Trinity VII, 3rd August, by The Rev'd Lucy Newman Cleeve

Hosea 11:1-11
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the preview of Inter Alia at the National Theatre. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it – and I’ll try not to give too much away.

At its heart is Jessica Parks, a Crown Court judge who has built her career around advocating for justice, especially for survivors of sexual violence. In the courtroom, she’s incisive and courageous, resisting victim-blaming and holding the powerful to account. At home, she is something else: a mother, pouring herself into the daily, demanding work of raising her son, Harry. She’s tried to do everything right, guiding him with patience, compassion, and fierce love. She’s had the hard conversations about consent and respect, about online culture and boundaries. She’s done what many parents do: tried to shape a decent young man in a complicated world.

Then, on the cusp of adulthood, Harry goes to a party. There’s drink. There’s a girl. Something happens – or is alleged to have happened – and suddenly Jessica is thrown into a storm she can’t escape. The case isn’t hers to judge, but she can’t step aside. She is mother, and she is judge. And now those two roles – love and justice – come into terrible conflict.

She doesn’t stop loving Harry, but the values she has spent a lifetime defending – truth, fairness, accountability – seem to stand on the other side of a line her son may have crossed. And the play offers no easy resolution. We're left with the agonising question: when someone you love deeply has done something terrible, how do you hold love and justice together?

That’s the question at the heart of our first reading from the prophet Hosea – a passage that gives us a glimpse into God’s own wrestling with that same, impossible love. “When Israel was a child, I loved him,” God says through Hosea, “and out of Egypt I called my son.” This isn’t the voice of a remote or abstract deity. It’s something far more intimate – a parent remembering.

The imagery is tender, beyond what we might expect from ancient Near Eastern religious language: “It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms… I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks, and I bent down to them and fed them.” It’s one of the most moving images in all of Scripture: God as the nurturing parent, steadying Israel’s steps, lifting them with delight, bending down with infinite care to feed them. This is the God we worship – not a distant judge, but the one who taught us our first steps in faith. Who still calls us, not because we are worthy, but because he loves us and delights in us.

But then comes the heartbreak: “The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals.” Despite all that tender love, Israel turns away — seeking safety in idols, placing their trust in foreign powers, and forgetting the one who had loved them from the beginning.

It isn’t just a moment of rebellion – it’s persistent. God calls, and they walk away. Not all at once, but not unaware either. Other voices become more compelling. Other promises seem more secure. And the covenant – the love that first formed them – is set aside.

Listen to the anguish in God’s voice: “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” These aren’t rhetorical questions. They reveal God's genuine emotional struggle. The Hebrew suggests God's heart literally "overturning" within.

Any of us who have ever wrestled with loving someone through their difficult choices, who have wondered whether to keep pursuing or to step back and protect ourselves from further hurt, can understand something of this divine anguish. But of course, in this story, we are actually more like Israel.

And in Hosea’s vision, Israel’s choices are not without consequence. The people’s refusal to return leads to collapse: foreign powers rise, violence spreads in the cities, leaders are consumed by their own schemes. God is present – but seemingly silent. It appears the story might end in judgment.

But then comes the turning point, the moment that changes everything. A declaration that transforms our understanding of God's nature: “I will not execute my fierce anger... for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” This is one of the most powerful moments in all of Scripture. God’s holiness is not revealed in punishment, but in mercy. It does not destroy. It transforms.

But how does that transformation take place? Paul begins to answer that question in his letter to the Colossians. The change he describes isn’t about behaviour management or trying harder to be good. It’s ontological – a death and a rebirth, a letting go of the old self and the emergence of something new: “You have died,” Paul writes, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Through baptism, through faith, through the mystery we celebrate at this table, we participate in Christ’s death and resurrection. The old self – the one that sought security in false gods and fragile promises – has died. And a new self is being raised, grounded not in fear or striving, but in love.

“When Christ, who is your life, is revealed,” Paul continues, “then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” We live in that tension – between what is already true, and what is still becoming. Already we are loved. Already we are held in God. Already we are being transformed. But the fullness of that life is still being revealed.

And because this is true – because we are hidden in Christ, because we are held by mercy – we are free to begin the work of real change. Not to earn God’s love, but because we already live within it.

Paul names what needs to be put to death: patterns of desire that distort our humanity – sexual immorality, greed, anger, malice, slander. These aren’t arbitrary rules; they’re symptoms of the old self that has forgotten what it means to be made in the image of God. And then he names what we are to put on: the new self, being renewed in knowledge and likeness – day by day, clothed in Christ. 

This new life in Christ is not just about individual renewal; it brings about a new kind of community.

“Here there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free – but Christ is all, and in all.”

This is the fruit of transformation: not private piety or compartmentalised religion, but a community reshaped by love — one that transcends the boundaries we so often cling to. Racial, cultural, economic, social: the walls come down. Our habits of comparison and control begin to loosen. We start to see one another differently. Speak differently. Live differently.

This, too, is the love we glimpsed in Hosea — the love that did not abandon, even when spurned. A love that does not coerce but patiently reshapes. And in Colossians, we begin to see what that reshaping entails: not imposed from the outside but awakened and sustained from within. Not as something we achieve, but as something we are drawn into. A response to a mercy already given.

But not all respond. And that brings us to the Gospel.

Jesus’ parable of the rich fool offers a stark contrast — a glimpse of what happens when we forget whose we are. Here is someone who has not been transformed. Someone who has never known what it is to be held by God’s love.

Listen to his language: “my crops, my barns, my grain, my goods.” Everything is “mine.” He speaks only to himself. He imagines no claim beyond his own. “Soul,” he says, “you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” He places his trust in accumulation, not in grace.

The Greek word Jesus uses for greed – pleonexia – speaks of that insatiable hunger for more. When we do not know God’s care, we try to feed ourselves. When we forget that we are loved, we hoard.

But God's response is swift and sobering: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared – whose will they be?” All that he called “mine” turns out to belong to someone else. The life he tried to secure slips through his fingers. “So it is,” Jesus says, “for those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.”

What does it mean to be rich toward God?
It means living as those who know they are loved.
It means trusting in God’s faithfulness and provision, not in our own control.
It means remembering whose we are – even when the world tells us otherwise.

This morning, as we prepare to come to the table, we are reminded that God’s holiness and love are not in conflict but work together in a single movement of grace: to redeem, to reshape, to restore.

This bread and wine speak of a love that would rather enter death than abandon us. But they also speak of a holiness that does not leave us unchanged. The love that receives us also remakes us.

So the question isn’t only whether we believe in God's love – but whether we are learning to live as those held by it.
Where are we still seeking security in our own barns and goods?
What habits of the old self are no longer ours to carry?
How might the vision of new humanity reshape our relationships – our lives together?

As we come to this table, we come as people still learning to walk in God's love. Still being lifted. Still being fed. Still being transformed – not by our own efforts, but by the mercy of the one who bends low to meet us.

Come, then –
All who know your need of grace.
All who long to be made new.
Come and be nourished by the one who will not let you go.
Come, and live into the love that is already yours.

Amen.