Awed to Heaven Rooted in Life Sermon

We struggle with Hosea.
So often we approach faith as WISH FULFILLMENT. “Hey God, I am struggling just to survive here, would you listen, would you help?” Hosea is one of the most personal and painful books of the Bible. Where Faith and Prophecy are Lived and seem to be inflicted on a troubled disfunctional family. That children could be born, “Not Pitied, Not Mine”. Instead, I believe we have inherited a text that has been reworked and reworked. The core of which may have been a REAL PERSON OF FAITH Who reflected on his life, and saw a reflection of what God's love might also be like.

Not so long ago, I was meeting with someone who described, I am SEARCHING, searching because I am not satisfied with the faith I have, I am looking for something new, something different, when I come to church and hear the sermon, there is nothing for me, I have heard it all before, I am bored with faith, bored with God, looking for something else.
Then the last couple of weeks, persons hung around after worship, or called during the week, to say, “YOU NAILED IT. You said exactly what we needed to hear.”
The pain of a preacher, is both that we do not get to choose what to preach when, there is a lectionary so that every church of every denomination is one, and we cannot choose what people are ready to hear. Often our expectations color what we are willing to see, whether we can hear.

Our readings for this week, are NOT for Beginners.
This is not FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD GOD GAVE GOD'S ONLY SON.
This is not FROM OUT OF THE WASTE & VOID GOD CREATED LIGHT & LIFE & BEING. Not a Pablum Faith for the masses to be entertained, But instead, for a people of ADULT FAITH. Real people in the midst of real struggles. An Adult Faith for people in the midst of Adultry.
A PEOPLE ROOTED IN LIFE, AWED & INSPIRED TO BELIEVE IN HEAVEN.

In order to hear Hosea, you have to be the people of faith, who as infants heard the PROMISE OF GOD TO ABRAHAM: “Follow Me, I Will be Your God and You Shall Be My People”.
You need to have heard as children the PROMISE OF GOD TO MOSES: “Take My People from Oppression and Slavery to the Pharaohs of Egypt and Let My Go! Take My People into the Wilderness, where I shall make of them a people who only know God, I will bring them out into a Land following with Milk & Honey”.
To hear the Prophecy of Hosea, you need to have heard as a youth the PROMISE OF GOD TO DAVID: “I will be Your God, You shall be my people, You desire to build a house for God, I will build you a house & lineage. Ever after there shall be a Son of David upon the Throne of Israel.”

All throughout life, for Generations of our Ancestors, as long as anyone can remember, GOD Has Been FAITHFUL. And God says through God's Prophet Hosea: “My People are whores, prostituting themselves after this, that and everything popular. The Faithful, lac k Faith.”
Do you really want to know the Love of God?
Then invest yourself in the most intimate and binding of lifelong commitments, take a spouse, but do so of a prostitute, one who misplaces love, intimacy, compassion, trust, covenant commitment, with the most base and grotesque momentary sexual gratification of sensory stimulation bought and paid for whenever anybody wants it. To love, when your loved one knows not how... To commit everything to a relationship with someone who fickly flitters from one to another seeking flattery, that is the love and heartache of God.

This not faith for beginners, for Vacation Bible School, this is an adult faith of real relationships.
In the Old Testament, names are vitally important. Contemporary readers struggle with how do we pronounce this... when the point is what does the name INSPIRE.
GOMER, is base and ordinary, common.
She conceives and they name their firstborn JEZREEL, which literally means Beautiful garden of God but JEZREEL became a place with a history. At Jezreel there were massacres and slaughters of Kings. In recent years we have reacted with terror and fear at the shootings at Colmbine, CO and Virginia Tech, but few if any seem to have lifted up, these were places of privledge, communities like our own, not slums or tenements, but home to leaders and future leadership. We want to believe that the killings at Columbine would have disturbed us if these had been at Bedford Steyvesant or Harlem, or SW Washington DC, but I am not certain they would have held the media's attention. Naming the firstborn JEZREEL is killing off the last of the PROMISES, JEZREEL is a history of the death of leadership and trust in leaders.
Ruhamah is the most ften used description of God. Ruhamah means COMPASSION, MERCY. Hebrew is a beautiful language that with a prefix changes King into the Son of the King, or in this case Rumhamah= Compassion, to LO-Ruhamah meaning NO COMPASSION, NO MERCY.
AMMI is MY PEOPLE, and LO-AMMI then is NOT MY PEOPLE.
The family of the Prophet Hosea, embody the ABANDONMENT OF THE PROMISE OF GOD, that only makes sense because GOD OFFERED THE PROMISE UNCONDITIONALLY.
God is UNCONDITIONALLY Committed to Leadership for the Nation,
GOD IS Compassion and Mercy,
GOD is Committed to HUMANITY being My People and I am Your God.
But, the children of this relationship have killed leadership, had no compassion, chosen to be NOT my people and have NO GOD.

Prophecy is Not a matter of fortune telling, feeling the bumps on your head, or tracing the lines in your hand to predict blessings and curses, but rather to give WITNESS Verbally or in Hosea's case to embody, that GOD LOVES US UNCONDITIONALY, BUT AS WE SEEK FLATTERY & SENSORY SATIATION, all that can be born is a lack of leadership, a people without mercy or compassion, and to believe we are not God's People, ther is no God.
In ALL of Scripture, in the Whole History the Human Race, I doubt there is a more painful indictment than the Prophet Hosea; yet a very REAL CRITIQUE of our time. The GOOD NEWS is that while Hosea comes in response to all God has PROMISED, to all that was before, this is only the beginning the introduction to the Prophecy of Hosea. The real question, is God CANNOT leave us there, leave us here. SO how is God seeking to redeem us? As BASE and REAL as we are in our mundane common lives, ROOTED in LIFE, what inspires to believe to be transformed, claimed, resurrected?

According to Luke, the Disciples came to Jesus saying “OKAY TELL US THE SECRET”. Give us the words to Pray, so we can be faithful. Whereas Matthew describes this scene with the eloquent liurtigical prayer we have learned since childhood, Luke cuts to the essentials. Prayer is not a magic incantation, not a philosophy to understand, but an essential relationship. And that relationship can be AFFIRMED, WITNESSED in 5 ways.
FATHER, not a Stoic Reserved Patriarch, but intimate, knowing us, having a personal affection and love for us, even as much as to say “DADDY”.
HALLOWED BE THY NAME, Honored, Trusted, Revered, Sacred, Personal.
THY KINGDOM COME. This is not our world, BUT God's Kingdom being revealed all around us, not fully known, but living.
GIVE US EACH DAY OUR DAILY BREAD. We depend on God, not just in the future, but now.
FORGIVE US OUR SINS, FOR WE FORGIVE EVERY ONE WHO IS INDEBTED TO US. We are human, we do sin, but as a communiy of believers we also practice forgiveness, so forgive us.
LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. Life is hard enough, keep us on the straight & narrow.

As if to make the point even stronger, that faith is not words to be memorizd, or a prayer to be recited, Jesus tells a very ordinary story, any of us could see ourselves in. And human nature compels people to act rightly, but GOD is not Human, God is more loving and more forgiving than we can ever imagine.