Psalm 107:1-5,7,8,43; Hosea 11: 1-11

A smitten God

I watched with great admiration how the youth group with the help of April, Ben and Wade ran the vacation Bible School program.  As you have heard, they built a paper airplane and transported the kids from Parkview, the Indonesian congregation and the Portuguese Catholic Church on an imaginary journey to China, Japan, Mexico and Italy. They even had a view from the cockpit on youtube and turbulence and a wing made out of a baby grand piano.  In honor of this program I wish to take you on a small trip in space and in time.  Imagine yourself on a beach in Hawaii. You face the east as you stand and wait for the sun to rise a thousand years ago.  Imagine what you see as an ancient Hawaiian.  The sun appears and you think of Kane, the god of dawn sun and sky.  It gets you thinking about Kane’s complementary god, Kanahea which Kane shares the directions of the compass.   You pray for peace on the island and hope Ku, the god of war will not prevail.  As the sun rises you turn around to work your taro field and you think of Lono, the god of fertility and music.  It is possible the ancient Hawaiians got Captain Cook confused with Lono or as someone whom Lono wished to claim. You think of Pele, the goddess of fire and how she has provided the fire that help make the land fertile with her volcanic force.  Now go back to google earth and lets fly across the Americas and over most of Europe to Greece.  There is a rocky beach there and beautiful blue water but the surroundings aren’t as lush.  You stand there on that rocky  beach two thousand years ago and you think of  all the fine wine in Greece and you feel like worshipping Dionysus, the God of wine.   But then too much wine may make you amorous and you will want to worship Aphrodite.  Or it may make you aggressive and make you want to worship Ares, the god of war.  Now , friends, let’s travel to present Bali, a Hindu island in the midst of Muslim and Christian and animist islands.  You worship the one God and main gods related to the one god, but you also leave offerings for others on the road or one the beach to ward off destruction on the island of powerful, lush nature, art and overpopulation that is under threat from Muslim terrorists.   These cultures have a beautiful and similar ways of believing in deities that have specific roles in the same way that cultures around the Hebrew people did when they worshipped Baal and other gods.  So I am now transporting you to ancient Israel.  The Hebrew people did not know what to do with this at first.  They thought of God as a rival to these deities.  But in the book of Hosea among others you see they are getting more sophisticated. They start to get it.  They start understanding that we have a tendency to assign jobs and characteristics to God.  All religions do that. All religions find ways to make statements about what God condemns and what God hates, but that we make up. Even we do.  We want God to do our bidding. In Hosea the people begin understanding the deep meaning of what’s at the heart of the Bible underneath and between the lines of these verses that are often so hard to understand: that God is essentially love.  Faith evolves throughout the Bible, not smoothly but in spurts.   People more and more start getting it and once Jesus comes He truly reveals what God is like:  in love with justice, merciful, forgiving.  Hosea, especially in today’s text reveals to us the smitten God who is so desperately on love with God’s children that it eats at God.  God is tortured by God’s love, like a desperate mother.  Listen to the text t the words of the suffering God:” When Israel was a child I loved that child and out of Egypt I called my child.  The more I called them, the more they went away from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals.  Yet it was I who taught ….(the child) to walk I took them up in my arms, but they did not know what healed them.  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 feed them…  How can I give you up…, how can I hand you over…?” Friends, in Hosea we find new levels of radical love, a God smitten by love, but also tortured by love.  Finally in Christ we have God hanging on a cross, God’s torture is complete, God’s humiliation final and ultimate.  The world pokes at God, spits at God, makes God taste sour wine, drives nails into God at the cross.   It is an evolving, a deepening of our understanding of God that we can never fully grasp.  Even further than that it is an understanding of God not Whom we fear and Who serves us, but a God Who seeks us and Whom we should serve.  In a way the story of God’s love for us is a story of unrequited love.   M. Scott Peck wrote: by all means seek happiness, but do so wisely…Seek to be loved and you probably won’t be, seek to love, on the other hand, and your probably will me. “So friends, Christian faith is based on a romantic notion, a romantic notion that God loves us beyond belief, that God is smitten with us. It is this wild and crazy idea that the powerful force at the heart of the universe has evolved into or at its deepest level has always been… love. Friends, may we return God’s love. Thanks be to God.