Sermon text: Hosea 5:15–6:3
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen. Amen.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? The wicked witch in the Snow White story asked, falsely believing that she was in fact the most beautiful woman in the world. Yet her true appearance — internal ugliness, which was due to a sinful pride — is eventually revealed in a physical manifestation of an ugly witch. In large measure, we are kind of like that witch. We aren’t as pure and holy and spiritually attractive as we ought to be. What Isaiah said of himself and the people of his day is true of us: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” Our good works are nothing but filthy rags in God’s sight apart from Jesus Christ, soiled by our chasing after false gods that in fact we love more than we love our Lord God Jesus Christ and our heavenly Father. In ways we don’t even realize, we’ve left our good, holy, and perfect Lord behind us. When we look at ourselves in the mirror of God’s law with honest eyes and humble hearts, the witch in Snow White has plenty of company.
But unlike the witch in Snow White, we have a hope. In our text this morning, through the prophet Hosea, God says he will put distance between his children and himself for as long as they do not repent and seek his face. Chapter 5, verse 15: “I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress earnestly seek me.” When we seek the Lord’s face and favor through confession and absolution, the face of our Savior looks back at us in his graciousness and forgives us our sins. So Hosea invites us back into fellowship with God for our sins: “Come, let us return to the LORD,” he writes in chapter 6:1. In Hosea’s day, God had distanced himself from his people and vowed not to return until they had repented. After all, the worst thing imaginable for God’s children, for any child, is to have their parents go silent, not to speak. Consider the silence of Jesus toward the other impenitent thief on the cross. To the one who repented, he spoke. To the other one, he did not. The words of rebuke are more welcome than silence.
The Lord God said to his people through the prophet Hosea, “I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress earnestly seek me.” And what is their sin? They worshiped false gods and had no interest in worshiping the one God, Yahweh Elohim. To have the face of God turned away is an act of judgment upon the people for their idolatry and other sins. God is retreating to his place, which is illustrated in the preceding chapter, chapter 5, and the preceding verse, verse 14. There God said, “For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear and go away; I will carry off, and no one shall rescue.”
Now the book of Hosea itself starts with a rather shocking command. Chapter 1, verse 2: When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” Why did God command a prophet of his, Hosea, to marry a prostitute? Well, call it an object lesson. The marriage between Hosea and Gomer, a woman of ill repute, serves as a living metaphor, as a type of play God used to demonstrate his pursuit and restoration of his unfaithful people. The play was real, though, real life for Hosea and for the woman of ill repute. The prophet Hosea loved the Lord and was obedient to him — so obedient that when God told Hosea to marry a woman of ill repute who will break his heart with her unfaithfulness, he marries her as commanded. In the story, the prophet Hosea stands in the place of God. He stands in the place of God. In Gomer, the prostitute represents the corrupt and unfaithful people of Israel. God likens Israel’s worship of false gods to one spouse leading another spouse to another lover.
Hosea and Gomer’s challenge begins with Gomer’s sins. She lusts after what other men can give her: sex, attention, jewelry, clothes. She longs for what they say they will provide for her, things she believes she is not getting at home with Hosea. But what she doesn’t know is that even when she’s living and sleeping with other men, her faithful husband Hosea is the one who is spending the money and buying the food to make sure she eats, and even gives her gold, the gold she lusts after. Gomer’s desires lead her to be passed from man to man, until one day she’s thrown away and ends up naked and helpless, on sale in the local slave market. What Gomer had thought was love was nothing more than misuse and abuse. And now she has nothing, not even hope. Hosea is at home with his children when he hears that his wife is for sale at a local slave market. A slave costs thirty shekels of silver, but Hosea doesn’t have that kind of money. So he scrapes together what he has — fifteen shekels of silver and some barley — and rushes to the market, hoping it would be enough. It was. He redeems his bride in love. He reclaims her, forgives her, and restores her to health and welcomes her back to her home.
Israel was worshiping false gods made by human hands, in an egoistic staring at oneself in admiration, thinking themselves to be beautiful and righteous and holy. Even when their sacrifices were directed toward the true God, Yahweh Elohim, they were rejected because they weren’t sincere, but arose from an impure and self-righteous heart. They gave because they thought it was done in faith. We too leave God for our own gods. Often it is self-love, self-pride, even self. We attribute our personal success and spiritual victories to our achievements and our hard work. But all comes from God by his gracious hand. We think of our fortunes in life come to us because God is pleased with us, and our misfortunes are set because God is displeased. So we try to earn God’s favor by doing our own kind of good works, buying his blessing with our sacrifices. Our priorities are things and people first, and the Lord God and worship second. That’s leaving God for self-love as well.
Israel’s love for God evaporates like a passing cloud and the morning dew — Hosea 6:4 tells us so. Also our love for God evaporates like a passing cloud, for us as well. We have lost generations of baptized children to the pragmatism of our day, to the cult of entertainment and self-satisfaction, and the churches of our day and individual wayward Christians; our culture now suffers from the consequences of the Lord’s absence in both the public square and in the sanctuary of the church. We suffer because we have forsaken the pure doctrine of God’s word. Thus, the prophet Hosea rebukes us for ignoring the cutting and healing words of God’s mouthpiece, his faithful pastors and teachers, and we refuse to repent when the call comes to us. In so doing, we deprive ourselves of God’s presence. He hides himself from us so that we may confess our sins. Like Gomer, the woman of ill repute, we have cut ourselves off from the source of real love. Yet the affliction we deserve — God will bring his beloved bride, his church, back to himself through his prophets.
Israel’s arrogant response to the rebuke of God’s prophet: show me the evidence that God is angry with us. Look, life is good among us. We’re rich and we’re successful. That too is a forsaking of the Lord God, Yahweh. It’s living by sight rather than by faith, conforming to the dictates of our culture rather than to the words of God. In Hosea’s day, Israel was comfortable. Rebellious Israel was deceived by what they saw, thinking God was pleased with them, preventing them from listening to the divine prophecies. We believe we’re blessed when life is good, pain-free, and filled with success and riches. But the theology of the cross teaches us that the true blessedness is hidden and judgments are governed by God’s word. Believing God is pleased with what he sees in our works — it’s like staring into the mirror of the law but allowing it not to convict us of our sins. But as the Latin phrase goes, “Lex semper accusat.” The law always accuses. No one escapes it. It speaks and we are condemned. Instead, we stare at ourselves in the mirror with delusional admiration, persuaded that the beautiful bride that stares back at us is us.
A church may experience growth in membership by compromising doctrine and its practice to attract the crowd. But that’s not evidence that God is well pleased with their worship. We are to live by faith. Faithlessness — sight replacing faithfulness — is idolatry. This living by sight amounts to a faithless idealizing of man’s own goals for growth. The unfaithful of Israel, as a body and as individuals, were punished by afflictions later in history. Also, their impure, faithless hearts resulted in impure fruits. They neglected the poor, the lonely, the hurting, the oppressed. They received judgment for their faithlessness.
Yet, there’s hope. By repentance and belief in true doctrine, we return to the Lord, who comes to us in mercy, ultimately by means of receiving the sacrifice of our Messiah that he made for our sins. Driven by unconditional grace and eternal steadfast love, our perfectly holy Jesus clothes you in his righteousness, which he purchased for you at Calvary and handed to you in holy baptism: an eternal wedding gown covers all spiritual filth. Hosea hints at this New Testament promise with references to the third day and a restored relationship before Yahweh Elohim through the afflictions of the Messiah. Jesus’ beauty becomes hidden on the cross through the very act of taking on the ugliness of sin and death. Whether in good times or in bad, success or failure, we are his beloved children, beautiful in his sight. God is compared to rainwater soaking the soil of the desert. Hosea’s day took Israel some time — in fact, a couple hundred years — before believing the word of their pastor-preacher Hosea. They remained stricken under the judgment of God whether they felt it or not. They needed healing despite not feeling the symptoms of their central disease: rebellion. It is a healing God is eager to grant, due to what he would do so mercifully in the coming of his anointed sacrifice for sin. The call went out from Hosea: Return to the Lord. God calls for individual repentance as a condition of personal healing from sin by a Savior. He was torn up for us on the cross, wounded for our transgressions, smitten, stricken, and afflicted on Calvary, and yet rose in victory on the third day. He is the only sacrifice and burnt offering that appeases the anger of our heavenly Father. Because he takes away our guilt, all temporal punishment and discipline is used by God to deepen our relationship with him. All things work together for good to those who love the Lord. The Bible says, “In spite of appearances, we are always blessed, even in the midst of suffering.”
Reason resists such a marriage between a pure, faithful prophet and an impure woman of ill repute. But God’s ways are not our ways. He does things differently. His ways are often hidden, but they are always good. We of the church are harlots by nature but redeemed by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ. Baptism is our marriage, and communion is the ongoing consummation. In the liturgy, in the sacraments, we have the support of that sacred marital relationship. The bride, the church; the groom, Jesus. This becomes a kind of living letter of love that we call the liturgy. In the word, the liturgy, the sacraments, the Lord interacts with his bride through his pastor. The body of Christ, the church, may sometimes look like a person of ill repute, for we often leave our Lord, but our husband is a rightfully jealous lover. 2 Corinthians 11:2: “For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.” Communion fellowship is a loving expression of the intimate spiritual monogamy between one husband, Christ, and one wife, the church. Unlike pagan practices that require burnt offerings to appease the gods and to earn spiritual points, God’s relationship with his people is restored through a broken and contrite heart. Your perfect husband returns to you through his holy sacrament, and he tolerates your faults out of love for you. We confess that God returns to us when we reaffirm our commitment to his word, to the creeds, to the Lutheran confessions. He comes through the preaching of the mouth of the pastors and through the office of the keys of the church.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Jesus is. So when you return to the Lord and humbly seek his face, you will find a beautiful and merciful Savior staring back at you. Jesus is the face you see in the mirror of his grace, purchased for you at the cross. The more we stare at him through faith, the more his image is reflected upon us. In spite of our leaving, he returns and bids us, “Come, let us return to the LORD. For your sins are forgiven in his love.” Amen.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.