Promise made, promise kept Hosea 2: 14-20 January 14, 2007

Cinderella Man is one of my favorite movies. Filmed in 2005 and starring Russell Crowe, it’s the story of a heavyweight boxer, James J. Braddock. Like many successful sports-oriented movies, it is about grit, about never-say-die and about the triumph of the underdog. A feel-good movie of the first order.

It would be a good movie if that were all it was about. It’s s great movie, in my opinion, because it is really about promises. Promises made, and promises kept.

The movie takes place during the Great Depression, and fairly early on in the story, James and his family are among the many families who are having real trouble putting food on the table. The family’s eldest son, Jay, with the best of intentions, steals a salami from the local butcher shop. When his father finds out, he marches him, salami in hand, back to the butcher in order to return it with an apology.

The scene that follows is priceless. James concludes, correctly, that his son stole the meat because he was afraid. Afraid, because some of his friends had been sent away to live with relatives because their fathers couldn’t afford to feed the whole family. In tears, young Jay admits that he is afraid and his father picks him up, holds him in his arms and promises that he will never send him away, no matter what. It’s a promise he makes – and keeps, even though he has to swallow his pride and accept a Welfare check and ask for handouts of cash from others in the boxing business.

But the best scene in the movie happens after James is on the comeback trail. He is now making some money – back “in the black” as he calls it – and so walks into the Welfare office, waits in line for the second time, and, this time returns the amount he received, back when he needed it. When reporters ask him about this unusual act – no one voluntarily gives money to the Government – he responds by saying that he is glad to live in a country that helps a man when he’s down, and he just thought he should return it. James had made a promise to himself that if he ever got back on his feet he would return the money. It was a promise made and a promise kept.

Promises, perhaps not as dramatic or poignant as the ones in Cinderella Man, but promises none the less, are things we make – and generally keep, or at least try to keep – on pretty much a daily basis. We make promises to our coworkers, we make them to our family, and we make them to our friends. They are implied in our everyday speech patters. When one of you asks me to do something and I respond with “I will,” or “sure, I’ll be happy to,” that’s a promise made.

The word “promise,” not surprisingly, has been snatched up and used by a whole host of products, services and organizations – it’s a testament to the overall positive message it sends:

Family Promise is a national not for profit organization that works with low-income children and families,
Digital Promise is an educational organization that strives to make use of advanced information technologies,
Millennium Promise is a worldwide anti-poverty initiative and,
Promise Buttery Spread promises to help maintain a healthy heart when eaten instead of butter or margarine.

Yes, it’s probably safe to say that the word promise – and the concept the word conveys – is in danger of such common use as to diminish its meaning. Promises are often made without much thought and, more importantly, broken so often, that their reliability is anything but a certainty.

And that, my friends, is an unfortunate reality. One which we, as people of God, must reject out of hand. Most importantly, we must soundly reject it when it comes to promises from God.

For God, you see, does not make promises lightly or frivolously. The Biblical record is filled with promises from God, and the record is unambiguously clear. A promise made by God is a promise kept.

In fact, most of the great moments in Biblical history are marked with promises – or covenants, as we typically call them. From the Covenant with Abraham in Genesis and the Covenant with Moses at Sinai through the “New Covenant,” the fulfillment of the promised Messiah in the person of Jesus Christ, the relationship that we, as a people of God have to the God who created us is marked by a series of promises.

Our text for today – which, as you know, is also our Congregation’s Watchword for 2007 – is one of those promises.

The text is taken from the second chapter of the Book of Hosea. We know almost nothing about its author, by the way, except that he made his home in Israel and, like most of the prophets of the Old Testament, found himself in bitter and irreconcilable conflict with the officials, priests and other leaders of the nation. The setting, chronologically speaking, is roughly 800 BC.

The dominant theme of Hosea’s prophecy is marriage. Hosea’s own personal life and his marriage to an unfaithful wife are set out as an example for all people to witness. It serves as a metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel.

Gomer, Hosea’s wife, represents Israel. And Israel, at this point in Her history, was as unfaithful to God as Gomer was to Hosea. The people of Israel had allowed their faith to be corrupted by the idol-worship of the Canaanites, in much the same way that Gomer, as the story goes, had run after her multiple lovers.

Despite the unfaithfulness, however, Hosea predicts a joyous reconciliation.

“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my Baal (the idolatrous god of the Canaanites).’ I will remove the names of the Baals from your lips, “

“In that day, I will make a covenant for you…I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.”

Marriage images are used repeatedly throughout the Bible. In the Old Testament, they are everywhere in the prophetic literature. Isaiah uses them extensively, as does Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and, as we just read, Hosea. In the New Testament, Jesus talks about a wedding banquet when he discusses the Kingdom of Heaven, and – in our Gospel Lesson for this morning – he performs his first miracle –turning water into wine – at the wedding feast in Cana.

I suppose it’s not surprising, when you think about it. The marriage relationship symbolizes faithfulness. In the marriage ceremony, the couple promises to love one another and to be faithful in that love. It’s a frame of reference we can all understand and relate to.

And we can also relate to the fact that marriages, in the real world, often have problems. Fidelity is not always a given. Relationships are sometimes broken.

So when Hosea uses his own marriage to Gomer as metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel, you and I can relate to that image. We can understand why God does not reject Israel outright, and why God forgives her after all the wrongs she has committed. We can understand Hosea's metaphor describing both the power of unconditional love and the devastation of betrayal. We can understand his example of God’s complete faithfulness in the midst of Israel’s unfaithfulness.

What remains, for us, is to apply this message to our life together as a congregation – in 2007.

Fortunately, the application is actually pretty straightforward. It can be summarized in three simple points.

Point one: God’s promise – God’s covenant – applies as much to us as it did to Israel. When God said to Abraham “I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, and make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed;” when God said those words God was promising – unconditionally – that we are, today and forever, God’s people. God’s elect. We have inherited that same promise that God made to Abraham. It is ours. It is a promise made and a promise kept.

Point two: Despite God’s promise, we are often unfaithful. We are actually quite skillful at finding all kinds of ways to muck things up. The Church, after all, is made up of sinners. We do not always act as though we loved the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength; and we certainly do not always love our neighbors as ourselves. We may not act out as graphically and dramatically as Gomer did, but often faithfulness is not the order of the day.

Point three: It doesn’t matter how much we muck things up. God loves us anyway. There is nothing we can do to change that. Lord knows, if it were up to us to keep up our relationship with God, the love would have died centuries ago. Fortunately, that is not the case. Fortunately, God forgives us and loves us even though we are sinners.

God’s forgiveness and unconditional love is beautifully expressed in those words from Hosea that contain our Watchword for 2007: " I will betroth you unto me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord."

Our task, then, is to let this Watchword remind us, throughout the year, of God’s incredible promise. And to act, as a congregation, as a people who have claimed that promise for our own.

Sometimes, that is easier said than done. We often find ourselves, in the Church, joined together with people we disagree with, sometimes even with people we do not even like very much. But that is exactly what God’s promise is all about. God reaches out to people who are not likable – people who are sinners. It is only because God graciously embraces imperfect human beings that any of us have a chance to be included in God’s promise.

The final scene in Cinderella Man is one of those great movie endings that you can watch over and over again. It’s about good triumphing over evil, about David slaying Goliath. But it is also about another promise made and kept. James comes home, after the fight, to live out the rest of his life as a husband and a father. He does so in fulfillment of his promise to his wife – made just before he enters the violent, dangerous prize ring to fight for the title. Promise me you will come home, she asks. Promise me you will come home.

As 2007 unfolds before us, may we remember that we have, in hand, a solemn promise from God. “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you will know the Lord.” May we never forget this steadfast and unconditional love, and may it inspire us to great acts of love to each other and to those around us.

AMEN