There he was, sitting on the red crushed velvet sofa, with his hands between his knees, as he waited for them to come down. The madam was glad to oblige him, thinking that she was about to get herself a new customer. But when Hosea proposed to Gomer, right there in the perfumed parlor, and Gomer said 'yes.' the madam threw them both out on the street. The sober looking fellow in the dark suit, Hosea, and the mincing woman with the big hair, squinted up at the sun as if she had not been outdoors in years."

They got married, but the story doesn't end there. There was a honeymoon, I imagine. But it didn't last very long. We are told that, well . . . Gomer went looking for somebody else.

This is the essence of the morning’s text. It isn't exactly a Hollywood story; then again, maybe it is. I just read the headline in PEOPLE -- Brad Pitt’s Desperate Heartache.

She came back. Maybe even on her knees. But according to the story she went her way again and came back again. We don't know how many times this was repeated, but it's an old, old, story -- is it not? Dorothy Parker put it perfectly when she said, "Life isn't one [darn] thing after another, it's one [darn] thing over and over." And she is absolutely right.

Over time Hosea began to get an idea of what God was doing by calling him into this marriage, just as we don’t understand why we marry the particular person we choose right away. Not the real reason, anyway.

Hosea realized that he and Gomer were playing out in their marriage the experience that God had had with the people of Israel. God had chosen this little back-water people to partner with, perhaps unadvisedly. And they too, had a short honeymoon period before there was the taking-leave-of-God in the wilderness; and the coming back tattered and broken on their knees, over and over again.

Like Hosea, God took them back and back and back again with all the same apologies and all the familiar promises -- too familiar -- like, "I'll never do it again." And God knowing they meant it and, at the same time, knowing they would, in fact, do it again the next time they had the chance.

It is an unfortunate turn of events, is it not, that a woman in this story is cast as the faithless partner in the marriage? Especially when one thinks that women in the ancient world had so much stacked against them anyway.

I went to a pastor training event a couple of weeks ago in Lake Tahoe. The part that didn’t burn up completely. There I saw a woman I had gone to seminary with 30 years ago. For the last 27 years she has worked for THE MARY MAGDALEN PROJECT in LA. A mission to get prostitutes off the streets and into healthy lives. It takes about seven years, she said, because, like Gomer, they have to go and come and go and come a half dozen times before they get it. But 2/3 of them get it she said. And every one of them came from an abusive situation growing up. Every single one in 27 years had the same story.

They needed someone not to give up on them and that’s the miracle at the bottom of the Bible story this morning.

These were ancient times, and we need to see how remarkable and how progressive is this text's witness to God's faithful love. What we are seeing here, in this rare book of Hosea, is a picture of God that is so big and so just, so loving and so forgiving. God is weak-kneed in the love department and the story is so refreshing for that very reason.

I wonder if there aren’t some marvelous life lessons to be gleaned as we reflect on that love in the context of marriage.

To look for a life partner is not merely to attempt to live beyond loneliness. It’s to search for the other half of one’s own soul. As I have said, it takes years to find out the real reason we choose a certain someone.

If we can give up the infantile images of the beloved we invariably begin with in our love relationships and exchange them for a more mature appreciation of the person we discover we have partnered with, the marriage has a chance and we can come to an appreciation of another aspect of ourselves, as well. If we can jettison our resentments of the other for not living up to what we hoped they'd live up to in our lives, and if we can forgive ourselves for being so darn pie-eyed when we fell in love with them in the first place; forgive ourselves for being so blind to what was there in them all along, we can truly grow as people.

It’s hard. Very hard. Our own Patty Romeo once said to me that “In every marriage there a re a lot of little divorces. Hosea found this out fairly early on.

To be fair, sometimes a marriage isn’t just flawed. All marriages are flawed. But sometimes it’s just all wrong.

I love what Meredith Pax said about this. She said, "I married twice. The first time was just to show my mother I could do it." That's not a good enough reason.

Sometimes we find out it is wrong pretty early and yet we hang out in it despite our better instincts. I was visiting with someone who works for Dunn House – the battered women’s shelter. She been a victim of abuse herself and said, "You know, I went back to my husband seven times after he beat me over the head. And I sympathized. "I was one of the smart ones." she continued. Normally it takes fourteen times before women get the message and give up. That's the average, we figured." Too many times! When violence is the name of the game, one just needs to drop out, or maybe run the heck away.

Well regardless of the circumstances it takes two people to tend a marriage to make it work. Perhaps the most helpful lesson to take to heart is that the needs of both partners have to be addressed all the way along the path. And the tricky part is learning that the needs of men and women are very very different.

One thorough research study came up with five needs of men and women in order of priority.

For women the first need is for affection. This means that a woman needs to know that she is cared for. And she needs to know it on every level. It involves touch but goes far beyond sexuality.

Secondly a woman needs conversation. True sincere give and take, with eye contact and true attention.

Third, a woman needs honesty and openness from a partner. Only this way can she feel secure with him.

Fourth, a woman needs financial support. Even if she is the principle bread winner, she needs to know he wants to be this kind of support.

Fifth there is the need for family commitment. Even women who have no intention of having children have a nesting instinct, and the man must contribute to that.

The needs of men, are related but different. The first need of am man is a fulfilling sexual relationship. This changes over time and takes many shapes but it is a man’s number one needs for decades.

Secondly a man needs recreational companionship. A man wants someone to be his playmate. Someone to share a passion he may have that involves relaxation.

Third, a man needs his partner who continues to try to attract him. Just trying pays great dividends.

Fourth a man needs domestic support. Someone who, with him will try to make a home of a house.

And fifth, a man needs a woman to admire him. No matter what he does, he wants to be with someone who is proud to be with him.

Surely Gomer continued to wander because it was an old habit. But the wonder, of the story (not the wander) is the abiding love of the one who kept coaxing her home.

Here’s that story in modern terms. It’s a poem by Stephen Dunn, a favorite of mine.

I had the supreme pleasure to work with him just this last week. Think of Hosea and Gomer.

Stephen Dunn “What Goes On”

After the affair and the moving out,
after the destructive revivifying passion,
we watched her life quiet

into a new one, her lover more and more
on its periphery. She spent many nights
alone, happy for the narcosis

of the television. When she got cancer
she kept it to herself until she couldn’t
keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated
and saved her, and one day

her husband asked her to come back –
His wife, who after all had only fallen
in love as anyone might
who hadn’t been in love in a while –

and he held her, so differently now,
so thin, her hair just partially
grown back. He held her like a new woman

and what she felt
felt almost as good as love had,
and each of them called it love
because precision didn’t matter anymore.

and we who’d been part of it,
often rejoicing with one
and consoling the other,

we who’d seen her truly alive
and then merely alive,
what could we do but revise
our phone book, our hearts,

offer a little toast to what goes on.

Poor Gomer. Imagine the banquet of pride she had to swallow in order to crawl back home.

Fr. Richard Rohr has said something to the effect that part of everything we do is a saying "yes" to God. Even the shabby things we do or say. What he means is that we make choices; choices that oftentimes we aren't ready for in our lives. We end up, because of that, running into a lot of dead ends. But we can find that even those dead ends, from time to time can be turned around, through the providence of God.

Fr. Rohr puts it this way. He says "trust that even your dead ends, your mistakes, your wrong headed choices for love . . . were merely misguided attempts to find the Great Love." The real, sustaining love of life that comes from the Creator.

Can we understand the providence of God in those terms? The way Hosea did?

It’s a big stretch for some. Here's another stretch I love. This comes from the wonderful novelist Anne Beatty, who says "the real killer in life is when you marry the wrong person, but have the right children." It's a wonderful part of our today's Bible story too, because the fruit of the marriage of Hosea and Gomer, three children, are oddly named, but profound additions to the world.

To think you married the wrong person, but still have the right children causes even atheists to step back and consider that perhaps there is such a thing as divine providence.

For some reason bigger than both of them, the two were brought together.

Kathleen Norris, who I am proud to say is a Presbyterian, has written a wonderful poem about the subject called "Answered Prayers."

I came to your door with soup and bread.
I didn't know you, but you were a neighbor in pain.
And a little soup and bread, I reasoned, never hurt anyone.

I shouldn't reason.

I appeared the day your divorce was made final.
Here I was, a woman flushed with cooking and talk.
And you watched, fascinated, coiled like a spring.
You seemed so brave and lonely.
I wanted to comfort you like a child -- I couldn't of course.
You wanted to ask me too far in.
It was then I knew it had to be like prayer.
We can't ask for what we know we want.
We have to ask to be led, someplace we never dreamed of going.
A place, we don't want, in fact, to be.
We'll find ourselves there, one morning. Opened like leaves.
And it will be all right.

That's a big God. It takes believing in a big God to swallow such an idea. We don't ask for what we want. We ask to be led somewhere we never dreamed of going. A place we don't want to be. Where eventually we will find out it is all right.

There was an extraordinary piece on ABC's 20/20 some time ago It was the story of a couple of twins who are part of a study of Alzheimer's disease. One of them, the one without Alzheimer's had taken Ibuprofen for her arthritis, and so they were wondering in their study whether that had made a difference. But the video profile turned out to be much more than a scientific study.

The interviewer spoke with the husband who was sitting with his wife of many years; the one with the Alzheimer's. One could see the toll it had taken on her. She was childlike. She was a veritable mute.

And the interviewer asked those "interviewer" kind of questions that make you squirm on your sofa. "Why do you still visit her if she doesn't know who you are?" That kind of question. The husband said, "I took some vows. They're just words but after 40 years you grow into them." Then the interviewer asked, "Is that love?" And the wife, the wife who was in the background until now became totally animated. She said, "Love. Love." As if she had invented the word and knew what it was to her depth. As if she were an expert on the subject -- which in a way, she was at that moment.

Her husband just wept. So much of her was simply gone, but love was there, at her core. If that doesn't tell us what is at the core of life, then nothing else will.

It wasn't a place the poor man wanted to be. It was not a marriage he, as a young husband, had ever signed on to go, but there he was in front of the camera, opened like a leaf. And, for that moment at least, it was all right; the both of them were together again. Love.

These are hard matters, but they are shot through with promise. Let’s end hearing the word of God from the heart and pen of Hosea – God calling God’s people in a time of war and uncertainty back to God’s self.

Therefore I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, my Israel. And I will speak tenderly to her. From there I will give her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall respond as in the days of her youth. As at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. On that day, says the Lord, you will call me your husband. I will make for you a covenant on that day, with the wild animals, the birds of the air and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow and the sword and war from the land. And I will make you lie down in safety. And I will take you for my [wife] forever.

Amen.