Mutinous Runaway Bunnies: Hosea
Certainly more than half of the Hebrew Scriptures at one or more points in their history were refugee documents. Given the repeats of civil war, imperial exile, and expulsion, these texts in their varied histories were carried across the dividing lines. Never a small book (books as we know them are first developed hundreds of years later), but child-sized scrolls of thin animal skin, single-sided handwritten. Stored perhaps like the Dead Sea Scrolls in large pottery jars. Heavy, bulky.
In their earliest incarnations, scriptures were not scripture like we might honor it. The preciousness was present but the impact is still a mystery. Choices were made to carry this harsh word. Refugees carried these texts, on their backs, on a cart. They could only take what they could carry. What precious items, clothing, food, and other texts were left behind to hold on to these wonderings and promises and judgments? What in your life are you being asked to leave behind to carry what is important to God with you through this time of challenges and crisis?
The text doesn’t narrate its own journeys but the fact of the texts being in our hands does. The prophetic book of Hosea suggests it journeyed through at least two of these crises’. During the destruction of the Northern Kingdom Israel by the Assyrian Empire in the 8th-century BCE, at that time it seems these texts were likely carried south to Judah. And then when the same fate from the same sins crushed Judah, it was most likely smuggled to Babylon in the 6th-century Exile. This text isn’t sunshine and sweetness like a ‘Little Golden Book of Prayers’. It is rather like Runaway Bunny, but a salacious mutinous Runaway Bunny. It explores why we are here and where we are going.
We know almost nothing about Hosea, we don’t know if the metaphor they explore was really lived into, and it doesn’t really matter because the story works as it is. It evokes strong feelings of shame and guilt and dismay in the very words it chooses. The W word is not what you might have expected to hear first thing in on a Sunday morning. That W word in Hebrew is not about industry, but instead, it is a ‘free love’ kind of word. It is just as degrading an insult as it felt like today, but the word is calling someone loose or fast meanly, it is not something in our criminal code. More importantly, this word of the prophet isn’t about intimacy so much as it is about how we use our powers. So much intellect and ability and shaped for good and mutuality. All this abundance through which we can know God closely, and respond more readily. AND instead every new invention we create we use for corruption as fast as possible. Again and again, we delight in our unchastened affection for the easy way. Again and again our unabashed attraction to the most selfish interpretation of free will. These are our sins against God’s love, and self, and earth, and neighbors – and God doesn’t even have to smite us – we are doing it ourselves. Thousands of years have passed since Hosea’s words met parchment and we face the same charges. As the old punk song says: we’re doing ourselves in much faster than nature could. When the Martians come, perhaps we will make great pets (warning: the song and therefore the link has explicit language).
The story we are offered for the partnership of God and humanity is one of marriage. However, it is far away from the love matches, mutuality, and balanced dignity of most of the marriages I encounter. The driving metaphor Hosea uses is one of an unequal union, rather like person and pet, except that we are not pets yet, and they are perhaps, much better at fidelity than us. The partnership in this story is more like coach and player. Ted Lasso and Jamie Tart actually echo this prophet’s illustration quite well, if Coach Ted was a whole lot more ticked and grieved more of the time. In the context of Hosea, ancient marriage was more like current professional sports – players are contracted with and traded in a mercantile type exchange for the long-term prosperity of the team. A player and coach may become friends, healthy affection can make it more life-giving; but at the end of the day it is rooted in a business-type relationship. So part of the power of this Hosean story is the contrast between that typical coolness and how much love and commitment he has for his mutinous spouse.
The most important facet of what makes scripture scripture isn’t that it is a weather forecast or cookbook. It is that we continue to find our lives and our relationships with God and neighbor in it. Hosea is openly wondering about the perplexing reality that God’s fidelity is more forceful than God’s raw power. Does it ever make you wonder – why God sticks with us? All we know or perceive of God is relational – we are God’s partners, but also, the dumb undeserving creatures that God chooses repeatedly. Part of the story tells of the feeling that God at times is so fiercely outraged that God tries to walk away, but also, then, always turns back. God is fully available to us and takes this obligation freely; and in our most truthful moments – we can give no reasonable reason for it. Truly Love that surpasses understanding. The fact that there is a story to tell at all, is because of God’s creative freedom. The story continues because of God’s infinite passion.
What Hosea offers us today was spoken and scribed and sacrificed for in a time of partisanship, corruption, assassinations, dubious foreign actors, existential questions, and everyday woes. Sounds familiar. Scripture is scripture because we continue to find ourselves in the middle of it. We are in this, all our trespasses and trials and thanksgivings. We are the mutinous Runaway Bunny, and the selfish Jamie Tart, and both the salacious and the compassionate acts have real consequences for life together on Earth, and eternally with God. Hosea’s harsh words are real for us, right now. So are the promises of God’s passion for us, and God’s commitment to reconciliation. The parts of our likeness to the metaphor do not have to persist. God is never going to give us up. We are given storerooms of jars of wisdom to carry through this time. We must choose what to set our hearts and souls and lives by, and we will have to leave some things we like, behind.