Sermon: Our Loving Parent
November 10th, 2019 Rev. Betsy Perkins
First Baptist Church, Delavan WI
Scripture passage: Hosea 11:1-9
The hymn we just sang was written in 1930, by Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding pastor of the well-known Riverside Church in New York City. Riverside Church is an interdenominational church located on the edge of the Harlem neighborhood, and affiliated with our American Baptist Churches. Rev. Fosdick wrote the song for the dedication of that church, but also with world events in mind, in the midst of the Great Depression and between the two World Wars. It was first sung as the processional for the opening service of that church. The words shocked people at the time; that the hymn would call out human shortcomings, our failures and sins. It sings of “warring madness”, of “pride”, “fears and doubts” “our wanton, selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul”. All leading to the plea of the last verse for God to “save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore”. This is a hymn in the prophetic tradition, the tradition of someone like Hosea.
Israel, Rebellious Son
Last week we focused on the prophet Elijah’s challenge to the people of Israel who were running here and there to worship all sorts of gods and powers other than the One Lord God. When Baal, the idol god, was exposed as a sham, and the Lord God demonstrated His true presence and power, the people loudly declared, “The Lord is God! The Lord is God, for real!”
Unfortunately, there was no change in the hearts of the leaders at all or even hearts of the people for very long. When Hosea is called by God to speak to the people of Israel, it is another 120 years later. There have been another dozen kings, in a succession of kings who follow in the footsteps of King Ahab. In fact, one of them even announced that “Ahab served Baal a little; I will serve Baal much more!” (2Ki.10:18)
The people of Israel continue to waver. Hosea describes their love for God to be like the morning mist, like the early dew that quickly evaporates and is gone (6:4). In Hosea 4, their failures are laid out as an indictment against the whole population: No one is faithful, no one shows love, no one knows the first thing about God, there is only cussing and lying and killing, stealing and cheating and adultery. They break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed. (Hosea 4:1-2) Rather than rely on God, they have relied on their own strength. In fear of their enemies, they have made treaties with other nations and then reneged on those treaties. They make decisions and plans without consulting God in prayer. When they face illness or injuries they pray to idols for healing. Hosea concludes that they have exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful! (4:7)
The brokenness and pain in the relationship between the children of God and God their Father, is illustrated in the brokenness and pain in the relationship Hosea has with his own family, his own children. Hosea’s first child is a boy, and the Lord tells Hosea to name him ‘Jezreel’. Now Jezreel was the name of the town where there had been a terrible slaughter of 70 children of a deposed king. The children were killed by the hands of their own people in order to save their own skins and please the power-hungry, revenge-seeking new king. It was a shameful incident in Israel’s history. It would be as if someone today named their son ‘Hiroshima’ or ‘Wounded Knee’ – the site of a massacre of several hundred Lakota Indian women and children.
After his son Jezreel, Hosea had a daughter. The Lord told him to name her Lo-Ruhamah, which means ‘not loved’. A couple years later Hosea had another son, the Lord said, “Call him Lo-Ammi (which means ‘not my people’), for you are not my people and I am not your God.”(1:8) Can you hear the broken heart of the Father, as he names his children ‘shame’, ‘unloved’ and ‘not mine’? God’s children have rebelled against Him, they have shunned Him, done whatever they wanted, acted in ways that disregarded and disrespected their Creator and Lord.
Have you ever been that rebellious child? Have you ever told your parents to get lost, you’re useless, ‘I don’t care what you think or what you say’? Have you ever ignored your parents, disregarded and disrespected them?
God, Brokenhearted Father
Or maybe you have been the parent. Maybe you know the pain of having a child defy you and the rules you tried to put in place to create a safe and loving home. Maybe you have stayed up nights worrying and praying because your child had run away and was breaking the law and breaking your heart.
In today’s scripture passage, we hear that broken heart of God the Father. Look at the first 4 verses of Hosea 11 (on the back of the bulletin or pull out the pew bible). Verse 1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him and out of Egypt I called my son.” God is a Father to the people of Israel. He loves them as His children. When they were enslaved and suffering in Egypt, God got them out of that terrible situation. It makes me think of foster parents who have rescued a child from a bad situation, from an abusive father or a drug-addicted mother. The parents who then love that child so much that they take steps to not just be foster parents, but to adopt the child as their own.
The people of Israel were not the best and the brightest, there was nothing innate about them that made them special or especially loveable. It was simply God’s special love for them. And while there were moments when they reciprocated that love, moments when they pledged their hearts to God, like at Mount Sinai or as they entered the Promised Land at the Jordan River, most of the time they struggled with a rebellious streak. Verse 2, “The more I called them, the further they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and burned incense to idols.” The first commandment that Israel had agreed to at Mount Sinai was to have no other gods, to worship the Lord alone. The more God called them back, the more the prophets spoke God’s words of correction to the people, the worse things got.
Sounds like a teenager, pushing the boundaries, testing the parents’ love. The loving parents can only shake their head and wring their hands and say, like God does here, (verse 3) “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk.” Ephraim is the name of one of Israel’s sons, one of the 12 tribes that made up the nation of Israel. “I took them up in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them.”
God had rescued them again and again, protected them and defended them, yet the children of God didn’t even realize it was God who had been working on their behalf. I wonder how many times God rescues us and we don’t realize, don’t give God credit for accidents that never happened because of God’s protective hand. “I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. I treated them like those who lift infants to their cheeks; I bend down to them and fed them.” (verse 4)
What wonderful images of God’s love! Can you picture it? The tender love of a father or mother. If we, as fickle and flawed human beings can muster that kind of love, how much more our Loving Parent, God our Father, God our Mother. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine God, your Loving Parent, leaning down to hold you close and put His cheek against yours…
Tough Love
There is tender love and then there is tough love. If you have been a parent to a rebellious, defiant child, perhaps you are in the midst of that challenge right now, you know the dilemma and the frustration. Tender love isn’t always enough to reach the child. When tender love has been rejected, what do you do?
In verses 5-7, we hear God in the midst of that dilemma. God has directed Hosea to prophesy that the children of Israel will be reaping the consequences of their actions. God will no longer step in to protect them, but will allow Israel to be swallowed up by their enemies. “They will return to the land of Egypt,” meaning they are going to end up back in a situation where they are enslaved, oppressed, forced to work for cruel and heartless people. “Assyria will be their king, because they have refused to return to me.” Since they have rejected God as their king, someone else will take that place. A situation not unlike a young girl who has rebelled against the authority and protection of her parents, only to find herself under the authority and protection of a pimp.
“A sword will strike wildly in their cities; it will consume the bars of their gates.” This is a symbolic way of talking about war. When you make a deal with a bully or a gang for protection, but then don’t fulfill every demand of the bully/gang, you know trouble is coming. That is what Israel had done with Assyria. That is what people today do with their drug dealers, or with abusive partners. It “will take everything because of their schemes. My people are bent on turning away from me; and though they cry out to the Most High, He will not raise them up.”
This is the picture of tough love. God is going to allow the children of Israel to suffer the natural consequences of their actions and not step in to shield them. This is the parent who has finally had enough, so when there is yet another call from the child, that he’s been arrested again, the paret makes the tough choice to not bail the child out right away but to stand back and let the situation play out. It does not indicate a lack of love, a failure of love, but the choice to allow adversity to teach a child what affection could not.
God’s Compassion
So does God just steel Himself to His children’s situation, just turn His face away? No. No, we hear God again in verses 8-9. To hear these words right I think we need to imagine God with tears flowing down His face, filled with anguish. “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboyim?”
Admah and Zeboyim were small towns close to Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities that were destroyed in the time of Abraham because of the intense evil that filled those cities and the terrible sins perpetrated in them. God is grieving the intense evil and brokenness throughout the world, and torn up about letting Israel be destroyed because the evil all around has infected them as well. Like a child that falls into bad habits, whose head gets filled with wrong ideas, because the kids she hangs around with have those behaviors and ideas.
God says, “My heart winces within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” It’s too painful for God to stand by and do nothing. It’s breaking His heart. “I won’t act on the heat of my anger; I won’t return to destroy Ephraim,” God concludes. And why? Why doesn’t God follow through with the tough love approach? Because “I am God and not a human being, I am the Holy One in your midst.” God is not a human with the desire for revenge, or the need to somehow prove Himself right. God has another way, another plan. A plan to show the full extent of His love by entering into the experience of His children. And like a parent who goes undercover as a homeless person in order to put their arms around their homeless child, God goes undercover in Jesus to come alongside us.
Have you ever defied God or disappointed God, have you ever wandered away or turned your back on God? As a result, have you ever questioned God’s love for you? Take your bulletin home and re-read Hosea 11 every day this week. Put your name in each place where the name Israel or the name Ephraim occurs. Hear God’s love and compassion for you.
The Lord directed Hosea to rename his children: Shame becomes Restored, Unloved is named Beloved, and Not-Mine is named Mine (2:22-23).
Let me pray for you: Loving Parent God, I pray for each one here, that Your Spirit might work in their hearts so they might have the power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ, and that they might know this love and be filled to the brim with all the fullness of God. Amen.
Closing Song: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” # 45 verses 3, 2, 1
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