I have a friend who wanted me to preach on this passage at his wedding. A good friend, a minister friend, someone I love and trust, wanted me to read and preach from Hosea before some 300 people, his own parishioners, at his own wedding: “Go take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (1:2). I protested loudly, not wanting to stand up and in any way imply that my friend was marrying a woman of dubious character. It’s just not the kind of things friends do.

But he was insistent. The wedding sermon had to be from Hosea. “All that talk about whoredom is just symbolic,” he said. “What matters in this text is the faithfulness of God. God is faithful, even when we are not. God is faithful, even when we cannot. God …