"Desired"

A sermon by the Rev. Matthew B. Reeves
Parkville Presbyterian Church, Parkville, Missouri
The Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 29, 2007

Text: Hosea 1:2-10

You heard that word, didn’t you? It’s hard to miss. It’s an important word, but not a very nice word. I don’t feel very comfortable saying it in church, especially from the pulpit. But there it is in the Scriptures, coming from the mouth of God. "Hosea, go. Take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord." Whoredom. Three times in one sentence: impossible to miss, not easy to say. I practiced saying the word in my study, it felt so weird. It’s a good thing no one walked in on me, Pastor Matthew all alone saying, "Whoredom, whoredom, whoredom."

In adult Sunday School I’ve mentioned the importance of learning the vocabulary of faith—words like grace, sin, justification, sanctification. That we should learn this particular word has never crossed my mind! Children’s Sunday School curriculum writers run to Jeremiah for lessons on the calling of prophets, God calling the boy Jeremiah who says, "Oh, but I’m only a boy!" And God says "Don’t say I’m only a boy." Now that’s a good, uplifting call story for the kids. Can you imagine the lesson on Hosea? "So, Johnny, what did you learn about in Sunday School today?" "It was great! We learned about whoredom!"

If the word hurts our ears, just think of poor Hosea. The call to be a prophet is always rough, but Hosea is a special case. Most of the time God calls prophets to speak a word. Go into the marketplace, the Temple, the streets and squares and speak. It’s never an easy word—usually word of judgment before it’s a word of grace—but at least it’s just a word. Hosea, though, God tells Hosea not to speak, but to live a word. To do something. The Bible paraphrase The Message puts it this way:

"God spoke to Hosea and said: ‘Find a whore and marry her. Make this whore the mother of your children. And here’s why: This whole country has become a whorehouse, unfaithful to me, God.’"

Hosea’s response? He does it. Can you believe it? He obeys! Hosea goes to the kind of place he’d find such a woman. Was it the worship site of pagan fertility god Baal? The ancient red light district? We don’t know where he went, but we know why: to propose. Hosea could have drawn from plenty of biblical warrant for not doing such a thing, something like Proverbs 23:27, "a prostitute is a deep pit; an adulteress is a narrow well." But Hosea doesn’t protest, never complains. He hears God’s word and marries Gomer the harlot.

I need to pause here and say again that this is an uncomfortable passage. It’s not just that grimy-feeling word. Anyone with half an imagination could take this passage and go down visual roads that seem ungodly. The discomfort is intended. Prophets call us out of our comfort—not so much because they are radicals, but because they speak for a radical God.

"Uncomfortable" is too soft a word to describe family life and Hosea and Gomer’s place. That Hosea has married this woman of ill repute must be the talk of the town—has he gone out of his mind?—and then come the children. Can he be sure these children are his? The passage never tells us Gomer quits her day (or night) job. With Gomer pregnant, God speaks again, giving names to her "children of whoredom." They get awful names. Jezreel, after the valley where Jehu slaughtered Israel’s royalty—Jehu, whose Jezreel massacre was the first seed of unfaithfulness sowed by his house. Baby Jezreel, after the place destruction was sowed. Then comes little Lo-ruhamah, little "No Mercy," followed by baby "Lo-ammi," baby "Not-my-people." Hosea bounces on his knees babies named for God’s heartbroken intentions for Israel: sowed destruction, no mercy, not my people. Israel has become to God the best little whorehouse west of the Jordan. The people are selling themselves, giving it up to other lovers—lesser lovers than covenant faithful God.

The metaphor’s graphic nature is intentional. It’s sexual, physical, passionate, marital. The metaphor of the covenant people turning bride to harlot is wide through Scripture: Exodus. Ezekiel. Isaiah. Jeremiah. The marriage metaphor carries to the New Testament that calls the church the Bride of Christ and the great heavenly banquet the marriage supper of the Lamb. In love, God marries himself to people, intending to be forever faithful, forever tender. And so God is. But the people God marries? That’s the story of Hosea. God’s pain over Israel’s adultery gets shown in Hosea’s pain over an unfaithful wife. It may as well have been a female prophet called to bear with a cheating husband or deadbeat dad. The point remains. God is furious and heartbroken over people trading the intimacy and loyalty reserved for only God for empty loyalties that might give pleasure but have no substance. That’s what’s so wrong with prostitute sex, or pornography for that matter. It’s intimacy misplaced, a self-centered act in which another is used, the reduction of a living, image of God person to a thing.

Steven Levy says he’s found "The Perfect Thing." The Perfect Thing is the title of his book, the cover of which makes the book look like an oversized version of the thing itself. Most of us have heard of this thing. Many of us have one, and that’s fine. It’s a great little thing. Here’s how Levy describes it:

It weighs 6.4 ounces and consists of a few layers of circuit boards and electronic components, covered by a skin of white polycarbonate and stainless steel. It’s slightly smaller than a deck of cards. On the front is a screen smaller than a Post-it note, perched over a flattened wheel. If you didn’t know what it was, you might guess it was a seek, high priced thermostat…. A very sexy detached thermostat that feels good when you palm it.

Have you figured it out? It’s the iPod, which Steven Levy calls the object that is the twenty-first century. (Now that the iPhone is out, maybe Levy’s next book will be The More Perfect Thing.)

Levy talks about getting to know his iPod:

I began to cultivate a nice relationship with the actual device. It felt very good to hold. Spinning my thumb on the scroll was satisfying. The smooth, silvery back felt so sensual that it was almost a crime against nature.

One day, sitting on the subway, I plugged in the iPod and the world filled up with the Byrds singing, "My Back Pages." The faces around me became characters in a movie centered around my own memories and emotions. A black-and-white moment of existence had sprung into Technicolor. I held my iPod a little tighter.

Something odd began to happen. As the days passed and I bonded with my iPod, my spirits somewhat lifted.

All this about a thing! A spiffy thing to be sure. But a dead, soul-less device from which sensual pleasure and meaning of existence are felt. A relationship is formed—with a thing. To go whoring in the biblical sense, to engage in spiritual harlotry is to give to that which is not God the kind of trust, devotion, and loyalty reserved only for the God of the covenant. Spiritual prostitution is the attempt to get from that which is not God the intimacy, the security, the life direction that only God can give. Elsewhere scripture calls it idolatry, worshiping that which is not God. Today we’ve got a more carnal metaphor. "The land commits great whoredom," says the Lord.

Of course it’s possible to have an iPod without pining after it, just like we can have money without hoarding it, have power without cherishing it, look on a beautiful woman or handsome man in delight rather than lust, keep a full schedule without serving the calendar. But, as John Calvin said, "We are, incurably, worshipers." If the heart of worship is the giving of love and praise, then we are also, incurably, lovers. God has given us a ravenous appetite for love and life, and we quest to satiate the pangs. Yet all that we crave is insatiable outside the steadfast love of God, and we can be such lechers! It can be that outside of God—in the world of things—is mostly where we look.

We don’t know how ended up this way, poor Gomer. The story tells us so little about her—where she’s from, how became up a prostitute, whether she’s an Israelite at all. But we do know she’s more than that ugly word, whore. That’s not all she is. If she were that only, Hosea wouldn’t have bothered. We don’t get the details of their encounter, but we can guess. Hosea walks up not even knowing her name. Gomer sees him and assumes what he wants. She can’t avoid the assumption. Hosea will be just another in the line of how many, and how many more? Just another pair of hands, another body, another guy that will get his thrill and be on the way. Fake transcendence for him, deeper pangs for her. Except, that’s not what happens.

We don’t know how he says it, but it couldn’t have been tactful. There is no discreet way to propose to a harlot. "I want you to marry me." How ridiculous is this? Hosea taking for a wife this least desirable of women. Hosea taking as wife this woman many times taken. Hosea committing to love a common whore who has known so little of real love, is she able to love him back? But that’s what he does. Hosea takes Gomer as his wife.

I wish the biblical witness gave us more about Gomer—what she felt being loved in her unloveliness; being desired in her undesirability; being seen as someone worthy of another’s honor and respect and loyalty, not a just sex-thing to be used and left when her purpose is served. And how it must have cost Hosea to marry this woman—cost respect, honor, ease. It’s a painful fidelity but Hosea chooses it. He does this amazing thing because he’s a prophet of God called to speak in deeds, not just words. Hosea marries Gomer the prostitute all because God wishes to say, people of Israel, people of all time, this is how I love you.

"Love" has become one of the cheapest words in the English lexicon. We’ve prostituted the word "love" so extensively that it’s hard for us to grasp how profound it really is when it comes from God. Hosea rescues the word. Hosea shows us that the love of God looks like a prophet that marries a common whore. That God goes after us at our worst. That no matter how often we bring God-empty desires into the marriage bed of our souls, God does not leave us. That no matter how far we stray, God always wants to bring us back. God does not cast off unfaithful lovers of God. Instead, God calls them to account, returns them to himself and names them beloved. "He eats with tax collectors and sinners," they said of Jesus. "He welcomes prostitutes!" Yes he does. For the very same reason he welcomes me. The same reason he welcomes you. The same reason God would come to change the names Hosea’s children. "In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ‘Children of the living God.’"

Rowan Williams, now the Archbishop of Canterbury, once gave an address called "The Body’s Grace." It’s a theological reflection on sexual intimacy as a gift of God. Williams says that for all the ways sex will always for human beings both comic and tragic, sexual intimacy within the bond of fidelity has at its core the message of the gospel. In physical love, there is a wonderful, soul-deep discovery that we are wanted, that we are significant, that we are desired. That is the message of grace. That is the message of the cross. The costly love of the cross proclaims that Jesus died for us because God wants us. Despite our infidelity, God desires us—so much so that Jesus took our infidelity upon himself. Christ shows God is a stubborn lover willing to suffer shame, humiliation, death if it means he will betroth his beloved which is you and which is me. And so it really is true. Against all reason, it’s absolutely true that "nothing in life or death or all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord." Amen.