It is the truth that none of us know what is going on within our bodies at any given time. We all have some, as the doctors like to call it, "underlying conditions" something that isn’t quite perfect; something that is flawed. We never really know what is going on, and maybe it is a good thing that we don’t, but we live our lives often with unseen influences working within us affecting us. These things sometimes present themselves. Just a few weeks ago, I got up one morning and looked in the mirror, and there to my great surprise was a very long grey hair. I looked at it with horror and disgust, as if I had had a nightmare. I looked at this hair, and I really didn’t know what to do with it. Do I just cut it off and pretend that it is not there, or do I leave it and act in a dignified manner. What do I do with this?
Then, I realized that it is nothing compared to what I like to call the “unfortunate demise of cranial follicles,” the loss of hair on the rest of my head, which is far more important! When I spoke to my hairdresser about the grey hair, he laughed. He said, “Why are you worried about a dying lamb, when it seems that the whole flock of sheep have already left?”
It was a humbling moment!
I said, “In that case, because they are leaving so quickly, will I get a discount on my haircut?” I didn’t get very far with that one!
We never know what is going on within our bodies. We do not know what is taking place, and it is probably a good thing! But sometimes it is not just our bodies that suffer from decay; sometimes it is in our moral and in our spiritual lives as well. I thought about this particularly, because this is Father’s Day, and as is my custom on Father’s Day, I go back and I read some of the sermons that my father, who was a preacher wrote. Fifty years ago, in June 1964, he preached from today’s passage from the Book of Hosea. It is a magnificent passage!
You might have wondered why such a negative passage would be read on Father’s Day and on Baptism Sunday, but it is only a negative passage if you don’t understand why it was written, and for whom it was written. It was written at a time when the state of northern Israel was in decay. It was in decay for a number of reasons: One of them being that the Assyrians had invaded northern Israel from the north, and therefore northern Israel – and a synonym for that is Ephraim, the largest tribe in northern Israel – was weak. They became a subjugated people by the Assyrians.
Hosea is writing to them because he is concerned, he sees doom and great losses as they go forward, and he is worried about them. He is worried that they are becoming weak. He sees signs of that weakness, and he likens it to a king, who has a lot of grey hairs on his head. These grey hairs are for Hosea a sign that the king is not aware that in fact he is turning grey, but that there is a change taking place, and this change is affecting the life of the people. He can see this. He sees it visibly in front of him. For example, the princes are now lying to the king, because they no longer feel he has any power as the Assyrians are in control. The people are committing adultery. The people are filling themselves with wine and getting drunk to kill the pain of being overtaken by the Assyrians. There is within the nation a great malaise. Hosea, as a great prophet is concerned about this.
Hosea is worried that the nation will lose its strength, that it will not be able to stand up to the Assyrians; that they will be weak within their consciences, and they are trying to lose themselves and forget their demise and their decay. But Hosea loves them! He is concerned for their wellbeing. He pours out his heart to them: he prays for the king and his greying hairs, and he prays for the adulterous nation and then, he makes one of the most moving analogies in the whole of the Bible, for Hosea’s wife had committed adultery, and Hosea compares the state of his nation with his own situation!
He sees that the nation has been adulterous toward God. It has turned its back and the people have followed idols. They have become syncretistic and adopted the religion of the Assyrians. He says that this is like adultery. This is like breaking the love bond with the one to whom you are promised, which is Almighty God. From a deep personal experience of pain, Hosea, this great prophet of love, pours out his heart and says, “The king’s hair is getting grey, but he does not know it.”
In Africa, I saw many amazing things as you can imagine, but one was absolutely startling. I visited a town in southern Zambia. When I was there, I was taken around by some of the leaders to see what had happened to their community. I went to one area that was absolutely amazing. It was an area where they had built some new houses out of wood and because the people were impoverished, they wanted to make sure that they built them with good wood. They built them and the people moved in.
For a few years, the people loved their new homes, until one day there was a storm. The storm happened just before I got there – and it completely flattened the whole neighborhood. I said, “How on earth can one storm flatten every single house?” They picked up a piece of wood and they showed it to me. What had happened is that white ants –we would call them termites – had eaten all the walls from the inside and when finally the storm came along the houses just collapsed: rotten from the inside, completely eaten away. When they fell to the ground, they actually turned into piles of sawdust. I have never seen anything like it!
The person who was doing the planning had said that they had, so they were told, an ant-free area in which to build this, because they knew that these ants, these termites, would crawl up walls, but they were assured that it was okay. Everyone had told them that it was okay. The only thing is that a few weeks later they found out that the owner of that land had been paid off to sell the land to them for his gain. He lied!
I think when Hosea looked at Ephraim he saw they had been eaten away from the inside. It had been decayed from the middle. Then, when the Assyrians came along, they were destroyed. Hosea loved his people. He didn’t want them to have this, but so often moral decay goes hand-in-hand with physical decay, and with the decay of life as a whole. I like how one of my teachers used to describe our society. He said that we have an “elastic conscience.” We start over here and we think we can bend it and move it and bend it and move it and bend it and move it, but there is a point at which even the most elastic of bands can break.
In our own lives we can find ourselves deciding that we are not going to take faith in God seriously. We are not going to pay homage to God. We are going to mix God up with all the other things that we have in our lives. We are going to live lives that give us pleasure, but at the same time ask God to come along and baptize those pleasures later on. Or else, when we find a crisis and a difficult moment in our lives it is then that we say “Well, we turned to God” even though in all the other times leading up to it, we have discounted God and treated God as nothing. We will act in a way that is godless that sometimes makes fun of the godly as an unnecessary thing in life, but at the same time then when things get really rough we find our houses have been eaten from the inside out.
This is a word for young families. This is a word for families with young children. It is a word for fathers. Keep things strong. Keep a moral centre. Keep a sense of right and wrong. Keep a sense of what is pure. Don’t be like the people from Ephraim who were always bragging. They were bragging to Hosea, “Yes, but we’ve got money!” and “Yes, we are safe!” and “It doesn’t matter that the Assyrians have come in and polluted us. It doesn’t matter, because we are affluent and we are safe.” They became weak and the moment they did that they lost their identity. Then, when the Assyrians turned nasty on them, Israel had no core on which to stand.
However, this is a passage of love, is it not? Is there not something about the grey hair on the king that is actually positive? Well, yes! Hosea ends the whole of his book with these words:
Oh, Ephraim, what more do I have to do with you and your idols, except that I will answer you and care for you? I am like a green pine tree and your fruitfulness and strength comes from me. Who is wise? He will realize these things. Who is discerning? He will understand them. The ways of the Lord are right. The righteous walk in them and the rebellious stumble over them.
Hosea understands then that this experience, this decay, can in fact be turned to wisdom and that, by the love of God and a change of heart they themselves can become wise, and in their wisdom become righteous, and in their righteousness follow the Lord God.
Hundreds of years later when Jesus broke on to the scene he was saying exactly the same thing. He said, “Have I not commanded you to love one another as I have loved you?” Is this not the foundation for your life? Even if you have decay and even if you have had suffering and even if you have wandered from the path that is before you, if you keep his commandments, he will love you and will bring you back. Look at the change that Jesus made within his society. Look how he altered things.
Recently, I was reading a book entitled God’s Justice by Don Postesrski. Don wrote these words about how Jesus had changed society, and how his love and his righteousness had changed everything. I love these words!
Lepers were touched, women were bestowed a quality, and children were included. Racism was challenged. Second-class citizens were deemed heroes. Drunkards and prostitutes were saved. Tax collectors changed their behaviour. Pharisees were confronted. Political leaders were resisted. The poor were protected. The rich were humbled. The oppressed were gifted with freedom, because Jesus had made life right for others.
The righteousness of God, my friends, is exactly what Jesus did. It is exactly what Hosea wanted. But they both knew what you and I know deep down in our hearts: that the foundation of this is the love of God, and that when you take that away and you do not treat it seriously or you avoid it or you quietly push it off to the sidelines, then you know that you are weakened and you are eaten from within and you have no strength.
My father was always an articulate and a kind man. He never finished a sermon without some good news. He never wanted to leave people without hope and he preached in some pretty dark times in the history of the twentieth century: for who could preach in Cape Town against apartheid in 1979 and not have the inner strength and the core he did? But he was always humorous with it too. So I leave you with this..... What I leave you with is that the grey hair that was on my head is gone! I have cut it off! I will never cover it up, I swear to God! But, I have cut it off! There will be others that will come along and they will remind me of how mortal I am, and they will remind me at times about how weak I am. But, there is one thing I know: Our strength does not come from ourselves; our strength comes from God.
No matter what grey hairs are on our heads, it is the wisdom of that knowledge that is our ultimate strength! Amen.