c. scott andreas

As part of my plans for Lent, I’ll be studying a few of the minor prophets with Doug. I will post some of my notes here. Feel free to join in the discussion if you like. First up is Hosea.

General Theme ::

God’s endless love for the fickle people he chose for himself. It’s a story of pain, agony, and betrayal. It’s filled with calls to return, promises of restoration, as well as warning of judgment.

But it’s a love story and it ends by revealing the path to life - a romantic comedy, if you will. Kind of like Lent.

Sociohistorical Background ::

Hosea lived in the Northern Kingdom (Israel), prophesying from ~786 - 722 BCE. According to the accounts of this period found in 2 Kings 14:23-17:41, Israel was governed by a series of kings who ruled poorly, enabling and encouraging the people to serve other gods (the evaluations of Israel’s rulers in 2 Kings are generally negative and repeat a similar narrative pattern).

While Hosea’s early years were rather peaceful, political tensions grew increasingly tumultuous. Beginning in 738 BCE, King Ahaz failed to make an alliance with Assyria, rendering Israel an Assyrian vassal (2 Kings 17.4).[1] Now subordinate to the Assyrians, Israel’s kings engaged in reckless dealings with other leaders in an attempt to subvert Assyrian rule. Relations worsened in the decade that followed as Hoshea took the throne. After he failed to pay tribute, the Assyrians invaded Israel, captured the king, and carried the people out of the land (2 Kings 17.5-6).

Here, the narrator (of 2 Kings 17) breaks from the earlier form of describing the succession of kings and the actions of each. He cites Israel’s worship of other gods and refusal to repent as the reason for capture (2 Kings 17.7-18). The beliefs of the fertility cult held that Baal the Canaanite storm god, not YHWH, was the source of rain and the god responsible for bountiful agriculture. With his anger burning due to his people’s unwillingness to recognize his constant work, YHWH removed his protection and allowed the people to be carried off.

As such, Hosea confronted two primary issues:
(1) Sexualized worship of fertility gods.
(2) Escalating political tension and reckless “foreign policy,” if you will.

These two problems form the basis of Hosea’s indictment and are visible throughout the text.

The message of Hosea is not merely spiritual, but political as well. Many passages decry the hierarchical, almost bureaucratic structure of Israel’s governance. This is not terribly surprising, as Hosea likely wrote as a descendent of a Levite priestly lineage that was pushed to the margins of Israel’s social structure as the monarchy rose and replaced traditional, kin-based patterns of social organization. Hosea accuses the kings of this period of concerning themselves with projecting power and accumulating wealth rather than an undying pursuit and establishment of mishpat and sedaqah (justice and righteousness) (8.4, 10.1,7, 12.7-8, 13.6,10).

As He often does, God promised to restore Israel by humbling her - overwhelming the hierarchical monarchy and replacing it with an organic village-based society in which covenant-affirming lifestyles could flourish (2.14-15; 3.4; 12.9).

Might this sound familiar? I think that this is a future we can long for even today.  Perhaps we can participate in realizing it, too.

[1] It’s worth noting that Ahaz seems to have participated/encouraged the worship of Molech, which involved the sacrifice of children by fire just outside Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom (in the NT, gehenna).  Not a bright spot, to say the least.

[ This is loosely based on a piece written by James Luther Mays and Stephen Cook. I expect that what I’ve written above is not without error. As N.T. Wright often said to his students, “One third of what I will tell you is wrong. The only problem is that I don’t know which third it is.” Nonetheless, I hope that you will find it helpful. Feel free to correct offer corrections. ]

At around 10:30 this morning, Brian returned from a couple interviews. As he regaled me with his tales of triumph, a disturbing noise began emanating from the kitchen, growing rapidly in intensity. We looked at each other for a moment, then at the “new” dishwasher (which we haven’t used - it must earn our trust).

About thirty seconds later, clean dishes in a drying rack began clanging and a plumbing snake popped up through them. We turned once more in disbelief, watching as it moved along the counter, wrapped itself around the coffee maker, then fell to the floor and crawled out of the kitchen and into the living room.

I knocked on our neighbor’s door and asked if someone was working on their sink. He said “Yeah,” then ran to tell the plumber. I couldn’t hear what he mumbled, but the plumber shouted “COOL!”

Over the next hour, two plumbers ran between our homes, alternately fishing the snake through the pipes, using a toilet plunger on the drain, and ignoring a wretched black sewage-goo that simply would not stay down.

And that’s how our sink became sullied by sh*t.

I don’t often read the IDS, Indiana University’s daily student newspaper.  But I walked by the newsstand today and saw a headline on the front page that read, you guessed it, “Trading iPods for AK-47s.”

[ Read the full article here ]

It’s about a student and alumni group called “Fearless Charities” that works in dangerous areas such as Darfur, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia.  According to the article, the group set up 16 charities to distribute mosquito nets, thousands of cholera tablets, “as well as a few iPods” in a creative venture to trade music for guns.

They’ve got big dreams and some really great plans.

Really, really cool, guys.  Keep it up!

Hoosier Hills Food Bank and Career Center is having their annual “Soup Bowl Benefit” this  Sunday.  Tickets are $20 and go to support their work throughout the year.  Local potters  make some really great bowls that you get to keep, and a good friend  tells me that it’s a really great time.

I’ll be grabbing my ticket this afternoon.  They’re on sale at Bloomingfoods (East 3rd and Downtown) for the next couple days, but they’re down to about 10.  If you’re interested in coming along, let me know and I will grab one for you.

Lent is a forty-day season of fasting and reflection that has been observed by millions of Christians each year since the fourth century. I’d like to invite you to be a part of it today.

It’s a time to take stock of all the weight that you carry on your shoulders and leave it behind with reckless abandon.

It’s a time to get in touch with yourself, with those close to you, with creation, and with the God who made it all.

It’s a time to rediscover an ancient tradition.

But most importantly, Lent symbolizes the anticipation of new life. The season begins near the end of winter and looks forward to spring, inaugurated by Easter. It’s about reclaiming sacred time, celebrating the resurrection of the Son of God as new life bursts forth from the ground in April.

And it’s about preparing oneself for it. Lent is a partial fast, usually observed by giving up something that you’ve become accustomed to or adopting a new, better habit with the intent of disrupting your routine. That could mean committing to spend time in prayer each day, unplugging the TV, giving up meat/animal products (esp. on Fridays), fasting completely once a week, or even trading in Facebook for a better book.

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 21). Since my church does not offer an Ash Wednesday service, I’ll be attending mass at St. Charles. If you’re a fellow Bloomingtonian, I’d like to invite you to come along - both then, and on this longer lenten journey together.

(Don’t forget Fat Tuesday, either; that’s your day to have fun and chow down!)

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Susan Bordo’s Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. It’s very interesting and quite well-written.

Susan Bordo develops a nuanced critique of the status of images and narratives in Western culture. Admitting her fascination with beautiful images, she suggests that “the problem” lies in our collective unwillingness to engage media in a complex manner. Neither “beauty” nor constructions thereof are the core issue – rather, it is the manner in which we’ve become accustomed to receiving these images: passively, much like victims. As a result, Americans thrive on endless interpretation and debate concerning the meaning of a digitally-mastered “surreality” without bothering to question the implications of abandoning ourselves to an existence we refuse to question simply because there seem to be so many answers.

As such, “the problem” (a highly reductionist statement in itself) is as much epistemological as it is practical. Bordo suggests our collective flirtation with postmodern ways of knowing combined with lazy, oversimplified thought processes has left us without the ability or even the desire to separate “fact” from “fiction.” Washed in a subjective world of fleeting trends, we have traded in “reason” as a measure of facticity in favor of “believability.” Here, Bordo points to the jurors of the O.J. Simpson trial who held that DNA evidence “carried absolutely no weight,” preferring instead a contrived narrative that made sense of the facts and allowed jurors to dismiss pesky science (93). Thus, we take refuge in cartoonish abstractions such as race, gender, and class but refuse to recognize the endless particularity and multiple strands of identification that compose an individual.

Bordo suggests that we would do well to recognize the virtue in questioning our ability to know a thing with absolute certainty. She does not propose a flight to the ivory tower of modernity, as this risks further engendering resistance to complex thought. Rather, enlightened by a chastened epistemology, the task is to build our knowledge up once more with critical eyes, proper confidence, and complex engagement. Empowered by our newfound ability to push back against the images and narratives that pervade our world, we might discover something real as we appreciate the value of picking them apart. Negotiating the middle path between the gulfs of positivism and relativism, perhaps we could imagine something better, too.

I’m slowly catching on to something that many in the emerging camp have been onto for quite some time. Better late than never, I suppose.

Indulging a tangent from an ongoing research project, I spent the better part of this afternoon exploring the secrets that people tell on their blogs. It began as a quest for narratives constructed for the purpose of establishing a sense of authenticity – a peephole, as it were, selectively revealed by the author to an anonymous audience in order to establish a connection of sorts. I refined a new sort of search designed to automatically trawl for these stories, then configured a script to publish them to a web page, updated once every ten minutes.

And it worked. It worked too well, in fact. The stories that came up were not selective revelations. They were constructed, certainly, but most were fits of emotion - veritable hearts bleeding XHTML - and not intended for strangers.
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