Hosea Sings the Blues

Sermon

It’s Jazz Sunday at Westminster. It didn’t dawn on me until after I’d entitled my sermon “Hosea Sings the Blues.” A quick check with Jeff Lewis assured me that jazz’s roots are in the blues, so we’re good to go. Wanting a sermonic riff on that title, I thought about using jazz tunes as sermon illustrations, so I Googled “jazz songs about cheating.” What came up were titles like “You Don’t Know What Love Is” (Dinah Washington) and “Why Would You Stay” (by an artist called Kem). Not very evocative. The songs that did go through my head as I read Hosea were country-Western. “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed” or “She’s Acting Single and He’s Drinking Doubles” and Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” After reading womanist theologian Wil Gafney on Hosea, what came up was Shel Silverstein’s classic, “Put another log on the fire. Cook me up some bacon and some beans. Go out to the car and change the tire. Wash my socks and sew my old blue jeans.” The husband’s extensive to-do list for his wife concludes with, “Then come and tell me why you’re leaving me.”

This Hosea story is horrid. God asks Hosea to enact a prophetic gesture to give a message to Israel. Hosea is to take a wife, Gomer, and have children with her. In the course of the marriage, Hosea is instructed to abandon her and, by the way, to give the children names which, in many countries, the birth registrar would disallow by virtue of their abusive nature. Finally, Hosea is told to take Gomer back but to punish her with silence. So the question: exactly who is singing the blues—God, Hosea, or Gomer? And what is the point of the prophetic gesture? Certainly the prophet means to convey that God has been jilted, but just how this has happened and by whom is what’s at stake.

The traditional reading of Hosea is God-as-husband, wronged by Israel, the whoring wife. But I just read the book Educated, in which author Tara Westover recounts her childhood and youth of being abused at the hands of her father and brother all because “God told me to punish you, whore”—which she’s not. One consequence for my of reading this book is a hyper-sensitivity to religiously motivated abuse of women and children. I’d like to go on record as rejecting the image of God as abuser. Reading the prophet Hosea makes me wonder how divine love, compassion, and fidelity got confused with battery, vindictiveness, and violence. I don’t think that’s the divine plan for women.

The names of Gomer’s children are key to understanding the book. The first child, Jezreel, is named after a political bloodbath which, according to the book of Kings, is instigated by God through the prophet Elisha. Hosea’s king, a descendent of the man who carried out the Jezreel coup, is the kind of ruler who believes that because he’d been anointed, he can do anything he wants. Gomer’s next child, a girl, is named No Mercy. The Hebrew meaning of her name means Withhold Mother-Love. The last child’s name reflects total rejection—You Aren’t My People, I’m Not Your God.

The names invite us to step back from the church fathers’ traditional interpretation to look at Gomer’s witness with her children. Gomer, the wife we love to blame. The word translated as “whore” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible doesn’t mean a street walker or someone who engages in sex for money, it means someone who is promiscuous. The writer doesn’t give us evidence of her unfaithfulness to Hosea, just states that she is, at some point, promiscuous. That is, indiscriminately loving. We don’t know whether she had extra-marital relationships after marriage or before, whether she was a rape victim or a temple prostitute for one of the gods currently being worshiped in lieu of the God in Jerusalem. Each of these acts is sufficient cause to label her as promiscuous. In an honor-shame culture, it’s an insult to be married to a woman not faithful to you. Just as it was to Joseph that his wife, Mary, has a child whose father is not him. Gomer’s children were of her lawfully married husband, who claimed them by naming them. Unlike most women in scripture, Gomer is also named and located within a family—she’s the daughter of Diblaim. She was someone, and what this someone does is exhibit extravagant motherly love—she nurses and weans her child, Withhold Mother-Love (we also hear that about the prophet Samuel’s mother, Hannah), despite the command implicit in her name. That act alone is “promiscuous”—loving her children no matter what anyone else commanded.

So whose blues are being sung? Israel has been treating God like that wife in “Put Another Log on the Fire,” as if God is a useful member of the household staff. God gets invoked to bring rains at the right time, to bring good crops. God is an appreciative audience for the worship extravaganzas staged to consolidate politico-religious power. God is consulted when there’s an exterior threat, is invited to save Israel, but forging attractive and expensive alliances with former enemies might be more effective; you don’t mind if we help you out, do you God? Remember the passage from Hosea 11 that I read to the children? God sings the blues there, coming across as doting on, cooing to, and coddling the precious, vulnerable Israel-child. In her promiscuous, extravagant, and indiscriminate love for her children, Gomer makes a prophetic gesture of the love God expresses in chapter 11. The power clique of Israel so takes for granted God’s promise of faithful love, they use it as their trump card, their ace in the hole, expressing their sense of exceptionalism. They almost disdain the One who offers it. It’s the functional equivalent of national “Put Another Log on the Fire.”

You might know how this feels. I hear stories, mostly from women, about being treated this way by an organization. One woman in particular told me about a congregation she’d supported for years that cheerfully took her financial gifts and volunteer hours, allowed her to provide care to members and to plan and execute major fundraising events. But they somehow never quite got around to inviting her to a leadership position to help decide how those funds would be used. “Put another log on the fire.” Israel offers a similar bargain: a little devotional lip service, some beautiful worship, then God can fork over the blessings. God is not being given even the dignity accorded a wife. Flowers and chocolate on Valentine’s Day to cover up the lack of daily respect. Maybe that’s what Hosea’s prophetic gesture is about—the transactional relationship of “What’s in it for me?”

Israel knew what was expected of them. That’s what the first five books of the Bible are about. In case the Torah was not communicating adequately, on a regular and frequent basis, God sent prophets to remind Israel about getting the relationship back on track. What salts God’s socks is what Israel had been warned about all along—behavior that doesn’t coincide with what they say they believe. Prophets critique kings and cronies who tax the 99% so the 1% don’t need to be. They rail against indentured debt servitude—what we call payday loans and low minimum wage. They condemn unjust trade practices—what we call higher prices in low-income areas. They condemn that widows and orphans are not cared for—what we call cuts to food stamps, foster care, Medicare, and Social Security. They hate disrespect for the resident alien.

Hosea is supposed to be a love story. That’s what all the reader’s notes to the book say in our study Bibles. It’s not Hosea’s fault it’s so hard to read. His culture is so foreign to us. Marital infidelity alone isn’t perceived the way it once was. I’m told that 20% of all marriages experience infidelity. In 20 years of doing weddings, I’ve only done one wedding for people who weren’t already living together. So how do we hear this story? When the story is read as “the prophet done wrong by his woman,” it becomes a cheesy version of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and it’s all sentimentality and stereotyping that lets us off the hook. If it’s read as “Put Another Log on the Fire” it’s little more than an apology for the abuse of women and children, and that’s no kind of gospel for half the world. But if we allow Gomer to mirror God’s promiscuous love of us, maybe we’ll have the courage to let what we say we believe be reflected in our behavior. We’re doing jazz today, something beautiful and creative, neither cheesy nor sentimental. But whose blues are these, anyway? God’s at Israel’s infidelity? Hosea’s at his wife’s? Gomer’s at what is required of her? Or ours on behalf of the world?