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Sermon of July 18, 2010
Amos 8:1-12
Luke 10:38-42
Amos 8: 1-12 This is what the Lord God showed me – a basket of summer fruit. He said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the Lord said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by … The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.” Luke 10:38-42 But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” When a child is ignoring basic responsibilities, parents rely on a well-known parenting technique to make a point. Mom looks her ten-year-old in the eye while holding a toothpaste tube in one hand and the cap in the other. “This is called toothpaste,” she says, “and this is called a cap. They go together.” Vince Lombardi used the same remedial method several times during his first year of coaching the Green Bay Packers. Team morale was abysmal in 1959. The “Pack” had won only one game the prior year. Most of the previous decade had been a losing proposition for the franchise. Then, during one summer practice of uninspiring play, Lombardi’s patience ran out. He blew his whistle and called the team together. Then he picked up the oblong pigskin. “Gentlemen,” he barked, “This is a football.” Packer wide receiver and jokester Max McGhee is said to have replied, “Hey coach, not so fast. Not so fast.” Prophets both ancient and new are also not beyond impatience and remedial instruction when people need a reminder about neglected responsibilities. Amos, a prophet of some 2700 years ago told of how God held a basket of ripened fruit beneath Amos’s nose and said, “Amos, what do you see here?” The prophet, sensing that God was quite serious, didn’t bother joking. “A basket of summer fruit,” he replied. Then it is reported that with this brief exchange, strangely similar to a parent remedially instructing a child, the doors opened to a flood of divine wrath. It may be helpful to imagine the fruit-basket conversation taking place in wintry months, a time of year when many of us enjoy luscious fruit picked by underpaid migrant workers half a world away. Delighting in juicy raspberries on one’s breakfast cereal in mid-December is a perfect commentary on personal wealth. If you live in North Dakota and you cannot spot your mailbox through the snow drifts, there is no way those fresh peaches on your ice cream came from Thelma’s garden up the street. A Latin American farmer who is eking out an existence picked that fruit for you. There is sin among the wealthy elite in Israel, and it is rampant. On second thought, scratch the phrase “wealthy elite” – it excuses too many of us from the prophet’s remedial instruction. Anyone capable of making a profit, any entrepreneur or executive, any small business owner, any farmer with grain to sell, anyone with enough means or social placement to be feasting on sumptuous raspberries in December needs to sit up straight when listening to the eighth chapter of the book of Amos. There is the presence of iniquity wherever people forget the weather-beaten hands that labored to produce those raspberries. As a tyke in the next to the last pew at church, I struggled during tedious parts of the Sunday worship service. The confession of sin seemed interminable. Kneeling provided the perfect height for a kindergartener to put teeth marks into the pew back. I gnawed on the rounded oak while adults around me muttered: “I, poor, miserable offender, confess unto thee all my sins and iniquities.” I had no idea what iniquities were, although they sounded bad Today I know a little more about iniquity through firsthand experience and some better linguistic understanding of the word. Change one letter in iniquity you have inequity. Both have to do with being uneven, unequal or out of balance. Just as we tip over if the tiny fluid-filled canals in our inner ear malfunction, so our faith life tips out of kilter if we cannot find a way to deal honestly and fairly with those who have less than we do. I suspect that is one thing Jesus was getting at in the familiar story of busy, busy Martha and lazy, lazy Mary. I do not hear a clear indictment of Martha’s busyness, but rather an invitation to her to bring more balance into her life between doing and being. That’s one thing I like about the RISE mission trip program. We will be commissioning this year’s missioners at our second service. The RISE program is balanced between doing during the day and being during the evening hours. Missioners are busy during the day offering hospitality to those in need. In the evening, they gather for evening devotions, sitting at the feet of Jesus to get some of his own hospitality for themselves that they offer during the day. Our iniquity and that of the many systems in which we participate is the imbalance that comes from tipping the scales to favor of our own needs at the expense of someone else. The movers and shakes in Amos’s time knew iniquity. They knew how to rig the scales and increase the counterweights when selling grain. They understood how to hide rotten strawberries at the bottom of the For Sale cartons. They knew how to dilute infant formula and sell it at the price of whole milk. They were masters at sweeping chaff from the floor and mixing it in with the good wheat when no one else was looking. In all of this, poor people were the victims. If they wanted to eat, they had little choice but to put up with uneven and dishonest selling practices. And to add insult to injury, the perpetrators in this culture of iniquity treated religion as an inconvenience. They talked a good game of faith but had little patience for its workings. Anytime one finds it irksome to have to set down the tools of the workplace in order to honor the Sabbath, something is spiritually amiss. Again, that might be another thing that Jesus is getting at in today’s gospel reading. Superficial religion is at play. To chafe at the prospect of losing a single day’s profits is to be so personally out of balance as to render the whole idea of faith at least as unimportant if not ridiculous and irrelevant. According to Amos, the stern response to this corrupt state of affairs is to engage a deprivation that hurts more than the worst kind of physical hunger like Martha’s or spiritual hunger like Mary’s. A verbal famine will strike the land. I will let you decide whether or not that prophecy has come true. Is anyone here hungry for the words of the Lord? Not religious rhetoric, not politics wrapped up in scripture, not this group declaring moral superiority over that group, but words that seem to come from beyond those who speak them, words that startle the ear with their clarity, their freshness, their life-giving rather than life-denying power. Has anyone here run to and fro seeking such words and failed to find them? It seems they are rare, that is for sure. Most of us do not have the words to talk about what is important to us anymore. Like Martha, we are so busy and anxious we don’t know how to listen to our own lives anymore. We know our lives lack something that work and complaining cannot fill. Plus our ears have been so assaulted by the impostors of God that many of us are hard of hearing. Most of what we hear sounds like noisy gongs or clanging cymbals. And yet, every now and the, divine words do break through – clear notes emerging from a background of static. Sometimes they come straight out of the bible. Other times they come through human speech, and not always in a church. I have heard God speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and at the men’s shelter at St. Paul’s in Paterson. I have heard God speak through jailbirds and transgender persons. The question is, how do you know? With so many words coming at you, how do you know which ones are God’s and which ones are not? I am not sure there is only one answer to that question, but I am aware of things I listen for when I am trying to tell the difference. The first thing I listen out for is arrogance. In my experience, God’s subject matter is rarely surprising. God seems to stick to three or four basic themes: uncompromising love, wholesome living, endless forgiveness, justice for all. Since any human being who speaks of such things speaks as someone who has failed to do them from time to time, enormous humility is required to pronounce these words. They almost never serve to support our own positions. They almost always yank our supports out from under us, so that we learn never to rely on our own constructs. This is not divine meanness. This is divine passion that will not allow anything to stand between us and God – not even our own beliefs about God. So I am generally suspicious of people who quote God to support their own positions. I am also wary of people who want to coerce me, since God does not do that. The choices may be as clear as life and death. The consequences may be spelled out one-two-three, but God never takes away our freedom to choose. The last thing I listen out for is fear. While I am vulnerable to scare tactics like everyone else, I try not to succumb to them. The words of the Lord sometimes frighten, but fear is never their goal. Their goal is the healing of the cosmos. Their goal is abundant life. Again, back to parenting skills – imagine a parent watching a two year old pick up a rattlesnake. What does the parent say? “Drop the snake!” What scares us is the loud voice God sometimes uses to warn us away from things that can kill us, but it is a rare prophet who does not wind up his prophecy with a vision of homecoming. Even Amos’s mood improves at the end. “I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,” God says through him. “I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up.” I guess the best way to combat the famine of hearing the words of the Lord is to speak them ourselves – never with arrogance, never to coerce or frighten, always with the understanding that they are like nitroglycerine in our mouths – but also with the willingness to speak them, as our way of letting God know we have heard the word of life. It is not anything we are supposed to do all by ourselves. God does not call many of us to stand alone, like Amos, warning a whole nation and its perverted systems about the snakes it picks up. What God does instead is to call us together, into communities like this one, where the words of the Lord can go to work on us, and through us, until the sound of them becomes like a heartbeat in our ears. The thing is, to let them give us life. The thing is, to let them turn our lives into blessings on all other lives, so that new crops of God’s sustaining word spring up on the earth. Amen.
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