Back after a LONG Break

At the end of June, I went on a 3 week road trip, visiting all five of my children, performing a wedding, and touching base with old friends, returning to some interesting challenges in my parish.  And then I did some continuing education in Arizona and took my last vacation week for our son's wedding.  In November we had a flood at church when a radiator burst.  Then it was Advent and Christmas. The blog languished.

It's January 4, 2015.

It is COLD in Minot, North Dakota.  The wind chill when church began this morning was south of -40 degrees (where, incidentally, the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales cross…), and it was -17F before we factored in the wind chill.  The temperature has risen a bit, but so has the wind.  It was so bitter that when I wanted to capture the amazing sun dogs late this afternoon, I was too wimpy to go outdoors!

People in my congregation have continued to read.  It has not always been easy or pleasant.  sometimes it hasn't even seemed very edifying.  Yet when we've met on Wednesdays, a group of retired women for the most part with an occasional visitor, the conversations have been meaningful.

So where are we this coming week?  Reading Hosea and Joel.  Reading Psalms 101-106. Starting to read the Gospel of Luke.  We are on our second pass through the Psalms, and now just beginning our second pass through Luke.  I will be interested to ask the group how their second reading this year differs from their first reading.  These women have been reading the Gospels all their lives and hearing passages read in church.  Yet the more intensive task of reading larger chunks of the Bible daily has been eye-opening.

So…. some comments about HOSEA, the first of what are called the "Minor Prophets," because they are relatively short and they come at the end of the English Old Testament; or the "Twelve" in the Hebrew tradition.

Hosea preached in the 8th century before the Common Era, just before the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians.

Hosea 1.
Notice the structure of the first verses.  We locate Hosea as "the son of Beeri" and the time when "the word of the LORD came to" him, both in the dynasties of the Kings of Israel and the Kings of Judah.

Hosea is called to what I'd like to call Prophetic Street Theatre.  God calls him to marry a prostitute and have children with her, "for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD" (1:2).

Having been a priest for more than a quarter century, I have seen the pain that marital unfaithfulness causes.  It's hard to imagine a person willingly taking on the risk of marrying someone who has no plans to be faithful.  Perhaps that's too un-charitable a reading of Gomer's situation.  Maybe she was amazed that Hosea would ask her to marry.  Maybe she fully intended to be a conventional wife.  Maybe she was a conventional wife at the start.  Hosea and Gomer had babies together, and gave them names that would be hard to carry: Jezreel,  "Not Pitied," and finally "Not My People."

Hosea 2.
If we'd been hoping that Gomer would respond to Hosea's love with faithfulness, it would appear that chapter 2 doesn't allow for such an interpretation.  Hosea's relationship with his wife and children is like God's relationship with Israel: passionate, loving, but disappointing.

What do you think about the role of the land in reflecting God's disappointment with Israel?
What do you think of this picture of God as One who punishes unfaithfulness?
The feminist in me still recoils at the idea of an unfaithful woman as a metaphor for human sinfulness.
Yet the pain and pathos of the LORD in the face of the unfaithfulness of his people is so very moving in Hosea's words:
         "She did not know
                that it was I who gave her the grand, the wine, and the oil,
          and who lavished upon her silver
                and gold that they used for Baal.

God continues to try to woo Israel back:
         "Therefore, I will now allure her
                 and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.
            From there I will give her her vineyards,
                 and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
            There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
                 as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt (2:14-15).

The following chapters continue this theme.  The idolatry of Israel is likened to adultery.
God is so frustrated, so disappointed.
(This is an astounding admission on God's part, gives us a very different picture of God than we sometimes have.   Theologians of the Middle Ages spoke of the Impassibility of God.  They could not imagine God in pain, God suffering, because pain and suffering imply imperfection, a lack of completeness, and God must, by their definition, be perfect.)

Hosea 6:4:  "What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
                    What shall I do with you, O Judah?
                     Your love is like a morning cloud,  like the dew that goes away early."

Watch how Hosea develops the metaphor of a vine in Ch. 10.
Watch how Hosea's words "Out of Egypt I called my son" (11:1) are used in Hosea, and how they are appropriated in Matthew's gospel as a prophecy of the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.  (Matthew 2:15)

Notice how God continues to agonize in 11:8ff!

And notice how even by the end of the book there is still ambiguity.  14:4-7 are so full of hope and love.  Yet 14:8 still is quite open-ended; we don't know what Israel's response will be:
      "O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?
           It is I who answer and look after you.
      I am like an evergreen cypress;
           your faithfulness comes from me."

(14:9 is actually a post-script and probably not originally part of Hosea's prophecy.)