Sermon for Proper 10 C Revised Common Lectionary

Sermon for Proper 10 C, Revised Common Lectionary
To be preached at St. John’s Lancaster 14 July 2013
Amos 7:7-17

If any of us had lived in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century Before Christ during the reign of King Jeroboam II, we would probably have been as upset with Amos as most of them were. Imagine with me. What business does this uneducated foreigner have dressing us down for how we worship our God and live our lives? He wasn’t even properly ordained. It seems pretty obvious to me that God has blessed our King and our Kingdom. We are after all enjoying unprecedented prosperity is very volatile diplomatic times, and if our religion is a little more open minded than that of the southern kingdom, it works for us, and who is this insulting hillbilly from down south to tell us how we ought to live? I’ll grant you that I liked some of his early sermons. There have been some major social inequities in our system as we have moved from a more rural and labor based economy to a more technologically advanced and urban culture, but in all fairness, we have been working on them and have made some real progress. After all, a rising tide floats all boats. And as for those charges of compromised religion and sexual immorality, he needs to realize that we are not a tribe wandering in the wilderness anymore. History moves on and if we wait for people like him, we will never see real progress in this land. And another thing, I take real offense at his implication that just because we have a strong work ethic here and believe in rewarding people who work hard and smart, somehow we don’t trust God. I wish he would go back to where he came from if he doesn’t like the way we do things here.

Such an argument could have been heard on any of the talking, or should I say yelling head news and opinion shows last week, but it was heard clearly twenty eight hundred years ago at the eastern end of the Mediterranean basin. People really don’t change that much after all.

Before we proceed with our examination of this passage, I would like to clear up one very common misunderstanding. That is that the passages in the Bible which refer to ancient Israel and Judah were aimed primarily at nation states, and that they ought to be directly applied to nation states today, particularly our own. While God’s Word does apply to all people and to all associations of people, when the prophets and patriarchs addressed Judah and Israel, they were primarily addressing the people of God, and whether that people was organized into a family, or a tribe, or a kingdom, or a diaspora was essentially secondary to the point at hand. In short, the comments we discuss today are not necessarily addressed to Israel, or to the United States of America, or the UK, or France, or Germany, or Canada, or Nigeria, or Uganda, or Argentina, or any other political jurisdiction. They are addressed to the people of God, the Church, one, holy, little “c” catholic, and apostolic, wherever she is found and whatever denominational name she may call herself. In short, God still speaks to us through Amos and all the others.

What is it that he says? Let’s take a look.

The first set of judgments was directed against the neighbors of the Jews, most of whom were their cousins, and against the Jews themselves.

1. Your business, military, and diplomatic practices do not consider the basic human needs of your neighbors.

2. You pushed your neighbors out of their homes for your own security and profit.

3. You broke your word and betrayed your neighbors.

4. Your anger and fury are often unchecked in warfare and in politics.

5. You have ripped open pregnant women and killed the unborn.

6. You are merciless to your enemies and showed no human kindness.

7. You have spurned God’s law and disobeyed what he commanded, and you choose to follow false gods more to your liking.

8. You oppress the poor with your lending practices and value profit above people. You grind the heads of the helpless into the dust and push the humble out of their place in the name of power and profit. Your religion is characterized by sexual perversion and gluttonous license of your own choosing. You have forgotten the blessings by which I delivered and established you in the past. Your clergy have been effectively silenced by their own compromised and immoral behaviour and beliefs.

That is chapter one and two. Now Amos gets serious:

1. I chose you as my own for the sake of the entire world. I shared my wisdom and plans with you. I gave you a purpose and a mission. But you ignored me and spurned the vocation to which I called you.

2. Therefore, I’m going to get your attention says the Lord. I will destroy your beautiful houses with all of their expensive art work, because you built them with money that you made oppressing the poorest in your communities. I will destroy your places of worship because they are polluted with the philosophies of the world and the practices of other religions, practices which dishonour me. I will break the power of your families and parties, because that power is based on oppression and greed and misuse of power.

3. Then he directs a particularly dire and graphic threat against the women of Samaria, who he calls the “cows of Bashan” that I will leave you to read in chapter 4, because it is a bit too graphic for mixed company and children. Their main sins seem to have been oppression of the helpless and the poor to support their own luxurious lifestyles. And because their religion was fraught with pride and hypocrisy and show.

4. The remainder of chapter four and the beginning of chapter 5 are given over to a classically balanced address which basically says, “we’ve been here before. My judgment, which basically consisted of giving you enough rope to hang yourselves, seemed to get your attention before, but now you have forgotten and here we go again.” And then the list gets very, very specific: You justify your unrighteous behaviour by legal technicalities and make all sorts of excuses to favor the guilty over the innocent. You build your great projects with money effectively stolen from people who don’t have enough money to live on. You are bullies and coerce people to get your way, especially if those people lack resources or are marginalized.

5. Then comes a heartfelt exhortation to “Seek good and not evil, that you may live, that the Lord, the God of Hosts, may be with you, as you claim he is. Hate evil, and love good; establish justice in the courts; it may be that the Lord, the God of Hosts, will show favour to the survivors of Joseph.”

6. And then he is off again. I despise your fake piety, and when you pray and seek the day of the Lord, you have no idea what you are asking for. Your splendid liturgies and your elaborate church services I loathe. Spare me the songs and the ceremonies, “instead, let justice flow on like a river and righteousness like a never failing torrent.”

7. Your luxurious lifestyle, and your living for the day and for pleasure blinds you to the needs around you and leads to arrogance and failure to consider the consequences of your actions. I detest all of this and will abandon you to your fate, the fate that you have brought upon yourselves.

That outburst brings us to chapter seven, and the visions of Israel’s judgment, one of which we heard in today‘s first lesson. “I will stretch the plumb line of my law and will judge my people, says the Lord. Judgment is at hand.”

Then in chapter 7 verse 10 the priest of Bethel, who could be thought of as a bishop or an archbishop, rejected the authority of Amos, the un-ordained prophet from another country and told him to go home and preach to his sheep. Amos replied, “God called me, and it won’t be long until you see that what I have said is true, because judgment is come upon you and everyone like you.” Then he tells another parable and again condemns the people of God for talking a good religious talk but not walking the walk, for failing to care for the poor and for maintaining systems that are unjust and unrighteous, and for practicing a religion of their own making instead of that which God handed down through revelation to Moses.

And this brings us to the ultimate question. “How do we in the modern church stack up against this prophesy? Are we guilty of doing the same types of things they did back then? If so what things? What do we need to change as Christians, as Episcopalians, as members of this parish, as individual people trying to serve God faithfully? Do we act like Christ says his followers ought to act, or do we sometimes find ourselves playing at a religion which is designed primarily to make us feel good about ourselves? Do our lives reflect the teachings of Jesus about how we ought to view and treat our neighbors, about how we should discipline our lives, and about how we should practice our faith? Folks living in Israel 2,800 years ago probably didn’t get up in the morning and say, “how can I be a hypocrite today? How can I oppress my neighbors and live selfishly for my own pleasure? How can I pervert justice and maintain societal structures which will make me wealthy at the expense of others? How can I make my religion into a hollow performance of beautiful but meaningless ceremony?” In all likelihood, they just never thought about things like that. They just did what everyone else was doing, and over time they grew farther and farther from God, and less and less able to hear his Spirit calling them to change. It can still happen that way today. Might each and every one of us consider seriously today whether we are listening to God’s voice, and let us examine our opinions and our behaviours in the light of God’s teaching, lest our religion be found wanting as was theirs. If we truly follow our faith, it must impact what we think and how we act.

Lest we end on a serious downer, jump ahead with me to the last stanza of Amos, chapter 9, verse 14. “I shall restore the fortunes of my people Israel; they will rebuild their devastated cities and live in them, plant vineyards and drink the wine, cultivate gardens and eat the fruit. Once more I shall plant them on their own soil, and never again will they be uprooted from the soil I have given them. It is the word of the Lord your God.” God calls us to introspection and to behavioral and attitudinal modification because he loves us, and he has promised to us, to the church, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us as his people. So take hope this day. Do the hard work of self examination. Change where it is warranted. And live in the knowledge that God loves you, and that he will never leave you or forsake you, even though he may do some pretty dramatic things to get your attention if the situation warrants. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.