June 11, 2023

Hosea 5:15-6:6; Matthew 9:9-13

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

In the Book of Hosea, we are hearing something new. New in the scheme of the Bible because obviously this was written long ago. Steadfast love not sacrifices. The knowledge of God not burnt offerings. God does not want the things that have been offered since long ago. God wants something else, something new.

Steadfast love, meaning steadfast love of God. Knowledge of God is an odd phrase, but it means essentially the same thing as steadfast love. To know God is to accept what God is asking of us.

The reading from the Gospel follows a similar theme, but it is set in the context of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus was born centuries after Hosea, so these prophetic lessons are not new. but they were clearly not followed. Why not? Because sacrifices made at the Temple have again become the central expectation of religious life.

In the Gospel passage, Jesus is hanging out with some sinners around his dinner table. And the Pharisees, who are essentially the morality police of the era, they have a few bones to pick with Jesus. “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Why does a supposedly holy man choose his company so poorly—this is a not very subtle dig at Jesus as seen through the strict religious viewpoint of the Pharisees.

How does Jesus respond?

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

Jesus is returning criticism twofold upon the Pharisees. He questions their understanding of who is really in need of help. And Jesus further invokes the language of the prophet Hosea, language that the Pharisees not doubt know. To be fair, the Pharisees were generally more in line with this way of thinking, unlike the Sadducees who were focused on performing the required rituals and sacrifices.

Hosea lived in the Northern Kingdom of Israel during a time when the people were turning away from the exclusive worship of God. Not only were they faithless, their moral and ethical behavior was sliding away from what was expected.

They still maintained their sacrifices, though. They still spent money in the Temple, though this was also a problem. They were no longer traveling down to Jerusalem but setting up places of worship in the north. Such deviation was not acceptable.

Hosea’s prophecy was intended to remind the people of what God expected of them. It was to bring them back into compliance with the covenant. But looking back over the many centuries of Biblical history, it might be difficult to pinpoint what that covenant included from time to time. The Ten Commandments might pop to mind, but the Law of Moses was far more involved. By one count, there are 613 commandments to be followed. That’s a busy week.

And this long list was not always around. Think back to the Book of Genesis. Israel does not yet exist. Abraham is not Jewish in any recognizable sense. He was a worshipper of Yahweh, the god of his tribe who would eventually be known as the God of Abraham. But during Abraham’s life, there was a relatively small group of his kin who devote themselves to worshipping this one particular god.

We know that sacrifices were expected back then. The grim account of the Binding of Isaac reminds us that God momentarily asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son. There are other passages in the Bible that declare that human sacrifice is a sin, but that is noteworthy. You needed to tell people not to do something, meaning it had been done at various times. The account of Abraham and Isaac may have been offered as the final word on a past practice.

And so, they sacrificed a ram instead. Animal sacrifices became the norm. This was the case for centuries. But then there are moments when even that tradition is drawn into question. We have the example of Hosea, but he may have been making a point rather than starting a new rule.

In the Book of Hosea, the translation I read from uses the term loving kindness. In other versions, the word is translated as mercy. This ties in with the word used by Jesus in our Gospel passage, but are these the same thing? In Hosea, the idea is to stay within the existing covenant. But with Jesus, there seems to be an extra step, or at least a broader understanding.

This use by Jesus probably is also made in light of the famous and later passage from the Book of Micah: what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? The King James Version uses the word “mercy,” while others sometimes use “kindness.” Mercy and kindness are being equated. Is that how we would interpret those words?

Mercy is an unearned act made in response to some transgression, some form of sin. Kindness seems broader, more about generally helping someone. It is not an assessment of circumstances or moral culpability. Mercy and kindness are both gifts, but mercy comes with a dose of shame.

I am belaboring the words here for a reason. Over time and across the centuries of the Bible, what the people were expected to do changed. It changed in many ways. There are moments when the prophets remind the people to follow God’s commands, or what God wants. But what God wants is not consistent.

For example, no one ever says we need to go back to the time of Abraham. Why? Because none of the familiar Biblical rules applied to Abraham. The covenant established between God and Abraham was quite limited. God at first agreed to give Abraham many descendants and all the land from the Nile River to the Euphrates River. Quite a lot. The Book of Genesis later adds a condition to the covenant, that all male descendants of Abraham must be circumcised.

Besides this physical sign of the covenant, the many rules about things you shall and shall not do will not be created until the time of Moses hundreds of years later. There were a few other broad rules in place from the time of Noah: no killing each other, no eating blood. In exchange for those few, God agreed never to flood the world again and destroy everything.

A covenant is an agreement. The first two such agreements involving Noah and Abraham are quite limited. More was given by God than God required in return. The covenant with Moses comes around far later and it is more complicated. And that set of laws expands far beyond the Ten Commandments to over six hundred laws that must be followed. Modern Christians do not follow these laws, of course. But why not?

When you connect the dots from Hosea to Micah, from Micah to Jesus, you will see a significant change in emphasis. You are not supposed to offer animal sacrifices at the Temple because God does not want those. Instead, God wants the people to behave in certain ways. To follow the covenant according to Hosea. To perform acts of loving kindness and mercy according to Micah.

Jesus follows this same pattern. He shifts the emphasis away from the many rules of the Law of Moses. He does not however abolish those rules outright, like Paul and the Apostles later did. Where do Paul and the Apostles get the authority to do this? Good question.

The early church leaders pinned a lot of emphasis on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” So, the leaders had the authority to set the agenda, to make the rules, and perhaps to break the rules. Break which rules? The old rules.

The early Christian church still set requirements of behavior. At first everyone was supposed to be celibate because the world was coming to an end—that did not last, obviously, because the world kept on going. The church eventually developed its own traditions. These sometimes copied and sometimes supplanted aspects of the Hebrew scriptures. And the rules could be changed by the church when it was thought necessary or even convenient.

Divorce was never supposed to be allowed, which led to the concept of annulment. The church created a whole system for explaining why annulment does not equal a divorce. It is an annulment, a negation, because it was never a true marriage. And there was a list of reasons. It was a forced marriage. It was never intended by one party to be an exclusive arrangement. Of course, those reasons clearly existed when Jesus said that divorce was never acceptable. But the church took its authority to bind heaven and earth quite seriously, even over the objections of Jesus.

Such uses of power strayed into abuses, into hypocrisy. And tensions over this double standard led to the Reformation. Many Protestants would decide that God does not desire certain behaviors from the people. God desires their faith and only their faith. Faith becomes the sole basis of the covenant with God and the sole basis for salvation from God. God is the source of all mercy, forgiving our unforgivably sinful natures. And this is one way of distinguishing Protestants and Catholics, these expectations about behavior.

Let’s think for a moment: does God need anything? Anything from us? Anything at all? If we operate under the assumption that God is the creator of everything, why would God have need of anything from us given that everything already belongs to God in some sense. We can’t give God anything.

What about our behavior? How should we order our behavior, if at all? How should we live our lives in the spirit of God?

Over the years, I have read a lot of philosophy. Philosophy is by one definition the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Philosophy is one way of considering the world around us.

Philosophy can be about logical propositions. It can be about fundamental assumptions leading to various conclusions. That does not mean that philosophy is always logical or that it leads to logical conclusions. But the good thing about philosophy is that it requires you to be disciplined. It is not quite like mathematics, but if your philosophy cannot be followed along like mathematics, there is little chance that anyone will sign on to it.

One philosopher I have turned to over the years is John Rawls. He was a political philosopher, meaning he thought about how politics should work, what assumptions we should make or not make. And one fundamental assumption Rawls made was that fairness should be at the core of politics. That is the crux of his political and philosophical outlook. And to further that focal point, he came up with an idea. It was a thought experiment. It was called the veil of ignorance.

Imagine we all somehow existed before we were born into the world, behind that veil of ignorance. We know nothing about what our lives will be like after we are born. And in that pre-existent and unknowing state, we are asked how human society should be organized. Not how we will be born, but how society will function.

We do not know how or where or even when we will be born. We do not know if we will be rich or poor, healthy or sickly. We do not know our gender, our race, our ethnicity.

But behind this veil, we know that what we bind in heaven, so to speak, will be bound on earth. How then should we organize our world, our society, our ways of behaving? If we do not know how we will be born, one imagines that the best choice would be to make everything as fair as possible.

This has been likened to asking children to divide up a cake. The first child gets to cut the cake but will then be the last to choose a slice of cake. Logic suggests that the cake would be divided into perfectly equal slices. Everyone gets their fair share.

How would that process work in society? What would people decide to achieve the fairest outcome? Do you require everyone to share everything equally? Do you allow for some differences, but make sure that everyone has enough, a minimum standard for living? Enough to eat and drink, a decent place to live, a chance to find some purpose in life? What shall be done and what shall not be done?

As you might guess, this philosophical system is not how we run the world. There are far greater inequities than this philosophy might allow. But the notion that society should be premised on a sense of fairness is compelling. What might that look like if we applied it to our society?

Everyone has a right to clean water. By the way, that is not true right now in the United States. You must pay for water. And if you do not have money to pay, no more water.

Everyone has access to enough food to sustain themselves. Again, that is not the case in the United States. During the past year, for example, up to a third of people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were food insecure, meaning they did not have enough food on hand at some point during the last year.

There are food pantries, but they are charities funded by the kindness of others. Charity is not a right and it is not a certainty.

There are some government benefits, like food stamps, but those are minimal. And these are now being subjected to even more stringent requirements. In other words, it is entirely possible to suffer malnutrition in the United States and there is no legal recourse to fix that.

What about housing? What about healthcare? What about childcare? What about transportation? What about all that? There are no rights to any of those.

The United States has an economic system in place that relies upon each person to earn their own way. That does not mean you will be able to afford to pay for all those items, like food and water, like housing or healthcare. That right to earn your own way also assumes a decent paying job exists in a place near enough for you to get there.

There is a terribly limited social safety. Social security if you meet the age requirements or become disabled, but it is based on what you paid into the system. Transitional assistance is available only for those who qualify, which by that name “transitional” assumes it is limited assistance timewise. Honestly, if you are between the ages of 18 and 62, there is little help available.

Why do we have a system like this? Because we want to make sure that people who can work will work. Even if they have trouble finding work. Even if there is no work. And the little help available is often conditioned in ways that are at times arbitrary and often ruthless. Do we want our nation to be arbitrary or ruthless?

Think back to the changing list of Biblical expectations. Over time, the religious outlook changed. When Hosea was calling out to the people of the Northern Kingdom, it was because they were not taking care of people in their society. The rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. Sound familiar.

Hosea was crying out about unfairness and was calling the people back to fairness, to kindness, to mercy. Fairness to one another. Kindness for those in need. Mercy even when people were not deemed worthy by some method or measure.

This is the same message from Jesus. He was sitting with the sinners. They were not worthy by some measure of righteousness, but they are still at the table.

What should we do if we discover that our next-door neighbor is hungry? If their water has been cut off? If they are too sick or too frail to work or to care for themselves? What should we do?

Of course, we probably know them a bit. That may mean it is easier to help them. It may mean that, but it might not result in that. And we also know that there are people in our country, in our state, in our city or town that need help. What should we do about that?

I am going to propose a thought experiment of my own. Imagine we are sitting behind John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. We are being asked to set up the world. But this time, we are being asked to write down a covenant. A covenant between God and the people of the world. In this covenant, God will give us one and only one thing: the entire world. We have to figure everything else. We are on our own. How to feed ourselves. How to stay warm. How to do anything and everything. How should that look?

Because, to be honest with you all, that is how it works. We basically make up all the rules as we go along. Some of those rules are old. Some of those rules are new. And some of those rules change from time to time. Every single rule about how humans behave is made up.

Those rules are frequently organized in ways to protect those in power, like the kings of Israel. Hosea tried to change their minds, but that does not mean that they listened. Bear in mind their kingdom was conquered and disappeared from the map.

We have our own set of rules. Rules as Americans. Rules as citizens of Massachusetts. Rules as residents of a city or town. We make up those rules. And we can change those rules under certain circumstances.

Should it be legally permissible under those various rules for people to starve, to go thirst, to be unable to find a place to live? Because it is that way right now.

We can also make rules about how we are to respond to such situations, as people of faith. Of course, we can change those civil laws, but we can also consider how we want the world to be as religious folks dedicated to our way of being.

Is that way to be Biblical? Then we should change those other rules. Is that way in keeping with the teachings of Jesus? Yet again, we need to change those rules. Our present set of rules are not in harmony with the Bible or the teachings of Jesus.

We have the right to set down in our covenant with God how we expect each other to act. How we expect the world to look, at least the corner of the world within our control. What would we set down in that covenant of our making?

Would it be about having faith and nothing else? Would it be about moral behavior, the shalls and shall nots? Would it be about how we are to treat one another? For that which you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, that you do unto me. And if our covenant is about loving one another, what will love look like in practice?

I do not have an answer for you this morning. Consider this your homework for summer vacation. And may God bless you on your journeys. I hope to see you all again very soon. Amen.