me from. I mean, have you ever read this thing? It’s scandalous. There are so many stories in her that you just do not read to your children before bed. Today’s story fits that mold, it’s got a plot line that more resembles an HBO or Showtime special than an episode of Veggie Tales. But it starts out like this

The word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and during the reign of Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel –

Where we are at here in history is in the 8th century B.C. about 700 some years before Jesus. This is during a period of time known as the Divided Monarchy, where Israel is split into two nations, Judah in the south and Israel in the north. So, while a few weeks ago we talked about the people of Judah, The destruction of their capital Jerusalem, and their exile into Babylon, today we are in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and a few hundred years earlier. The king is Jeroboam, and this is what we know about him:

In the fifteenth year of Amaziah son of Joash king of Judah, Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel became king in Samaria, and he reigned forty-one years.24 He did evil in the eyes of the Lord and did not turn away from any of the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he had caused Israel to commit. –

So, he’s not a good king. And Israel is not following God.

Ok I know -- I promised you a scandalous story and then I told you a bunch of history. Like that flying book they make you read at the beginning of a Star Wars film. But remember one thing out of all of that. Samaria is the capital of Israel. We’ll come back to that later. So here we go.

Hosea’s Prophecy

2 When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.” 3 So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. -

You can kind of see what’s going on here. Prophets were these people who shared the very heart and emotions of God. For Hosea, God wants him to know exactly how he feels and how he sees his relationship with Israel. So, he says hey Hosea, go marry a woman whose got a reputation for being unfaithful. Because that’s who Israel has been to me. And Hosea marries this woman Gomer and she actually has 3 children. And God tells him to name them awful things – Jezreel after a battle that Israel is going to lose, Lo-Ruhamah which means “not loved” and finally “Lo-Ammi” which means “not my people.” He’s not just feeling what God feels, but he’s actually living it.

And to be honest if the story ended right here this would look really bad for Israel, and I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t really look great for God. It looks as if he has not only declared judgment, but actually abandoned Israel. However, what we know about the practices and culture of this northern country of Israel shows us that they are worshipping other gods and have pretty much abandoned the ways of YHWH. And so, the story goes on.

The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.” -

It appears that Gomer has gone out and either cheated on Hosea and shacked up with another man, or perhaps even more likely depending on the translation, has sold herself into a relationship with another man. And so now the character of Gomer is becoming much clearer. In Chapter One, she was kind of just a person who had a past, easy to overlook because who doesn’t. She had a reputation for being on the naughty list, and not just like the naughty on Friday and Saturday night list, like the naughty all the time list. But Hosea takes her as his wife, redeeming her status in society. And then she leaves him. Just like Israel has been rescued by YHWH from Egypt but has turned to the worship of other gods. Essentially, Israel is Gomer.

But we are also getting a clear picture of the character of Hosea. Check this out.

So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley. 3 Then I told her, “You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will behave the same way toward you. -

He takes this wife who undoubtably everyone warned him against. And when she leaves and get herself into trouble, instead of saying good riddance, God tells him to go get her back. And so he does, and he’s got to pay roughly the cost of purchasing a slave back in those days to get her out of the bondage that she has sold herself into. While everyone was probably telling him he got lucky and now it’s time to move on, Hosea puts himself out there and brings her back into his home. But there is a period of waiting. They are not to be intimate with one another (or anyone else) for a certain period of time. And this is explained a little bit more in the next verses.

For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or household gods. 5 Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last days. -

Israel too, like Gomer, is going to have a waiting period before they can really have an intimate relationship with YHWH (or any other god) again. There will be many days without a king – the symbol of God’s reign on earth. They won’t be able to sacrifice to YHWH or any other gods, and certainly idolatry will be out. But eventually they will come seeking God and the king to come who is from the line of David.

While Gomer got her redemption quickly and was immediately brought back into Hosea’s home, the same can’t be said for Israel. Not long after Hosea’s prophecy in 722 BC the Assyrian Empire came in and utterly destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Assyria was a brutal nation, known for not only conquering but making it their goal to annihilate the culture and religion of the people they had power over. It seemed as though all hope was lost. The scriptures go dark. Israel and its capital Samaria are all but a lost memory of an earlier time, a warning and case study for Judeans in the south of what happens to those who are unfaithful to YHWH.

But Judah faces their own enemy and is carted off by the Babylonians who eventually also conquer Assyria. And then the Persians take over. And the people of Judah head home and during the time between the return of the people to Judah, the fate of the 10 lost tribes of Israel is debated and dreamt about. There are people living in those lands to the north, but they do not have the same Jewish culture and worship that those living in and around Jerusalem have. And so, there is tension. When Jesus is born, he comes into a world where God’s people are divided once again – No longer as Judah and Israel – but now as Jews and Samaritans.

When I think of this social situation that was happening two thousand years ago between two sets of folks – one who believe they were God’s people and that the others were not -- I can’t help but feel like we are not 2000 years and a few thousand miles removed from the situation. I feel like this is still who we are, now we just call ourselves different names. Christians – non-Christians. Or sometimes even Protestants – Catholics. Baptists – Methodists. Or like my super least favorite: Methodists – Methodists. You see the politics of alienation aren’t new, and they certainly haven’t died with the ancient empires. They haven’t gone away with the dawning of the information age and the high interconnectedness that we now have. We still live in a world where God is used to separate us rather than to unite us.

A King like David

But we come together in December every year and we worship the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ Child. God with us, a man who walked and talked and taught us a new ethic. A new way of relating to one another. A new way to reach out across the God sized chasm that humans have created between themselves. He closed the gap between the divine and the natural. And while the rest of the Jews (the disciples included) were busy feeling some type of way about their half-breed heretic neighbors to the north, Jesus one day decided to take a short-cut through Samaria.

And in the heat of the day he went to a well, where he encountered a marginalized woman from Samaria. She had a reputation for being, Naughty. And in the midst of this boundary breaking, culturally and socially taboo interaction, Jesus shared with her the message of his kingdom. And she left transformed heading to her town telling everyone what she had heard. And the response was this:

40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.

42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” –

Jesus came to seek out and rescue those who were lost. But Jesus also came to fulfill promises that God had made many years earlier. But the work was not quite done yet. Many years later, after Jesus was crucified and his disciples were building the church, they came again to Samaria. And in Peter and John lay hands on the people of Samaria, and they receive the Holy Spirit.

Here’s why this is so important. Why Jesus’s pit stop in Samaria and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on them matters. Jesus’s ministry reminded the Samaritans of a promise that was made to them. A promise that the Assyrian Empire had tried to eradicate from their memory. That there was a king, a king like David whom they could trust in, who would save them. And the coming of the Holy Spirit, the person of God who binds all believers together and to God has come upon them, and finally God’s words to the prophet Hosea have come true, see right after God tells Hosea to name one of his children “not my people” he says this:

10 “Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘children of the living God.’ 11 The people of Judah and the people of Israel will come together; they will appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel.

Finally, Israel has been vindicated. They can have an intimate relationship with God again, they can worship, they have a king, they have been given hope. Keep in mind that 800 years have passed. And yet God has remained faithful. He has rescued them, bought them out of the bondage and slavery that they were physically in by Assyria, and has released them from the spiritual bondage placed on them by years of idolatry and the bitter rivalry between them and their brothers and sisters to the south. The nation of Israel is again united under the leadership of King Jesus.

Love that Rescues

All of this is just one of many illustrations of what God’s love actually looks like. In Hosea’s case we have a man who is practically living out God’s heart. He loves a woman despite her flaws. He rescues her from the consequences of her own actions because his love is faithful. God pledges that same love to Israel and personally comes to rescue them in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. You see God’s love isn’t just a feeling or some words on a page. God’s love is a love that rescues.

Jesus came and he proclaimed “repent, for the kingdom of heaven draws near.” But that wasn’t the sum total of his ministry. While he proclaimed this, he went from town to town, healing those whose physical and spiritual states had left them on the outskirts of society. He didn’t say “stop sinning and I will heal you.” He healed, and then said, “go and sin no more.” God’s love walked among us in the person of Jesus. That love rescued Israel, rescued individuals, and God’s love still walks among us today and rescues you and me. But God’s rescue mission for Israel was not completed by Jesus, it was completed by his disciples – Peter and John.

Peter and John were like anyone in those times, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had particularly bad feelings towards the people of Samaria. But they had a strong belief in their heart, a belief that no one is outside of the love of God. They had walked with Jesus and witnessed his cosmic acts of rescuing love. They had listened to his teachings about the upside-down nature of God’s kingdom, and how God desired to rescue all of the descendants of Adam from their sin. How he overturned the negative consequences that the world’s sin had brought into their lives. And so, they went to Samaria. And they walked among the Samaritans. They became agents of God’s rescuing love.

So let me ask you this, how are we as a church, how are you as an individual, living a life of love that rescues. I’m not talking first-aid love. We are all really good at that around here. We see a need and we fill it. And it makes me so proud to be a part of this community. We show up. We show up for kids, we show up for those in need in our community. But are we rescuing people? Are we just helicoptering in and wrapping some bandages and then saying see ya later! Or are we taking the extra time to invest in people. To harness them and medi-vac them out of their situation, to nurture them back to heath, to get them the help that they really need, and to leave them in a better situation than the one we found them in? Because that is love that rescues.

Everyone needs to be rescued in some way. Love that rescues invests time, effort, and resources to complete God’s mission and promise to all people. When we, as Christians love in this way, we show the world that while love walked among us 2000 years ago in the person of Jesus, love still walks among us today. The final words of Matthew’s Gospel are “I am with you until the end of the age.” Let us love like people who are walking with Jesus every day.

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