A sermon preached by Revd Andrew Woodward for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, Sunday 3 August 2025
Reading for address: Hosea 11: 1-11
St Augustine reminds us that, ‘Thou has made us for thyself, and our heart has no rest till it rests in thee’.
Our Old Testament reading from Hosea is one that I hold dear. It is as if Hosea makes a breakthrough concerning the divine nature of God, or it is God revealing God’s nature to Hosea in a new way.
In other chapters of Hosea, we have seen God portrayed as a jealous husband and reference to his wrath and fierce anger, but here we see God portrayed more as a loving parent who expresses human attributes within God’s divinity. In Chapter 11 our reading for today, the metaphor changes from that of the relationship between husband and wife to that of the relationship between father and son.
“It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, took them up in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I bent down to them and fed them.”
It reminds me of how we can discover within our own humanity the potential of the divine, and how the two are inextricably linked. These two dimensions are supremely expressed in the person of Jesus Christ, fully human, fully divine.
We see God’s compassion portrayed and God’s heart is turned from wrath to something that is warm and tender, the Holy One in our midst.
And it is not only this one occasion. We see how God has been there all along, nurturing this child, helping the child to walk and to pick up the child when they fall over.
For those of us who have been parents and others who have had the responsibility of caring for children, this story resonates with our experience and some of us may also remember our own childhood experiences some of which will have been positive and others not so.
This story presents us with an aspiration to work towards. As Christians we read the Hebrew Bible through the lens of the New Testament. It is the understanding of God that is taken up by Jesus.
It also anticipates the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke chapter 15 where the father welcomes back the wayward son with open arms and with unconditional love.
It is out of God’s overwhelming love for his people that salvation comes. The picture of the self-giving love of a parent for a child offers us an inkling of what this love is like. This is only one window into that discovery as there are many other ways where this love can be demonstrated, for example between caregiver and one being cared for, through to partnerships and relationships of friendship.
Being with others on the journey reflects the nature of God, who is with us throughout the many challenges we each face day by day.
Our Epistle helps us to see what things are most important in life and those things to avoid. The essence of the passage is ‘You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God’.
Paul is revealing to us the essence of the Christian message that we do not belong to this world with its emphasis on the accumulation of things, by which we become possessed, and then hurt ourselves and others, but rather that we should set our minds on things above and not on earthly things.
God calls us to be clothed with the new self ‘which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the creator’.
It is this image of God in Hosea in whose image we are created. Hosea paves the way for our own transformation.
This transformation is not easy, we may fail and fall, but this is a learning process as our new self is being daily renewed in the image of the creator, and we look forward to the day when we shall be “revealed with him in glory”.
Baptism is a way of marking out this transition. It is a universal sacrament – a once for all event – “You have died,” but it is also a continual call to holiness,” Put to death whatever in us is earthly.”
Some of this is easier said than done to get rid of “anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language from our mouths.” We each carry hurts from the past and these things can erupt especially when we are frustrated or tired.
When I read the Epistle in preparation for this sermon, it sounded very much like a comprehensive safeguarding policy as to how we protect our life together! More of that later in our Safeguarding discussions at 12 noon. Suffice to say that every day we are encouraged to put aside our old, soiled clothes and to put on the new self. Little by little we can each be transformed into the likeness of the creator.
Our Gospel reading picks up the theme of what is most important in our lives. I remember when I was in the bank, I visited a dear lady who was dying but whose main worry was to ensure that she had used her full ISA allowance for the year. It wasn’t a terrible thing, but it resonated very much with the story in today’s Gospel where the rich man had so much that he didn’t have big enough barns to store his crops. He therefore planned to pull down his existing barns and build bigger ones, so he could store all his grain and his goods so they would be sufficient to see him through his life so he could simply relax, eat, drink and be merry.
There are a couple of things here to consider –
- The hoarding of things leads to a deep dissatisfaction leaving us with lots to live with, but little to live for.
- And the things that have been stored – whose in the end will they be?
Greed or idolatry, as Paul refers to it can leave us spiritually shipwrecked and incapable of truly living as we compromise our being which is made in the image of our creator.
Jesus is emphatic – “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
The things that matter most in our life are love, relationship, trust, wisdom and justice and these increase as we share them together. In our culture the risk is that we can become possessed by our possessions.
Our wealth or lack of it is not the determining factor, but more our accountability and attitude towards possessions, what we do with them, and how we use that which is given to us, which includes the giftedness of life and our relationships together.
A few days ago on 31 July, the church marked the feast day of St Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th century soldier who discovered Christ and founded the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits.
He wrote what he called his spiritual exercises on prayer, meditation, and discernment out of his own experience. Seeking those things that are above are high on the list of Ignatian Spirituality- asking us to choose where our true allegiance lies.
What really matters to us? What gives real value to our existence? What do we value more than anything else?
At the end of the Spiritual exercises, Ignatius invites the person taking the exercises to take time to contemplate the love of God, expressed in all the gifts God has given us and in the giving of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ.
And in the light of all those gifts and the deep sense of gratitude that wells up within, Ignatius asks a question of accountability, how do we respond to all that we have been given by God in Jesus Christ and in the gift of the Spirit.
Ignatius expressed his response in these words –
Take, Lord, and receive, all my liberty, my memory,
My understanding, and my entire will,
All that I have and possess.
Thou has given all to me,
To Thee Lord, I return it.
All is Thine,
Dispose of it wholly according to Thy will.
Give me Thy love and Thy grace,
For this is sufficient for me.
Christ invites us into a life greater than our anxious fears over things that have no ultimate worth.
He invites us into deeper relationship with God and with others – a treasure far greater and more enduring than we can ever imagine.
