Hosea 11:1-11
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
August 3, 2025
Los Angeles Times sportswriter Bill Plaschke has written about a father, Dale Hahn, and his son, Cory. Dale had always supported Cory in his baseball dreams and development as a player. At home, the two of them would play catch and work on Cory’s swing; and, from tee ball to a celebrated high school career at Mater Dei in Santa Ana, Dale would attend every game to cheer Cory on. When Cory turned down a signing bonus with the Padres to hone his baseball skills at Arizona State, Dale remained Cory’s biggest fan and most devoted coach.
But Cory’s dream was shattered when, in his third game at Tempe, he slid head first into second base and broke his neck. Today Cory is paralyzed from the chest down, with limited use of his hands and arms. The kid, who once led his team to a high school championship by pitching five perfect innings, making an over-the-shoulder circus catch and hitting a tape-measure home run, now struggles to comb his hair on his own and to operate his motorized wheelchair to get to class. Cory says, “My goals don’t take days anymore; they take weeks and months.” But Cory says he reaches them by riding on his father’s shoulders. “There were times”, Cory admits, “I’d wonder if I’d be better off dead. But then I’d see my Dad there, and think, If he can do it, I can do it.”
To support him at university, Dale moved into an extended stay motel near the campus. Every morning, the two of them together get Cory ready for the day; and every evening, the two of them together get him into bed to rest up from it. Cory notes, “We’re a team, and we live for the little victories.” Not long ago, they celebrated Cory’s using his once-lifeless hands to feed himself after countless days of practicing with Dale. “It was really messy,” Cory says, “but we did it.”
Dale endlessly expresses how proud he is of his boy as he continues to extend his independence. For example, Cory keeps improving his skill in negotiating his wheelchair around students running and scootering this way and that as he gets himself to the library, therapy, ball games and hang-out times with friends.
Dale says he’ll always be there for Cory as long as he needs him. He says, “When you’re a Dad, you’re a Dad forever.”
And when You’re God, You’re God forever – especially when You’re a loving, heavenly Father God who’s resolutely determined to encourage and support His children even if they, unlike Cory, get broken through their own fault and even if they, unlike Cory, break their Father’s heart again and again.
In today’s scripture, God cries out in righteous “fierce anger” against His children and yet professes a gracious longing to save them from the just punishment they’ve earned – something, by the way, they’re already getting a taste of as they suffer “the sword raging in their cities” and suffer the reversal of their exodus from Egypt by a forced return to Egypt as slaves yet again.
God laments how they are “bent on turning away from me” and anguishes over how “the more I called them, they more they went from me.” Yet, despite their repeatedly hurting Him, God with a “compassion” that is “warm and tender”, hurts over their reaping in pain, deprivation and displacement what they’ve sown in rebellion, betrayal and ingratitude.
God knows He could with justice destroy them; but as He thinks of their family history – how, when they were first His “child”, He liberated them from Egypt and how, when they were young in faith, He “taught [them] to walk” as one teaches a toddler, “bent down and fed them” as one spoons nourishment into a baby’s mouth and “took them up in My arms” as one “lifts infants to their cheeks” – God’s heart “recoils” within Him at the thought of their eradication. God doesn’t have it in Him to give up on them and to let them vanish like Admah and Zeboiim, sister cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Out of His love for His children, children so often unlovely in character and conduct, God resolves not to “execute” His justified “wrath” against them. He rejects the possibility of allowing their destruction by enslavement either in the original Egypt or in the new Egypt of Assyria. Instead God will one day command their release from whatever Egypt they find themselves in, and sound forth their liberation with a loud roar like a lion calling its cubs to its side, that they might return to God trembling like little birds and make their home in His loving company once more.
And God has no guarantee that they will treat Him any better than they have, but God guarantees His love for them will outlast their disobedience, indifference and insanity.
Haddon Robinson tells of a man from Illinois who met and wooed a woman from Kentucky. They married and set up their first home in Chicago. Three years into their marriage, a sudden, severe mental illness befell her. At her best, she was confused and agitated, and would say hurtful things she didn’t mean. At her worst, she’d scream with such volume and frequency that neighbors begged them to move out of the apartment building. So they found a house in the suburbs, and he changed his line of work to have time enough to try to nurse her back to sanity and serenity.
Significant progress was hard to see. A doctor then suggested they take a break and visit where she grew up in Kentucky, in the hope that those familiar surroundings might calm her and memories of happier times might lift her spirits. She enjoyed seeing old friends dear to her, and lingering along the river whose flow and flora once settled her soul and gave her peace. Those moments of tranquility, however, never lasted long.
So, feeling defeated and dejected, they packed up the car and drove back to Chicago. As they drew near to their home, he noticed she’d fallen asleep with a calm, restful look on her face he hadn’t seen in months. When they pulled into the driveway, he lifted her from the car so as not to disturb her slumber, carried her inside, gently placed her on the bed and covered with a blanket. Then he pulled up a chair to watch and wait through the night. When the first rays of the rising sun reached through the curtain and touched her face, she awoke, turned her head and saw her husband there at her sider. She said, “I think I’ve been on a long journey. Where have you been?” Her husband, speaking out of months of patient watching and waiting said, “I’ve been right here, all along, at your side.” She smiled then with grateful contentment – and things started to become better from then on
If you ask, “Where is God?”, His reply is much the same as that husband’s: “I’ve been right here, all along, at your side, watching over you and waiting for you to wake up to the reality of Me, to believe in the grace of Me, and to respond to My love with a little trust and love of your own.”
In warm and tender compassion, God holds back His righteous wrath and, in gracious love, reaches out to offer you liberation, restoration and exultation.
You can count on Him, for He is “God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst” – that is, at your side in faithful and bountiful goodness!
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