Saints By Seven

Hosea 3

by Daniel Harrell

I’d say that with this being Super Bowl Sunday, most of your minds are on football. But if that were true you wouldn’t be here. So rather than thinking about whether the Saints can slow down Peyton Manning and the Colts tonight, imagine this scenario instead: A man walks into my office and informs me that the Lord told him to marry a woman with a pretty shady past. OK, she has a pretty shady present too. She’ll sleep with anybody. Stays faithful to nobody. Still, he loves her. God told him she’s the one. So he married her. Had three kids with her—though he’s not sure that the third one is his. She cheated on him―he doesn’t know how many times. And then she left him―left him with the kids but without the credit cards. She took them and maxed those out. And now the creditors are calling, and even the police. He took her to court. For all practical purposes they are divorced. He hasn’t seen her in months. The whole thing has been utterly humiliating and hurtful. Horrible, basically. But now he hears that she’s broke and homeless. So he’s thinking of taking her back. Despite everything, he still loves her. He wants to know what I think. I think he’s crazy. The woman is clearly messed up and needs professional help. Why he would want to open himself up to more hurt? And what about the children? But then he says that God told him to take her back. God told him to pay off all her debts. I tell him he’d better get some professional help too. There’s no way that God would ever tell him to do that. But then he tells me his name is Hosea.

You might wonder how a loving God could ever make a blameless man go through such misery, but then you already know the reason. The Lord commanded Hosea to marry this slatternly woman because he wanted Hosea to know how it felt for God to be married to Israel. Only then could Hosea prophesy with the pathos and the passion of God himself. Hosea had to suffer what God suffered so that he could speak for the Lord. Bad enough that Hosea had to endure adultery and abandonment from his wife―but now in chapter 3 God commands Hosea to take her back and do it all over again. Why? Because God still loves his people. He can’t help it. And no matter how horrible they behave toward him, he always takes them back. And make no mistake―they have treated him horribly. Hosea’s wife, Gomer, may have dumped him for other men. But the Israelites dumped God for what amounted to snack food. Verse 1; “…they turn to other gods and love their sacred raisin cakes.” Your NIV adds the word “sacred” to try and make Israel’s rejection not seem so unseemly. But there’s nothing sacred in the Hebrew text. Israel dumps God for a Twinkie.

How do you get over such rejection? How do you forgive such betrayal? Love is the answer―but love is what got you into the mess to begin with. Isn’t it better to move on? Cut your losses? Lick your wounds? Guard your heart? Live to love another day? Not here. God commands Hosea to “show your love to your wife again,” though the command is actually more forceful than that. The Hebrew literally says “go love that adulterous woman.” How does Hosea do that? Where does he get the strength and the love to suffer more humiliation and more hurt? He gets it from God who suffers humiliation out of his love for Israel. It’s as the apostle John wrote in the New Testament: “We love because God first loved us.” Or as the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “The love of Christ compels us.” Likewise, God’s love compels Hosea’s love. And it compels our love and makes us able to forgive. Now mercifully, in some cases, love and forgiveness are made easier because the ones who’ve hurt you confess their wrong and ask for forgiveness. But this is not one of those cases. There is nothing approaching repentance on Gomer’s part. Still, Hosea must love and forgive her? Why? Because God loves and forgives her. God loves and forgives Gomer and he loves and forgives Israel―which means that he loves and forgives Hosea too. Just as he loves and forgives you and me.

But isn’t this all a little dangerous? Unconditional forgiveness is so easily taken for granted and abused. How will Gomer learn her lesson if Hosea just lets her off the hook? Where’s the justice? I think it is important first to remember that to forgive is not to abandon justice. If anything, to forgive is to indict, to accuse. You only forgive people who’ve done something wrong. To forgive is to blame. Secondly, I think it’s important to remember the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is necessary for reconciliation to occur, but forgiveness is not dependent on reconciliation. It is a free gift given, even if reconciliation never happens. You do have to repent to receive forgiveness―you can’t be forgiven if you never confess your wrong. But repentance does not cause forgiveness. Forgiveness does not wait on the offender to repent or apologize. Forgiveness does not wait for the hurt to diminish or the scars to heal. It was while we were still sinners and enemies of God that Christ died for us. It is while your enemies are still your enemies that Jesus commands you love them. Is this hard to do? It is unbearably hard to do. It kills you. But it killed Jesus more. And it’s because he died for us that we can die to him. “Christ’s love compels us,” Paul wrote, “He died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” It is Christ’s suffering for the sake of forgiveness that makes our suffering doable. Christ’s love in us forgives through us, and that is why and how we forgive.

I was out in Minneapolis last weekend speaking at a church where I retold the story of a man I knew who was in a serious financial mess. He had delayed the sale of a house he owned for several years so that he wouldn’t have to evict two tenants, both of them professing Christians―brothers and sisters in Christ. Nevertheless, these Christian tenants put off paying their rent to this brother, offering one excuse after another, month after month, until they’d run up a back-rent of more than $30,000. Still willing to help, this man refinanced his mortgage in order to lessen their financial obligation. Eventually however, unable to sustain two mortgages on his own, he ended up having to sell the house and evict the tenants anyway. He called me because he wasn’t sure what to do about the back rent. It was causing him a ton of stress. My initial advice was to suggest he seek legal assistance and get what was rightfully owed him. It wouldn’t have been an unbiblical route, especially given that it was a last resort. But as a follower of Jesus I couldn’t help but also ask, albeit hesitantly, whether he’d considered just forgiving the debt. I hesitated because I knew most people would consider such a move enormously irresponsible, unfair and as far as the tenants were concerned, totally underserved. But I noted an immediate lightness in his voice at my suggestion. He sheepishly asked, “Would that be OK?” See, he also knew that to forgive such an enormous debt was irresponsible, unjust and clearly undeserved—which was precisely what made it feel so much like grace. I assured him that, yes, grace is always OK.

Afterwards, someone from the congregation walked up shaking his head. He told me his story about a trusted friend who swindled him not out of back rent, but of out of his entire life savings in Bernie Madoff fashion. He went to his minister who, like me, advised that he take his friend to court and get what was rightfully owed him. And doing so saved his life―though he obviously lost the friendship. Not that there was much of a friendship to lose. What kind of friend cheats you out of everything you own? I’m thinking, probably one like the wife who leaves you and the kids, runs up your credit cards and runs off with the snack food vendor. The good news is that God takes Israel to court. We read about that back in chapter 2. The hard news is that he does it in order to take her back. The Lord courts Israel in both senses of that word. His indictment is an invitation. He accuses in order to spur repentance. He forgives in order to invite reconciliation. God uses every art and tool to win a response that will make for a genuine reunion. He can’t help it. He loves his people. So he does whatever it takes. Even though it kills him. On a cross.

It’s Christ’s love in us that forgives us. It’s what makes forgiving others possible. “So I bought her back,” Hosea says, verse 2. “I paid off her debts with my own money even though I didn’t have to. I took her back into my home. I loved her. And I forgave her.” But again, to forgive is not to pretend as if nothing happened. To forgive someone implies that he or she is not a good person. There would need to be ground rules. Verse 3: Hosea told her, “You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will live with you.” A better translation has Hosea saying to Gomer, “you must have no sex with any man, nor I with you.” In other words, for this promiscuous woman it was time to go without. Cold fish. Cold turkey. A clean break. In Israel’s case: idolatry detox. Verse 4: No idols, no ephods, no sacred stones, no sacrifices, no princes, no kings. Ephods are liturgical vestments. Sacred stones are like monuments. Along with sacrifices, these were all parts of proper Israelite worship. But they had become corrupted by Israel using them in pagan worship. Princes and kings would have been fine, except that these were leaders of pagan nations whom Israel ran to instead of God for help. They had rejected the Lord and his gifts, turning his good gifts toxic. Sin does that. It gets all its power from the good things it perverts. It’s why we describe it with words like injustice or iniquity or ingratitude, disorder, disobedience, unfaithfulness, lawlessness and ungodliness.

But Israel’s deprivation was not an end in itself. Like all detox, its purpose is intended for good. A clean break was needed—deep enough and long enough to make a new beginning possible: a pure return, in all humility, to the Lord himself; a renewal of marriage that had seemed beyond all repair. God’s harsh indictment turns out to be an open invitation. He ferociously accuses in order to ferociously embrace. He unfairly and unconditionally forgives in order to spur repentance and pave the way for reconciliation. God’s mercy is as severe as it is generous. It killed Jesus, and it kills the sinner too. “Christ’s love compels us,” Paul wrote, “because we have concluded this: that Christ died for all; therefore all have died.” This would be Israel’s come-to-Jesus moment. Where is the Jesus they come to? Verse 5: “The Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the LORD and to his blessings in the last days.” The reference to “David their king” is a reference to the one who ultimately would inherit King David’s throne and crown, the one before whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess as Lord, Jesus Christ the risen king.

So what’s the takeaway for you and me? If you’re like me, you read chapter 3 and immediately identify with Hosea. You think of all the people in your life who have humiliated you and hurt you like Gomer hurt him. How do you forgive them? How can God ask you to do that? Even if to forgive is to indict and detoxify for the sake of repentance and reconciliation, it’s exhausting. Who’s got time for all that? Isn’t it better to move on? Cut your losses? Lick your wounds? Guard your heart? Live to love another day? Besides, what are the chances that forgiveness would work anyway? Most likely you’d just end up humiliated and hurt all over again, and how does that help anybody? Good for Hosea. But I’m not Hosea.

I’m Gomer. That’s the takeaway. Inasmuch as Israel’s story is our story too, we’re the adulterous wife, the unfaithful bride of Christ, the ones too willing to put everything else before our husband. We refuse to love, we take no time to care and take God’s grace for granted. We deliberately choose to do the same stupid things over and over again with little regard for the hurt we cause. It is me and you whom God indicts. You and me whom he blames. You and me whom he accuses. You and me whom he loves. He can’t help it. No matter how horribly we behave toward him―and make no mistake, we behave badly―God always takes us back. He spreads a table before us even though we act like his enemies. He forgives us and overflows our cup so that we might spill his grace even onto our own enemies. The only remaining question is whether his grace is enough to spur your repentance and return you to the Lord to fix the marriage. His indictment is an invitation. Come to Jesus and his table, confess your sins and receive his grace.

How I Met Your Mother

Hosea 2

by Daniel Harrell

There are few things uglier than divorce court. Couples who had pledged undying love to each other now only want each other dead. Heated courtroom battles rage over previously ridiculed wedding presents. Accusations fly over formerly adorable habits. And of course the kids are stuck in the middle and forced to choose sides, all the while watching the two most important people in their lives ruin everything. This being America, we’ve managed to turn divorce into entertainment. Three times a day in Boston, you can tune to WFXT to watch Divorce Court, now in its eleventh season. Viewers can witness firsthand the embittered fighting between husbands and wives. This week’s episodes featured one wife divorcing her husband for pawning her grandmother’s rosary beads. Another has a husband admitting to sneaking through his wife’s belongings where he found love letters and a picture of another man on her cell phone.

Of course you don’t have to watch Divorce Court on TV. There are plenty of places to turn away from such scandalousness. Unfortunately your Bible is not one of them. Hosea 2 is Biblical divorce court. Last Sunday I began a tour through the life of this prophet―a life embittered by his own obedience to the Lord. Because the most effective communicators are those who speak from experience, God gives Hosea an experience he would have never picked for his worst enemy. He commands Hosea to go out and [quote] “marry a whore, and get children with a whore.” Why? “Because the country itself has become nothing but a whorehouse by abandoning Yahweh.” Remarkably, Hosea goes out and does it. He enters a marriage that was as horrible as it was necessary. In his miserable marriage, Hosea empathized with God. He grew to understand that his own personal sorrow echoed God’s sorrow. Hosea suffered what God suffered—and therefore could speak for the Lord.

Chapter 2 works as a poetic replay of chapter 1. Same sordid beginnings. Same unexpected ending. The difference is that rather than viewing Israel’s predicament through the literal lens of Hosea’s predicament, chapter 2 features the Lord himself as the jilted husband. God takes Israel, his two-timing wife, to court and there instructs their children to denounce their mother. Who are the children here? There are three of them, represented by Hosea’s actual children whom the Lord named Jezreel, No Mercy and Not My People. Jezreel (which deliberately sounds like Israel), hearkened back to a time when Israel’s King Jehu was commanded to eliminate all idol worship, but he became enchanted with it instead, taking everybody else down with him for years afterward. Thus the Lord pronounced No Mercy and Not My People, for to God, idolatry was adultery of the highest order. Bad enough that idolatry credited other gods for creation and the provision of crops and rain. Worse that these other gods didn’t actually exist but were made (and made up) by human hands. Why? To make up your own gods means you can make up your own values and ethics too. You can do unto others however you want. You don’t have to deny yourself for anybody or anything. You can forgive whomever you like, or not. You can say whatever you want. You can keep all your money for yourself. You can sleep around. You can ignore needy people and not feel guilty―or at least pretend that you don’t feel guilty. All the while feeling good about yourself since you’re so religious.

It’s sad, really. Why do people chase after pleasures that are so selfish, yet capricious, hurtful, and ultimately disastrous―and then rationalize, minimize and blame everybody else? Hosea will write that we do it because the human heart is deceitful. We want what we want. Though we were made, theologian Richard Niebuhr wrote, “to stand in the presence of eternal, unending absolute glory, to participate in the celebration of cosmic deliverance from everything putrid, destructive and defiling, to rejoice in the service of the stupendous artist who flung universes of stars on canvas, sculptured the forms of angelic powers, etched with loving care miniature worlds within worlds… we throw away that heritage and are content with the mediocrity of an existence without greater hope than the hope for comfort and for recognition by transient others. Human beings made to be great in the service of greatness, make ourselves small by refusing the loving service of God; and in our smallness, we become very wicked and covetous of the pleasures that soon will be taken away.”

You’d think this would make God sad too. But instead, it just makes him mad. If ever you have loved and given yourself completely to another only to have that love betrayed and abandoned, then you know the hurt and the grief and the anger that ensue. Thus God angrily announces in chapter 2 that Israel is no longer his wife. Eugene Peterson taps into that anger with his own translation, The Message: “Haul your mother into court. Accuse her! She’s no longer my wife. I’m no longer her husband. Tell her to quit dressing like a whore, displaying her breasts for sale. If she refuses, I’ll rip off her clothes and expose her, naked as a newborn. I’ll turn her skin into dried-out leather, her body into a badlands landscape, a rack of bones in the desert. I’ll have nothing to do with her children, born one and all in a whorehouse. Face it: Your mother’s been a whore, bringing bastard children into the world. She said, ‘I’m off to see my lovers! They’ll wine and dine me, dress and caress me, perfume and adorn me!’ But I’ll fix her: I’ll dump her in a field of thorns, then lose her in a dead-end alley. She’ll go on the hunt for her lovers but not bring down a single one.”

Now a bit of metaphorical clarification is in order. If Israel is the adulterous wife, and her children are Israel the unfaithful children, who’s accusing whom? Most commentators make the distinction between the government, priests and kings of Israel as the mother, and the ordinary citizenry as its children. Thus having the children denounce the mother here is not unlike Massachusetts voters electing Scott Brown. Arrogant leaders who take voters for granted get their due. If such is the case in modern democracies, how much more in ancient Israel where God himself directly determined who sat on the throne? Facing the wrath of voters is one thing. Facing the wrath of God is another. This goes for everybody.

Understandably, the adulterous wife attempts a turnaround. Sounding a lot like the prodigal son in verse 7, she says, “I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.” But unlike the waiting father, God as the cuckolded husband knows better. He’s got history. He refuses to be taken in by fake sincerity or phony contrition. He continues to read off the charges.

Verse 8. “She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold—gifts which they then wasted as offerings to Baal.” Baal, remember, is kind of the catch-all name for Israel’s pagan idols. Baals were believed to be patrons of fertility and thus you had to pay homage to them if you wanted a bounteous crop come harvest time. This not only included the kinds of offerings and sacrifices you were supposed to pay God, but it also included having sex with temple prostitutes―a blatant and adulterous violation of sex as the expression of marital faithfulness. It was twisted stuff—made even more so by the belief that to have sex with these prostitutes was to have sex with the gods and somehow to tap into their virility for yourself. Like taking some ancient version of Viagra. Except that temple prostitution was not just personal sexual sin. It was a personal grab at divine power. Having an idol meant you had control of your personal universe, that you could do whatever you wanted, or so you thought.

In this way some suggest an analogy between ancient idolatry and modern science. Just as local idols were understood to account for natural phenomena in Israel’s day, so in our day science explains natural phenomena, and if you can explain natural phenomenon scientifically, who needs God? Moreover, if you can explain it you can eventually control it, or so we think. But if God is the author of nature, then he is the natural source of nature’s ability to do all that it does. A natural explanation is not a godless explanation because God made nature. As creatures made in God’s image, we are given power to creatively and humbly participate in the goodness of God’s creation. But whenever that participation becomes an arrogant and idolatrous power-grab―from atomic energy to genetic engineering―harm and disaster are genuine dangers.

Verse 9: “I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready. I will take back my wool and my linen,” says the Lord. “I will expose her nakedness before her lovers, all of whom will be helpless to help her.” The punishment will fit the crime. The Israelites literally uncovered their nakedness in temple prostitution as part of the Baal fertility rituals. Yahweh will, in effect, give them the nakedness they wanted, only not the way they wanted it. Yahweh will withhold the agricultural fertility they sought from Baal resulting in their own “nakedness”—a metaphor for destitution and shame and ultimately exile—all of which Baal is powerless to do anything about. Hosea foretells famine and finally God’s abandonment of Israel to the Assyrians, a military calamity that will finish off the northern kingdom.

It was a bitter lesson to be learned. And Hosea tried to warn them. It’s like the Ohio mother who just before Christmas called the cops on her 6-year-old daughter after she caught her shoplifting a package of stickers. “You’ve got to catch them when they first start if they do something wrong,” said the mom. Bloggers and child psychologists were predictably aghast, labeling the mother abusive and uncaring. (Though the mom did turn down the $30 reward from the store for catching a shoplifter.) I thought my own dad abusive and uncaring when he marched me back to the store from whence I’d lifted a candy bar as a 6-year-old. I had to shamefully confess my sin to the store owner and not only give back the candy bar, but pay for it too—a tough thing to do when you have no income. I hated it but have to admit it did me some good. Here I am a minister. It’s easy to read God’s punishment as abusive and uncaring too. He names Hosea’s kids No Mercy and Not My People. He decimates their fields, their country and allows them to be taken captive by their enemies. And yet this is not the end of the story. The Lord punishes Israel but he has never ceases to love her.

Nowhere is this more evident than in verse 14, where Hosea offers the third of three “therefores.” The first was in verse 6: “Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.” Israel deserved that. The second is in verse 9: “Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready.” Israel deserved that too. The third shows up in verse 14, where you rightly expect a deserving final declaration of divorce and retribution. But instead you get the gospel—an unexpected expression of mercy. “I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert…” Now for every Israelite, “desert” was a code word for abject failure. It was in the desert that their forebears so abysmally messed up on their way to the Promised Land. Despite being rescued from Egyptian slavery by God in truly miraculous fashion—ten plagues, Passover, Red Sea crossing, pillars of fire, the works—they rolled out a golden calf―an idol ―and showed their gratitude to it instead. It was adultery of the highest order. So why go back to the desert and risk all of that again? Because the desert was also the place where God and Israel had their first date. God takes Israel to court, but what he wants to do is court her. He uses every art and tool to win a response that will make reconciliation genuine. “I am going to speak tenderly to her.” I’m going to romance her and win her back. I will give her back her vineyards, roses and wine, and she will sing as she did when she came out of Egypt, before everything went wrong. It’s a chance for a do-over.

Hosea makes it sound so promising. Verse 16: “In that day,” declares the LORD, “you will call me ‘my husband’….” Verse 17: “I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips,” Verse 18: “I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety.” It does sound so promising―but it also sounds crazy. Ask any marriage counselor and they’ll tell you that going back to the beginning doesn’t fix anything that’s bad about a relationship. You have to fix the people involved.

Which is what God does. Verse 19: “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion.” God lavishes bridal gifts on his wife again, only the gifts he gives are the gifts of himself. Righteousness, justice, love and compassion are all core traits of the Lord. God gives his whole self to this new marriage. But God wasn’t the problem. Marriage is a two-way street. What about Israel? What’s going to make her faithful this time around? The answer is God. Verse 20: “I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.” It’s a shotgun marriage. Or better―a crucifixion marriage. God takes Israel back to the desert, but this time, rather than relying on her to keep faith, God keeps it for her through Christ. Jesus takes Israel’s place―he takes our place―at the altar. Jesus came to earth as God in the flesh to be sure, but he also came to earth as representative of all humanity. When Jesus confronts Israel’s temptations in the desert―satanic temptations to cheat on God by bowing to the devil himself―Jesus stays faithful. As our representative, his faithfulness becomes our faithfulness. His obedience becomes our obedience. And his death becomes our death and his resurrection becomes our resurrection too. God fixes his people. He fixes us. “I have been crucified with Christ,” is how the apostle Paul put it. “I no longer live. Jesus lives in me.”

And it is to Jesus in us that God responds. Verse 23: “I will show my love and mercy to the one I called ‘No Mercy.’ I will say to those called ‘Not my people, ‘‘You are my people’; and they will say, ‘You are my God.’” The whole thing sounds just like a renewal of marriage vows. And it is. Only this time, in Christ, the vows have been kept. The do-over has become a done deal. As the apostle Peter writes, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises [and serve] the one who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

Arranged Marriage

Hosea 1

Daniel Harrell

One of the most powerful aspects of our faith in Jesus is the realization that God himself, having worn human flesh, experienced firsthand the struggles and hardships of human life. “He was despised and rejected by people, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering,” Isaiah wrote. Likewise the book of Hebrews, speaking of Jesus, says “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tested in every way, just as we are….” To pray for the suffering people of Haiti is to pray to a God who understands suffering. To pray for your own troubles and grief is to pray to a God who gets it. As the old spiritual sings: “Nobody knows the trouble I seen, nobody knows but Jesus.” True, as Martin Luther King Jr. also recognized, “The struggle is still there. It gets discouraging sometimes. It gets very disenchanting sometimes. …It seems to mean nothing. And so often … you are left lonesome; you are left discouraged; you are left bewildered.” But Jesus knows the trouble I seen. He knows the loneliness. He knows the discouragement. He knows how you feel. And there is power in that.

But what about God’s feelings? That’s sort of an odd thing to ask. “Who is the unchangeable Almighty that he would be subject to the changing tides of emotion?” And yet page through the Bible and you read over and over again about a God who gets hurt and aggrieved and angered by the infidelity of his people whom he loves. Whenever we suffer personal trouble or disaster, the tendency is to wonder why God doesn’t do something. Does he not care? Does he not really love us? But open the book of Hosea and God asks the same questions about us. If we are people who belong to God, then why don’t we do something to show it? Do we not care? Do we not truly love the Lord? How do you think this makes God feel?

Having completed a year-and-a-half walk through Mark’s gospel, I thought it time to turn back to the Old Testament, which I would like to do through Epiphany and Lent by taking us through Hosea. Based on the data in verse 1, Hosea’s prophetic career likely ran from around 760-710 BC. It was a tumultuous time in Israel’s history—as is usually the case whenever prophets show up. King Jeroboam II had reigned over a booming economy, political stability and border security; and yet as we know from our own recent history, booming economies mask deep rifts between rich and poor. Political stability is a moving target. And secure borders are mostly a state of mind. Once Jeroboam died, chaos ensued. The economy tanked. Successions to the throne came by way of assassinations. National security was threatened by a burgeoning and menacing Assyria. Why didn’t God do something? Perhaps he would have had his people honored their vows and kept the faith. But instead they didn’t, choosing instead to place their faith in other lovers—silly idols carved out of sticks and stones.

It sounds ridiculous. How could anybody ever choose a thing over a person, a chiseled rock over a real relationship? You’ve probably seen the Lite Beer commercial that spoofs an e-harmony ad with this sappy couple dancing and hugging with goofy music chirping in the background. The grinning man remarks, “What can I say? I have discriminating taste.” His gorgeous girlfriend adoringly gazes at him and agrees. They dance a little more. Then he says, “I never thought I’d find the one, I mean, I found ones that I liked in the past, but none that I really loved!” “Until now?” she asks with assured anticipation. “Until now,” he says, as he raises his bottle of Lite beer. Naturally she furiously storms off and we laugh at the absurdity. But it’s a nervous laugh. Who hasn’t ignored or snubbed another person, if not for a beer, then for football on television, or a computer game, or a new iPhone app, or any other number of personal pursuits. Actual people can be so time-consuming, and so demanding.

And what about God? Sure, he forgives your sins and guarantees an eternity of good life, but he also tells you to love your enemies and work for justice and be generous with your money and take time for the poor. He insists that you speak the truth, honor your relationships and deny your own needs for others’ sake. Who’s got the time and energy for all of that? Better to have gods you can manage; ones that let you do whatever makes you happy.

When the Israelites first entered the Promised Land, they found it overrun with an idolatry tied to the seasons and cycles of nature. That these gods supposedly controlled the death and fertility of nature, led to all kinds of twisted rituals, from forced prostitution to even human sacrifice. God warned the Israelites to sweep the Promised Land clean of this scourge, but not all of it was so bad. A lot of it felt good. Why deny yourself if you can please yourself instead? Why submit yourself to the will of your Creator when you can have creation submit to you? What’s so wrong with playing around a little? Is it such a terrible thing to have a few idols in my life? Is it so bad to do whatever makes me happy?

Hosea answers yes. Israel’s idolatry wasn’t just playing around; it was adultery of the highest order. If you have ever loved and had that love betrayed and abandoned, a marriage vow broken, then you know the hurt and the grief and the anger that ensue. But when you’re the adulterer, you rationalize and minimize the pain and grief and anger you cause. Therefore, in order that the people might understand the hurt their infidelity had caused, that they might know how God feels, the Lord recruited Hosea. But instead of just sending Hosea to preach some hellfire sermons, he sends Hosea through personal hell. Whether it’s the former addict, the ex-con, the deceived employee or the cheated spouse—nobody communicates with deeper conviction and authenticity than the ones who have been there. So God takes Hosea there. Verse 2: “Go, marry a whore, and get children with a whore; for the country itself has become nothing but a whorehouse by abandoning Yahweh.”

What if the first words you ever heard from God were “find yourself an unfaithful spouse”? Can you imagine? So much for e-harmony. No way a God so committed to family values would command such a thing. You must be hearing things. But what if you were actually hearing God? What if you could be sure that it was his voice telling you this? I bet you wouldn’t do it. Who would? If you’ve ever been in an unfaithful marriage you wouldn’t wish it upon your worst enemy. And yet the astonishing thing—at least for those of us unaccustomed to straightforward obedience—is that Hosea goes out and does it, for better or worse. And it does get worse. Not only does Hosea purposely marry a whore, but he has three children with her after which (or during which) she cheats on him with another string of men. She does get her due, thank God, by getting dumped herself and hung out to dry. But then God ridiculously tells Hosea to go find her and take her back! This had to be excruciating. Gut-wrenching. Horrible. And necessary. For as time went by, Hosea understood how his own personal misery and sorrow echoed the sorrow of God. Hosea suffered what God suffered—and could therefore speak for the Lord.

Hosea’s marriage is the message. His own children become prophesy for the people. God names all the kids. The first, a son, he calls Jezreel, verse 4: “because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of Israel.” Jehu and the massacre at Jezreel refers back to 2 Kings 9 and 10 where King Jehu of Israel assumed the throne by making a bloodbath out of the notorious King Ahab and Queen Jezebel along with all their supporters and all the idolatrous priests who served them. Read the passage for yourself and you can’t help but be shocked by the violence. You conclude that Jehu clearly overreached in his bloodthirsty vengeance, except that you also read that God both commanded and commended the whole slaughter. Like it or not, divine wrath is ferocious when it comes to the kinds of evil Ahab and Jezebel perpetrated. So then why is the house of Jehu being punished and Israel destroyed? Jehu’s punishment is not for the massacre at Jezreel, but for failing to learn its lesson. No sooner was the pagan idolatry eliminated than Jehu and his successors began to practice it for themselves.

Why the fascination? Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel writes that pagan gods have always appealed to the imagination and are beloved by poets, painters and I would add movie-makers (if you’ve had a chance to see Avatar in 3-D yet). Heschel asserts that the idea of one God who created heaven and earth is too hard to handle. There is such multiplicity and variety of beings, so many thousands of communities and millions of people, along with countless numbers of galaxies and stars—how can there be only one God? Throw in notions of the Trinity and the Incarnation and the Cross and the Second Coming, not to mention all the commandments and all the suffering and self-denial—no wonder idolatry is so easy on the imagination—and so desirable too.

Avatar paints the picture of a luscious, anti-technological fantasy land (created by the latest advances in computer technology ironically) where life in lived in harmonious (and literal) sync with nature, albeit a fake nature. Movie critic Ty Burr, in reviewing Avatar, writes how the movie “brings us one step closer to what has long been the holy grail of our pop culture industrial complex: Fully immersive mass-appeal dream-worlds. So what happens to reality when the fantasy outpaces it? You remember reality, don’t you? The place we live when we don’t have our heads stuck in a TV screen or a cellphone or a Wii or an iTouch or a computer screen or any of the hundreds of digital interfaces we encounter every day?” It’s not a rhetorical question. The week after “Avatar’’ opened, Burr received this e-mail:

I am a 20-year-old male, who lives a normal life in this normal world. But after seeing so many movies that have awed me, this one just has done something I can’t explain. The non-realistic nature of it makes me want to live it, to actually go to the wonderful place that I have seen in the film. To take my normal, unsatisfying life and transform it into that of which cannot be. It burns so much that once I returned home from the theater it brought tears to my eyes . . . Hopefully one day we will have technology to go into such a world of beauty and amazement.

This is the fascination of idolatry—the power of non-realistic realities we craft for ourselves. As Ty Burr writes, “we’ve become so adept at building fantasy worlds that waking life has become a burden—a gray limbo to which we resentfully return, sharing it as we do with ugly headlines, unpleasant bosses, and all those other people who, sadly, aren’t us. Why bother returning at all, when the entertainment omniverse is at our fingertips 24/7? Why jack out when the movies will be offering total immersion playing to all of us individually, when 3-D will be arriving on the family TV within a few years? Now that screens are everywhere—on phones, in restaurants, in cabs, in public bathrooms— we don’t have to think about realities beyond our control. We don’t have to think at all. Our entertainment wonderworlds are …for many an addictive replacement for actually living one’s life. What’s depressing is how masturbatory and lonely so many of these experiences are, playing for our sole amazement while keeping actual humans at bay.”

It’s a movie! Or in Israel’s case, it’s a statue! A wooden figurine. A tinker toy. Take off the glasses. The God of Abraham is a real live 3-D deity right here who invites you into an actual relationship of love and hope with a flesh and blood Jesus instead of with a vacuous collection of digitized pixels or a silly trinket carved out of rock.

But alas, a relationship with a 3-D God feels too burdensome and grey. Sure, he forgives your sins and guarantees an eternity of good life, but he also tells you to love your enemies and work for justice and be generous with your money and take time for the poor. He insists that you speak the truth, honor your relationships and deny your own needs for others’ sake. Who’s got the time and energy for all of that? It’s too hard to do—and so we don’t do it.

Therefore Hosea and Gomer have a daughter named “No Mercy” because there will be no more mercy from God. How can this be? What parent could ever abandon refuse to love their child? What kind of father would ever abandon his daughter—not to mention name her no mercy? And yet that’s what we read in verse 6: “I will no more have mercy on the house of Israel, I will no more show love that I should forgive them at all.” And as if that weren’t awful enough, another kid has to be born into this troubled marriage whom God names “Not My People,” which plenty of people understood to mean “Not My Kid.” Some commentators believe that the name meant that Gomer had already started sleeping around again and that this third child wasn’t Hosea’s son at all. Heap humiliation and scandal onto the betrayal and adultery and can you imagine the deep hurt and sorrow Hosea feels? If you can then you can imagine how God feels. And you can understand why he seems so distant and absent when trouble and disaster strike.

Except that when you go to the very next verse you read “the Israelites will be like sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. And in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called children of the living God.’” What? Scholars insist this has to be a mistake—a later addition by some rabbi who felt bad for his congregation. How can anybody so betrayed and abandoned by his loved ones to the point of pronouncing “no mercy” and “not mine” make such a turnaround? The first hint comes in verse 7 where the Lord says he will save the house of Judah. In a classic power struggle following the reign of King Solomon, Solomon’s feuding sons had split the kingdom in half. The northern half, to whom Hosea preached, was called Israel while the southern half was called Judah. That Hosea would hold out hope for Judah is not due to Judah’s stronger faith—they were as idolatrous as Israel. The hope is because of God’s promise. Judah is the home of King David, the land and the line from which God promised ultimate salvation. And because God always keeps his promises, we eventually read: “Unto you is born in the city of David, a Savior who is Christ the Lord” A genuine, 3-D savior, God in the flesh, who died on a cross for the sake of a mercy so unimaginable that it must be real.

How does God feel? The apostle Paul put it this way: “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners—idolaters and adulterers—Christ died for us.” In God’s eyes you are more wicked than you could ever fathom. And in Christ God loves you more than you could ever hope.

Sermon Backlog

OK so Advent has been busy. Here (at last) are the rest of the Advent sermons. Merry Christmas to all!

Heirs of Hope
Fourth Sunday of Advent
by Daniel Harrell

As with most every Christmas, the angels’ song of “peace on earth” is being mocked again―this year with suicide bombs going off daily in Pakistan and Iraq and the United States announcing a troop escalation in Afghanistan. Ironically, President Obama accepted his Nobel Prize for Peace right after authorizing the military buildup. To the President’s credit, he did acknowledge the irony, remarking in his acceptance speech how, “The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice.” In other words, in the real world, when it comes to peace, war is sometimes required. Ironically again, New York Times commentator David Brooks labeled Obama’s speech as a classic example of Christian realism. And I thought, waging war for the sake of peace may be realistic from a foreign policy perspective, but since when is it Christian?

Turns out that Brooks was referring to the theology of the American Cold War theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr is best known to members of AA; he’s the author of the serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity/ To accept the things I cannot change;/ The courage to change the things that I can;/ And the wisdom to know the difference.” Niebuhr’s theology of Christian realism is characterized as the responsibility as to take steady, faithful steps forward in an inevitably flawed world. You could hear this theology in Obama’s speech. He described how “adhering to [the] law of love” (“doing unto others as you would have them do unto you”) “has always been the core struggle of human nature.” “We are fallible;” he said, “we make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil.” However, to live as fallen people in a fallen world is no reason to despair. “We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place."

Many trace Christian realism back to the 13^th century theologian Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas set forth the principle of double effect, which basically states that when a decision has to be made where the act will have both a good and an evil effect, the moral decision must be made on the principle that the good effect outweighs the evil. It’s the main principle behind the theory of just war—to which Obama alluded. Yet Aquinas developed his own theology based upon his reading of Scripture, passages such as the one we read from Paul’s letter to Titus. Paul writes that followers of Jesus must submit themselves to rulers and authorities―even if the rulers and authorities are Roman tyrants. After all, this what Jesus did. His submission to Roman rule was the epitome of double effect. The evil of his unjust death was outweighed by the good of his atoning sacrifice for human sin. “The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice.”

No doubt some of you are checking your calendars: Isn’t this the Sunday before Christmas? There’s a beautiful snow outside with lights all aglow. Where’s my manger? How about some shepherds? I came to hear some joy to the world! Why are we reading Titus? Interestingly, this text from Titus is actually assigned for Christmas by the Christian Lectionary—a schedule of readings for each Sunday of the year shared by churches the world over. Park Street doesn’t follow the Lectionary as a rule, but I do check it from time to time to see what’s being read in churches that do. And I was surprised to see the Titus text too. The reason it’s listed is verses 4-7. In Greek these verses comprise a single, poetic sentence leading many scholars to conclude that this is some sort of early Christian hymn or creed. Paul calls it a “trustworthy saying.” It is as tight a summary of the gospel as exists anywhere in the Bible—which is what makes it so appropriate for Christmas. Christmas is about nothing if it’s not about Jesus coming into the world to save sinners.

Titus was one of Paul’s converts who accompanied him to the island of Crete to spread this gospel. Paul left Titus to finish the work, which turned out to be no easy job. Word on the street was that “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes and lazy gluttons”—a designation that Paul cited and even agreed with in chapter 1. And yet, to live as fallen people in a fallen world is no reason to despair. There was hope even for Cretans. Paul and Titus knew this firsthand. In verse 3, Paul writes that all Christians were Cretans once―stupid and stubborn, dupes of sin, ordered every which way by our glands, going around with a chip on our shoulder, hated and hating back. But then came the come-to-Jesus moment; or more accurately, the Jesus-come-to-us moment. Paul writes, “…the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared and he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” He gave us a good bath in the Holy Spirit and we came clean as new people, reborn and renewed and made right with God. No longer rebels and enemies, we were adopted as children and put in the will. Paul calls us heirs in hope of eternal life. In the Bible, hope is never “I hope so” but always “I know so” because the hope we have is in Christ. We’re trust fund kids with guaranteed inheritances. As Paul put it in chapter 2, “we wait for the happy fulfillment of our hope in the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Paul was absolutely convinced that Jesus was coming back soon. This conviction affected everything. For him, the present period between Christ’s first and second coming was just a turnaround period, the time it took for the future to fill up the present. Paul knew it was coming, but he hated the wait, if only because he was so excited about it happening. It’s like being a kid at Christmas, eagerly sitting perched atop the steps overlooking the Christmas tree, unable to sleep. The good thing, at least from my parents perspective, was that my waiting usually inspired good behavior. True, I knew that my parents would come through with my presents anyway―I was their kid―but why risk it? In a similar fashion, Paul calls God’s children in Titus to be obediently wait, to be ready to do whatever is good, to be ready to do honest work, speak bad of nobody, avoid quarreling, be considerate, show courtesy and genuine humility. Paul is clear that while there is nothing you can do to earn your salvation, you must still do something to show you’re received it.

But how do you do that as fallen people in a fallen world? Well, technically, we’re not fallen people anymore. We’ve been bathed and reborn. And yet one of the paradoxes of the Christian faith is that the very people who’ve been bathed and reborn still need a bath. Using another analogy, Paul described the Christian life as having to run a race he’d already won. The problem is that we run the race more like hamsters on a wheel of sin and forgiveness and sin and forgiveness. Rather than treating grace as motivation for obedience, we treat the Bible’s commands as unreachable ideals only good for making us feel guilty. But grace is not supposed to make you feel guilty. It’s supposed to inspire you and empower you to do better. When Paul says “to do whatever is good, speak bad of nobody, avoid quarreling, be considerate, show courtesy and genuine humility,” he’s not being idealistic. You can actually do that that. It’s hard, but you can do it.

The Catholic mystic Thomas Merton once wrote: “It is not complicated to lead the spiritual life. But it is difficult. We are blind, and subject to a thousand illusions. We must expect making mistakes almost all the time. We must be content to fall repeatedly and to begin again to try to deny ourselves, for the love of God. It is when we are disappointed at our own mistakes that we tend most of all to deny ourselves for the love of ourselves. We want to shake off the hateful thing that has humbled us. In our rush to escape the humiliation of our own mistakes, we run head first into the opposite error, seeking comfort and compensation. And so we spend our lives running back and forth from one attachment to another. If that is all our self-denial amounts to, our mistakes will never help us. The thing to do when you have made a mistake is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.”

This is Christian realism: living as bathed and reborn people in a fallen world, as unrealistic as that may seem. In a world of TMZ and Tiger Woods, snark and sickopaths; doing good and being courteous and humble sounds ridiculous―I men, have you met my family?―it sounds so ridiculous that it has to be gospel.

After all, there is nothing more ridiculous than an angel of the Lord showing up to an impoverished unwed teenage girl with news that God was going to get her pregnant and she’d give birth to the savior of the world. But still Mary rejoiced at the news, praising God for the great things he has done, even as she and her people were being beat down and bankrupted by Roman domination. In a song we have come to recognize as the Magnificat, Mary sings of the Lord’s salvation growing in her womb: “God has bared his arm and performed mighty deeds; He has scattered the proud, he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” And as is typical of Biblical prophecy, Mary confuses her verb tenses. Instead of singing about a God who will lift up the lowly and will fill the hungry, a God who will bring down the mighty and will send the rich away empty, Mary sings as if all these things had happened already. Jesus isn’t even born yet and already she’s declaring victory. That’s because Biblical hope is hope in Christ. It’s like DVR-ing the Patriots game only to have somebody slip you the score in advance. Sure it spoils the suspense, but dang if you don’t feel more confident about the outcome when you finally do get around to watching that game. Mary is so confident that God’s going to win, she can sing as though He already has.

Of course the victory Mary declares hardly looked like a victory. Her own life went from triumphant singing to scandalous hand-wringing. Her husband Joseph considered divorcing her since everybody knew the baby wasn’t his (and nobody was going to believe God did it). Caesar’s coerced relocation induced Mary to give birth in a feed trough. And as for the Son of God himself, rather than toppling tyrants, Jesus gets toppled himself. Instead of lifting up the humble, Jesus gets humiliated himself. But that’s what the gospel looks like. Even in heaven. Turn to the last pages of the New Testament and you’d expect to find a risen Jesus all ferocious and victorious in heaven, an Aslan the Lion figure, especially since he gets announced that way. Yet when Jesus shows up what you see is not a ferocious King of the Beasts but a bleeding baby of beasts, a vulnerable lamb having been butchered. It doesn’t seem to be much of a victory. But that’s what the gospel looks like. A Lion conquers by inflicting death, but the Lamb conquers by dying. The Successor to King David’s rides out to wage war, but the Lamb of God suffers all the casualties.

Sure, I wish that I lived in a world where 30,000 more troops were not being sent to a war-ravaged country where evil men seem convinced that driving a car loaded with explosives into a crowded mosque is the best way to make a point―not to mention flying planes into skyscrapers. I wish I lived in a world where the richest 10% of the population own more than 85% of the world’s household wealth. I wish I lived in a world where the richest get richer by selling snake oil securities and reaping outrageous bonuses only to have hard-working tax-payers have to bail them out. I wish I lived in a world where breathable air and drinkable water didn’t take a back seat to industrialization and economic power. I wish I lived in a world where so much of that power wasn’t corrupt and abused. But that’s not the real world―at least not yet. However, it is a world I can hope for because my hope is in Christ. And as long as I can hope I can wait. And if I can wait, I can live like a hopeful person.

President Obama offered a glimpse of what this looks like. “Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he’s outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school―because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's dreams.” It reminded me another letter Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” Death is at work so that resurrection can work.

Christ came at Christmas in humility and weakness, only to die as victim and enemy on account of the human sins he bore. A Lion conquers by inflicting death, but the Lamb conquers by dying. The Successor to King David’s rides out to wage war, but the Lamb of God suffers all the casualties. However death is at work so that resurrection can work. Salvation comes not by political uprising but by Jesus rising up from the dead and bringing with him a new heaven and a whole new earth. Jesus takes our blame and wins our race―and all that’s left for us is to run the race we’ve already won. As long as our hope is in Christ we can wait. And if we can wait, we can live like a hopeful people. We can run.

Myrrh
Third Sunday of Advent
by Daniel Harrell

It’s one thing to get all you ever wanted for Christmas. It’s quite another thing to get what you never wanted. To guard against the latter, my wife’s family has this helpful tradition of making gift lists with the exact specifications and locations of acceptable presents. It makes for a very stress-free Christmas on both the giving and receiving ends. However, such practicality deletes the unpredictability that was always a part of Christmas in my house. Our family placed a high value on insightfulness and understanding. It’s one thing to get someone the perfect gift because they told you exactly what to get, quite another to know someone so well that you can figure it out for yourself. It is more risky, I know. It requires that you actually pay attention to the people in your family. That you understand their needs. That you know what makes them happy. That you really care about them enough to pick up on the little things. Which is why I just give cash. I’ve blown it too many times.

I had to laugh at the latest MasterCard commercial with Colts’ quarterback Peyton Manning and actress Alyson Hannigan. My patriotic dislike of the Colts notwithstanding, the commercial reminded me so much of me. Take a look.



Nevertheless, some Christmases I get in the Christmas spirit for the gift-giving challenge. A few years back, just before Christmas, my grandfather, rest his soul, died after a battle with Alzheimer’s. The family gathered at the funeral home to honor his life and bid him safe passage to glory, taking turns to view the open casket containing a body that never looks like the person―which perhaps is how it should be. Afterwards, reflecting upon our own mortality, my wife Dawn­―who is an avid fan of both Tolkien and Norse mythology―mentioned off-handedly how when it comes her time to go, she’d like to be buried holding a sword. And I thought: Jingle bells! What a perfect chance to show Dawn how well I pay attention and understand her! How well I know what she really wants! How well I pick up on the little things. So I jumped online and Googled broadswords and lo and behold, eBay was stocked to the hilt. I found the perfect present.

While this was hard to wrap and disguise under the tree, I managed to pull it off. Christmas morning came and Dawn tried to guess what it was. She thought maybe an extension for the vacuum cleaner. Or an ironing board. Something sexy like that. Boy was she in for a surprise! She eagerly unwrapped it―unsheathed it―and I saw that look in her eyes. I could tell she was thrilled. She hardly knew what to say. “A sword. You bought me a sword. Why did you buy me a sword?” I said, “remember how you mentioned that when you died you wanted to be buried holding a sword? Now you have one!” “Well, thank you, dear. How sweet. It’s good to get those funeral arrangements out of the way early. It’s a shame Santa couldn’t get a casket down the chimney too.” “Oh, don’t be silly,” I said. We don’t―have―a―chimney. Wait a minute. Was she being sarcastic? Nah. She loved it. I could tell. She couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards. She’d just lie there in bed with her eyes wide open clutching that sword in her hand, staring at me in shock. I could tell she was excited. She was so excited that she could hardly eat. She refused to put a single morsel of anything I cooked in her mouth for the next several weeks. She wouldn’t ride with me in the car either. Though come to think of it, that was a little weird.

I wonder how Mary felt when the magi rolled out their third gift of myrrh. On the one hand, myrrh was a luxury aromatic spice fit for a priest. It was used to anoint a Jewish high priest for service. That certainly fit. The Magi had come to worship the newborn king, but Jesus was the newborn priest too. To be priest is to intercede and make sacrifices to God for the sake of his people. But on the other hand, myrrh was also used to anoint dead bodies. In a day before funeral homes, preservatives and caskets, myrrh kept corpses from stinking. Was this any present to give to a baby? What would you do as a mother if someone showed up to your baby shower bearing embalming fluid? Why not just give Mary a sword too?

Actually, that would come a few weeks later. Joseph and Mary took Jesus to the Temple to be presented to God as the Torah commanded of every firstborn male. While there, an aged priest named Simeon, filled with the Holy Spirit enough to recognize Jesus as the Savior he’d been waiting for, let loose praising God. He blessed Mary too―only his blessing was about as welcome as that box of myrrh. Simeon said to Mary, “a sword will pierce your soul too.” “Too” because Mary, along with Jesus, was due to suffer deep anguish: Mary at the loss of her son. Jesus at the loss of his life. After his dreaful death, there was no suitable place for Jesus to be buried, just as there had been no place for him to be born. A sympathetic Pharisee named Joseph offered up a spare burial tomb, and another Pharisee named Nicodemus offered the myrrh. The Magi were right after all.

Simeon was right too. A sword no doubt pierced Mary’s heart. What mother can ever endure the death of her child? As for Jesus, the sword he suffered was the cross on which he was killed. Like a sword, the cross was an instrument of death. Author Andy Crouch reminds that there were crosses long before there was the cross. The Romans designed it in world in which rebellion against the empire’s peace needed to be brutally and publically punished. But what began in the minds of some as a grim necessity, was perverted in Jesus’ case into an instrument of senseless violence against the innocent. Jesus was “literally impaled on the worst that the world could do—an instrument of torture that stood for all the other dead ends of history, from spears to bombs, from gas chambers to water boards. There is nothing good that can be affirmed about the cross; it was designed to extinguish life in most horrifying fashion. The cross represents the culmination of human history gone wrong. If “the hopes and fears of all the years” were met in Jesus birth, they were shattered at Jesus’ death. On the cross, Jesus suffered the full weight of human rebellion―not against Rome―but against God. And yet, as Andy puts it, “The strangest and most wonderful paradox of the biblical story is that its most consequential moment is not an action but a passion—not a doing but a suffering.” Jesus is priest, but he is also the sacrifice.

What kind of Christmas present is this? You come expecting birth but all you get is death? The great American poet TS Eliot, in his poem Journey of the Magi, asked, “were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

And yet in another strange and wonderful paradox of the biblical story, this death―our death―is also our birth. The Nicodemus who brought the myrrh for Jesus’ burial is the same Nicodemus whom Jesus told that he needed to be born again. This made no sense to Nicodemus, of course, how can someone already born enter his mother’s womb a second time? Jesus answered that the Spirit gives birth to spirit, by which he meant God makes it possible. God turns death into new birth through the cross. The full weight of human rebellion―our rebellion―suffered by Jesus, dies and gets buried with Jesus. And then he rises from the dead three days later, bringing with him the full weight of God’s redemption, the full weight of God’s grace and forgiveness―for us. It is this redemption, this grace, that makes spiritual rebirth possible. As we will sing tonight, “born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them―give us―second birth.” A new birth, a new beginning, a new life, a new start―starting now: It’s all you could ever want for Christmas. And with Jesus, all you could ever want is what you always get.

O Little Town of Bethlehem (Micah 5)
Second Sunday of Advent
by Daniel Harrell

Tonight’s installment from Micah features one of the most familiar passages in all of the Old Testament. We hear it read every Advent in Matthew’s Christmas story. You know it well: After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, wise men from the east visit Herod—Rome’s Judean puppet ruler. They’d seen a star which according to their astrological calculations indicated the birth of the legitimate king of the Jews. They wanted to know his location so that they could go and pay homage. The maniacal King Herod, insanely jealous for keeping Rome’s hand up his back, was deeply disturbed. He feigned due interest in the newborn king, but assassination was on his mind. Checking with his religious advisors—the Jewish chief priests and teachers of the law—Herod confirmed what Micah had indeed foretold. The Christ would be born in the little town of Bethlehem, the least of the clans of Judah. Or as Matthew put it, “by no means least,” since Matthew knew how his gospel was going to turn out.

An angel gives the Magi a heads up. They bypass Herod on their way home. Heavenly heralds of peace on earth and goodwill among people notwithstanding, the hoodwinked Herod furiously goes off on his infanticidal rampage. Often overlooked due to the gruesomeness of Matthew’s account is how the ones who actually worshipped the King of the Jews were the Gentile Magi. The church marks this irony with the holy day of Epiphany. However, the Magi’s adoration of Christ was not a complete surprise. Micah predicted that back in chapter 4. He foresaw how “many nations will come and say, ‘Let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.’” Granted, the manger wasn’t much of a mountain yet, but the idea is the same: God had come in Christ to draw all nations to himself.

In Micah 4, “peace on earth and goodwill among all people” was also foreshadowed. The mountain of the Lord, the holy Zion, rises up above all other heights as the apex of righteousness. All nations stream to it, learn from it, live by it. God’s truth emanates from a new Jerusalem and pervades all life: politics are no longer the love of power but the love of service. Economics are motivated by generosity and equity rather than by bottom lines. Justice governs with integrity and honesty. The Lord himself settles the disputes of all nations. In turn they hammer their swords into shovels and their spears into rakes and hoes. Everyone tends their own garden plot. Everyone sits under their own shade tree. Nothing causes anyone any fear. Life is lived in amity and in prosperity—a prosperity not defined by excess but by access. Everyone has enough. And because everyone has enough, nations do not take up swords to fight or shields to defend; they do not train for war anymore. History no longer repeats itself. Shalom takes hold.

Micah’s vision of this peaceable future generated intense longing in Israel for the advent of God’s salvation. However this longing grew longer with each passing century—by the time of Jesus’ birth it’d been seven centuries since Micah’s prophesy. Given such long longing, you’d have thought the Jewish religious leaders, upon hearing the Magi’s report and knowing their Bibles as they did, would have been especially anxious to learn the identity of their salvation. But sadly, as is too often the case, knowing your Bible is one thing, believing it enough to actually do what it says is something else.

This certainly applied to Israel’s history. So far in Micah, their spiritual condition was not healthy. Micah indicted God’s chosen people for blatantly despising their chosen-ness. They treated God’s free gift of grace as a free pass to do as they pleased. They deliberately confused God’s favor with favoritism, cloaking their disobedience in a religious façade. They contorted their theology in order to justify their deceitful behavior. In the name of God, his people exploited the poor, extorted the land, made treaties with tyrants, corrupted justice and selfishly lined their own pockets. In turn, the Lord, not one for having His name so taken in vain, particularly by those who should know better, doomed his elect to inescapable ruin.

However their fall was not their finale. God’s justice and fury against sin is not finally about getting even, but about finally getting His people back to himself. As Micah makes clear, the trajectory of God’s justice bends toward peace; it bends toward reconciliation and redemption. Sin may be relentless, but it’s not nearly as relentless as grace. God’s long-suffering love that inspired Micah’s vision of shalom would likewise inspire his people toward the firm resolve of which we read in chapter 4, verse 5: “Other people may choose to live as they please, chasing after bogus idols and lies; but as for us, we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever.”

Of course, experience teaches that to actually “walk in the name of the Lord” can be a rocky road. Genuine faith in Jesus confines you to the sidelines of society; you’re marginalized in the halls of power, irrelevant in the halls of academia, unpopular at parties and ironically treated as trouble at Christmas. “Sure, Christ the Savior is born but do you have to get all religious about it?” Micah foresaw this too. He refers to the genuinely faithful as a remnant, language that can bring to mind leftover carpet―doormats on which people wipe their dirty feet. Remnant life is an alternative life grounded in public faithfulness to Jesus. It refuses to concede or accommodate to the corrosive values of prevailing culture; values related to wealth, power, luxury, achievement, self-indulgence or excessiveness. Remnants are real live communities comprised of people who believe their Bibles and actually obey them: keeping promises, genuinely loving their enemies, saying their prayers, making peace, speaking truth and heeding it. They’re communities where the poor and sinner are welcomed, where burdens are borne with mercy, where morals get practiced, where having enough is not having it all, and where righteousness is worth suffering for. They are communities of the cross.

Remnant life can be hard. Micah compared it to a woman in labor. However, in doing so he infuses hardship with purpose. No mother cradling her child, even after the most excruciating labor, would ever say that her suffering was not worth it. The Israelites’ labor under the thumbs of the Assyrians evoke from Micah a call to “marshal the troops” in chapter 5 and verse 1—an overly optimistic order given the circumstances. With the use of Hebrew homonyms, the sentence can also be translated “gash yourself in grief” which probably coincides better with Israel’s predicament. We read that the Assyrians will “strike the ruler of Israel on the cheek.” This was no mere slap in the face. Israel stood defenseless. Their boundaries would be breached. God’s remnant would be rendered a relic. Hardship would have no purpose unless the Lord intervened.

Which He did, of course. Verse 2: Salvation will come, but from a most unexpected place. A place so small that it didn’t even make most ancient maps. A place from which would rise a shepherd-like-savior reminiscent of illustrious King David, also born in Bethlehem. Though “least among the clans of Judah,” verse 4, out of that leastness would emerge “a greatness stretching to the ends of the earth.” A ruler to shepherd his flock “in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God.” He would secure Micah’s dream of everlasting peace. For God’s remnant under siege, this was good news. But again, as is characteristic of remnant life, it was good news with hard news wedged in between. Verse 3: “Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor gives birth.”

Delayed birth meant elongated suffering—but not under the current oppressors. The Assyrian siege would abate. In accordance with verse 3, Israel would be abandoned and eventually shipped off to Babylon, the ancient nucleus of abomination and evil. God’s marginalized remnant would be marginalized even further, plunged deep into exile as sheep among wolves. Their land would be ransacked and the house of God, the Jerusalem Temple, destroyed. Yet hardship had its purposes. “You will go to Babylon,” Micah forebode in chapter 4, “and there you will be redeemed.”

Once rescued from Babylon, the people did return to their promised land, albeit under Persian management. They reconstructed a Temple, albeit not nearly as glorious as the original. Yet Micah’s peaceable dream went unfulfilled. And then Israel got stepped on again, this time under the heavy boot of Rome. By the time of Jesus’ birth, Micah’s Bethlehem prophecy took on a mythical character; a promise too good to ever come true. Maybe the Jewish leaders’ reluctance to accompany the Magi to Bethlehem signaled the resignation they felt about God. It’s like that busy friend or parent who “promises they’ll be there for you next time,” but then next time comes―and goes―so many times that you just stop hoping anymore.

Yet even for those who did keep hope, when “she who is in labor” finally gave birth, the birth of Jesus must have been a disappointment. Despite angelic announcements and all kinds of miraculous trailers for the kingdom of God, in the end this savior born in the city of David got strung up like any common criminal. Were Micah’s prophetic promises nothing but promises? Promises of swords getting beat into plowshares while 30,000 more men and women get shipped off to Afghanistan? Promises of tending gardens while 2.8 billion people subsist on less than $2 a day? Promises of dwelling secure as bombs explode worldwide and guns go off in our own city every day? Promises of peace as people are devastated by relational crises, financial stress, layoffs, illness and plain bad choices? Nothing but promises? Nothing but words?

A few Christmases back I mentioned the story a couple who had longed for a long time to become parents. Their friends prayed and waited with them month after month, year after year. When they finally did get pregnant with a due date near Christmas, it was deemed miraculous, akin to Mary and Elizabeth—though with much lower expectations of the newborn boy, of course.

But then my phone rang. There was a problem, an emergency, and I was needed at the hospital right away. Fresh out of seminary, I rifled through my notes for instructions on what to do. My training had not included emergency visits to the NICU. I grabbed my Bible. Prayed the whole way over. Arrived amidst utter distress. The mother had delivered but her baby was wired to every sort of tube and machine. The incubating lights blared against his translucent skin. His little heart beat rapidly. Heroic nurses and doctors were doing all they could. I stood alongside not knowing what to say. But they needed to hear something. So I looked at the Bible in my hand and decided to read aloud. I read Romans 8: “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” I read John 16: “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have trouble, but take courage; I have overcome the world.” I read James 5: “The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.”

Nothing but words. Even as I read them I wondered: Here is this dear couple on the edge of an abyss of sorrow. If their son dies, how does this possibly work together for good? What kind of peace accompanies such loss? How would Jesus overcome that? Could their dying baby really be made well if we prayed with faith? Just how much faith was required?

The doctors approached looking grim. Their baby was not going to make it. He simply wasn’t responding and all of his vital signs were failing. They could keep trying, but it would be futile. The parents needed to make the final decision though. The doctors wouldn’t disconnect life support without their consent. The parents looked at me. I looked at my Bible. I read John 11: “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ Jesus said, ‘Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” I hadn’t intended Jesus’ question to be a question for them, but they took it as that and asked if I would baptize their son. It was my first baptism. Afterwards they unplugged him so they could hold him as he died.

My first baptism led to my first funeral. I asked the parents what they wanted me to say. They requested I read the words again. So I read Romans 8: “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God.” And I looked around and saw a roomful of mournful friends and family, a remnant community of people bearing each others’ burdens with mercy. And I saw that the NICU nurses and doctors had come too. They said they needed to be there for themselves. I read John 16: “These things I have spoken so that in Me you may have peace.” And there was peace to be had in Jesus. Otherwise this couple would never have made it through their sadness as they did, would have never gone on to adopt four children, two with special needs.

I read James 5: “The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up,” and remembered aloud how in the Bible, the words “save” and “raise” refer mostly to resurrection. And then I read from John 11: “I am the resurrection and the life, whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live … And this is the will of God, that I should not lose even one of all those he has given me, but that I should raise them up at the last day.”

“In the last days,” said the Lord through Micah―words understood by New Testament authors to mean the first days of heaven―the mountain of the Lord will rise up above all other heights as the apex of righteousness. Many nations will say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.’ They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Everyone will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid. And you O Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are least among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will rule. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they will live securely, for his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. And he will be their peace. For the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The dwelling of God will be with people, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, the old order of things has passed away; behold all things are become new.”

Nothing but words. But with God—by whom the earth was created with words and in whom the earth is being redeemed by his word made flesh——with God words are everything.