A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
Hosea 14:1-9 & Romans 6:19-23
by William Klock
I’ve been reading a great book by an Oxford classicist named Teresa Morgan. It’s a study of the Greek and Latin words for faith and what they meant in the culture of the Greeks and Romans, the Jews, and in the early Church. It’s a fascinating read and as we were getting ready to go camping last Sunday afternoon I tossed it in my bag. But then I stopped for a second, I panned across a wall of bookshelves, and my eyes settled on a copy of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which is—as far as I’m concerned—the ultimate novel written for Gen-X nerds who were born in the early Seventies and came of age in the Eighties. It’s a sci-fi novel built around references to things like the Atari 2600, Dungeons & Dragons, Zork, and Pac-Man. I read it about ten years ago, but I decided to read it again this week with apologies to Dr. Morgan and her study of pistis and fides. And I enjoyed it the second time as much as the first. In the back of my mind, however, I was mulling over our Epistle from Romans 6 and how St. Paul writes about being slaves. That meant that one particular part of the book kind of jumped out at me. In the story there’s an evil mega-corporation out to conquer and corrupt the virtual reality paradise where everyone in the future spends all their time. And this evil corporation has its fingers in everything, which means it’s easy to end up owing it money. And when that happens, you’re arrested and transported to headquarters where you become an indentured servant, slaving away at some menial and demeaning job until you die—because there’s no way out. Between late fees, interest payments, charges for room and board and healthcare, your debt only grows, it never gets any smaller. And Cline does a pretty good job of making it sound utterly miserable—at least to me—because it reminded me of my days as a Mac tech when I had to do phone support, which is an utterly miserable job. But this book makes it ever more miserable: these indentured servants—slaves—did the phone support. The description hits close to home in a lot of ways and it makes you—or at least me—want to shout out, “Let my people go!”
But like I said, I also had Romans 6 percolating away in the back of my brain too and I was asking myself: Would I rather be a slave like the Israelites in Egypt, breaking my back to make bricks without straw under the hot Mediterranean sun or having my brain turn to mush doing non-stop tech support for Innovative Online Industries? I don’t know. What I do know is that being delivered from either one of those slaveries would completely change my outlook on life, the universe, and everything.
And that’s just how it was for Israel. The beginning of the Book of Exodus paints a bleak and desperate picture of Israel’s turn of fortune—or, I should say, “providence” because, we learn as the story unfolds, the Lord was in control of the narrative all along. Jacob and his family went down to Egypt as honoured guests of Pharaoh, but four hundred years later a new Pharaoh turned them into slaves, making bricks for his grand building projects. Mixing mud and straw, filling moulds, baking them in the sun, then carrying those heavy loads of bricks to wherever they were needed. All the time baking themselves in that hot sun, day in and day out. Day in and day out with no rest. Eating out of fleshpots—which sounds pretty awful all by itself.
Put yourself in that place. (Or doing phone support as a slave if that seems worse to you.) And then imagine how you would feel after the Lord came and delivered you from that slavery. And not just a simple jailbreak. Consider how the Lord came first to Moses and his people and reminded them that he was their God, the one who had made promises to their fathers and who had been sovereign over all of this all along. And the Lord then goes, through Moses, to Pharaoh. Again, this isn’t a secret jailbreak in the dead of night. The Lord announced to the king, before his whole court, that Israel belonged to him, that Israel was his beloved son, and demanded Israel’s release. And then the showdown began. The Lord sent ten plagues that exposed Pharaoh and his gods for the powerless frauds they really were. Defeated, Pharaoh finally let them go, but that wasn’t the end of it. In one last ditch effort to recover his slaves and his dignity, Pharaoh went after the Israelites with his army and cornered them at the Red Sea. Israel had escaped the frying pan only to land in the fire. And then the Lord acted again. He bared his mighty arm and parted the waters of the sea so that his people could pass through on dry land. And when the Egyptian army tried to follow, the Lord drowned them all and left “mighty” Pharaoh, the greatest king on earth, powerless and pounding sand on the opposite shore.
Again, it wasn’t just a simple jailbreak under cover of darkness: You know, the Lord rescuing his people but with as little effort as possible. To the contrary, he showed his faithfulness and his love towards his people, but he also showed his glory. He brought the prison walls tumbling down in broad daylight for everyone to see. He humbled the greatest king and the most powerful gods in the known world. And he wasn’t done. That was just the first act. From the Red Sea he led Isreal into the wilderness and fed her miraculously on manna and quail and water he caused to flow from a rock. He met her at Mount Sinai and there he made a formal covenant with her. “I will be your God and you will be my people.” And he gave them his law, a new way of life that would separate them from all the other peoples of the earth. They wouldn’t just be the Lord’s people. The law would allow them to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst. A holy people, set apart. And so they built a tabernacle as a place of meeting with him and the Lord’s glory descended like a cloud to fill it. And for a third act, the Lord led them into the land of Canaan and conquered it for them. The Lord gave them cities they hadn’t built; wells they hadn’t dug; and fields and vineyards they hadn’t planted. All to show them his faithfulness, his love, his grace, and most of all his glory.
The Lord made them the rescued-from-slavery people and every year they celebrated that identity and the great show of glory and faithfulness the Lord had made to make them that people. Each year they gathered as families and ate the Passover and as they did that they remembered who they were and what the Lord had done for them. And they were grateful. They loved the Lord with all their heart and soul and mind and strength. They loved their neighbours the way the Lord had loved them. They were righteous—meaning that they love and obeyed his law. His heart was their heart. They worshipped him and him alone. And, forget horses and chariots! They trusted in the Lord who had shown the power of his mighty arm when he delivered them from slavery.
Or so you might expect.
But then you read the history of Israel and it’s mostly the opposite. They neglected the Passover and, not surprisingly, they forgot what the Lord had done for them. They forgot his faithfulness. They forgot his love. They forgot his grace. They forgot his glory. They neglected his covenant and his law. They worshipped other gods—the very gods defeated when the Lord conquered Canaan for them. And instead of trusting in the Lord and his mighty arm, they trusted in horses and chariots and politics and intrigue and money.
And that’s where our Old Testament lessons comes into this. The Lord sent the Prophet Hosea to the king and to the people of Israel with a message. At this point the kingdom had split: Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Judah was bad, but Israel was so bad they made Judah look like a goody-two-shoes. And Hosea’s ministry began with an acted-out prophecy. The Lord told him to take a prostitute as his wife. Hosea obeyed. He married Gomer, a prostitute, probably from one of the pagan temples. And he loved her and cared for her and he had children with her. But repeatedly she left Hosea and returned to her life of prostitution. And each time, his heart broken, Hosea would go out and find her and bring her back to his home and love her.
Through the prophet the Lord was saying to his people: I am Hosea. You’re the prostitute. I loved you. I delivered you from Egypt. I gave you a land that was not your own and I caused you to prosper in it. I repeatedly defeated your enemies so that you could live at peace. But over and over you’ve prostituted yourselves to foreign gods and foreign kings who have done nothing for you other than to lead you away from me, your true love. Through the prophet the Lord stressed his faithfulness over against Israel’s unfaithfulness.
And so the Lord called to his people:
Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the Lord; say to him, “Take away all iniquity; accept what is good, and we will pay with bulls the vows of our lips. Assyria shall not save us; we will not ride on horses; and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands. In you the orphan finds mercy.”
And the Lord promised: If they would do this. If they would repent and return to him:
I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon; his shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon. They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow; they shall flourish like the grain; they shall blossom like the vine; their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
But Israel had to leave off her idolatry. It was not Baal or Asherah who delivered them from Egypt and caused them to prosper in the land. It was the Lord.
O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you. I am like an evergreen cypress; from me comes your fruit.
Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them; for the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them.
One way or another the Lord would heal their apostasy. One way or another the people he had chosen as his own would reveal his glory before the watching nations. Either they would be faithful to him and he would prosper them beyond measure or he would punish their unfaithfulness and let the nations destroy them.
And if you’ve read the books of Kings and Chronicles and the Prophets you know that the latter is what happened. Israel continued in her idolatry and was destroyed by the Assyrians, the tribes scattered and lost forever. About a hundred years later the same thing happened to Judah, but it was Babylon that defeated the people and destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. But in Judah’s case, even though the people were exiled from the land, they kept their identity and were eventually allowed to return. They rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple. And, so far as the worship of pagan gods went, they’d learned their lesson. Never again was that kind of raw idolatry a problem for the people of Judah. And yet we’ve seen in some of our recent Gospel lessons that the people still failed to be faithful to the Lord. Last Sunday we heard Jesus condemn the Pharisees—the most righteous, the most covenantally faithful people around. Even they weren’t as faithful and as righteous as they thought.
Enter Jesus. God himself, incarnate, became the faithful Israelite. He perfectly submitted himself to the God of Israel, to his will, to his heart, to his law. His righteousness—which, if you remember from last Sunday, means his faithfulness to God’s covenant, was perfect. And his fellow Jews killed him for it. They got the Romans to crucify him on their behalf. And that means that in Jesus, the son of God wasn’t just incarnate as an Israelite, wasn’t just the perfect Israelite in his covenant faithfulness, he even died the very death that the Israelites would face when the judgement he announced came to them a generation later. He very literally died the death that their unfaithfulness deserved. And just like Israel in Egypt, the fate of the son of God in Israel was all guided by providence. The Lord knew what he was doing. And in that, Jesus became a sacrifice for the sins of his people. If they trusted in him as the Messiah he claimed to be, they found forgiveness of their sins.
But that’s not all. The Lord also knew what he was doing in allowing sin and evil to concentrate themselves all in one place so that they could rise up and do their worst to Jesus. It was Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt all over again. If you know the story, you recognise that this how the Lord works. In the same way he allowed Israel to become enslaved to the most powerful king in the world who had the most powerful gods in the world, so the Lord allowed Jesus to go to the cross where the most powerful forces in creation would kill him. And he did it so that he could, once again, bare his mighty arm and raise Jesus back to life. In doing that he not only overturned the false verdict against him in his sham trial, but more importantly, he defeated sin and death the same way he defeated Pharaoh and his gods.
Jesus was leading his people in an exodus—the exodus—the exodus that the old one, the one that shaped them as a people, the one they remembered every year at Passover, was but a foretaste. The old exodus happened so that the Lord could set a pattern and teach his people his loving and faithful character—so that he could prepare them for a future rescue, not just from a pagan king and his fake gods, but so that he could rescue them from sin and death. Not to lead them into a land of milk and honey, but to lead them into his new creation—into a world finally set to rights, a world where they could live forever in his presence. And as he did in that first exodus, so in the second, the Lord displayed his glory not just to his own people, but to the watching world. And so Jesus didn’t just make a new way of covenant faithfulness for his own people, he made it for everyone who would see the glory of the God of Israel at the cross and at the empty tomb. For anyone who will trust that Jesus is Lord, who will trust that in his death and resurrection he has defeated sin and death, and who will pass through the waters of baptism to life with God—a life infused by God’s own Spirit—on the other side. A life of righteousness, of covenant faithfulness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.
Brothers and Sisters, that glory displayed at the cross and the empty tomb is what has drawn each of us. It’s faith in that glory and in the promise offered in our baptism that has taken us through those waters. And yet, like Israel of old, that vision of God’s glory and of his loving faithfulness somehow fades from our vision. That vision of glory that once caused us, like the Israelites singing the Lord’s praise on the shore of the Red Sea, to sing his praises ourselves, to joyfully proclaim the good news to the world, that motivated us covenant faithfulness—to a life of holiness—somehow it fades or maybe we just take our eyes off of it in the midst of our various trials and tribulations. And we lose our passion for the Lord, for holiness, for proclaiming his gospel. St. Paul saw it happening in the Roman church. The old divisions between Jew and Gentile were creeping back in. They were no longer pursuing holiness and gospel life the way they once had. And so he reminds them in Romans 6: “But now you have been set free from sin and enslaved to God, you have fruit for holiness. Its destination is the life of the age to come. The wages of sin, you see, are death; but God’s free gift is the life of the age to come, in the Messiah, Jesus our Lord.”
Brothers and Sisters, we need to be reminded of the glorious thing that God has done for us in Jesus. We were slaves to sin and death. We had no hope. But then we heard the story—the good news—about the mighty and glorious God of Israel, how he gave his son to die to redeem his people from their sins, how he raised him from death, and how his new creation has begun in this new people. How he’s poured out his Spirit on them and made them a temple and a foretaste of the life and the world to come. A free gift. God’s amazing gracious grace. And we believed and with joy we jumped into the waters of baptism. We left Pharaoh—we left sin and death—pounding sand over another escapee—and we met Jesus on the other side. And he filled us with his Spirit. And we set out with him to the promised land, to the New Jerusalem, to the life of the age to come. But somewhere along the way the joy and enthusiasm faded. We began to trade holiness for sin. We began to lag behind Jesus along the way, and began to look longingly at our old gods. We became apathetic about the gospel, about the good news that had once so captivated us.
Brothers and Sisters, come to the Lord’s Table this morning and be renewed. This is our Passover meal in which we recall the mighty saving deeds of our faithful, loving, gracious and glorious God. This is the meal that reminds us we were once hopelessly enslaved to sin and death, but that the God of all creation loves us so much that he gave his own and only son to die on our behalf. Remember that in him our sins have been forgiven. And remember that this meal is also God’s future, pulled into the present. It’s a reminder that death no longer has a hold on us, because in rising from the grave, Jesus defeated death as thoroughly as he defeated sin. The bread and wine here at the Table are a reminder of what God has done for us in Jesus and they are a reminder of the hope—the new world and the new life—that lies before us because we have trusted him.
Let’s pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.