Rev. Linda B. Hirst

June 24, 2001

 Our scripture reading is from the prophet Hosea, we don’t often preach from the prophets - you may hear from them occasionally, particularly from Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel;  they’re known as major prophets - the other prophets - people like Hosea, Amos, and Micah,  are known as the minor prophets - largely because their books are smaller than the major prophets - sometimes only 5 or 11 chapters long compared to the major prophets who run at 50 and 60 chapters.  Being a minor prophet must feel a little bit like being on the farm team of a major league baseball team. You know you’ve got some good stuff - important things to say, but it’s the guys in the big leagues getting all the fame.   So today, we honor the minor prophets by hearing the words of the prophet Hosea.   (Read Hosea 11:1-11)

  There’s a wonderful song by John McCutcheon titled, "Calling all the children home."  And in this song a parent is standing outside, calling for all the different children in the family, one by one, to come home:  Home is where this is warmth and love and comfort.  Home is where there is joy and peace and family.  Home is where there is sustenance, contentment, happiness ....At the end of the day, when your wandering is done, come home, come home.

   This passage from Hosea reminds me  of that song.   It is written from the point of view of a parent - God is the parent - the mother, the father.  And the children are the people of Israel.  God has nurtured them since they were infants,  led them out of Egypt,  through the wilderness to the promised land, provided for their every need, And now they are out wandering - getting into trouble.   Worshiping other gods, offering incense to idols, turning away.  And God is calling them home.

 It sounds a little bit like the parable of the Prodigal Son which Jesus tells in the gospel of Luke.  In the Prodigal Son the father is waiting for his son - who has gone off with his inheritance to explore the world  - to come home. The son gets into all kinds of trouble but eventually he does come home.  Here, it’s the same thing. God is waiting for his children -  who are out wandering, only it doesn’t  look like they’re ever coming home.

 It’s a sad story really.  Made sadder because God really appears to be suffering here.  And we don’t often see God suffer, especially in the Old Testament.  In much of the Old Testament God is mighty and powerful and strong, sometimes angry.   Whenever the Israelites go into battle they go with God’s blessing and it is God who is the victor.  God is creator, judge and king, if someone needs correcting, they are corrected - sometimes whole towns or whole tribes of people suffer the wrath of God.  And then there’s all those prophets - preaching all that gloom and doom.

 Many years ago, I once had the notion there were two Gods - the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament.  The scary vengeful God was on the one side and the loving, caring God on the other.  I shared this a friend who suggested that perhaps I didn’t know as much about the Old Testament or God  as I thought I did.  She was right.  But wasn’t alone in my thinking.  It turns out this view of two Gods - was widely held among a group of people called the Marcionites in the 2nd century.   The church declared it heresy - which is not a good thing.    So, in addition to my being at one time a Methodist and an Espicopalian  it turns out I was also a heretic - but only for a very short while.

 Of course I now know that there is only one God, the God of both the Old and New Testaments and once I read the Old Testament more carefully I saw God not only as Creator, Judge and King, but also as protector, comforter and redeemer.  And there are many times in the Old Testament when God is compassionate and merciful.

 And the prophets - well they were just men and women doing their job.    Their mission - to put it simply - was to get the people of Israel whom God loved more than anything - to turn away from whatever other gods they were worshiping, whatever evil they were doing and come home to God.  Sometimes the prophets did this by pleading with the Israelites, other times they threatened them with the wrath of God,  but always, in the end, the people were given a glimmer of hope:  in spite of your faithlessness, the prophets would tell them, "God still loves you."

 This is where Hosea is today.  Preaching on God’s behalf.  Telling the people of Israel that God loves them.  God loves them so much - loves them like a mother or father loves her son. Listen to the wonderful parenting images here:  Listen to the love and the anguish God is feeling in these verses:

 "When Israel was a child I loved him and out of Egypt I called my son.  I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.  I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks,  I bent down to them and fed them.  it was I who taught Ephraim -  one of the twelve tribes of Israel -  it was I, says God, who taught Ephraim to walk,  I took them up in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them."

 And now, as the children - the people of Israel - reach what we might assume are their teenage years, God watches them rebel.  You see, it’s true, teenagers are the same everywhere.

  And God responds with tough love.  "They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me, "  Predicting the collapse of the Kingdom of Israel, the prophet announces a new captivity for the people - similar to the one they experienced in Egypt in the days of Moses.

 And yet...God still holds out hope.  Hope that his children will realize their mistakes and come back home, come back home to God.  And when they do, God will be there, waiting.  "They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria; and I will return them to their homes, "says the Lord.  God is hoping for a home-coming.

 So why don’t they come?  Why don’t they come home to God?  It’s hard to hear this passage - so full of God’s love and pain and sorrow - and wonder why the Israelites don’t come home?  They have all they need right there with God.  They will never be loved more or cared more or fulfilled more by anyone else or any other gods.  Don’t they know that?  Why do they continue to look for happiness elsewhere?

 We could ask ourselves the same thing.  Why do people today wander away from God - because we know it happens, we all have friends who say, "I don’t need God",  I don’t need the church, or I don’t believe in God anymore.  We  may even feel those same things once in a while.  I have a friend who’s a pastor and in the past few months she’s had several church members say to her:   you know the older I get the more I find that I do
don’t need God, so I won’t be coming to church anymore.

 Quite often during premarital counseling sessions a couple will say to me, "We’re just not a big church goers. We just don’t  need God in our lives."  And my heart breaks a little each time and I wish I had the exact words to push them back into the church, into God’s arms except I don’t, so I say really silly things like...well, you know.  The church is a great community, you find support and love there and wonderful ways to serve, and I think you’d like it if you went" when what I really want to say is:  "Go to church!  Listen, learn, share, worship, serve, pray.  Open up your hearts, your minds, open yourselves up to God.   You’ll find what you need, what you’ve been missing.  I don’t know how or why or when...but it will happen...I promise you.  And at some point you’ll say to yourselves:  Boy - this God thing is great !"  Of course I don’t say that, but maybe one of these days...

 Why are we, today, sometimes unfaithful to God?  Why do we search for happiness, for fulfillment, for love somewhere else?

 I think one reason is because the world tells us that happiness is out there somewhere...from the time we’re children we learn this:  My kids used to come home from playing at a friends house and say to me: "The toys at Keith’s house are really neat.  They’re much better than my stuff.  I wish I had his stuff.  I wish I had his parents."  The world tells us we need stuff to be fulfilled and lots of it.   And when that stuff gets old we need new stuff.  John Ortberg, a pastor at Willow Creek Church tells this story about the search for happiness and fulfillment in his family.  He and his wife have three small children and the only place the kids ever want to eat when they go out is "the shrine of the golden arches"  - McDonald’s.  And the kids always want the same thing.  It’s a combination of food - which they really don’t care about - and a little prize.  It’s not much of a prize, really just some cheap little plastic thing but in a moment of marketing genius, the folks at Mcdonald’s gave it a particular name.  They call it the Happy Meal.  It is the "meal of great joy."  You aren’t just buying chicken nuggets and a plastic Hercules Ring, you’re buying happiness.

 Every now and then he tries to talk them out of it - he’ll give them fifty cents - a dollar to buy their own cheap plastic objects but they just chant all the more loudly, "We want a happy meal.  We want a happy meal."  Other customers then stare at the father who won’t buy his kids the meal of great joy.  So he buys them the Happy Meal and it makes them happy for about a minute.  The problem is that the happy wears off.  The contentment doesn’t last.  He says that you never hear of a young adult coming back to his parents and saying, "Gee, Dad, remember that Happy Meal you gave me?  That’s where I found lasting contentment and lifelong joy.  I knew that if I could just have that Happy Meal, I would be content for a lifetime, and I am.  Thank you.

 The truth is, the only one that Happy Meals bring real happiness to is Mcdonald’s.

 You would think, Ortberg says, that kids, being fairly bright these days, would sooner or later, catch on to this deal and say, "You know, I keep getting these Happy Meals and they don’t give me lasting happiness so I’m not going to do it anymore.  I’m not going to set myself up for frustration and disappointment."  But it never happens.  They keep buying Happy meals and they keep not working.  O f course, only a child would be so foolish.   Only a kid would be so naive as to think that contentment and lasting happiness could be acquired through some kind of external acquisition.  Only someone very young and not so very smart would believe that lasting happiness could be achieved by a change in external circumstances only. Only a child...

 For many people - contentment and fulfillment is still just a Happy Meal away - only the happy  meals keep getting more expensive and more elusive.  If only I get that new car, then I’ll be happy. If only I changed jobs - that perfect job - it’s out there - then life will be good.  If only I win the lottery - it doesn’t even have to be the Powerball - just the lottery, then I’ll have everything I need.  And the search for fulfillment continues...

 Of course there are many other reasons people stray, other reasons we wander;   being faithful is not always easy - this is something the Israelites knew.   It takes time and energy to be faithful;  to worship and pray and serve. It takes time and energy to love God with heart and mind and soul and our neighbor, too.  And while there’s great joy on this journey, sometimes there’s pain as well.  Being faithful often means being tested and challenged, listening for a God who sometimes appears to be silent, persevering when things get difficult.  That’s why we pray, during a baptism for strength and courage for the journey - we need it!  It isn’t easy being faithful - so we wander, we look somewhere else for what we think we need,  we look for another way that we think might be a little bit easier.

 And as we do, as we wander, as we stray, God watches us, as God watched the Israelites, fretting over us like the children we are,  hoping upon hope, that some day soon we will realize that only God  can give us everything we need.  God who has loved us since our infancy, who took us in her arms then and takes us in her arms now, who continues to bend down to nurture, feed and sustain us.  All that we need...is right here...in our walk with God,  in our walk with Jesus Christ and in our walk with one another on this journey of faith.

 The message of Hosea is a hopeful one.   At the end of the day when our wandering is done, God is waiting for us, calling all the children home.  Amen.