St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr in the City and Diocese of Cape Town at Evensong on the XXVII Sunday of the Year, the Eighteenth after Pentecost, 4 October 2009

Sometimes communities are blessed with a sacred presence. Someone, a child, a woman or a man, stands out among them as an unmistakeable sign of goodness, or reconciliation or peace. Sometimes these unusual people become world figures, recognized everywhere for the radiant lights they are. The Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Maximilian Kolbe were such people; their presence brought a goodness and holiness that both judged and blessed their time and place. Our own Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former President Nelson Mandela remain such plumb-lines for us – by their actions and their words speak truth into our midst. They challenge us to be the best we can be.

800 years before the birth of Christ, such a person lived in the midst of the people of Israel. Years of comfort and prosperity had made Israel complacent and self-satisfied. The good times made the people forget their covenant with God: they lived for the pleasures each day could bring and the luxury their affluence could afford. God was far from their hearts. For all this, they were rigorous in making sacrifices: the temple yard ran with the blood of bulls and calves, sheep and goats, doves and pigeons. For form's sake, to maintain and vaunt their eminent respectability they made their sacrifices with regularity and much trumpeting.

But there was something rotten in the state of Israel. It was as though the people were losing their way: following their greedy desires rather than their calling, taking their ease in gluttony and drunkenness, sexual licentiousness and a general lawlessness. Corruption was abroad in the land, vice and crime was rampant among the people. It was a corruption that turned a blind-eye to crime and tolerated criminals. It was a corruption that infected trade and commerce making the business of buying and selling underhand and duplicitous. It was a corruption that undermined government and authority, rendering justice unjust and administration prejudiced in favour of those who were powerful and wealthy. Most significant of all, it was a corruption that eroded the people's faithfulness to their God as they were seduced away from loving God with all their heart, and all their mind and all their strength to run after false gods and worship idols of stone, silver and gold.

This was a people far from their first gratitude to the God who had brought them out of Egypt. They had forgotten their thanksgiving for being delivered from hunger in the wilderness when God fed them with manna from heaven. They had lost the amazed blessedness that they derived from being the very people who had crossed the Red Sea on dry land and been saved from their enemies. Now they were the people of a new moment, seduced by its luxury, tempted by its flesh-pots, lured by its trappings of power and wealth. They had not only left their God behind, they had taken other gods to their hearts. These they worshipped and adored.

It was into this decline and decay that Hosea the prophet spoke. His words were not his own, they God word being spoken through him, in his words and in the circumstances of his troubled life. Hosea's words were weighted with the poignancy of profound heartache since his prophecy was borne out of his wife's flagrant unfaithfulness and whoring. Hosea and his promiscuous wife Gomer stand for God and Israel. Gomer is Hosea's wife and Israel is covenanted to God. Hosea is committed and constant. God is faithful and dependable. Gomer is a whore and Israel is apostate.

The oracles of Hosea are the utterances of the heart of God, a lover's cries, a betrayed lover's rage.. Now angry and incensed, now wounded and broken; now fuming and condemning, now tender and forgiving; now caught in the grip of the present betrayal, now remembering the first love and holding onto the future hope.

The early church Fathers and theologians down the ages have held that God is unchanging, that God's nature is immortal and eternal, never waxing or waning, without variance, alteration or modification. Of course, by this they meant that God's goodness was everlasting, God's truth ageless and God's mercy without end. And this must surely be the case. But Hosea's story challenges this assumption about God. Here God's wrath is turned into God's tenderness, God's thirst for judgement and conviction is overturned by God's own mercy and God's own forgiveness. As we ponder this changeable God, we remember Noah, the flood and the rainbow - and God's promise to deal differently with God's people in future.

The story of Hosea is an invitation to reflect on the nature of God. We cast God in our own image. Our notions of power and grandeur, splendour and majesty we project onto a divine being of our own making. We limit the otherness of God and force God into human form – a stern judge, a powerful king, a benevolent autocrat, big brother, magician or puppeteer. But God is much more than any or all of those. Hosea, the prophet, invites us to embrace God as pure Love: the Love that gives birth to a universe and nurtures it is a steady and loving hand; the Love that sets the pulse of time and breathes the rhythms of the seasons. This Love-that-is-All-Loving is at the heart of all things and is the heart of all reality. No anthropomorphic conception nor the postulate of the fevered human brain, no, God is neither principle nor theory. God is the passion at the heart of all that is. The ground of our being and the purpose of reality is the Love-that-holds-the-Universe-Together – and it is this transcendent wonder of Love that we call God.

So far beyond us is this Love that we do not have words for it. Its magnitude is too great for our imagining and its splendour is beyond what we can fathom. Our lack is made up from God's loving goodness. Here a man, there a child, here a woman lives this many splendoured love: giving when there is nothing left to give, loving when every overture is met with betrayal. Francis, whom we remember today was one such person. For him and all those countless others we give God thanks and praise. This is what we see in Jesus Christ unmistakeably, this Love writ large. It is there in tonight's story of the son of the widow of Nain. “As Jesus approached the gate of the town,” we heard from Luke's gospel, “a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, 'Do not weep.'” There are those immortal words: 'When he saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep,”' Our God is compassion, mercy and grace. Always and ever. Never leaving us alone and ever supporting us.

The life of faith which you and I come to seek here within these sacred walls and which we hope to carry out into the world with us is nothing less than this: to accept the mystery of God who is love, whose love holds the universe together, whose love seeks us out, finds us and cherishes us with a never ending love. This is the faith we seek and without which we cannot live.

May the God of love grant us this faith, and give us the wings of faith to rise into orbit of love, there to lose ourselves in wonder, love and praise.

Back to Sermons page

Mission and Vision | Services | Music | Ministries| History | Glass | Tour | Staff
Cathedral Friends | Publications | Links | Site Map | Home