KGL+
Sermon
Trinity Church Boston
Year A, Proper 5
June 7, 2026
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
I don’t think I fully understood my capacity for long term, personal scorecard-keeping until my husband Chris and I were trying to come up with names for our first child.
For a litany of names which makes me cringe even to this day, I would find myself saying things like, ‘Oh, we can’t use that name, that was a girl I knew in third grade who pushed me once’; ‘We can’t use that name, that was the girl who was too cool for me in eighth grade and made sure I knew it’; ‘Nope, that was a boy who dumped my friend in college’; and a personal nadir for me, ‘Not that name, that’s the character I didn’t like on Beverly Hills, 90210.’
It would have been completely appropriate to have my parenting card revoked during that process, as it appeared that there was a whole host of humans— some of whom are currently incredibly wonderful, creative, people simply existing in this world—against whom I harbor some surprisingly lengthy, and petty, grudges towards. For someone who regularly misplaces her phone, apparently my memory works just fine when a laundry list of people who slighted me that one time comes into play.
The funny thing is that while I was rattling these ‘do not use’ names off to my husband, I didn’t feel embarrassed or badly about them—I mean, I did, but only once they reached a number which made Chris’ eyes widen just a bit as he considered the personal applications of his wife’s apparent grudge holding nature— but in general, there was a feeling of justification embedded in all of this for me. That somehow, all the wrongs and missteps held merit. They held space. The actions were the sum of the parts. The story ended there.
The prophet Hosea is best known for the one reading included in our lectionary cycle which gamely uses the phrase ‘whore’ and ‘whoredom’ enough to make the message edge comical in our day and age, rather than impactful.1Year C, Proper 12: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp12_RCL.html Written eight hundred years before Matthew’s Gospel proclaimed just now, Hosea speaks to his people—a people divided, ruled by one of the least capable rulers in Israel’s history, and prone to worship sources of power other than the one God who loved them. Hosea’s northern kingdom would eventually fall to the Assyrians, and remain in captivity for generations— a result, Hosea says, of the people’s desire to draw near to power in any form, and increasing unfaithfulness to a God whose primary attribute was unyielding fidelity.
What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early… For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
The Hebrew for knowledge of God here is the word yada—it is not the intellectual framework we post-modern Christians love—the word isn’t about our cognitive appreciation of what God has and will do. It’s the intimate verb ‘to know’— more about closeness in relationship and less about understanding.2The other instances of ‘yada’ point also to the intimacy of the word—you can see how it was used prolifically in Genesis especially: https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3045.htm Hosea’s call to repentance is not that the people are not worshipping God—it’s that their worship has taken the place of their relationships with one another; those relationships being the very extension of God’s relationship with them in the first place. God desires love, not sacrifice, Hosea tells them. God desires redemptive relationship over sacramental perfection.
Christians like to consider Jesus as the bringer of new ideas— we love the idea of a having a reformer as a savior, if not the realities of one. In fact, the verses omitted in this week’s Gospel reading from Matthew follows Jesus saying, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners,” are when Jesus says that one should not put new wine into old wineskins. We could imagine ourselves tacitly pooh-poohing the Pharisees’ reaction to Jesus associating and eating with sinners if we chose to go that route. Which we absolutely could—we could simply frame the gospel as ‘Jesus likes everyone when other people don’t!’ and go home for the day.3There is always the danger of making the Pharisees out to be the villains—they are not and were not. A stumbling block? Yes, but they were the ones who were the ‘progressives’ of the time. Jesus truly does not create something new (i.e. by diminishing the roles of purity laws), but pulls out of his own tradition Hosea’s words. Supersession of Jesus ‘over’ the Pharisees is a danger here. But Jesus isn’t pulling out innovative frameworks for his engagement of Matthew, the tax collector, whom he calls simply to follow him. When Jesus is accused of eating with unlikely and undesirable people, his response draws from his own, and the Pharisee’s own, depth of tradition; he quotes Hosea: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”4Cf. Matthew 9:13
The Greek word for ‘mercy’, eleos, is the closest thing we can get to the Hebrew term, hesed, that covenantal loyalty, or steadfast love, which is shown through yada, that relationship with the Holy.5I realize that this may read like a transitory property situation rather than a direct path: eleos –> hesed –> yada; the three are entwined in the ancient interpolation of mercy –> covenantal fidelity –> relationship with God , rather than being independent from one another. The God of the unreliable nation and the God of the unlikely disciples are one and the same for us today: the God whose faithfulness to us, whose love of us, whose commitment to us, is our model for our own expansion of faithfulness—not simply through cognitive belief, but through our action in our relationships. To show and know mercy, Jesus says, is the way to being in relationship with God; the God who is the epitome of mercy towards us.
Righteousness is far easier to swallow when we frame it up in deeds and intellectual assent, but Hosea points out that even good intentions first thing in the morning can dry up in the heat of the midday sun. Jesus brings us back to that prophet—the prophet whose entire message focused on the infidelity of Israel when push came to shove—and recalls it to those who would query him on potentially limiting the nature of God’s extravagant love.
Which begs the question for us today who are sitting here: where are our fidelities located?
I can rattle off the names of those who have wronged me seventy times faster, I suspect, than I can rattle off the names of those who have loved me. The ease of recalling the slights, the infractions, the power that they afforded me and still afford me, cultivates my own power source of indignation—in each of those rejected baby names, there held a one-sided, long-term power grab which aligned me and my righteousness with the plenteous dew in the morning, but which dried up by midday. The satisfactions of power rather than the transformation of mercy are not just the problems of those who lived alongside Hosea, twenty eight hundred years ago, or two thousand (with Jesus), but are alive and with us in this room today.
To say that we love and welcome everyone is easier than enacting it. In some ways, it is far harder to do with those who are closest to us, rather than embracing those with whom we have nearly no personal interaction, and therefore no significant investment. In the wake of the death, resurrection, ascension and then descent of the Holy Spirit, newly formed in the mystery and unity of the Trinity—our readings today plunge us back into the messiness of the incarnation, the less than satisfying endings and awkward beginnings, and mistakes made throughout as the Church—the gathered people of God—navigated and continue to navigate how to embody the mercy—the ongoing steadfast loyal love of our God—in our own lives; learning how to receive it with grace, learning how to distribute it with the extravagance made known in our God’s love for each of us. It is the lifelong unlearning of existential scorekeeping—modeled after our God who delights not in ticking off the boxes of how we each have erred—and good friends, each of us has erred magnificently at some point despite our best attempts—but in recalling us to God’s nature from the beginning steeped in yada—the intimacy of knowing and loving our God; our God who knows us, and loves us anyways.
As I went through the names we absolutely could not name our children for reasons varying from the plausible to the clearly unhinged, it was clear in my husband’s face that he perhaps understood better why there wasn’t a glut of friends’ children who were named ‘Kit’ strewn about the world.6There was actually a puppy named after me at the rescue in my former church’s town. A black lab puppy, who was apparently a troublemaker and not housebroken. I still have a photo of her to this day. The dew of the morning can dry up if we let it fester without renewal; when we imagine that it is our righteousness- self or otherwise- which begs Jesus to call us as a disciple, we need only hear Jesus’ response to the Pharisees: the ones called to follow Jesus are the ones in need of relationship. The one constant—despite all that the broken world will throw at us—is that God’s mercy towards us—God’s constant claiming and redemption and gathering of us– can transform us more closely in that love which frees us from every stricture and structure of resentment that we build to imprison ourselves in tax booths of our own making.7Cf. Matthew 9:9
And so in the name of that liberating and loving God, we pray—Amen.