“The Lion Roars” (Hosea 11:1-11)

 What do you say to a congregation you’ve never met before, in a denomination where you’ve never served, and among whom you know barely a single soul? That’s the predicament I’m in this morning here with you at King’s Presbyterian. And if you have the answer, I’ll gladly surrender the pulpit to you for the next twenty minutes! More seriously, I am grateful both to my long-time friend and colleague, Paul Hutten, for his recommendation and for the graciousness of your Minister, Tim Archibald, for entrusting his pulpit to a stranger for a Sunday morning.

But back to my conundrum. What to preach on? Well, as an Anglican my fallback position is, when in doubt, go to the lectionary. And among the Scriptures that the lectionary offers for this particular Sunday in the church’s year is the reading you heard a few minutes ago from the prophet Hosea, chapter 11.

As I began to read through the passage, I felt a little bit like the teacher of the law that Jesus talked about in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus said he was “like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13:52).

Recently I came across the story of Terry Herbert, a metal detector enthusiast:

In July 2009, [he] decided to try his luck in farmland close to his home in Staffordshire in the English countryside. He came across an artifact, and bingo. Over the next five days, he found enough gold objects in the soil to fill 244 bags. An archeological expedition was hatched, and all told, the “Staffordshire Hoard” was found to contain some 3,500 pieces representing hundreds of complete objects. The cache of gold, silver and garnet objects from early Anglo-Saxon times represents one of the most important kingdoms of the era—and was valued at around $5.3 million.[1]

Like Terry Herbert, who I suspect may have walked past that Staffordshire field dozens, even hundreds, of times, I know I’ve read Hosea 11 many times. Yet in over forty years of ordained ministry I’ve never preached on it before. And as I began to comb through it, I also began to realize what a treasure I had been passing by again and again. As one biblical scholar has put it, “Here we penetrate deeper into the heart and mind of God than anywhere in the Old Testament.”[2] So let’s take the next few moments to see what God may have to say to us from these verses.

God’s abiding care (1-4)

The reading divides neatly into three sections, the first of which begins with a declaration by God himself: “When Israel was a child, I loved him…” As parents love their children, so God intimately, tenderly loves his people. You can see that love reflected in the series of verbs that follow: “I taught them to walk.” “I healed them.” “I led them with kindness and love.” “I lifted them to my cheek.” “I stooped down to feed them.”

Those who are parents in the congregation will remember how you cared for your own children, how you looked after them, fed them, taught them, bandaged up their cuts and scrapes, and no doubt shed the occasional tear with them as well. And if you haven’t had the privilege of sharing that kind of love as a parent, I suspect you probably received it as a child.

The eighteenth-century poet William Cowper beautifully expressed what we read this morning in a hymn that includes these words:

I delivered thee when bound,
and when bleeding healed thy wound,
sought thee wandering, set thee right,
turned thy darkness into light.

Can a woman’s tender care
cease toward the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
yet will I remember thee.

Mine is an unchanging love,
higher than the heights above,
deeper than the depths beneath,
free and faithful, strong as death.[3]

Of course Hosea was not the first to say what he did. In fact, the opening words of this morning’s passage hark all the way back to the time of the Exodus, when God commanded Moses to tell Pharaoh, “This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son…” (Exodus 4:22). Nor would Hosea be the last. Years later the prophet Jeremiah would proclaim, “The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness’ ” (Jeremiah 31:3). And of course part of Cowper’s words came from Isaiah, through whom God reminded his people, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15). For me one of the places this truth is most poignantly expressed is in the Garden of Eden, when God looks on the human being that he has formed from the dust and bends down and breathes into him the breath of life. It is an arresting picture of the deep tenderness of God’s love for us, his creatures.

Of course as Christians we see this love taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus. Jesus’ act of reaching out his hand a leper, who had not felt the warmth of a human touch for years, perhaps decades, spoke to him more about the love of God than any words even of the most eloquent prophet. Jesus’ act of stopping and turning to a woman who was too humiliated to do anything more than touch the hem of his robe said to her in a way that words could not, “You matter. You too are God’s precious child.” And calling down Zacchaeus from his safe perch up in the sycamore tree and going to his house to share a meal would teach him that God’s love does not exclude cheats and reprobates either.

John’s gospel tells us, “God so loved the world…” But that love is not just a theological construct or some feel-good wish. It is a love that is both personal and practical, a love that cares, touches, heals and even weeps for his people. Yet there is a whole other side to Hosea’s prophecy, as we shall see…

Israel’s persistent defiance (5-7)

In the second segment of Hosea’s prophecy the focus shifts from God to the nation of Israel. And what do we find? We move from a gently caring parent to a defiant and rebellious child. There is an important historical background to what Hosea wrote. The year was probably around 733 BC. Hosea was writing in the northern kingdom of Israel, centred in Samaria. The nation had already been attacked and conquered by the powerful armies of the Assyrian Empire and a couple of things had happened. Some of its citizenry had fled southwards to Egypt, while others of its leadership had thrown in their lot with their Assyrian conquerors. In either case, this represented not just a geographical move or even a political alliance, but a shifting away from God to embrace the rituals and practices and, more seriously still, the deities of those nations.

Equally seriously, even those who had remained had consistently refused to heed warnings of the prophets, who had repeatedly called them to repent and return to the Lord. Less than a generation before Hosea, Amos had warned them in these crystal-clear words (and here I read from Eugene Petersen’s earthy paraphrase in The Message):

This is what the Lord says:
Because of the three great sins of Israel—make that four—
I’m not putting up with them any longer.
They buy and sell upstanding people
People for them are only things—ways of making money. 
They’d sell a poor man for a pair of shoes.
They’d sell their own grandmother!
They grind the penniless into the dirt,
shove the luckless into the ditch.
Everyone and his brother sleeps with the ‘sacred whore’—
a sacrilege against my Holy Name.
Stuff they’ve extorted from the poor
is piled up at the shrine of their god,
while they sit around drinking wine
they’ve conned from their victims…
I also raised up prophets from among your children…
but you commanded the prophets not to prophesy. (Amos 2:6-8,11-12)

The biggest problem facing Israel, Hosea and the other prophets argued, was not its Assyrian conquerors who had attacked from the outside, but the spiritual and moral corruption that was slowly but inexorably eating it away from within. In the New Testament we find Jesus saying much the same thing to the religious leaders of his day. Again, let me read it to you from The Message. “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You’re like manicured grave plots, grass clipped and the flowers bright, but six feet down it’s all rotting bones and worm-eaten flesh. People look at you and think you’re saints, but beneath the skin you’re total frauds” (Matthew 23:27-28). As the prophet Isaiah lamented, “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Isaiah 29:13).

And so we see that some of the most telling condemnations that we find in the Bible are against God’s own people. We are quick to blame so many of the world’s woes on other people, be they politicians, Islamists, Hollywood, the NRA or whatever. But what about ourselves? We may not have bowed down before idols like Hosea’s fellow Israelites. But to what extent have we yielded to false values of the world around us? How much does what we profess here on Sunday morning bear an influence on what we do and the kind of people we are from Monday to Saturday? Does God look upon us in the same way that he did upon the people of Hosea’s day?

The final outcome (8-11)

There was a punishment prescribed for recalcitrant youths in the Old Testament and it was severe. Let me read Deuteronomy 21:18-21 for you:

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

I’m not sure the sentence was ever carried out (I certainly hope not!), but I have no doubt that when Hosea proclaimed his prophecy against his people, both he and they were well aware of these words. As a nation they had brought upon themselves what was happening to them. They deserved to be wiped out. Yet God, who had brought them into existence, who had nurtured and cared for them, who loved them with an everlasting love, would not allow this to happen. “How can I give you up?” he cries. “How can I hand you over? … My heart recoils within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger… For I am God, and not a man—the Holy One among you.” If we had time, we could spend hours just poring over these remarkable verses. In all of Scripture there are only a handful of other places where we are permitted to gaze so deeply into the heart of God. I think we could probably count them on the fingers of one hand. Like Moses we need to take off our shoes and hide our faces, for we stand on holy ground. We have entered the Holy of Holies.

But our moment of meditation is broken by a lion’s roar. And I suspect that those of us who are C.S. Lewis or Narnia fans will not be able to read these verses without thinking of Aslan. Do you recall the scene, towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the great lion says to the children, “And now to business. I feel I am going to roar. You had better put your fingers in your ears.” Then the story goes on,

And they did. And Aslan stood up and when he opened his mouth to roar his face became so terrible that they did not dare to look at it. And they saw all the trees in front of him bend before the blast of his roaring as grass bends in a meadow before the wind.

“The Lord will roar from Zion,” wrote the prophet Joel, “and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the heavens will tremble.” And then he goes on: “But the Lord will be a refuge for his people, a stronghold for the people of Israel” (Joel 3:16). God roars—his hatred of evil and all that undermines and despoils his good purposes in creation is unabated. God roars—and the powers of wickedness and injustice will fall like a house of cards before him. God roars—and his children will know that they are safe once again.

“When he roars, his children will come trembling from the west.
They will come from Egypt, trembling like sparrows,
from Assyria, fluttering like doves.
I will settle them in their homes,” declares the Lord.

The Lion has roared. May we hear his voice today.

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[1]        http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/6-incredible-treasures-found-with-a-metal-detector

[2]        H.D. Beeby, Grace Abounding, 140

[3]        “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord”

“I press on” (Philippians 3:4b-16)

If you take a look along the boulevard in front of the church, you will see four fairly decent-sized boulders. They were dug up this past week during the excavation of Ford Parkway and someone thought that they might make an attractive addition to our garden. I understand that people can pay large sums of money to acquire boulders like that to place on their lawns, but we’re going to get them for free!

In Matthew’s gospel Jesus tells the story of a man who is out tilling a field, when suddenly his plow scrapes against something hard. Thinking it’s a rock, he digs down and what does he find? A treasure! Without wasting any time he rushes off and sells everything he owns so that he can have enough cash to buy the field and claim the treasure. That, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of heaven is like. People say, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” That may be true in the financial world. But Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is worth it.

False Confidence

In many ways what we have in this morning’s Epistle reading from Philippians is a real-life version of Jesus’ parable. It was on his way to Damascus that Paul (then Saul) discovered in Jesus the treasure that made all his worldly advantages seem worthless by comparison—and those advantages were considerable. Paul lists them out for us in the opening verses of this morning’s passage. First of all, he had been circumcised on the eighth day in precise accordance with the Old Testament Law. Once in a while I hear people describe themselves (often with a certain level of pride) as “cradle Episcopalians”. Well, Paul was a cradle Jew, raised from birth in the religion of his ancestors. Secondly Paul describes himself as “a member of the people of Israel”—and not only that, but also a member of the tribe of Benjamin, the tribe from which Israel’s first king, Saul, had arisen and the only one of the twelve tribes that had remained true to Judah when the kingdom had split after Solomon.

Added to that, Paul was “a Hebrew of Hebrews”. That is that, although born in southern Turkey, where people communicated in Greek, Paul spoke the Hebrew language. (What he does not mention in this passage, although he does elsewhere, was that his teacher was none other than Gamaliel, one of the leading rabbis of the first century.) And so Paul could claim not only religious and racial purity, but cultural purity as well.

However, the list does not end there. Paul had also been a Pharisee, a strict adherent to the laws and traditions of Israel. His devotion to Judaism had been such that he had been a sworn enemy of the newly founded sect that claimed Jesus as the Messiah, going to great lengths to hound and persecute its followers. Looking back on it all, he could in complete honesty declare that he had fulfilled all the demands of the Law. It was an impressive list, of which he could be justifiably proud—and no doubt it need not have ended there. Paul was still a young man and his star was still rising.

Now let’s just stop there for a moment and think about what Paul has been saying about himself. Have you ever considered how different Paul’s story is from so many of the testimonies that we hear today? It was not as though Paul had been a hopeless alcoholic unable to wrest himself from the lure of the bottle. He had not been a lawbreaker committed to a life of violence and crime. In every sense he had been a model citizen, successful in everything that he undertook. Yet, says Paul, it was those very things, those good things, that he now counts as loss “for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord”.

In the nrsv Bibles in our pews we read that he “suffered the loss of all things”. I think the New Living Translation gets closer to what Paul meant when it uses the word “discarded”. Paul didn’t have these privileges taken away from him. He threw them away. Indeed, he says, he considers them rubbish. The word in Greek is skúbala and the seventeenth-century editors of the King James Bible weren’t afraid to translate it with the much earthier word “dung”. It is like something that some careless dog owner leaves behind that somehow finds its way onto the sole of your shoe. You scrape it off and fling it into the garbage. That was Paul’s attitude towards everything that had once brought any sense of significance, any sense of accomplishment, to his life.

Surpassing Worth

Why was this so? Why the 180° turnaround in Paul’s life? The reason was that, like the man plowing the field, Paul had found a treasure of infinite worth. Like the merchant in search of fine pearls, he had found one that was worth cashing in all that he possessed. What Paul had discovered was that he had been measuring his life by the wrong standard. As Paul had once done, our world puts a great deal of store by the accident of birth. Think of all the attention that has been focused on the birth of Princess Charlotte to Prince William and Kate Middleton over the past few months. Adorable as that little baby may be, what makes her more worthy of interest than any other child? Like Paul, our world is often dazzled by personal achievement. We ooh and ah at great sports champions or movie stars—and in many cases their accomplishments are not insignificant. But does that really make them better than other people?

What changed Paul along the Damascus Road was God’s revelation to him that his value, his personal worth, was measured neither by the circumstances of his birth nor by his personal attainments. Rather, it was measured by the only true measure of human worth, which is the cross of Jesus Christ. And the cross tells us, in letters written in the blood of God’s only Son, that you and I are of infinite worth to the one who created and sustains the universe, to the one who knew us before we were formed in our mother’s wombs, to the one who stands with arms outstretched waiting to welcome us into his eternal joy. That’s what Paul means when he writes about “not having a righteousness of my own…, but one that comes through faith in Jesus Christ”.

Scientists like to talk about paradigm shifts—the one that took place in the sixteenth century, for example, when Nicolaus Copernicus and others began to realize that the sun does not revolve around the earth, but vice versa. Suddenly with that discovery everything began to make sense in a way that it never had before. What the apostle Paul experienced and what he shared with believers who had already gone before him and those ever since, could also be called a paradigm shift. But it was also far more than that. It was something that would not merely affect the way he thought about things. It was not just an intellectual choice, but a conversion, an all-engaging process that would affect every area of his being.

Now it does not always occur in such a dramatic fashion as what happened to Paul. For many of us (including most of the apostles) it happens in a quieter, more gradual way. When did Peter’s conversion happen, for example? Was it when Jesus found him by the seashore and greeted him with the words, “Come, follow me”? Was it when he came to the profound realization that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God? Could it have been when he arrived at Jesus’ tomb and found it empty or when after the painful threefold question, “Do you love me?” Jesus invited him again to “Follow me”? Or was it on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit fell upon him and the other disciples in the upper room? Or might it have been a combination of all these things?

There are some of us looking back on our own lives, who can point to a day or even an hour when that happened. On the other hand I suspect that there are many of us who would find it difficult to pinpoint exactly when the paradigm shift occurred. For those brought up in Christian families there may never have been a time when Jesus was not a reality for you. The point is not when it happened or how it happened, but that somehow we have come to perceive our worth in terms of the cross—in terms not of the world’s values or our whatever values we may set for ourselves, but the value that God himself has placed upon us in Christ.

Pressing On

While we may not be able to point to its beginning in our own lives, what we do know is that what Paul is writing about is the preoccupation of a lifetime. And he goes on to describe what it means for him in the final verses of this morning’s reading. “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal,” he writes, “but I press on…” The word is one of earnestness and striving. Paul will use it once again when he writes to his young friend Timothy:

But as for you, man of God…, pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called… In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus…, I charge you to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ…, the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. (1 Timothy 6:11-15)

“Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on,” says Paul for a second time. “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” What Paul had embarked on, what he was inviting the Philippians to join him in, was an adventure that, if they were willing, would involve their whole being—all their physical energy, all their intellectual capacities, all their courage, their imagination, their moral stamina, their tears and whatever else the Holy Spirit might muster within them.

The Christian journey is not for the lazy or the half-hearted. Yet again, like that treasure in the field, like the pearl of great price, and as Paul had discovered in his own experience, there is nothing that can compare with it. “Ours,” wrote Bishop Handley Moule a century ago, “is the happiness of wondering discovery, and rich possession, and ever-opening prospects.”[1]

It has been my privilege to share in that adventure with you over the past ten and a half years. And I pray for you, as I hope you will for me, that by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, you will continue to keep moving forward, to keep pressing on, to explore the vastness of its implications, to let it capture more and more of your mind and heart, to live it out amid all the unexpected twists and turns of life, and that you will never cease to be amazed by the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus.

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[1]     Philippian Studies, 178