Larry Bethune. An impossible task, of course, which was the point. Thankfully, the movies have advanced our image of God since then. But most people — even nonbelievers — have trouble thinking ofGod in any other way than that old man with the long beard. The Bible, of course, forbids us from making images of God. But it gives us many verbal images that lead us to imagine God as a kind of superhuman. These anthropomorphic human shaped images help us to relate to the unknowable Mystery by analogy to what we know.
God has the full range of human emotions we do: love, hate, pity, compassion, anger, grief, and so on. The biblical God is a passionate, personal God. The Bible has many images of God. Not all of them are male. Not all of them are even human. But the strongest image, universal and deeply connecting, is the family imagery applied to God.
And the foundation of that imagery is found in the story of Hosea and Gomer. Gomer was unfaithful to Hosea. Our text today follows in this family imagery. No one can hurt us more than the people we love. Parenting young children is a joy, but also a challenge. It takes a village! The problem is that they turn into teenagers and then young adults. The whole family has to renegotiate from parent-child to adult-adult relationships. Parents have a hard time moving from their role to socialize and discipline to trusting their children to make their own decisions.
Our children are all doing well, thank God, for which I do not claim credit. Even so — and every parent can tell you this, no on has the capacity to break your heart more than your own children. Even though they are doing well as young adults, I think about them every day, carry their worries deeply, and do my best to stay out of their business unless invited.
And I know so many parents and children who still struggle with their family relationships, whether close or broken. In Hosea eleven Hosea shifts from the marital metaphor of his relationship with Gomer to a parent-child metaphor. Even if they were not his own, Hosea loved Jezreel, Loruhammah, and Lo-ammi.
