Sermon by Di Appleby
Many of us have heard a parent’s anguish when talking about their teenager. Perhaps you were the teenager I am about to introduce to you. Perhaps you’re the parent.
A 16 year old and the parent are engaged in constant battles. At this point in the story, she is barely speaking to her family and on several nights in the past month, she hadn’t bothered to come home at all. The parents have tried grounding her, withholding pocket money and using other forms of punishment, but to no avail. The daughter has lied to them, deceived them and found a way to turn the tables on them by saying ’It’s your fault for being so strict!’
The mother spent one night standing at the window, staring out into the darkness, waiting for her to come home. She felt so angry! She was furious with her daughter for the way she manipulated her, and her husband, and for the way she would deliberately hurt them both. The mother knew however, that her daughter was hurting herself more than anyone else.
And yet, when her daughter came home that night, or rather the next morning, the mother wanted to wrap her arms around her, to love her, to tell her that she wanted the best for her. She was a helpless, lovesick mother, wanting above all else to forgive and begin anew. Her daughter was alive and she was home!
Chapter 11 of Hosea has been described as one of the boldest in the Old Testament in exposing to us the mind and heart of God in human terms.
God’s chosen people knew how to wound him and he was crying out in anger and in pain.
We’ve already seen an unforgettable picture of God’s forgiving love with the imagery of the husband and wife in chapters 1-3 of Hosea, but now we’re seeing an equally memorable picture of God’s nurturing love with the image of God the parent and the people as God’s child.
The situation addressed in chapter 11 assumes that some Israelites are already in Assyria as captives (v 11). The cities of Israel have not yet been destroyed but will be shortly (v 6), and the people will be taken captive (v 5-6). Chapter 11 moves through four parts:
The Past: Out of Egypt (vv 1-4)
This is where the parent/ child imagery is introduced. The emphasis in these early verses is on what the parent has done for the child. ’I’ statements dominate. Look at them. I loved, I called, I taught to walk, I took them up in my arms, I healed, I led them, & I bent down to them. Yet the child is ungrateful, not acknowledging the parent’s care.
We could say that the early history of Israel, her childhood, was spent in Egypt, set apart for the world’s ultimate blessing. Israel was described to the Pharaoh then as God’s ’first-born son’ (Ex 4:22ff). Through God’s providence, Israel had taken refuge in Egypt, but needed to return to its own land to fulfil its calling. Although it had been threatened with extinction through the massacre of its infant sons, it was miraculously delivered.
(Not surprisingly, by the way, the infant Christ was also threatened and delivered. Matthew (2:15) uses the words from Hosea ’out of Egypt I have called my son’, to speak of Jesus being restored to God’s land to fulfil the task marked out for him.)
I wonder whether it was just my experience, or was it made easier because God was working in me, that loving a very young child was easy. We endure sleepless nights and interrupted thoughts; we curb our personal ambitions and desires because a newborn is utterly dependent on us for survival. As children move towards independence, we let them drop food on the floor as they insist they feed themselves, we let them walk out the door in the striped tights with the tartan skirt, the fairy wings and the football beanie and we even let them ride their bike to the shops, knowing that we will have to pull both child and bike up the hill on the way home.
While it’s difficult to be consistent as a parent when there are lots of pressures on us, those early years are full of lots of loving responses from our children which are rewards indeed for an exhausted parent. Without too much effort we can love our children, patch up their hurts, carry them, feed them and comfort them.
But then they grow up! We get a taste of it when the toddler shouts ’no’ or they exercise a ’go slow’ campaign when you want to be in the car in 5 minutes. But when they criticise something you’ve done, raise their voice in defiance, tell lies about where they’ve been, take money from your wallet, swear at you or strike you, it’s hard to love them. Imagine how much harder it would be to bear the rebellion of the teenage years, if our children caused injury to someone through drink driving, if they were involved in brawls outside nightclubs, if they made money during their uni years through prostitution or drug dealing. But children are also hard to love when they’re inactive; when they spend their days on the Internet, in cafes, sleeping, eating, being depressed or completely self focussed.
When we read of God as father in this passage, it’s not the indulgent father, caring too little about setting boundaries or the tyrannical father who demands loyalty regardless of the consequences. God is a parent who coaxes and supports a child’s first steps, one who picks up the child who stumbles, one who shows compassion over and over again. We read ’when Israel was a child, I loved him’ but of course, while they were loved as a parent loves a child, we’re actually reading about adults who had made a covenant with God. God loves them, now, as they are, even as he calls to them and they push even further away. They’ve abandoned him, not through ignorance or hardship, but in the face of God’s kindness and concern. In verses 3& 4 we read that God healed his people, led them with cords of human kindness. The Message Bible translates this as ’Still, I stuck with’ them. Yet, like some know-it-all, self-centred adolescent, they’ve forgotten or never realised what they owe to this relationship, in spite of the number of times God has put the young nation back on its feet.
Bringing children into the world is always a risk. How will your child turn out? The pain of parenting comes when our children make choices that are in direct contrast to the ones we would make, when they’ve lost respect for the things we value. There comes a time when we’re no longer able to punish our adult children, even though our hearts ache for them in the choices they make. But God’s love is a ’tough love’ that knows there is a time in the parent/child relationship for punishment and so, because the Israelites have transferred their loyalty to Baal, the prophet announces a new captivity of the kind once experienced in Egypt.
The Immediate Future: Back to ’Egypt’ (vv 5-7)
In these verses, the focus shifts from God to the people and ’they’ verbs dominate. Read them: they shall return to Egypt; they have refused to return to me; they are bent on turning away from me. The tone is one of accusation and announcement of punishment. The expression ’return to the land of Egypt’ (v 5) appears to have a double meaning here. As a result of the Assyrian conquests of 733 BC and the deportation of a portion of the people, some citizens of Israel did flee to Egypt as refugees. In the context of this chapter though, ’Egypt’ is a symbol for bondage. Just as the people had once been in Egypt in Moses’ time (as referred to in verse 1) so they would experience captivity again, this time in Assyria.
Even though this section consists of accusation and announcement of punishment, one can also detect a note of hope: the rebels are still ’my people’ (v 7) an indication that although the relationship with God has been strained, it has not been broken.
At this point let’s just stop and ask ourselves some important questions.
Is our ’turning’ to God or away from him?
Is our relationship with God strained? Is he being patient with us because he loves us or is God’s love for us rich and proud, because he is pleased with the way we are living for him?
The Present: The Loving Parent (vv 8-9)
Once again, the ’I’ of the Lord dominates. The Lord agonises over the coming punishment just as a parent agonises over the rebellion of a much loved child, a rebellion that causes a child to suffer. The suffering of the child causes the love of the parent to become more intense. You know how your heart goes out to a child when they’re in pain, whether they have physically injured themselves or they are enduring suffering or heartbreak of an emotional nature.
Admah & Ze-boi-im were cities destroyed with Sodom & Gomorrah in the days of Abraham (Gen 19), and the Lord resolves that such a fate will never befall his people again. ’How can I hand you over? How can I treat you like this?’ God says. He can’t do it! God continues in verses 8&9
How can I ever give you up?
How different is this response from the hard line that may have taken in families where a parent has said ’Enough!’ Out of anger and hardness of heart, children, usually teenagers or young adults, have been abandoned and left with no possibility of coming home and asking for forgiveness. As Jesus’ story of the prodigal son reminds us, God is ever waiting and watching for his children to return to him. He’s God, not a mortal like us with the weaknesses of pride or an over developed sense of our own importance or a warped sense of what is right. God is like a parent, but he is the Holy One standing in the midst of his people and in our midst saying: How can I ever give you up?
We mustn’t allow our experience of being parented or of being a parent to be used a model for the way God will parent us. We see God addressing the entire Northern Kingdom as a single, personal entity who deserves his anger, but God chooses not to act upon it. National guilt and judgement, betrayal and estrangement are interrupted by a passionate intervention driven by love. The Holy One with power, glory and awesomeness is at work among his rebellious people, disclosing to them his innermost feelings, pledging his compassion despite their disloyalty. And, God defines his otherness, his divine uniqueness, not in terms of power, wisdom or sovereignty, but in terms of love; constant, sure and steadfast.
So the very thought of abandoning the people God has lived amongst, to an extinction like that of the cities of the plain, stirs God to strong revulsion. But how does that fit in with what in fact transpired? For the Northern Kingdom, in this passage called Ephraim or Israel, fell in 722 and was deported to Assyria. One answer could be that she was given, after this prophecy, yet another chance to repent. More probably, the answer lies in the remnant, who threw their lot in with Judah (the Southern Kingdom) and whose descendants returned with them to be part of the continuing Israel that meets us in the New Testament as the parent stock of the church. The next paragraph seems to bear this out.
The Distant Future: Home from ’Egypt’ (vv 10-11)
The story which began by recalling the deliverance of a ’son’ from Egypt now returns to the theme that the Lord’s children will be delivered from bondage in the future. But only a chastened people ’trembling …trembling’ will come home at last when God leaps into action with a mighty roar. Thus the story comes to its end; out of Egypt, back into ’Egypt’ because of rebellion; then out of ’Egypt’ as God returns them to their homes because of His compassion.
Yet we know that for each of us, the story doesn’t end there. God has given his people and all the peoples of the world, another chance to honour their creator and loving father, in the sending of his Son. Jesus, in his incarnation (coming amongst us in human form) incorporated all that Israel was meant to be. ’Out of Egypt I have called my son’ says God, so that his purposes might be fulfilled: the Israelites to live by God’s rule and be a blessing to others and Jesus, through his life and death, to bring us all into the blessing of a relationship with God. Where there ought to be judgement, there’s hope, based on the distinctive nature of God. His compassion has been extended to us by the coming of the Holy One into our midst, leaving the comforts of heaven to live with us; healing us, feeding us and leading us.
Time and again, throughout salvation history, God acts out his loving nature. He continues to call people out of ’Egypt’: out of fear, out of oppression, out of loneliness, out of meaninglessness, out of bondage of every kind. He never gives us up.
For more sermons from this ource, go to http://home.vicnet.net.au/~sttheos/
