Sermon Tone Analysis

Love Walked Among Us

My mom was always very cautious of the

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.