This Week's Sermon: "Hosea"

“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Two

We all have some version of the glory days in our memory—for ourselves, for our favorite sports teams, for our churches, you name it. Unless you’re an Alabama fan, in which case every day is expected to be part of the glory days.

While I love being a pastor, I also think back on some of my pre-pastor days with the nostalgia of “Hey, those were glorious.” The summer before I began God School, I was working mostly evenings and nights in the kitchen of a pizzeria to save up money, meanwhile the European Championships were being played by the best national soccer teams in Europe—which is several hours ahead of us. So each day I would watch amazing soccer on the television, go to work and make and deliver fantastic pizza, go to bed and do it all over again the next day. It was great.

I especially enjoyed watching the Russian national team that year, because of their best player, a midfielder named Andrey Arshavin. He was the sort of player who made the beautiful game beautiful with his skill, but when he tried to parlay his national team performances into a big-team move to one of the best clubs in the world, Arsenal in London, he was wildly inconsistent and became known as a flop.

I think it was because he was the sort of player who needed an entire team built around him in order to really shine, rather than the sort of player who can easily plug into another team’s system. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with the first, but in order for it to work, you had better be a Michael Jordan, a LeBron James, a Patrick Mahomes—one of the very best in the world at what you do if you are going to have a team built around your sheer force of talent and personality.

Personality is vital, but its strength only takes a people so far. That is a lesson that was hard learned by the ancient kingdoms of both Israel and Judah, one to which the prophet Hosea directly speaks.

This is a new sermon series to take us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade, in fact. But it never quit fit into the arc of my ministry until now. Because I think that after all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series can help us catch our breath and focus on getting back into the weekly rhythm of worshiping in-person again. We have gotten off our couches and back to the gym, now we need to settle into a pace on the treadmill.

So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we will hear from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.

To best facilitate following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began last week with Daniel, and today move on to what is probably a much less known book in most Christian traditions, the book of the prophet Hosea.

Hosea is a much earlier prophet than Daniel. Daniel is what is called an “exilic” prophet, so named because his career coincided with the exile in Babylon during the 500s BCE. Hosea predates Daniel by at least 160 years, as Hosea’s active career coincides with the tenure in the northern kingdom of Israel of Jeroboam II, who reigned for roughly forty years until his death around the year 746 BCE.

During this time, Assyria was by far the biggest existential threat to Israel, so much so that only twenty-four years after Jeroboam II’s death, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V conquers Israel and Samaria outright.

If that timeline sounds a bit familiar to you, it almost precisely mirrors the timeline of the fall of the kingdom of Judah to Babylon around the time of Daniel. If you recall from our sermon series on King Josiah a few months ago, Josiah died in battle around 609 BCE, and twenty-four years later, around 587 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II conquers Jerusalem.

So for both Israel and Judah, it only took twenty-four years to go from a long-tenured and effective king to being violently conquered by another monarch. The key difference here is that while Josiah was a righteous king—the last righteous king—Jeroboam II was emphatically not. He was effective, but he was not righteous. In the spirit of his idolatrous namesake Jeroboam I, he endorsed golden calf worship and other idolatrous practices, and the inequity and inequality his reign produced made him the target of ire not only from Hosea, but other minor prophets like Amos.

What really got Hosea’s proverbial goat, though, was Jeroboam II’s foreign policy, which relied upon placating both Assyria and Egypt. This may have been out of existential necessity to forestall an invasion, but it had the ancillary, and deeply unfortunate, consequence of increasing the spread of worship of false deities throughout Israel.

This was not an uncommon phenomenon in ancient Israel. For instance, Ahab—(in)famous for his exploits against the prophet Elijah—endorsed the worship of Ba’al, who was the Phoenician rain god, and it remained a widespread enough of a practice that decades later, God through Hosea continues to condemn it here. The overlap of religious practices was as much a political and diplomatic matter as a theological or spiritual one in the eyes of such kings, but not in the eyes of prophets like Hosea. To him, without the full protection of God, ancient Israel had to rely solely on the human skill of a king like Jeroboam II to protect it from an empire like Assyria.

And this is where the lesson of the strength of personality comes into the story, because when Jeroboam II dies, there is little else to protect ancient Israel from Assyria, and it falls to the much bigger empire in short order. Jeroboam’s personality and skill may have protected ancient Israel while he was alive, but he left no protection for Israel after he was gone.

God, by contrast, is described by Hosea here in full and enduring tones. God’s love for the people is far greater than any earthly king’s. God’s love for the people did not, and does not, rely on the strength of personality, or on international diplomacy, or the use of force. God does not rely on any of those things. God may use them, but God does not necessarily need them.

God is bigger than that. God is more eternal than that. And God is more steadfast than that. Whatever ancient Israel may do, Hosea says, God cannot give up the people. God’s love for them is, like the rest of God, simply too big for that.

And in that is the moral for us. We may not live in ancient Israel, threatened by a far bigger neighbor, but we do live in a world that relies more on the strength of personality than on the strength of God—and that includes here in the church. Congregations and ministries can grow, and just as quickly (if not quicker) fall, on the basis of a particularly charismatic leader’s personality. Many of you can probably recall this directly from the televangelist financial scandals of the 1980s onward, but that phenomenon is not limited to them. It absolutely can include our congregations. I have even seen congregations—sometimes megachurches—close as a result. At least in some cases, it was because who was being worshiped there may not entirely have been God.

While it may sound cynical on the surface, I honestly have found it helpful for me to imagine my ministerial vocation as a revolving door that I enter through and then hopefully don’t get hit by on my way out. Because if I become irreplaceable, then it is not God being glorified, but me. I can, and should, be vital to the life of the congregation—we all should. But the church was the church long before I was born, and the church will be the church long after I am dead. We should not become irreplaceable to the congregation, because the church is not about us. It has always been about God.

And while Hosea is prophesying hundreds of years before the birth of the church, we absolutely should take his juxtaposition of God and Jeroboam II to heart. God’s love for the people is eternal. Jeroboam’s was not, because he was not righteous. And even when the leader is righteous, as Josiah was, God still outlives Josiah. God outlives us all. And God outloves us all.

Instead of trying to outdo the maker of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen, how can we be led by that creator? How can we be guided, shaped, perfected so that we, the present Body of Christ, might be better guided, stronger shaped, and more perfect?

Have you made room for God to do that in your life? And if not, are you ready to make room?

For the love of God is great. If you choose to make room for it, it will find you. And if you choose to let it, it will save you.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

June 6, 2021