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SENTIMENTAL FOOL OR AVENGING GOD?
Hosea 11:1-11, Luke 12:13-21
A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church by Carter Lester on
August 4, 2013
Introduction: More than once, Kerry and I have had someone say to us how much more he or she “likes” the God of the New Testament when compared with the God of the Old Testament. They will say something like, “the God of the New Testament is so full of love while the God of the Old Testament seems so harsh and judging.” Do you ever feel that way? Before any of us reach that conclusion, we might want to look at the two passages being read today. They may surprise you.
There is another split perception of God that some people have – except these perceptions leave them outside of the church altogether. Whether it is the Old or New Testament, or whether it is the witness of Christians who come across as more hateful and judging than loving and gracious,some folks think that the God of Christians is too judgmental to believe in. And then there are others who reject Christianity for just the opposite reason. They hear about the forgiveness and grace of God and wonder if it matters at all how we live or what we do. I remember hearing the words of a public figure who converted to Islam because he thought that with Christianity it did not matter what you did – God had to forgive and love you anyway.
Is that the choice we have then – between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God? Or between an avenging God and a sentimental fool?
Let us read Hosea 11:1-11.
In this extraordinary passage, Hosea, the prophet who lived 2700 years ago, gives us a series of portraits that any of us can easily picture in our own lives in 2013.
“Yet it was I who taught Ephraim [another name for Israel] to walk.” “I took them up in my arms.” (v. 3) You have seen this scene surely at one point or another: a father with outstretched hands and a huge smile on his face, urging his toddler on to take the first steps of her life. The only change from Hosea’s day is that now there are cell phones clicking and videotaping every moment. And when the child takes those first tottering steps, the father scoops her up with glee and joy. This is how it is for God and the nation of Israel, Hosea tells us, how it is when God considers each one of God’s children.
And then there is a second portrait: “Iwas to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.” (v. 4) A mother bends over her son’s crib, lifts his chubby body to her face with total delight in her face, marveling that this baby and all of his wonders, is her child, came from her body. She nurses him, not out of reluctant obligation but with eagerness and joy. She would do everything she possibly could do for this child because she is just bursting with love. This too ishow God feels about God’s children, Hosea tells us.
But then Hosea paints a third portrait, a later andsadder one: “the more I called them, the more they went from me.” This portrait is not about infants or toddlers because God is no longer talking about the way it was with Israel. Now, through the prophet Hosea, God is talking about the way it is. Despite all of the love and providential care shown to Israel, the people have grown up and gone astray. And this is no case of a baseball thrown through the neighbors’ glass window or the teen who seems in a perpetual bad mood when his or her parents are around. The picture Hosea draws is of children who have changed so much that they are almost no longer recognizable.
From what we can tell from the rest of Hosea, Israel’s rebellion and rejection of God was three-fold. In disobedience of the Ten Commandments, the people were worshipping other gods, especiallythe fertility god of the neighboring Canaanites. Second, the leaders trusted not in God but in the military alliances they made with other countries – and they made foolish ones. And third, there was rampant greed, injustice, and neglect of the poor. As one commentator sums it up: “the once-liberated nation has invested its freedom in bad religion, bad politics, and bad social arrangements.”[1]
Israel has walked away from God so that God has every reason to walk away from them. Indeed, it would be natural for him to do so, Hosea says, but God cannot do it: “How can I hand you over, O Israel?...My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender..I will not execute my fierce anger;...for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” (vv.8-9)
To be sure, the people’s rebellion has its own consequences. “The sword rages in their cities,” Hosea points out. As a result of Israel’sleaders’ futile efforts to thumb their noses at Assyria and build an alliance with Egypt, Assyria will conquer Israel and send many people into exile. But that is not the final word that God has to say, Hosea tells the people. God will not remove the consequences, but God will insure that the effects of Israel’s rebellion are not permanent : there will come a time when the exiles will be able to return homes “like doves from the land of Assyria.” (v. 11)
If Hosea portrays the tenderness, anguish, compassion and patience of God’s love, Jesus seems to paint a portrait of a harsher God in Luke 12. In the passage we heard this morning, Jesus is speaking to the disciples and a larger crowd when one in the crowd interrupts him and asks Jesus to solve a family dispute about the age-old issue of dividing up the family property. Jesus refuses, however, to serve as a ‘Judge Judy.” Instead, he tells a parable - one about a successful landowner who has a bountiful harvest and decides to build larger barns to store the grain and then starts partying to celebrate his good fortune. Rather than being applauded for his success and preparations for the future, the landowner is called something else: “God said to him, You fool!” Jesus tells the crowd, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”
“Why such sharp words?” we may well wonder. Is prosperity a problem? Isn’t the farmer being careful and conservative, preparing for the future? And where is the grace? This farmer is given no opportunity to repent and change his ways before he dies.
The problem for this rich man is that it is all about him. As one commentator writes,“he lives completely for himself, he talks to himself, he plans for himself, he congratulates himself.”[2] There is no place for God, no words of thanksgiving for what God has done or the good fortune he has enjoyed. And there is no place for the rich landowner’s neighbors: there is no compassion or concern for the needs of others. Remember, Jesus was talking at a place and time when having enough to eat was a real issue for many. So, people would be going hungry while this landowner hoards grain in his growing barns.
What Jesus is telling the crowds in Luke 12 is similar to what the prophet Hosea is saying to Israel seven hundred years before: “Stop what you are doing! Stop now - because you are going in a dangerous direction!”
There is no topic that Jesus spoke to more than money or greed, because then and now, there is no greater threat to our faith and faithfulness. Focusing on money distracts us as we pay more attention to what others have – and we don’t have. Focusing on money also tempts us to base our sense of security and anxiety on ourselves rather than on God. Too much money can make us greedy, selfish, and uncompassionate for those in need around us. A recent study of American society, in fact, found that those with more money in America give less than those with less income, with measured as a percentage of income. To be specific, those in the top fifth in income in America donated lessthanhalf as much as those in the bottom fifth of the American economy.[3] That is why when we talk about stewardship in the church it is never primarily about church budgets; stewardship and our use of money is always about our relationship with God andourspiritual health.
And this is why Jesus has in effect five words for anyone who is worried most of all about how much he has, or about how well she has done when it comes to money and stuff: “DON”T BE SUCH A FOOL!” Because we don’t know when death will come but we do know this: “we can’t take it with us.” And as Jesus says on another occasion to the disciples: “What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” (9:25).
And so, let us return to those opening questions: Is there an Old Testament God who is different from the New Testament God? Do we only find a God of judgment and punishment in the Old Testament, and a God of love and grace in the New Testament? No, the God we meet in the Old and New Testaments is the same God, revealed most clearly in Jesus Christ but consistently shown throughout the Scriptures. And the God we meet in the Scriptures, Old and New, is neither an avenging God who is quick to seek punishment or destruction, nor is our God a sentimental fool, who can be fooled by us, or who treats our foolishness and rebellion as of little or no consequence.
Instead, our God, as revealed in Hosea and Luke, is both a holy and a loving God, both a God of justice and judgment and a God of grace and mercy. God made us and loves us – but God also claims us. We are to have no other gods.God gives us a path to follow, a way to live – not because God is arbitrary and capricious, but because God made us, loves us, and knows what is best for us.
Hosea gives us a fitting metaphor for the love that God has for us: “They shall go after the Lord, who roars like a lion; when he roars, his children shall come trembling from the west...” (11:10). “Like a lion.” I don’t know if C.S. Lewis had in mind Hosea when he invented his Christ figure in the Chronicles of Narnia, but I think there is a reason that Aslan the lion has had such a strong impact on readers ever since the 1940s when the first of the Chronicles of Narnia was published.
In one of my favorite passages, one that Kerry and I have quoted before, the children are first hearing about Aslan from Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. After hearing the Beavers speak with hope and joy about Aslan’s return to Narnia, they are quite surprised – and concerned – to hear that Aslan is a lion. “Ooh,” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
Not safe but good. Aslan is no tame lion. But then in chapter 15 of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Susan and Lucy can roll on the ground with the resurrected Aslan and Lucy can say: “whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind.”
The love of Aslan reflects the love of the God revealed in Hosea and in Jesus Christ.God loves us with a fierce love, a love which is as tender as the love of a mother lifting her baby to her breast and a love which is as protective as the parent ready to catch his toddler after the little one has taken his first few steps. Our God has such a fierce love for us that God is anguished by our rebellion and may speak as sharply as Jesus speaks in the parable, as sharply as a parent yells out to her child when she runs out into a busy street.
Like a lion, God roars when we go astray with a roar that can be heard far away. It is the roar of love, of a wounded love, of a love that never gives up on us. It is a roar that was heard from the cross on Golgotha, and again on the third day. It is a roar that calls all of those feeling lost or in exile to come home – to be where we belong: in the armsof the One who made us and who loves us.
Can you hear it? Because to be “led by the sound of it toward home is to have more than enough reason to tremble with awe”[4] – and joy.
[1] Paul Simpson Duke, “Hosea 11:1-11: Homiletical Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Volume 3, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylors, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 293.
[2] Fred B. Craddock, Luke, Interpretation Series (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), 163.
[3] Ken Stern, “Why the Rich Don’t Give,” in Atlantic, April 2013, 75.
[4] Duke, 297.