The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13), July 27, 2025

What’s in a name?

So often I hear people say, “I want to study the Bible.” But most people do not. Studying the
Bible takes a lot more time than most people want to give to it, and it involves not just the
devotional reading of some feel good verses, “The Lord is my shepherd…” Studying the Bible
requires reading commentaries, digging in, understanding history and context and word
meanings and translations. Hosea 1 is a wonderful example, because there is a lot more going on
than meets the eye.
On the surface the text is quite odd. God commands the prophet to marry a prostitute. The
biblical word is not equivalent to the modern definition, one who sells her/his body for sex. The
Hebrew word has a broader connotation, meaning a more general promiscuity, which could
encompass fornication, infidelity, or prostitution. As James Nogalski has said, “Just beneath the
surface of this command to the prophet lies the implication that the prophet will learn what
betrayal feels like to YHWH.” (The Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary, The Book of the
Twelve, Hosea-Jonah, p.38.)
The prophet’s wife, Gomer, then conceives three children, and with each, the prophet records
these words: “And the Lord said to him, ‘Name him/her…’” Each name is a pronouncement of
judgement. The first child is to be called “Jezreel,” which alludes to the place of the downfall of
King Ahab and the death of Jezebel (2 Kings 9.30-37), and also to the Jezreel Valley, which was
fertile land in a mostly barren Israel. The irony of the name is that God uses it with an ominous
warning of “sowing” destruction to the nation of Israel because of its unfaithfulness to Yahweh.
The second child is to be called “Lo-ruhamah,” which means “not pitied.” The word pity does
not mean so much a feeling of compassion as an action of reversing a sentence or judgment. The
word “spared” might better convey the original, and God often spares the people of the
judgments that had been pronounced against them.
The third name is “Lo-ammi,” which may be the darkest of the three: “not my people.” Gale Yee
says, “The distinctive covenant between God and Israel is articulated by the formula ‘You are
[will be] my people and I am [will be] your God’ (Exodus 6.7; Leviticus 26.12-13; Jeremiah
11.4; Ezekiel 11.20).” (Gale A. Yee, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VII, p.218.)
With each of these names, the judgments of God against the people seem to increase, until they
are completely disowned, reversing the “distinctive covenant” they had enjoyed. The prophetic
name means: you are not my people! But here’s the interesting thing, and the part of reading
Hosea that requires some actual study.
Very little of the Bible was written just as we read it today. For example… the first five books of
the Bible were probably not penned by Moses (which include a record of his death!). The “book”
of Isaiah may really be four separate books, edited and rolled into one. And, the book of Hosea,
presented as a judgement against the northern kingdom of Israel, may have been redacted much
later, and edited to mitigate the devastating implication of God’s devastating judgement. Gale
Yee explains it this way:
“Preserved and circulated in Judah [the southern kingdom] after the fall of Israel, the call story is
reinterpreted for a new situation. Verses 5, 7, and 10 presuppose a period in which Judah has experienced the traumas of war and now needs a message of hope. I suggest that these verses
coincide with the context of the exilic redactor [the Babylonian exile, 587-539 BCE]. The
punishments embodied in the names of Hosea’s children are reversed.” (Gale A. Yee, The New
Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VII, p.219.)
“Name him Jezreel; for in a little while I will punish the house of Jehu,” but…
(5) “On that day I will break the bow [the end of war] of Israel in the valley of Jezreel."
"Name her Lo-ruhamah, for I will no longer have pity,” but…
(7) “I will have pity on the house of Judah.”
"Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God."
(10) “Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be
neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my
people,”; it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.”;
Jesus said to his disciples, “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you…” (Matthew 5.21)
Similarly, some editor, perhaps writing from the exile of a foreign land, took the dark words of a
prophet who warned the people of God’s impending, destructive judgment (Israel did fall to the
Assyrians in 721 BCE) – and recast the ominous text, ultimately concluding, “It shall be said to
them [you are], “Children of the living God”;
Scripture says, “Iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27.17), and a careful study of the Bible shows us
scripture sharpening scripture, scripture correcting scripture. The final word with a good and
loving God is always the word of hope and promise and compassion and mercy – even when it
takes a couple hundred years for an editor to make this clear.
For Christians, the ultimate mercy and compassion of God must be true, because we read the text
in light of Jesus, “in [whom] the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” Paul’s challenge to the
ancient church was to live as Christ lived – not given to proclamations of judgment but to lives
of compassion, forgiveness, love.
“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted
and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in
thanksgiving… [until] you have come to fullness in him.”
We live in an age of great challenge. The division within the country offers competing, often
diametrically opposed versions of “truth.” Hollywood tells us that “greed is good” (Michael
Douglass’s character, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie, “Wall Street”), and we were recently
taught that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” (Elon Musk). Such
“truths,” however, could not be farther from the biblical witness.
It is possible to read as much judgment in the pages of the Bible as one wants to find there – and
gleaning the deeper message will always take a little work. “You have heard that it was said, but
I say to you…” Is it Lo-ammi, “not my people” or Ammi, “children of the living God”? The answer may depend on how deep we are willing to dig, in the text, and in our own hearts, for the
truth.
Quotations about Truth
From the cowardice that does not face new truth,
From the laziness that is contented with half truth,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good Lord, deliver me. Amen.
–A prayer from Kenya. anonymous
This is the place where poetry and prayer meet. It takes faith to write the words you know are
true, words you are certain that you mean, even when you have to admit that you do not know
exactly what they mean, let alone whether they are literally true.
–Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace, “Truth” p.377
May you seek after truth. If anything I teach you be false, may you throw it from you and go on
to richer knowledge and deeper truth than I have ever known. If you become a [person] of
thought and learning, may you never fail to tear down with your right hand what your left hand
has built up if, through years of thought and study, you see it at last not to be founded on that
which is. If you become an artist, may you never paint with pen or brush any picture of eternal
life otherwise than as you see it. If you become a politician, may no success for your party or
even love of your nation ever lead you to tamper with reality and to play a diplomatic part. In all
of your circumstances, my child, may you seek after truth; and cling to that as a drowning man in
a stormy sea who flings himself on to a plank and clings to it, knowing that whether he sinks or
swims with it, it is the best that he has. Die poor, unknown, a failure – but shut your eyes to
nothing that seems to them to be the truth.
–Olive Schreiner
Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words,
in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the
finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?
–Sixth Patriarch Huineng, quoted by Rev. Beth Ellen Cooper in “Just Because it Didn’t’ Happen
Doesn’t Mean it Isn’t True.”
Only the young possess the simplicity
To accept a truth transcending rote and rule,
So that, like star-led shepherds, children see
The fact of miracle.
But logic, the sophist, clouds the maturing life,
Caution replaces the fearless face of youth,
Till the skeptic mind prefers a plausible lie
To a fantastic truth.
–Theodore Parker Ferris, quoted in The Good Life, Peter Gomes, p.116
You can’t always defend the truth of God – sometimes you have to feed on that truth.
–C.S. Lewis

The further a society drifts from Truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
–George Orwell
In the ramifications of Party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk
of the principles of Insoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past and denial of objective reality,
and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any
attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by
it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in
talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those
people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy
it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy
meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people
incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of
reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were
not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of
understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed
did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested
through the body of a bird.
–George Orwell, 1984, p.156
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.
–Mahatma Gandhi
What is truth? Truth doesn’t really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an
incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.
–Tracey Emin
There is nothing objective about your experience or mine. The minute we think there is, we
violate the ninth Commandment. "You shall not bear false witness" is thus a call to escape the
ignorance that plagues and distorts all human beings. "You shall not bear false witness" is a call
to a new awareness, to a new sensitivity. It is a call to come out of the ignorance of our killing
prejudices, the blindness of presuming that our view of life is objective, the slavery that comes
with identifying our partial truth with the ultimate truth.
“You shall not bear false witness,” is a call to a life that is open, free, vulnerable, and risky,
but that is where life is lived, and that is where its meaning is found.
“Know thyself,” is ancient wisdom. Know thy limitations. Know thy blindness. For only as we
do does the need to bear false witness begin to fade, and the vicious, self-serving attacks of our
human tongues upon the sacredness of life begin to cease.
–John Shelby Spong
“Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between
people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.”
–Mikhail Bakhtin
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd

–often attributed to Flannery O’Connor
What is truth? Said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.
–Francis Bacon
Truth is so obscured nowadays
And lies so well established
That unless we love the truth
We shall never recognize it
–Blaise Pascal
Worship Elements
A Prayer of Confession
Forgive our dishonesty, O God – dishonesty with you and others and with ourselves, in failing to
speak the truth. Remind us the words of the great philosopher that honesty is, “speaking the right
truth, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way, for the right reason.” Convince us
that now is the right time. And give us the courage to speak the Truth. Amen.
— from Aristotle
A Litany
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Jesus said, “For this I came into the world, to testify to truth.”
But Pilate scoffed: “What is truth?”
In a culture that increasingly questions truth, let us look to Jesus,
Our way, our life, our truth.
And let us think about truth;
Walk in truth;
Speak the truth;
Worship and love in truth.
May our worship together, our life in this community equip us to correctly handle the truth,
For truth (only The Truth) will set us free.
–from George Orwell and John 18 and 14, Philippians 4, 3 John 1, Ephesians 4, John 4, 1 John 3,
2 Timothy 2
A Litany
In days of confusion and turmoil, our world needs truth. Where shall we find truth? Some say
there is no truth; others say there is truth in all things. People of God, what do you say, what is
your truth?
Christ has told us that we should be sanctified in the truth, for God's word is truth, and
Christ is our way, our life, our truth.
ALL: Let us worship today in spirit and in truth.
–from John 17.17; John 14.6; John 4.24