God's expanding love

Hosea 11:1-9

Hosea 11 stands as a fulcrum on which the history of God’s love pivots. We who know Jesus may find ourselves less than keen to delve into the Old Testament because of the love of God we find there. After all, from the beginning, God’s love felt harsh. God loved us so much that he said “Don’t eat that one thing” not knowing, as parents do, that there is no better way to get our children to do something than to tell them it is the one thing they are not allowed to do.

From then on, God has a kind of quid pro quo relationship with the Chosen People. I am your God, I will give you land, and children, and a throne that endures IF you worship me. Through much of the Old Testament, God’s love is finite and dependent on a response. If Israel fails, then God’s love turns to rage, as in the Great Flood, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, as with many others. God’s love was a transaction with Israel as Chosen People.

However, with the prophets we begin to see hints of something more. God’s love doesn’t seem to be the same. Through scripture, we are presented with a God who changes. It’s the same God and, yet, the rules of the game evolve over time. Once Moabites were evil, but then there came the story of Ruth. Once Samaritans were impure, but then there came to the story of the Good Samaritan. God’s love, which once was bounded by human imperfection, begins to break through as we begin to see hints of the life we have in Jesus Christ.

Jesus changed everything. And, yet, it was a process that had already begun. Hosea gives voice to God’s love in this poem we read today, saying “My compassion grows warm and tender” even for a people who have failed and disobeyed. God’s love, which was once dependent on you getting it right, is now something different. In Hosea, we begin to see hints of grace—hints we cannot understand until Jesus.

I had some conversations this week with the other pastors in our conference about the invisible “others” in our midst—the people you don’t see so often unless you wander by the food pantry or stop by the Dollar General at the right time of day. These are the folks who are unlikely to ever show up here on Sunday morning for a multitude of reasons, but first and foremost because they already feel as if they are judged enough. Coming to Sunday morning worship would be one massive exercise in judgment. The imagined or real judgment of all of you, but also the imagined or real judgment of God. So many of us operate out of a mindset of the God who judges us based on all our failures and whose love is dependent on us getting it right. Sure, we talk about grace, but that doesn’t mean we operate as if it is remotely true.

The feelings of shame run deep in this part of the world. We feel ashamed of who we are—who we really are—and so we stay away from any place where it might hit us in the face. And, yet, we have a God in Jesus Christ, who didn’t hang out in churches—or, rather, he hung out in churches only to demonstrate how hypocritical they are. We have a God in Jesus Christ, who entered into the least holy of places, who dined with sinners, who met the woman at the well, who went in the middle of the day out of shame (because nobody went to the well in the heat of the day). We have a God in Jesus Christ who loves you not for who you could be but for who you are. The progression of God’s love is from the outside in, and it grips you, rather than the other way around. You may be ashamed, but God loves you nonetheless. God knows you completely and loves you still.

Hosea is the fulcrum. The love of God is coming in Jesus to change the whole world around. This is the movement of God through history. It is persistent, and it is irresistible, and it is a love so big that there is nowhere to hide from it. So, when Paul says in 1 Corinthians (13) that “faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love,” he is expressing an ultimate reality and where God’s love is taking us. Right now, we have faith and hope. Right now, we have a world that is as often terrible as it is great. Right now, we live under principalities and powers that value wealth first, that care nothing for other peoples’ children. Right now, we see a world going underwater, and war, and genocide, and people hating people because of their skin color, or their religion, or their gender or sex. Right now, God’s love is hidden behind a veil that we must perceive by faith and wait for in hope. Yet, the movement of history is in one direction and one direction only—God’s love is widening; it is coming for me, and for you, and for all the people you expect it to not be coming for. God’s love is expanding with the universe.

Hosea is setting the stage for Advent. We are waiting now on a God whose love has been revealed to us only in part, but someday… someday we will experience it in all its glory. Love is coming.