Exodus 3:1-15 "A Reluctant Leader"

In seminary, it was interesting talking to a whole group of people who went into ministry and discovering how they first felt that call. For each of us the call was different. For some, it came not just from ourselves but from those around us. I know I had a pastor when I was just a kid, not even through confirmation yet, who told me that I should consider ministry. As a sixth grader I must say I thought that was a silly idea. But that pastor was the first of many confirmations that lead me down the path that brought me to a place of professional ministry. But in seminary I was not the norm. You see the vast majority of people in seminary didn’t just come right through school. Many had done some other job first. I had a couple friends in seminary who were approaching retirement age, and had felt the call by God on their lives towards full time ministry. The vast majority, though, were in their 30’s or 40’s and saw God leading them to a new journey in their lives. Some had been Christians their whole lives, had been in leadership in their churches, but now were making the switch from lay leadership to full time ministry. Others became Christians later in life, and their new-found faith was calling them to give up what they had and move in a new direction. Some heard God speak quite clearly to them about this call on their lives, others saw the call more in the events around them. And many talked about how they fought the call for years if not decades.

In Moses, we see an 80-year-old man who is called to full time ministry, who is called by God to lead God’s people out of Egypt. It was not a job that Moses wanted. It was not something that he was prepared for. He had tried to do something for the people of Israel 40 years earlier and had failed miserably. But God called him to ministry and he followed God’s call and history was written.

I. Leaving Oppression

There is something amazing and powerful about the story of the people of Israel as they left the oppression and slavery they faced in Egypt and traveled for forty years to enter the Promised Land. It is an amazing story filled with miraculous occurrences. You have manna falling from heaven, you have water springing from rocks, you have donkeys speaking to their riders, you have people crossing the sea on dry land and you have bushes that are on fire but don’t burn up.

The exodus from Egypt has a resonance in it that is powerful. If you look particularly at many African-American spirituals that came out of the time of slavery before the civil war, they would continually reference Moses leading Israel out of slavery and leading them to someplace great. The slaves in America resonated with the slaves in Egypt as they longed for freedom from their slavery, as they looked for a God who would see their plight and respond. And though we don’t face slavery in quite the same way that the African-Americans did, nor as the people of Israel as they endured slavery in the land of Egypt; we do face our own bondages. And we know that as God looks down on us, he will remember us and deliver us from those things that we face. And we see that God will prepare a way for us through our trials and God will prepare people for us who will help us through that which we face.

These next three weeks we are going to look at this freedom from bondage that God offers. We are going to watch as God saved the people from Israel from slavery and brought them out of Egypt, and we are going to see how God can do the same for us, saving us from whatever slavery we face. And today we are going to look at the leader that God raised up to bring Israel out of Egypt, Moses.

Moses was an amazing leader. A true man of God who had a powerful relationship with God, arguing at times with God to protect the people of Israel from the consequences of their actions; receiving the Ten Commandments; and leading the people of Israel for 40 years as they wandered through the desert. If you truly want to get a sense of Moses’ leadership, I encourage you to read Deuteronomy, which is basically his last sermon to the people of Israel before he died. Powerful stuff!

But as we saw in today’s scripture, Moses wasn’t always the strong leader that Israel needed. In fact, Moses didn’t really want to do what God asked him to. He didn’t think he was up to the mission that God had given him. He was afraid. But if Moses had given into his fears, if Moses has allowed his doubts to cloud his call, Israel would never have left Egypt. And I wonder what kind of spirituals we would have if this were the case. And then I wonder whether we sometimes let our fear and our doubts get in our way so that we don’t follow where God leads, so that we don’t step up when God calls us.

II. A Burning Bush

The story of the burning bush is one of those that we learn earliest in life. We learn about how God appears to Moses and gives him his assignment and does so in a burning bush. But sometimes we allow our familiarity with a tale to distract us from it’s meaning. So let’s look at this scripture and see what it has to teach us about God, about Moses and about ourselves:

Chapter 3 of Exodus begins with Moses as a shepherd. It is amazing to me how God continues to go to shepherds and give them such important roles in his story. We have Moses, we have David and of course, we have the shepherds who were the first to see baby Jesus. So Moses is a shepherd, and not a young one. He is 80 years old. He had spent the first 40 years of his life growing up as an Egyptian prince. He was adopted by a daughter of the Pharaoh and lived the life of royalty. But then he struck out at an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite slave. And he killed this Egyptian. The Israelites feared him and the Egyptians were after him. He ran away to the Sinai Peninsula. In Sinai he married and became a shepherd and spent the next forty years of his life. And now, after having lived two full and very different lives, Moses was probably ready to sit down and retire. He was probably ready to enjoy the last years of his life in peace and quiet. But as he is caring for his sheep he sees something that amazes him. A bush that seems to be on fire, but that doesn’t burn up. And Moses is curious so he goes to check it out. This is where things begin to get weird for him. For he hears a voice call to him from within the bush, and the voice calls him by name, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses responds, “Here I am.” This is the first thing to notice about Moses’ call, it is a call given directly to him. It is a message for him alone. God calls out to him by name. When we are called to serve God it isn’t always as clear as it was for Moses. I don’t think I know one person in any sort of ministry who has seen a burning bush that called to them by name. But putting that aside, it is worth knowing that God does call us specifically. God doesn’t have a bunch of things he wants done in this world and just pick names out of a hat and assign them. It may sometimes feel like that, after all, we often find ourselves doing this sort of calling at church. We need this many Sunday School teachers and so we are just going to ask people until we get enough people to say yes. But this is not the way that God works. No, God prepares us for ministry and prepares our ministries for us. Everything that Moses had done up to that point was preparing him for leading Israel out of bondage. Moses had gone through much and it was all designed very intentionally to make him ready for what would come. The same is true for us. The joys we’ve had, the struggles we’ve faced, all these are there to prepare us for what is to come in our lives. We can think, like Moses, that we’ve already done everything that is important. Instead we need to be prepared to allow God to send us. And we need to be ready to hear God’s call when it comes, and not ignore it but allow it to speak to us, to call us by name. When you get that call from the Christian Education committee or from the Nominating committee, listen to see if God is speaking to you through them. Is God calling you by name? Is God pushing you to continue a ministry you are involved in or move into a new kind of ministry in your life? How are you going to respond to the call?

Moses responds to God’s calling him by name by saying “here I am”. It is a simple response. It is a safe response. He acknowledges that he is there, in God’s presence, but he hasn’t committed to anything yet. Smart. God tells him to take off his shoes because he is standing on holy ground. I’m very thankful that that is not something that we always have to do when we enter holy ground, take off our shoes. But there is a more important question here, what is it that makes this ground holy? Is it just holy because of where it is? Are there places in this world that by their very nature are holy? Or is there something more to it. Perhaps it is holy because of the bush that is burning on it. Or perhaps it is because it is a place where God is speaking.

Other people have crossed over that spot of earth since Moses. We can be sure of this. And no bush burned and no voice spoke to them. The place wasn’t holy when they passed over that space in the same way it was holy when God spoke to Moses there. I think what made the place holy is that it was a place where a person met with their God and where God gave that person a mission. God gave Moses a purpose. God gave Moses direction. And I believe that this is what made this into a holy place. A holy act was about to happen, and so God created a holy place for it.

We gather in this sanctuary and worship God here. We like to think of this as a holy place. We treat it different than other places we inhabit. No, we don’t take off our shoes as we enter this place, but there are certain unwritten rules that we follow in the sanctuary. They’re different for each of us. For some of us, we show its holiness by the way we dress. For others, we act different in church, more subdued. There are certain things that we would never think of doing in this place. The college I went to had originally been owned by the Catholic Church and was a school for Nuns. The chapel in the college was beautiful. When the nuns were ready to sell it there were two interested parties: our college and a police academy. The police academy wanted to take the chapel and turn it into a shooting range. Even though our college offered less money, the nuns sold it to us because we would continue to treat their chapel as a holy place. What is it that makes this place holy to us? Is it holy to us because it was holy to our parents and grandparents before us? Is it holy to us because we are told that it is holy? Or is it holy to us because it is also a place where we meet our God and where we find our mission?

III. God’s Mission and Moses’ Arguments

And now we come to the part in scripture where we see God give Moses his mission, his call. God doesn’t just tell Moses to go do this. He explains the need to Moses and gives Moses the chance to get behind it. He tells Moses about the suffering of the people of Israel and how he has heard this suffering and is going to act on their behalf. When God calls us he prepares us for this by making the need known to us. He gets us excited about making a difference. He fills us with a passion for that which he sends us to. If he is calling us to mission work, he fills us with a passion for the lost. If he is calling us to ministries of compassion and justice, he fills us with a passion for the poor and the weak. If he is calling us to work with children, he fills us with a passion for the young.

But we, like Moses, can argue with him about this. We can make excuses. We’re too old, we’re too young, we don’t know what we’re doing, nobody will take us seriously, we’ve already got too much going on in our lives with work and family, we cannot commit to something else, anyway that’s that pastor’s job, isn’t it? The list of excuses can go on and on. But if God is really calling us to a ministry, the excuses will not last. I have to say that in seminary I talked to a number of second career pastors who talked about having the call to ministry on their lives long before they accepted that call. They again and again talked about fighting that call in their lives. And they again and again talked about how God eventually wore them down and here they were in training for ministry. And their stories were always told as “don’t let this happen to you” stories. There is no pride in their struggle with God. It is not something that they are happy they did. They all wish they had given in to God’s will sooner. They wish they hadn’t spent so much time arguing with God.

Don’t let the fact that they all ended up going to seminary fool you though, for sometimes that is the place that God calls us, and other times God calls us to other ministry opportunities that are quite different. We are all called to ministry within our church; within our community; within our families. This ministry looks different for each of us. What is God calling for you to do? Don’t believe for a second that God is done with you. He still has a use for each of us. And don’t believe that he only calls some of his children to ministry. We are all called to lives of ministry in all we do. So what is God calling you to? How does he want you to serve him? How are you able to serve? Open yourself up to God’s call. Listen to see where he might send you. And when he calls, follow. Moses discovered that he had no option but to go where God led. He discovered that as God called him to ministry, God provided his resources for him in ministry. God will do the same for you. Perhaps God is calling you to full time ministry. If so, answer this call. But more likely, he is calling you to some other ministry in this church, in this community. Are you going to listen? Are you going to answer his call?

Micah 6:1-8 "What the Lord Requires"

This week a ninety year old Swiss man who lived in France passed away. He was known to people around the world as Brother Roger. In 1940 Brother Roger started a community in the town of Taizé, France where Christians could gather for prayer and worship, where Christians could flee the destruction of the war. Brother Roger founded this community as an Ecumenical prayer community and since it was founded people from around the world have flocked to it to experience a special time of peace and worship. Today there are about a hundred brothers who live in this community, but the Taizé community is much larger than these hundred brothers. Their worship gathers people from around the world together in peace and love and helps them to enter into God’s presence. Their worship style is unique. In our hymnal there are 10 Taizé songs. They are all short and repetitive, so that you can sing them over and over and enter into a place of prayer where you can commune with your God. Taizé is a place whose founder has passed into eternity, but his mission and ministry will live on. It is a place that Micah would like, for it understands very clearly the fact that our worship must be tied to our actions and our praise must be congruent with our lives.

I. Foundations

Over the last few weeks we have been looking at a couple of the minor prophets found at the end of the Old Testament. In them we see men of God who speak the word of God for the people of God. We also see that often the people of God don’t listen to them. We specifically looked at two particular messages that seem to crop up in all these prophetic writings. First there is the message that God desires justice. God wants his people to be faithful to him. He wants his people to care for those around them. He wants his people to live just and righteous lives. Many of the prophets predict doom for God’s people because they aren’t living just lives. These prophets speak out that there are consequences to your actions and if you don’t stay true, you will suffer. Today, as we look at Micah, we will again see this call for justice in our lives.

But there is another theme that runs through these minor prophets that is just as important. This second theme is the theme of God’s mercy and love. When we look at Hosea’s message in particular, we see a God whose love is so great that he will reach out again and again to a people who have not remained faithful to him and he will help them out. Again, in Micah we will see hints of promises of God’s mercy. Pain and suffering will come to the people of Judah, but it will be followed by blessing.

And so, in these prophets we see a call for justice and at the same time we see a promise of mercy. And when we look at these prophets we realize that you must have both of these for our faith, for our God to make sense.

I think there is something else that we need to look at to help us wrap our heads and our hearts around the message that Micah has for us today. And that is the definition of a prophet. Now normally when you think of a prophet you think of someone who predicts the future. I normally think of someone in robes with a long white beard who warns of coming disaster.

Now predicting the future is something that a prophet does, but that is not the key to being a prophet. Really, being a prophet is about speaking the word of God. In ancient Israel there was a dichotomy between prophets and priests. This is a separation that we don’t have as much today as our pastors take both roles to a certain degree. Both prophet and priest served God in certain ways. Both were trained in their arts at schools and seminaries. But they each filled different purposes in their ministries. Priests were about serving God in the temple. They were all about coming between God and his people and speaking to God on his people’s behalf. They were the ones that offered sacrifices. They were the ones who came before God in the holy of holies and lifted the people’s prayers before him. Priests entered God’s presence and spoke to God on behalf of his people. But prophets, they weren’t about speaking to God for his people, instead they were about speaking to God’s people for God. It was the prophets that brought the word. It was the prophets who spoke the truth that the people didn’t always want to hear. It was the prophets who were focused on making sure God’s people stayed true to God.

II. Micah

Micah, Like Amos, was not a professional prophet. He was called by God with a message and he shared this message with all those around him. He lived at the same time as Isaiah and his message was quite similar to that of Isaiah. But where Isaiah spoke with education and had the ear of the leadership of Judah, Micah came from a lower class and Micah spoke to the people.

Now, Micah had harsh words to share with the people of Judah. He talked about coming disaster and described weeping and mourning that will come to the people because of their decisions. Now when God accuses his people of turning from him he talks of it in one of two ways. Interestingly enough, these two ways both have to do with the great commandment. Either he accuses them of not loving God with their whole heart, mind, soul and spirit or he accuses them of not loving their neighbor as themselves. The first of these accusations is the accusation of idolatry. If you remember two weeks ago, that is what Hosea was accusing God’s people of. They were going off and worshipping other gods. They had idols in their households. They were not remaining faithful. Sometimes we as God’s people do not put God first, but let the things around us engulf us and take leadership in our lives. When this happens we are as guilty of idolatry as if we had a golden idol sitting in a place of honor in our living room. But Micah doesn’t really spend much time talking about idolatry. Oh, it is implied, but it is not the focus of his message. Instead he focuses on the second one. For God accuses his people of not loving their neighbors as themselves also, and this is Micah’s complaint. You have not cared for the poor. You have not fed the hungry. You have not visited the prisoner. You have lived lives focused on yourselves and your own desires and wants, and there are consequences to this. For Micah, our relationship with God is affected by our relationship with those around us. For Micah, worship is worthless without caring for those who need us. For Micah, praises are meaningless without justice.

III. Seek Justice

Micah 6:6-8 has become quite famous in its message, and for good reason. We really should hear these verses every time we gather as God’s people to worship God for they are all about worshipping God. And hopefully, they help us to have our minds in the right place when we come together to worship him. They begin with a question, one in the first person, one which we each should ask: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” These questions ask two things: how do we worship and how do we make things right with God for our sins? Now we have answers to these questions. Not necessarily answers that we have verbalized, but answers nonetheless. First, we worship God by singing songs to him. We worship God by taking an hour a week (when we can) to come to church and sing and praise and hear pastor preach. Maybe if we really want to show God that we’re worshipping him we’ll come to Bible Study as well or maybe we’ll volunteer to help out at church in some way. But, no matter what we do, when we talk about worship we invariably are talking about what happens when we come together on Sunday morning. But Micah will show us that worship is more than a Sunday morning event.

The second question is even easier for us to answer. How do we make things right with God for our sins? The truth is that we can’t. That’s why God sent Jesus, and though God doesn’t ask for our firstborns to save us from our sins, God sent his firstborn to pay for each of us. And since we’ve accepted God’s Son as our savior we’re mostly off the hook, right? Well, not exactly. Lets look at Micah’s answer to these questions.

“He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Yes, Jesus died for our sins. Yes, that is what brings salvation to us. But God still requires something from us. God requires for us to act with justice. God requires for us to live lives that are filled with a love for mercy. And God requires for us to walk humbly with him.

Justice is about being fair and impartial in our dealings with others. Justice is about not cheating on your taxes. Justice is about treating a stranger with the same care and love that you would treat a family member. Do we live lives of justice? Is justice a central factor in our decision making? I remember that it was high school where I first became aware of the concept of justice. My awareness of justice took center stage when I discovered that I wasn’t always being treated justly. I wasn’t treated as well by my friends because I was much more interested in reading and studying than sports. My sister who was two years younger than me got to do things two years earlier than I did. My friends had cooler cars and could stay out later than me. Life was unjust, especially for me. Now I was keenly aware of justice and I realized that I was on the losing end of justice issues again and again. Life just wasn’t fair. Unfortunately, this is not at all what Micah was talking about. You see, my sense of justice needed to grow outside myself. And this didn’t really happen for me until I made it to college, until I realized how well I had it, until I discovered that a true sense of justice doesn’t focus on what you are lacking, but rather focuses on what those around you are lacking. Justice is about sacrificing for those around you. It is about not worrying primarily about yourself and instead worrying about your neighbor. It is about loving your neighbor as yourself. All of a sudden my justice complaints were turned on their head. I was treated better by the teachers at school than students who were known as problems. I could do the same amount of work on a paper and just because I had done it, I would get a better grade. I got to try things out on my own growing up, but my sister had to do all this stuff with her bigger brother tagging along. And though I had friends with cooler cars, I also had friends who didn’t have the resources to have a car at all. And there were much more serious things to worry about than how life was being unfair to me.

Loving mercy can also be very difficult. Again, it is much easier when it is directed at you. It is much easier to be into mercy when you’ve just been pulled over for speeding. All of a sudden, mercy becomes a very good idea. But I’ve been on the road and watched cars swerve around other cars in such a crazy and dangerous way… then I’ve felt vindicated when ten minutes later I pass that car sitting on the side of the road having just been pulled over. In my head I know they deserve what they’ve received and the last thing I want is for them to receive mercy. Mercy is about getting something you don’t deserve, or even more, not getting something you do deserve. Traffic tickets are just one example. And mercy goes against a lot in our human nature. It fights against our human understanding of justice. And the question arises, do we really love mercy? Are we ready to forgive those around us for what they’ve done to us? Are we prepared to turn the other cheek? And we wonder how far mercy can really go. A love for mercy is not always something that you can act upon. But it does call for you to give up thoughts of revenge and anger. It does call for you to learn to forgive. And mercy brings you to a place of peace in your heart.

And then there is the humble journey that we are called to take with our Lord. Now we aren’t talking about our relationships with each other, instead we are talking about our relationship with God. And that relationship isn’t one where we know it all, it isn’t one where we have the upper hand. We aren’t traveling down the road with Jesus as our co-pilot. No, our journey with God must be a journey of humility. This isn’t only humility in relationship to God, this is humility in our relationship with others.

I think the arrogance of Christians is one of the biggest turn-offs to non-Christians. I’ve heard more people actually say, “If that’s what it means to be a Christian, I don’t want any part of that.” They see Christians as haughty and holier than thou. They see Christians as looking down on everybody around them as inferior. But that is not what our faith is called to be.

Being humble in our faith is about acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers. Being humble in our faith is reading the Bible looking for God to teach us instead of trying to prove our points. Being humble in our faith is listening to those around us and hearing correction when it is needed.

Micah’s greatest message for God’s people, for us, has nothing to do with predicting the future. At first, it doesn’t really even have much to do with our relationship with God. But it is an important message for us nonetheless. We are to act justly, we are to love mercy and we are to walk humbly with our God. This is what the Lord requires. This is the worship that God wants. We can sit and sing songs until we’re hoarse, if we aren’t living justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God, it means nothing.

Matthew 9:9-13 - "God's Superheroes"

Because of the Thresherman event this weekend the church service was shared with the town churches with a guest speaker. This is a sermon from June 5th which was also a shared service with Our Savior's Lutheran as we finished up our weekend of VBS together.

Superheroes are famous for their elaborate origins. Batman’s parents were killed when he was a boy. Superman rocketed from a dying planet and was raised by a Kansas farmer and his wife. Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider and the Incredible Hulk was bombarded with gamma radiation. But Matthew, a former tax collector who went on to write one of the books in our Bible has such a simple origin story. Jesus said, “Follow me” and he did.

I. Those God Chooses

Now it is an interesting conceit to thing of oneself as a superhero, as doing anything heroic, especially in relation to your faith, but when you look throughout the Bible you come across many people like Matthew: ordinary people, people dealing with the normal things that life brings them coming in contact with God and discovering what it means to be more than they thought they were because God is working through them.

There was an elderly couple who had money and had all they needed except that they didn’t have a child to pass it on to. And they were living their lives in the Middle East, doing what they did. And God came to them and told them to move south to a land which he would show them and he would make them into a great nation. After laughter and fears and tests and betrayals, they trusted God and obeyed him and the nation of Israel began in its unique way. This elderly couple became the parents of a nation and their descendants, both physical and spiritual, became as numerous as the sands on the shore or the stars in the sky.

There was a boy who spent his life tending sheep for his father. He was the runt of his family, the youngest of a great number of brothers. But a prophet came to him and anointed him to become the king of the land. This shepherd boy became the greatest of the Old Testament kings who was known for being a man after God’s own heart.

And then there are the disciples, like Matthew. Some were fishermen, ordinary workers, others were tax collectors. Jesus had followers who had been prostitutes and he even had a few revolutionaries who joined his band. Jesus’ followers weren’t highly educated. They weren’t trained in leadership or missions. But Jesus said to them, “Follow me” and they did.

II. What we are Chosen For

But what does it mean when we say yes to following Jesus? What does it mean to be a hero for God? I think at its simplest being a hero is about being more than you thought you could be, more than you have it in you to be. Matthew had it in him to collect taxes, to be hated by those around him but to make up for it by being wealthy. Peter had it in him to fish. David had it in him to be a shepherd. And Abraham and Sarah had it in them to stay in Ur and let their line end with them. But God had more planned for each of these and God gave them the power and the strength and the faith and the hope to bring about greatness.

Our kids learned about three heroic traits this weekend. These traits that they learned about aren’t the end all be all to being a hero, but they all are tied up in following Jesus’ command to Matthew and answering when Jesus says, “Follow me.” They learned that it is important to trust God and that in trusting God we learn to obey him. It isn’t human strength that we rely on but rather God’s strength. They learned that we can find courage in the fact that God has a plan for us. And they learned the power that comes from living a life of encouragement. We like to think that heroics are those big things that are done to save the world and help those in need, but one of the most heroic things we can do for others is to encourage them and help them when they need it.

These three traits of being a hero for God are only the starting point, they only begin us on the road where we find ourselves to be greater than we thought we were capable of.

If we follow the example of Matthew we answer Jesus’ call by saying yes. If we follow the example of Matthew we go where Jesus leads. If we follow the example of Matthew we will discover that though we are ordinary people living ordinary lives, God can use us to do the extraordinary. Matthew’s example is an example of trust, of obedience, of courage; it is an example of faith.

In today’s gospel we see a number of people who respond to Jesus with faith. There is the synagogue ruler who comes to Jesus for help because his daughter is dying and there is the old woman who touches Jesus to receive healing. These people trusted that Jesus was able to change their lives for the better. These people had courage to do something that was difficult for them. The synagogue ruler didn’t dare go to Jesus because Jesus was being branded as a heretic. The old woman didn’t dare face Jesus because she was considered unclean by all those around him. And yet they both let their trust in God lead them to acts of courage and their faith brought healing to them.

I began with the origin stories of a few superheroes. I also shared some stories of people from the Bible who lived lives of heroic faith. But the key isn’t to focus on them. The key is to look at yourself.

Those of you who belong to my church know that I’m being ordained in about 3 weeks. One of the steps along this process that I have been going through has been that I had to tell my own origin story to other Christians. It’s something that’s quite common among Christians, it’s called giving a testimony. It’s one of those things that can be scary to do… after all, who likes to get in front of a crowd and talk about themselves? But the testimony is our own way of bringing ourselves into God’s big picture. It is the place where we get to tell about what God has done in our lives, how God has worked and how we responded. It is our own origin story, how we came to be the Christian that we are. What is your origin story? What is your testimony? How has God changed your life and how did you react to this?

I’ve never understood the criminal who reads Superman and gets into it, then goes off and breaks the law. How can you be inspired by someone who stands for truth, justice and the American way and yet do things that go against that very thing? No, let these stories inspire and encourage you. Let these people of faith that we read about in the pages of the Bible be people who you long to live like and let their example be something that you strive for. When you open the Bible and come upon a story of someone following Jesus ask yourself what you would have done in their circumstance. Would you have had the trust that they showed? Would you have been as courageous as they were? Would you have stood up for those who needed to be stood up for, offering encouragement instead of disdain? Would you have responded to faith or fear? So often we allow our fears to keep us from truly living lives of faith. So often we let our worries ruin the greatness that God has planned for us.

But when we do follow, when we do let our faith take charge, when we do follow that example of Matthew, our lives move out of the ordinary and all of a sudden, the melodrama of superheroics becomes real to us.

And so, I ask you as we asked our kids this weekend, do you want to be one of God’s heroes? Do you want to step outside the ordinary and discover that he has a great plan for you? Are you ready to allow your faith to change your life and make you new? No matter where you are, what you’ve been through, God can use you. He is saying, even now, “Follow me.” How will you answer? Amen.

Hosea 1:2,3; 3:1-5 - "Grace & Mercy"

Certain heavy metal and rock songs from the late seventies and early eighties are known to be recorded in a way that if you play them backwards you hear certain hidden messages. Some of the messages have even been reported to proclaim satanic themes. Parents in the seventies and eighties didn’t only have to worry about the lyrics of the music their kids listened to, they had to worry about what would happen if the lyrics were played backwards. Now, in all honesty, we need to realize that much of this is urban legend and fearmongering towards parents who never seem to be able to understand the music their children listen to. There was even a band who actually worked into one of their songs that if you played it backwards you heard a voice saying, “you have too much time on your hands”. And then there’s country music. I’m sure you have all heard what happens when you play country music backwards; you get your wife back, you get your dog back and you get your truck back.

Well, I wonder if Hosea might be one of the first country songs out there, for in it we see a man whose wife cheats on him, and then leaves him and seems to take their children with her. But then Hosea turns the song around and starts playing it backwards for he gets his wife back and the children back and things turn around for him. But we also discover with Hosea that he didn’t sit and wait for his wife to come back to him, he actually went out and got her, he even had to pay money for her because she had become a slave, but obviously not a very good one, because the amount he paid was about half what a slave usually goes for.

But we see something much more than the makings of a country song in Hosea’s marital woes. We see an example of God’s relationship with us, God’s people, and we learn that, like Hosea’s wife, Gomer, we have been bought with a price by our loving God.

I. Balance

Today we continue with some of the minor prophets that are found at the back of the Old Testament. We so often skip over these teacher’s of God’s will and I think we miss out by doing so. Last week we looked at Amos and his call for God’s people to be people of justice and righteousness. Today we are going to look at Hosea and his example of God’s grace and mercy.

It is important to pay attention to both of these: justice and mercy; righteousness and grace. The two go together and need to be understood in context with each other. Too often, this world has tried to present God as a God of justice without mercy or God as a God of grace without righteousness. And if you fall into either of these traps you end up with a very skewed idea of who God is. Justice and righteousness without grace and mercy gives us a God who is vengeful and angry. When we start to see God this way we see a God who is constantly smiting the people of this world for not living up to impossible standards. This understanding of God has been used by people throughout the history of the church to scare people into doing right. And it causes people to wonder whether they really want to be a Christian and serve such a demanding God.

A God who only pays attention to grace and mercy without letting justice and righteousness enter the picture is wishy-washy and lets anything go. This God tells you that you don’t need to worry about how you live because you’ll be forgiven no matter what. This understanding of God is even more insidious in many ways. This understanding of God has allowed the strong to lord it over the weak and excuse themselves for their sins against each other. It makes God into the champion of the person who sins against someone else where God is so very clearly the champion of the person who is being sinned against. When God oly pays attention to mercy and doesn’t care about justice, he becomes the God of the oppressor. If God is only forgiving sins without calling us to a better life, he becomes an excuse to behave however we want without consequences. This understanding of God allows us as Christians to ignore much of what the prophets say and even what Jesus taught during his life.

And so there needs to be a balance. There needs to be a focus on Gods mercy and forgiveness, but there needs to be an acknowledgement that God desires for his followers to live just lives.

As we will see, Hosea lives with this balance so very deeply and profoundly.

II. Gomer

We often look at the prophets to see what they have to say. This makes sense. But at the same time, we also look at how they live. We do the same with teachers and preachers today. We ask ourselves whether their message in line with their lifestyle? Someone preaching against greed probably shouldn’t be living in a mansion. We sometimes even go a step farther and compare the way they are living to the full gospel. Even if I don’t get up here every Sunday and preach against adultery, if I began having an affair there would be something wrong. My message would not be in line with my lifestyle.

Well, Hosea is the story of someone taking this idea of keeping their lifestyle in line with their message to an extreme. For God doesn’t just give Hosea words to speak. He also asks him to live out God’s relationship with God’s people in a very profound way.

In Hosea 1, long before we get to any of the prophecies that Hosea has for God’s people, we are told about God’s command to Hosea. God tells him to go find himself an unfaithful wife. God tells him to marry a woman who is going to cheat on him. Go find an adulterous wife because my people have been adulterous to me. And then, when your wife cheats on you and then leaves you, you will know how your God feels when you do the same to me. So Hosea marries a woman named Gomer and she has a number of children, and Hosea doesn’t really know if they are his own. But God tells Hosea to name them different things to point out Israel’s sin towards God. One is named Jezreel which means “God scatters”. Another is named Lo-Ruhamah which means “not loved” and the third is named Lo-Ammi which means “not my people”. And you complain about what your parents named you. Imaging being named “not loved”.

And here is where we see Hosea’s understanding of God’s need for justice. Hear chapter 2, verse 2: “Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband.” Harsh words. It sounds like these words are coming from Hosea as he explains to his children what it is that Gomer has done to him and their relationship. But these are not Hosea’s words to his children, they are God’s words against God’s people who have turned from him. Hosea, in living out his love for a wife who was unfaithful has learned how brokenhearted God is when we turn from him.

III. God’s Love

You see, God desires us. When we are unfaithful it hurts him. He feels betrayed. And just like the people of Israel 2500 years ago, we tend to be unfaithful. We may not chase after the local gods, we may not have idols of Baal in our living rooms, but we are unfaithful in our own ways. We so often do not put God first. And though we do not have idols in our houses, we sometimes have other things that take up so much of our energy and our time. God doesn’t come first in our priorities, but rather we put the things of this world before him… And as a church we have even messed it up because we have related going to church with putting God first when what we are often doing is just finding something else to put before God.

So how do we put God first? God wants us as his people to be faithful to him. He wants us to live by what we refer to as the great commandment. Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself. An important message and one that I’m afraid we don’t always live up to, and so we find ourselves like Gomer, running off after an easier way; perhaps trying to convince ourselves that God doesn’t really care how we live so we can do whatever we want; perhaps figuring that we don’t want to put off the rewards for tomorrow if we can have them today. And so we enjoy ourselves the best we can and forget that when we prayed a prayer asking Jesus into our hearts, we were committing to a relationship with him that is eternal.

And then we get to the good news of Hosea 3. You see, God has Hosea act out his message yet again. God has Hosea go rescue Gomer from the predicament she has gotten herself into. Hosea actually has to go and purchase his wife from a slavery that she had gotten herself into. And Hosea does this. He shows grace and mercy to a woman who had spurned his love. He reaches out to the one who had rejected him and offers her redemption. Redemption here isn’t some pie in the sky good that happens after you die. Hosea redeems Gomer by buying her out of slavery. She has gotten herself into a mess and he rescues her from it. And in this, again, we see our relationship with our God. As Hosea rescued Gomer, Jesus came and paid the price for our slavery and set us free. God’s love showed mercy. But mercy came with a call for faithfulness. Gomer was told when she was rescued from slavery that she was to live with Hosea many days and that she must not cheat on Hosea again.

God looks for the same commitment from us, his followers. He doesn’t want our relationship with him to be a revolving door. He doesn’t want us to come to him when we need help and then run away when we think we can handle it on our own. He really doesn’t want us to be adulterous, he doesn’t want us to cheat. If we do, he will forgive us, but he has a much better idea for us.

We see a glimpse of what he wants our relationship with him to be in Hosea 2, starting at verse 14. Notice that this is relational imagery, God is so very clearly relating to his people as a husband relates to his wife. “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the days she came up out of Egypt. In that day you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’ I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.”

God’s justice is great. He desires faithfulness from us. He desires commitment. He longs for us to follow the great commandment. God wants us to put him first, before all the other things that this life has to distract us from him. This is key to who our God is. It is central to God’s very being. Again and again in the Old Testament God refers to himself as a jealous God and this is precisely what he is talking about. But this desire for justice is balanced in God’s very being and we see in Jesus that it is mercy that balances it.

But it’s not enough to look at this and apply it to our relationship with God, for as I said, God wants our lifestyle to match our message. And so, God wants us to live lives of justice and at the same time he wants us to show mercy to those around us. As Hosea showed love and mercy to his cheating wife, we are called to live out this same forgiveness and mercy in our own lives. Hosea is an extreme example, and I don’t think God is coming to any of us and telling us to name our kids, “I don’t love you.” With Hosea God was able to show more clearly what kind of God he is, and remind us what we are called to be. But our actions can be affected by Hosea’s. We can learn to temper our actions with mercy. We can learn how to reach out to those around us with God’s love: a love that expects much, but also forgives much. We can learn to be more like our God and reach out to those who have hurt us with forgiveness in our hearts. Our God shows us the way. Will we follow it? I can’t help but go back to the Lord’s Prayer where we pray for God to forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. Are we ready to take up the second half of this phrase? Are we ready to follow God more clearly and directly? Are we ready to follow the way Hosea did? Amen.